Podcasts about stephanie thank

Stephanie has a newfound interest in urban foraging for serviceberries in Chicago. Joël discusses how he uses AI tools like ChatGPT to generate creative Dungeons & Dragons character concepts and backstories, which sparks a broader conversation with Stephanie about AI's role in enhancing the creative process. Together, the hosts delve into professional growth and experience, specifically how to leverage everyday work to foster growth as a software developer. They discuss the importance of self-reflection, note-taking, and synthesizing information to enhance learning and professional development. Stephanie shares her strategies for capturing weekly learnings, while Joël talks about his experiences using tools like Obsidian's mind maps to process and synthesize new information. This leads to a broader conversation on the value of active learning and how structured reflection can turn routine work experiences into meaningful professional growth. Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) Zettelkasten (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten) Mindmaps in Mermaid.js (https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/mindmap.html) Module Docs episode (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/417) Writing Quality Method docs blog post (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/writing-quality-method-docs) Notetaking for Developers episode (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/357) Learning by Helping blog post (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/learning-by-helping) Transcript:  JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, as of today, while we record this, it's early June, and I have started foraging a little bit for what's called serviceberries, which is a type of tree/shrub that is native to North America. And I feel like it's just one of those, like, things that more people should know about because it makes these little, tiny, you know, delicious fruit that you can just pick off of the tree and have a little snack. And what's really cool about this tree is that, like I said, it's native, at least to where I'm from, and it's a pretty common, like, landscaping tree. So, it has, like, really pretty white flowers in the spring and really beautiful, like, orange kind of foliage in the fall. So, they're everywhere, like, you can, at least where I'm at in Chicago, I see them a lot just out on the sidewalks. And whenever I'm taking a walk, I can just, yeah, like, grab a little fruit and have a little snack on them. It's such a delight. They are a really cool tree. They're great for birds. Birds love to eat the berries, too. And yeah, a lot of people ask my partner, who's an arborist, like, if they're kind of thinking about doing something new with the landscaping at their house, they're like, "Oh, like, what are some things that I should plant?" And serviceberry is his recommendation. And now I'm sharing it with all of our Bike Shed listeners. If you've ever wondered about [laughs] a cool and environmentally beneficial tree [laughs] to add to your front yard, highly recommend, yeah, looking out for them, looking up what they look like, and maybe you also can enjoy some June foraging. JOËL: That's interesting because it sounds like you're foraging in an urban environment, which is typically not what I associate with the idea of foraging. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a great point because I live in a city. I don't know, I take what I can get [laughs]. And I forget that you can actually forage for real out in, you know, nature and where there's not raccoons and garbage [laughs]. But yeah, I think I should have prefaced by kind of sharing that this is a way if you do live in a city, to practice some urban foraging, but I'm sure that these trees are also out in the world, but yeah, have proved useful in an urban environment as well. JOËL: It's really fun that you don't have to, like, go out into the countryside to do this activity. It's a thing you can do in the environment that you live in. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that was one of the really cool things that I got into the past couple of years is seeing, even though I live in a city, there's little pieces of nature around me that I can engage with and picking fruit off of people's [inaudible 03:18] [laughs], like, not people's, but, like, parkway trees. Yeah, the serviceberry is also a pretty popular one here that's planted in the Chicago parks. So, yeah, it's just been like, I don't know, a little added delight to my days [laughs], especially, you know, just when you're least expecting it and you stumble upon it. It's very fun. JOËL: That is really fun. It's great to have a, I guess, a snack available wherever you go. STEPHANIE: Anyway, Joël, what is new in your world? JOËL: I've been intersecting two, I guess, hobbies of mine: D&D and AI. I've been playing a lot of one-shot games with friends, and that means that I need to constantly come up with new characters. And I've been exploring what AI can do to help me develop more interesting or compelling character concepts and backstories. And I've been pretty satisfied with the result. STEPHANIE: Cool. Yeah. I mean, if you're playing a lot and having to generate a lot of new ideas, it can be hard if you're, you know, just feeling a little empty [laughs] in terms of, you know, coming up with a whole character. And that reminds me of a conversation that you and I had in person, like, last month as we were talking about just how you've been, you know, experimenting with AI because you had used it to generate images for your RailsConf talk. And I think I connected it to the idea of, like, randomness [laughs] and how just injecting some of that can help spark some more, I think, creativity, or just help you think of things in a new way, especially if you're just, like, having a hard time coming up with stuff on your own. And even if you don't, like, take exactly what's kind of provided to you in a generative AI, it at least, I don't know, kind of presents you with something that you didn't see before, or yeah, it's just something to react to. JOËL: Yeah, it's a great tool for getting unstuck from that kind of writer's block or that, like, blank page feeling. And oftentimes, it'll give you a thing, and you're like, that's not really exactly what I wanted. But it sparks another idea, which is what I actually want. Or sometimes you can be like, "Hey, here's an idea I have. I'm not sure what direction to take it in. Give me a few options." And then, you see that, and you're like, "Oh, that's actually pretty interesting." One thing that I think is interesting is once I've come up with a little bit of the character concept, or maybe even, like, a backstory element...so, I'm using ChatGPT, and it has that concept of memory. And so, throughout the conversation, it keeps bringing it back. So, if I tell it, "Look, this is an element that's going to be core to the character," and then later on, I'm like, "Okay, help me brainstorm some potential character flaws for this character," it'll actually find things that connect back to my, like, core concept, or maybe an element of the backstory. And it'll give me like, you know, 5 or 10 different ideas, and some of them can be actually really good. So, I've really enjoyed doing that. It's not so much to just generate me a character so much as it is like a conversation back and forth of like, "Okay, help me come up with a vibe for it. Okay, now that I have a vibe or a backstory element or, like, a concept, help me workshop this thing. And what about that?" And if I want to say, "It's going to be this character class, what are maybe some ways I could develop it that are unusual?" and just sort of step by step kind of choose your own adventure. And it kind of walking me through the process has been really fun. STEPHANIE: Nice. Yeah, the way you're talking about it makes a lot of sense to me how asking it to help you, not necessarily do all of it, like, you know, kind of just spit out something that you're like, okay, like, that's what I'm going to use, approaching it as a tool, and yeah, that's really fun. Have you had good experiences then playing with those characters [chuckles]? JOËL: I have. I think it's also really great for sort of padding out some of the content. So, I had a character I played who was a washed-up politician. And at one point, I knew that I was going to have to make a campaign speech. And I asked ChatGPT, "Can you help me, like...here are the themes I want to hit. Give me a, like, classic, very politician-sounding speech that sounds inspiring but also says nothing at the same time." And it did a really good job of that. And you can tell it, "Oh, that's too long. That's too short. I want three sentences. I want five sentences." And that was great. So, I saved that, brought it to the table, and read out my campaign speech, and it was a hit. STEPHANIE: Amazing. That's really fun. I like that because, yeah, I don't think...I am so poor at just improvising things like that, even though, like, I want to really embody the character. So, that's cool that you found a way to help you be able to do that because that just feels like kind of what playing D&D can be about. JOËL: I've never DM'd, but I could imagine a situation where, because the DMs have to improv so much, and you know what the players do, I could imagine having a tool like that available behind the DM screen being really helpful. So, all of a sudden, someone's just like, "Oh, I went to a place," and, like, all of a sudden, you have to, like, sort of generate a village and, like, ten characters on the spot for people that you didn't expect, or an organization or something like that. I could imagine having a tool like that, especially if it's already primed with elements from your world that you've created, being something really helpful. That being said, I've never DM'd myself, so I have no idea what it actually is like to be on the other side of that screen. STEPHANIE: Cool. I mean, if you ever do try that or have a DM experience and you're like, hmm, I wonder kind of how I might be able to help me here, I bet that would be a very cool experience to share on the show. JOËL: I definitely have to report back here. Something that I've been thinking about a lot recently is the difference between sort of professional growth and experience, so the time that you put into doing work. Particularly maybe because, you know, we spend part of our week doing client work, and then we have part of the week that's dedicated to maybe more directly professional growth: our investment day. How do we grow from that, like, four days a week where we're doing client work? Because not all experience is created equal. Just because I put in the hours doesn't mean that I'm going to grow. And maybe I'm going to feel like I'm in a rut. So, how do I take those four days a week that I'm doing code and transform that into some sort of growth or expansion of my knowledge as a developer? Do you have any sort of tactics that you like to use or ways you try to be a little bit more mindful of that? STEPHANIE: Yeah, this is a fun question for me, and kind of reminds me of something we've talked a little bit about before. I can't remember if it was, like, on air or just separately, but, you know, we talk a lot about, like, different learning strategies on the show, I think, because that's just something you and I are very into. And we often, like, lean on, you know, our investment day, so our Fridays that we get to not do client work and kind of dedicate to professional development. But you and I also try to remember that, like, most people don't have that. And most people kind of are needing to maybe find ways to just grow from the day-to-day work that they do, and that is totally possible, I think. And some of the strategies that I have are, I guess, like, it is really...it can be really challenging to, like, you know, be like, okay, I spent 40 hours doing this, and like, what did I learn [chuckles]? Feeling like you have to have something to show for it or something to point to. And one thing that I've been really liking is these automated check-ins we have at the end of the week. And, you know, I suspect that this is not that uncommon for just, like, a workplace to be like, "Hey, like, how did your week go? Like, what are some ways that it was successful? Like, what are your challenges? Like, where do you need support or help?" And I think I've now started using that as both, like, space for giving an update on just, like, business-y things. Like, "Here's the status of this project," or, like, "Here's, you know, a roadblock that we faced that took some extra time," or whatever. Then also being like, oh, this is a great time to make this space for myself, especially because...I don't know about you, but whenever I have, like, performance review time and I have to write, like, a self-review, I'm just like, did I do anything in the last six months [laughs], or how have I grown in the last six months? It feels like such a big question, kind of like you were talking about that blank page syndrome a little bit. But if I have kind of just put in the 10 minutes during my Friday to be like, is there something that was kind of just for me that I can say in my check-in? I can go back and, yeah, just kind of start to see just, like, you know, pick out or just pay attention to how, like, my 40 hours is kind of serving me in growing in the ways that I want to and not just to deliver code [laughs]. JOËL: What you're describing there, that sort of weekly check-in and taking notes, reminds me of the practice of journaling. Is that something that you've ever tried to do in your, like, regular life? STEPHANIE: Oh yeah, very much so. But I'm not nearly as, like, routine about it in my personal life. But I suspect that the routine is helpful in more of a, like, workplace setting, at least for me, because I do have, like, more clear pathways of growth that I'm interested in or just, like, something that, I don't know, not that it's, like, expected of everyone, but if that is part of your goals or, like, part of your company's culture, I feel like I benefit from that structure. And yeah, I mean, I guess maybe that's kind of my way of integrating something that I already do in my personal life to an environment where, like I said, maybe there is, like, that is just part of the work and part of your career progression. JOËL: I'm curious about the frequency. You mentioned that you sort of do this once a week, sort of a check-in at the end of the week. Do you find that once a week is about the right frequency versus maybe something like daily? I know a lot of these sort of more modern note-taking systems, Roam Research, or Obsidian, or whatever, have this concept of, like, a daily note that's supposed to encourage something that's kind of like journaling. Have you ever tried something more on a daily basis, or do you feel like a week is about...or once a week is about the right cadence for you? STEPHANIE: Listen, I have, like, complicated feelings about this because I think the daily note is so aspirational for me [laughs] and just not how I work. And I have finally begrudgingly come to accept this no matter how much, like, I don't know, like, bullet journal inspirational content I consume on the internet [laughs]. I have tried and failed many a time to have more frequency in that way. But, I don't know, I think it almost just, like, sets me up for failure [laughs] because I have these expectations. And that's, like, the other thing. It's like, you can't force learning necessarily. I don't know if this is, like, a strategy, but I think there is some amount of, like, making sure that I'm in the right headspace for it and, you know, like, my environment, too, kind of is conducive to it. Like, I have, like, the time, right? If I'm trying to squeeze in, I don't know, maybe, like, in between meetings, 20 minutes to be like, what did I learn from this experience? Nothing's coming out [laughs]. That was another thing that I was kind of mulling over when he had this topic proposed is this idea of, like, mindset and environment being really important because you know when you are saying, like, not all time is created equal, and I suspect that if, you know, either you or, like, the people around you and the environment you're in is not also facilitating growth, and, like, how much can you really expect for it to be happening? JOËL: I mean, that's really interesting, right? The impact of sort of a broader company culture. And I think that definitely can act as a catalyst for growth, either to kind of propel you forward or to pull you back. I want to dig into a little bit something you were saying about being in the right headspace to capture ideas. And I think that there's sort of almost, like, two distinct phases. There's the, like, capturing data, and information, and experiences, and then, there's synthesizing it, turning information into learning. STEPHANIE: Yes. JOËL: And it sounds like you're making a distinction between those two things, specifically that synthesis step is something that has to happen separately. STEPHANIE: Ooh, I don't even...I don't know if I would necessarily say that I'm only talking about synthesis, but I do like that you kind of separated those categories because I do think that they are really important. And they kind of remind me a lot about the scientific method a little bit where, you know, you have the gathering data and, like, observations, and you have, you know, maybe some...whatever is precipitating learning that you're doing maybe differently or new. And that also takes time, I think, or intention at least, to be like, oh, do I have what I need to, like, get information about how this is going? And then, yeah, that synthesis step that I think I was talking about a little bit more. But I don't think either is just automatic. There is, I think, quite a bit of intention involved. JOËL: I think maybe the way I think about this is colored by reading some material on the Zettelkasten method of note-taking, which splits up the idea of fleeting notes and literature notes, which are sort of just, like, jotting down ideas, or things you've seen, things that you've learned, maybe a thought you had when you read a particular paragraph in a blog post, something like that. And then, the permanent notes, which are more, like, fully formed thoughts that arise out of the more fleeting ones. And so, the idea is that the fleeting ones maybe you're taking those in a notebook if you're doing it pen and paper. You could be doing it in some sort of, like, daily note, or something like that. And then, those are temporary. They were there to just capture information. Later on, you process that, and then you can throw them out if you need to. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. This has actually been a shift for me, where I used to rely a lot more on memory and perhaps, like, didn't have a great system for taking things like fleeting notes and, like, documenting kind of [inaudible 18:28] what I was saying earlier about how do I make sure that the information is recorded, you know, for me to synthesize later? And I have found a lot more success lately in that fleeting note style of operating. And thanks to Obsidian honestly, now it's so easy to be like, oh, I'm just going to open a quick new file. And I need as little friction as possible to, like, put stuff somewhere [laughs]. And, actually, I'm excited to talk a little bit more about this with you because I think you're a little bit different where you somehow find the time [laughs] and care to create your diagrams. I'm like, if I can, for some reason, even get an Obsidian file open, I'll tab to Slack. And I send myself a lot of notes in my just own personal DM space. In fact, it's actually kind of embarrassing because I use the Command+K shortcut to navigate to my own personal DMs, which you can get to by typing me, like, M-E. And sometimes I've accidentally just entered that into a channel chat [laughs], and then I have to delete it really quick later when I realize what I've done. So, yeah, like, I meant to navigate to my personal notes, and I just put in our team chat, "Me [laughs]." And, I don't know, I have no idea how that comes up [laughs], what people think is going on. But if anyone's listening to this podcast from thoughtbot and has seen that of me, that's what happened. JOËL: You may not be the only one who's done that. STEPHANIE: Thank you. Yeah [laughs], that's good to know. JOËL: I want to step back a little bit because we've been talking about, like, introspection, and synthesis, and finding moments to capture information. And I think we've sort of...there's an unspoken assumption here that a way to kind of turbocharge learning from day-to-day experience is some form of synthesis or self-reflection. Would you agree with that statement? STEPHANIE: Okay. This is another thing that I am perhaps, like, still trying to figure out, and we can figure it out together, which is separating, like, self-driven learning and, like, circumstance-driven learning. Because it's so much easier to want to reflect on something and find time to be, like, oh, like, how does this kind of help my goals or, like, what I want to be doing with my work? Versus when you are just asked to do something, and it could still be learning, right? It could still be new, and you need to go do some research or, you know, play around with a new tool. But there's less of that internal motivation or, like, kind of drive to integrate it. Like, do you have this distinction? JOËL: I've definitely noticed that when there is motivation, I get more out of every hour of work that I put in in terms of learning new things. The more interest, the more motivation, the more value I get per unit of effort I put in. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think, for me, the other difference is, like, generative learning versus just kind of absorbing information that's already out there that someone else's...that is kind of, yeah, just absorbing rather than, like, creating something new from, like, those connections. JOËL: Ooh. STEPHANIE: Does that [chuckles] spark something for you? JOËL: The gears are turning in my head because I'm almost hearing that as, like, a passive versus active learning thing. But just sort of like, I'm going to let things happen to me, and I will come out of that with some experience, and something is going to happen. Versus an active, I am going to, like, try to move in a direction and learn from that and things like that. And I think this maybe connects back to the original question. Maybe this sort of, like, checking in at the end of the week, taking notes is a way to convert something that's a bit more of a passive experience, spending four days a week doing a project for a client, into something that's a little bit of a more active learning, where you say, "Okay, I did four weeks of this particular type of Rails work. What do I get out of it? What have I learned? What is something new that I've seen? What are some opinions I have formed, patterns I like or dislike?" STEPHANIE: Yeah, I like that distinction because, you know, a few weeks ago, we were at RailsConf. We had kind of recapped it in a previous episode. And I think we had talked about like, oh, do we, like, to sit in talks or participate in workshops? And I think that's also another example of, like, passive versus active, right? Because I 100%, like, don't have the same type of learning by just, you know, listening to a talk that I do with maybe then going to look up, like, other things this person has put out in the world, finding them to talk to them about it, like, doing something with the content, right? Otherwise, it's just like, oh yeah, I heard this talk. Maybe one day I'll remember it when the need arises [laughs]. I, like, have a pointer to it in my brain. But until then, it probably just kind of, like, sits there, and nothing's really happened with it. JOËL: I think maybe another thing that's interesting in that passive versus active distinction is that synthesis is inherently an act of creation. You are now creating new ideas of your own rather than just capturing information that is being thrown at you, either by sitting in a talk or by shipping tickets. The act of synthesizing and particularly, I think, making connections between ideas, either because something that, let's say you're in a talk, a speaker said that sparks an idea for yourself, or because you can connect something that speaker said with another idea that you already have or an idea that you've seen elsewhere. So, you're like, oh, the thing this person is saying connects to this thing I read in a book or something another speaker said in an earlier session, or something like that. All of a sudden, now you're creating these new bits of knowledge, new perspectives, maybe even new mental models. We talked about mental models last week. And so, knowledge is not just the facts that you absorb or memorize. A lot of it is building the connections between those facts. And those are things that are not always given to you. You have to create them yourself. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I am nodding my head a lot because that's resonating with, like, an experience that I'm having kind of coaching and mentoring a client developer on my team who is earlier in her career. And one thing that I've been really, like, working on with her is asking like, "Oh, like, what do you think of this?" Or like, "Have you seen this before? What are your reactions to this code, or, like this comment?" or whatever. And I get the sense that, like, not a lot of people have prompted her to, like, come up with answers for those kinds of questions. And I'm really, really hopeful that, like, that kind of will help her achieve some of the goals that she's, like, hoping for in terms of her technical growth, especially where she's felt like she's stagnated a little bit. And I think that calls back really well to what you said at the beginning of, like, you can spend years, right? Just kind of plugging away. But that's not the same as that really active growth. And, again, like, that's fine if that's where you're at or want to be at for a little while. But I suspect if anyone is kind of, like, wondering, like, where did that time go [laughs]...even for me, too, like, once someone started asking me those questions, I was like, oh, there's still so much to figure out or explore. And I think you're actually really good at doing that, asking questions of yourself. And then, another thing that I've picked up from you is you ask questions about, like, what are questions other people would have? And that's a skill that I feel like I still have yet to figure out. I'm [chuckles] curious what you think about that. JOËL: That's interesting because that kind of goes to another level. I often think of the questions other people would have from a more, like, pedagogical sense. So, I write a lot of blog posts. I write a lot of talks that I give. So, oftentimes when I'm creating that kind of material, there's a bit of an inner critic who's trying to, you know, sitting in the audience listening to myself speak, and who's going to maybe roll their eyes at certain points, or just get lost, or maybe raise their hand with a question. And that's who I try to address those things so that then when I go through it the next time, that inner critic is actually feeling engaged and paying attention. STEPHANIE: Do you find that you're able to do that because you've seen that happen enough times where you're like, oh, I can kind of predict maybe what someone might feel confused about? I'm curious, like, how you got from being, like, well, I know what I would be confused about to what would someone else be unsure or, like, want more information about. JOËL: Part of the answer there is that I'm a very harsh critic myself. STEPHANIE: [laughs] Yes. JOËL: So, I'm sitting in somebody else's talk, and there are probably parts where I'm rolling my eyes or being like, wait a minute, how did you get from this idea to this other thing? That doesn't follow. And so, I try to turn that back towards myself and use that as fuel to make my own work better. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's cool. I like that. Even if it's just framed as, like, a missed opportunity for people to have better or more comprehensive understanding. I know that's something that you're, like, very motivated to help kind of spread more of [laughs]. Understanding and learning is just important to you and to me. So, I think that's really cool that you're able to find ways to do that. JOËL: Well, you definitely want to, I think, to keep a sort of beginner's mindset for a lot of these things, and one of the best ways to do that is to work with beginners. So, I spent a lot of time, back in the day, for example, in the Elm language chat room, just helping people answer basic questions, looking up documentation, explaining sort of basic concepts. And that, I think, helped me get a sense of like, where were newcomers to the language getting stuck? And what were the explanations of those concepts that really connected? Which I could then translate into my work. And I think that that made me a better developer and helped me build this, like, really deep understanding of the underlying concepts in a way that I wouldn't have had just writing code on my own. STEPHANIE: Wow, forum question answering hero. I have never thought to do that or felt compelled to do that. But I remember my friend was telling me, she was like, "Yeah, sometimes I just want to feel good about myself. And I remember that I know things that other people, like, are wanting to find out," and she just will answer some easy questions on Stack Overflow, you know, about, like, basic Rails stuff or something. And she is like, "Yeah, and that's doing my good deed [laughs]." And yeah, I think that it also, you know, has the same benefits that you were just saying earlier about...because you want to be helpful, you figure out how to actually be helpful, right? JOËL: There's maybe a sense as well that helping others, once more, forces you into more of an active mindset for growth in the same way that interrogating yourself does, except now it's a beginner who's interrogating you. And so, it forces you to think a little bit more about those whys or those places where people get stuck. And you've just sort of assumed it's a certain way, but now you have to, like, explain it and really get into some of the concepts. STEPHANIE: So, on the show, we've talked a lot about the fun things you share in the dev channel in our Slack workspace. But I recently discovered that someone (Was it you?) created an Obsidian MD channel for our favorite note-taking software. And in it, you shared a really cool tool that is available in Obsidian called mind maps. JOËL: Yeah, so mind maps are a type of diagram. They're effectively a tree structure, but they don't really look like that when you draw them out. You start with a sort of topic in the center, and then you just keep drawing branches off of that, going every direction. And then, maybe branches off branches and keep going as you add more content. Turns out that Mermaid.js supports mind maps as a graph type, and Obsidian embeds Mermaid diagrams. So, you can use Mermaid's little language to express a mind map. And now, all of a sudden, you have mind mapping as a tool available for you within Obsidian. STEPHANIE: And how have you been using that to kind of process and experience or maybe, like, end up with some artifacts from, like, something that you're just doing in regular day-to-day work? JOËL: So, kind of like you, I think I have the aspiration of doing some kind of, like, daily note journaling thing and turning that into bigger ideas. In practice, I do not do that. Maybe that's the thing that I will eventually incorporate into my practice, but that's not something that I'm currently doing. Instead, a thing that I've done is a little bit more like you, but it's a little bit more thematically chunked. So, for example, recently, I did several weeks of work that involved doing a lot of documentation for module-level documentation. You know, I'd invested a lot of time learning about YARD, which is Ruby's documentation system, and trying to figure out, like, what exactly are docs that are going to be helpful for people? And I wanted that to not just be a thing I did once and then I kind of, like, move on and forget it. I wanted to figure out how can I sort of grow from that experience maximally? And so, the approach I took is to say, let's take some time after I've completed that experience and actually sort of almost interrogate it, ask myself a bunch of questions about that experience, which will then turn into more broad ideas. And so, what I ended up doing is taking a mind-mapping approach. So, I start that center circle is just a circle that says, "My experience writing docs," and then I kind of ring it with a series of questions. So, what are questions that might be interesting to ask someone who just recently had experience writing documentation? And so, I come up with 4,5,6 questions that could be interesting to ask of someone who had experience. And here I'm trying to step away from myself a little bit. And then, maybe I can start answering those questions, or maybe there are sub-questions that branch off of that. And maybe there are answers, or maybe there are answers that are interesting but that then trigger follow-up questions. And so I'm almost having a conversation with myself and using the mind map as a tool to facilitate that. But the first step is putting that experience in the center and then ringing it with questions, and then kind of seeing where those lead. STEPHANIE: Cool. Yeah, I am, like, surprised that you're still following that thread because the module docs experience was quite a little bit a while ago now. We even, you know, had an episode on it that I'll link in the show notes. How do you manage, like, learning new things all the time and knowing what to, like, invest energy and attention into and what to kind of maybe, like, consider just like, oh, like, I don't know, that was just an experience that I had, and I might not get around to doing anything with it? JOËL: I don't know that I have a great system. I think sometimes when I do, especially a more prolonged chunk of time doing a thing, I find it really worthwhile to say, hey, I don't want that to sort of just be a thing that was in my memory, and then it moves out. I'd like to pull out some more maybe practical or long-term ideas from it. Part of that is capture, but some of that is also synthesis. I just spent two weeks or I just spent a month using a particular technology or doing a new kind of task. What do I have to show for it? Are there any, like, bigger ideas that I have here? Does this connect with any other technologies I've done or any other ideas or theories? Did I come up with any opinions? Did I like this technology? Did I not? Are there elements that were inspirational? And then capturing some of that eventually with the idea of...so I do a sort of Zettelkasten-style permanent note collection, the idea to create at least a few of those based off of the experience that I can then connect to other things. And maybe it eventually turns into other content. Maybe it's something I hold onto for a while. In the case of the module docs, it turned into a Bike Shed episode. It also turned into a blog post that was published this past week. And so, it does have a way of coming back. STEPHANIE: Yeah. Yeah. One thing that sparked for me was that, you know, you and I spend a lot of time thinking about, like, the practice of writing software, you know, in the work we do as consultants, too. But I find that, like, you can also apply this to the actual just your work that you are getting paid for [laughs]. This was, I think, a nascent thought in the talk that I had given. But there's something to the idea of, like, you know, if you are working in some code, especially legacy code, for a long time, and you learn so much about it, and then what do you have to show for it [chuckles], you know? I have really struggled with feeling like all of that work and learning was useful if it just, like, remains in my memory and not necessarily shared with the team or, I don't know, just, like, knowing that if I leave, especially since I am a contractor, like, just recognizing that there's value in being like, oh, I spent an hour or, like, half a day sifting through this complex legacy code just to make, like, a small change. But that small change is not the full value of all of the work that I did. And I suspect that, like, just the mind mapping stuff would be really interesting to apply to more. It's not, like, just practical work, but, like, more mundane, I don't know, like, labor [laughs], if you will. JOËL: I can think of, like, sort of two types of knowledge that you can take out of something like that. Some of it is just understanding how this legacy system works, saying, oh, well, they have this user model that's connected to this old persona table, which is kind of unused, but we sometimes rely for in this legacy case. And you've got to have this permission flag turned on and, like, all those things that you had to just discover by reading the code and exploring. And that's going to be useful to you as long as you work in that legacy codebase, as long as you work through that path. But when you move on to another project, that knowledge probably doesn't serve you a whole lot. There are things that you did throughout that journey, though, that you can probably pull out that are going to be useful to you on other projects. And that might be maybe you came up with a new way of navigating the code or a new way of, like, finding how different pieces were connected. Maybe it was a diagramming tool; maybe it was some sort of gem. Maybe it was just a, oh, a heuristic, like, when I see a model, I like to follow the associations first. And I always go for the hasmanys over the belongstos because those generally lead me in the right direction. Like, that's really interesting insight, and that's something that might serve you on a following project. You can also pull out bigger things like, are there refactoring techniques that you experimented with or that you learned on this project that you would use again elsewhere? Are there ways of maybe quarantining scary code on a legacy project that are a thing that you would want to make more consistent part of your practice? Those are all great things to pull out of, just a like, oh yeah, I did some work on a, like, old legacy part of an app. And what do I have to show for it? I think you can actually have a lot to show for it. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really cool. That sounds like a sure way of multiplying the learning. And I think I didn't really consider that when I was first talking about it, too. But yeah, there are, like, both of those things kind of available to you to, like, learn from. Yeah, it's like, that time is never just kind of, like, purely wasted. Oh, I don't know, sometimes it really feels like that [laughs] when you are debugging something really silly. But yeah, like, I would be interested in kind of thinking about it from both of those lenses because I think there's value in what you learn about that particular system in that moment of time, even if it might not translate to just future works or future projects. And, like, that's something that I think we would do better at kind of capturing, and also, there's so much stuff, too, kind of to that higher level growth that you were speaking to. JOËL: I think some of the distinctions we're talking about here is something that was explored in an older episode on note-taking with Amanda Beiner, where we sort of explored the difference between exploratory notes, debugging notes, idea notes, and how note-taking is not a single thing. It can serve many purposes, and they can have different lifespans. And those are all just ways to aid your thinking. But being maybe aware of the kind of thinking that you're trying to do, the kind of notes you're trying to take can help you make better use of that time. STEPHANIE: I have one last question for you before we wrap up, which is, do you find, like, the stuff we're talking about to be particularly true about software development, or it just happens to be the thing that you and I both do, and we also love to learn, and so, therefore, we are able to talk about this for, like, 50 minutes [laughs]? Are you able to make any kind of distinction there, or is it just kind of part of pedagogy in general? JOËL: I would say that that sort of active versus passive thing is a thing that's probably true, just about anything that you do. For example, I do a lot of bouldering. Just going spending a lot of time on the wall, climbing a lot; that's going to help me get better. But a classic way that people try to improve is filming themselves or having a friend film themselves, and then you can look at it, and then you evaluate, oh, that's what I did. This is where I was struggling to get the next hold. What if I try to do something different? So, building in an amount of, like, self-reflection into the loop all of a sudden catalyzes that learning and helps you grow at a rate that's much more than if you're just kind of mindlessly putting time into it. So, I would go so far as to say that self-reflection, synthesis—those are all things that are probably going to catalyze growth in most areas of your life if you're being a little bit more self-aware. But I've found that it's been particularly useful for me when it comes to trying to get better at the job that I do every week. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think, for me, it's like, yeah, getting better at being a developer rather than being, you know, a software developer at X company. Like, not necessarily just getting better at working at that company but getting better at the skill itself. JOËL: And those two things have a way of sort of, like, folding back into themselves, right? If you're a better software developer in general, you will probably be a better developer at that company. Yes, you want domain knowledge and, like, a deep understanding of how the system works is going to make you a better developer at that company. But also, if you're able to find more generic approaches to onboard onto new things, or to debug more effectively, or to better read or understand unknown code of high complexity, those are all going to make you much better at being a developer at that company as well. And they're transferable skills, so they're all really good things to have. STEPHANIE: On that note. Shall we wrap up? JOËL: Let's wrap up. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeee!!!!!! AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at: referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

Joël and Stephanie talk RailsConf! (https://railsconf.org/). Joël shares how he performed as a D&D character, Glittersense the gnome, to make his Turbo features talk entertaining and interactive. Stephanie's talk focused on addressing test pain by connecting it to code coupling, offering practical insights and solutions. They agree on the importance of continuous improvement as speakers and developers and trying new approaches in talks and code design, and recommend Jared Norman's RailsConf talk on design patterns, too! That One Thing: Reduce Coupling for More Scalable and Sustainable Software (https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2222816) Connascence.io (https://connascence.io/) [Connascence as a vocabulary to discuss coupling](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/connascence-as-a-vocabulary-to-discuss-coupling](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/connascence-as-a-vocabulary-to-discuss-coupling) The value of specialized vocabulary (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/356?t=0) Transcript: We're excited to announce a new workshop series for helping you get that startup idea you have out of your head and into the world. It's called Vision to Value. Over a series of 90-minute working sessions, you'll work with a thoughtbot product strategist and a handful of other founders to start testing your idea in the market and make a plan for building an MVP. Join for all seven of the weekly sessions or pick and choose the ones that address your biggest challenge right now. Learn more and sign up at tbot.io/visionvalue.  JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, I think I can speak for both of us and say what's new in our world is that you and I just came back from RailsConf in Detroit. JOËL: Yeah, we were there for, I guess, it's a three-day conference. Both of us were giving talks. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I don't think we've both spoken at a conference for at least a little over a year, so that was really fun kind of to catch up in person. And there was a whole crew of thoughtboters who were there. Yeah, I feel like we were hanging out, like, a lot [chuckles] all of last week, just seeing each other, talking about, you know, rehearsing our talks and spending time together on...there was, like, a hack day, and we were sitting at the table together. So, I feel like I'm totally caught up on everything that's new in your world, and that's it. That's the end of the show [laughs]. JOËL: On that note, shall we wrap up? STEPHANIE: [laughs] That would not be very fair to our listeners. [laughter] JOËL: Yeah. So, how was the conference speaking experience for you? STEPHANIE: Ooh, it was really great this year. I have not spoken at a RailsConf before, so this was actually, I think, a bigger stage than I had experienced before, and I had a great time. I met Ruby friends, new and old, and, yeah, I left feeling very gooeyed, and very energized, and just so grateful for the Rails community [laughs]. Yeah, I had a very lovely time, kind of being a little bit outside my normal life for a few days. And I think my favorite part about these things is just like, anywhere you go, you can kind of just have a shared interest with someone, and you can start a conversation with them. JOËL: That's really interesting. Do you find yourself just reaching out to strangers at conferences like this? Or do you tend to just hang out with the people that you know? STEPHANIE: Oh, I think a little bit of both. I like to get meals with people I know. But if I'm just hanging out in, like, the lobby or if I happen to get a seat for a talk and I'm sitting next to someone that I don't know, I find it quite easy to just be like, "Hi, like, I'm Stephanie. Are you excited for this talk?" Or, like, "What good talks have you seen recently?" There's an aspect of, like, the social butterfly that comes out of me when I'm at these things. Because I just don't get to have, like, easy access to, I don't know, people with, like, that shared interest or people who are willing to just have a conversation with you normally, I think. JOËL: Yeah, would you describe yourself more as an introvert or an extrovert? STEPHANIE: I am an extroverted introvert [laughter]. I feel like maybe that might be interpreted as a non-answer, but I think I lean more on the introvert side. But you know when you're with a group of people, and there's not, like, a very clear extrovert in that conversation, and then you're like, oh, I have to do the heavy [chuckles] lifting of the social lubrication [laughs] in this conversation, I can step into that role, reluctantly [laughs]. JOËL: Okay. I like the label that you used, the extrovert introvert, in that I enjoy social situations. I do well in social situations. But they also consume a lot of energy for me. I don't necessarily get sort of recharged by doing social events. So, people will be surprised when they find out that I tend to talk about myself as an introvert because, like, "Oh, but you're, like, you know, you're not awkward. You engage very well in different group situations." STEPHANIE: You have a podcast [laughs]. JOËL: And the truth is I enjoy those things, right? I really like social interaction, but it does, after a while, wear me out. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that makes sense. I did want to spend a little bit of time talking about the talk you gave at RailsConf this year: "Dungeons & Dragons & Rails." JOËL: I got to have a lot of fun with the theme. The actual content was introducing people to Turbo by building an interactive Dungeons & Dragons character sheet using vanilla Rails and a little bit of Turbo. So, we're not even writing any JavaScript. We're just using the Turbo helpers, a little bit of Action Cable to mimic something a little bit like...people who are in the know might be familiar with the site D&D Beyond, which is kind of the official D&D online character sheet website. Of course, it wasn't anywhere near as fancy because it's a 30-minute talk and showcasing different features, but that's what we were aiming for. STEPHANIE: Yeah, you know, you've talked a bit about giving talks on the show before, but I wanted to get into what made this one different because I think it could be fun for our listeners. [laughter] JOËL: The way I structured this talk so it has a theme. It's about Dungeons & Dragons, and we're building a character sheet. The way I wrote the talk was it's broken up into chapters. Each chapter is teaching a new feature in Turbo that I want to show off. In order to motivate learning each of these features...because I don't like to just say, "Oh, here's a thing that technology can do. Oh, here's a thing that technology can do." That's boring. You need a reason to learn that. So, I needed a reason to say, "We need to add this to a character sheet." So, every sort of chapter of the talk opens up with a little narrative portion. We're following this character, Glittersense, the gnome, and he's on adventures. And at different points in the adventures, he's going to do different types of roles or need different stats and things. And so, when we reach the point in the adventure where we need that, we sort of freeze frame and then say, "Okay, let's add that as a feature to the character sheet." And then, oh no, it turns out that this feature is a little bit more complicated. We're going to have to learn a new Turbo feature to do that. Who would have guessed? And then, we learn a new Turbo feature together. And then, we go back to the narrative portion. The adventures of Glittersense continue. And then, oh no, we're going to need to add another feature to the character sheet. And that's sort of how the talk is structured. STEPHANIE: Yeah. And you did a really cool thing with the narrative portions, which was you basically performed as Glittersense, the gnome, voice and posture, and a lot of really great acting from you [laughs], in my opinion. JOËL: That is something that came out pretty late in the talk preparation. So, I knew I wanted this kind of alternating story and code structure. Then, like, the weekend before RailsConf, I'm running through my slide deck, and I realized, you know what? What if instead of narrating Glittersense's adventures, what if I went first person for those sections? Glittersense tells his own story. And then, from there, it wasn't a big jump to say, you know what? This is D&D. If I'm going first person and narrating, I really should do a voice. And this is a conversation I had with a couple of people at the speaker dinner. And, of course, everyone's like, "You should 100% do the voice." And I was really not feeling confident in my ability to pull it off. So, for the next two nights, because I was speaking on the third day, the next two nights at the conference, in the evenings, I'm in the hotel room in front of the mirror just practicing my gnome voice to try to get something that got the persona of Glitterense, the gnome, across to the audience. STEPHANIE: How would you describe the persona? JOËL: Very extra. STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: Very high energy. STEPHANIE: Yes. The name Glittersense is very extra, after all. JOËL: [laughs]. I punctuated a lot of the things that he says with just high-pitched laughter. He's also...so, the framing device for all of this is that you're in a tavern listening to him tell his adventures. I wanted a little bit of the sense that Glittersense is maybe embellishing a little bit. I think it may be too much to say he's full of himself, but he's definitely making himself to be the hero of the story, and maybe making himself to be slightly cooler than he really was. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I definitely got, like, a little bit of eccentricity, too, from the persona. And you know when you just, I don't know, meet an older person who has, like, a lot of life experience, and they want to tell you about it [laughter], but you do kind of maybe have a little bit of suspicion around how much they're exaggerating [laughs]. But it was really fun. Everyone I talked to afterwards, like, loved it. And I got to share the little nugget that, like, oh yeah, and Joël only, like, started doing the voice, like, decided that he was going to do it two days ago. And they were just all really, like, blown away because it seemed so well practiced, and it was really fun. JOËL: I got to do something really fun, also, with physical space because Glittersense narrates his portion, sort of the story portions, but then the code portions where we're talking about Turbo, I'm talking in my own voice. And so, when I'm talking about Turbo, I'm standing at the lectern. And when I'm Glittersense, I'm kind of off to the side on the stage and doing the voice. And so, there's this almost, like, two worlds that are inhabited: one by Joël, the speaker, and one by Glittersense, the gnome. And it got to the point where I don't say or do anything. I only move from the lectern to the, like, portion of the stage where Glittersense lives. And the audience starts chuckling and, like, nothing has happened yet, like, no jokes have been told. No voice has happened. No slides have changed. But the anticipation, people know what's coming. STEPHANIE: Yeah. And I think the best part, what I really found just really fun and, I don't know, every time it happened, I just really enjoyed it, when you transitioned out of Glittersense, the gnome, and back to Joël because you were so nonchalant about it. You kind of, like, straighten up rather than having your little kind of crouchy gnome posture, and then just walk across back to the podium. And then, in your normal voice, go back to just, you know, sharing very...not necessarily dry, but just, like, straight to the point. "And this is, like, how you, you know, create a frame in [laughs] Turbo," as if nothing happened [laughs] when even just, like, you know, 20 seconds ago, you were just enthusing about, like, slaying the bandit, chieftain [laughter] known as Glittersense. JOËL: Uh-huh. I think, especially when I open, so I get introduced. I'm off stage. I walk onto the stage, and I'm immediately Glittersense. And I'm telling a story, and the intro goes on for, like, quite a while. It's a big story chunk. And then, at some point, I just walk over to the lectern, drop the voice, hit next slide, and it's my title slide. I'm just like, "Okay, now welcome to Dungeons & Dragons on Rails. We're going to build a character sheet together." STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's exactly the moment I'm thinking of. JOËL: The walking in as Glittersense and just immediately going to the voice caught everyone by surprise. And then, the, like, oh, he keeps going for this. Is the whole talk going to be like this? And then, the, like, just when you think, oh, he's really going for it, the, like, dropping it and going to the podium and title slide. It wasn't intended to be a funny moment, but I think the contrast and the fact that I just switched over was one of the biggest laughs I got. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I mean, I think that attests to how good the delivery of it was because that contrast was very felt. So, props to you. JOËL: I love the idea of, you know, the thought that you put into building a talk and, like, the narrative structure and the pedagogy of the stuff. And, I think, in this particular case, this is almost like a narrative approach called in media res, where you start kind of in the middle. You open your book, or your movie, or whatever in the middle of the story. And then, you kind of come back to the beginning at some point later. So, it starts with some kind of action scene that grabs your attention. So, in this case, my title slide is 10, 15 slides into the talk. We get immediately started with Glittersense and his adventures. And then, once we're sort of all bought into this world, then we move to the title slide and talk about, okay, we're here to build a character sheet and all that stuff. And I think that it wouldn't have had the same impact if I'd, like, opened with that and then gone into Glittersense's adventures. And that's something that was not the case at the beginning. I really reworked the talk to make it in that order. And I think that the talk had a lot more impact for doing that. STEPHANIE: Yeah, definitely. I guess I also just wanted to point out that this is very different from all your other talks. And I think it's really cool that, you know, you are a veteran speaker, but you still find ways to do something new and try something that you've never done before, and yeah, find ways, new ways to, like, speak and engage people and teach. I don't know, do you have just any thoughts about why or how you got into a position to be like, "Oh, you know, I'm going to do something super different this time around" [laughs]? JOËL: So, every talk I give, I try to do something new, something different, to push myself as a speaker to get better. That might be in the writing of the talk; that might be in the delivery. More recently, I've been trying to do more with dynamic presence on stage. So, when I spoke at RubyConf San Diego, I was trying to not just stand at the lectern but to learn to be able to give my talk while also, you know, walking around the stage, looking at the audience, making pauses where it's necessary, not to just be so into the delivery of the talk by just standing at the podium and, like, going through my deck, which is a small thing but I think is an area I wanted to improve in. This time, I was playing around with some more narrative framing and ended up, yeah, like, pushing it to an extreme. And it works with the theme because inhabiting a character and role-playing is the core part of D&D. Not everybody plays a D&D character by doing a voice. You are a little bit extra if you do that. But it's not uncommon for people to do a voice. And so, it kind of fit perfectly with my theme. I just needed to get the self-confidence to do it. So, thank you to everyone at the speaker dinner that was like, "No, you totally got this. You should do this," because I was feeling very unsure. STEPHANIE: It really paid off, so... JOËL: I'd like to circle back to your talk, though. So, you gave, basically, the first talk of the conference. You were the first session after the keynote. A theme that came up multiple times in your talk was this idea of coupling and how it affects different parts of our code and, particularly the way that we structure tests or the way that we feel test pain. How did you, when you were prepping this talk, discover that theme and decide to lift it up? Was that something that you knew ahead of time you wanted to talk about, or did it just sort of emerge as part of the talk preparation process? STEPHANIE: That's a really great question, and I'm glad you picked up on that. So, my talk was called: "So, Writing Tests Feels Painful. What Now?" Originally, when I came up with this idea, it actually started with coupling. I realized that I wanted to give a talk about coupling because it's just something that I was struggling with or, like, had seen other people struggle with and really wanting kind of a discrete resource, wanting to provide that. But as I was just thinking about it, I was like, oh, like, there are so many different ways that this could go. On one hand, it was a very like important topic to me, but also maybe too big of a topic. And so, I actually, like, kind of put that on the back burner. And it wasn't until later when I connected it to another...it wasn't necessarily different at all, but just, like, an extension of this idea is, oh, like, people are struggling with coupling in tests or, like, it manifests in tests. And so, I thought maybe that could be the angle that I took on this topic that kind of gave me a little bit more focus. And I didn't even end up saying like, "Yeah, this talk was, like, born out of just, you know, wrestling with coupling or anything like that." So, it's cool, to me, that you picked up on it as a theme because it was...I had, you know, ended up not being super explicit about it, but it was certainly, like, a thing that was driving the content from my perspective. JOËL: Interesting. So, it started as a coupling talk and then got sort of focused through the lens of testing. STEPHANIE: Yeah. And I think there was a part of me that was like, you know, I don't know if I could just teach the concept of coupling, like, by itself without the framing of testing for people who this is, like, a new concept for them. I realized that maybe it would be more effective to be like, "Hey, like, have you experienced test pain? You know, have you had to mock out a billion objects or changed, you know, made one change and then had to fix, like, a million tests subsequently? Then this talk is for you." And then weave in the idea of coupling in it to kind of start to help people feel familiar with it or just, like, identify it without as much, like, jargon as kind of I've seen when I've tried to figure out, like, how to manage it. JOËL: It's interesting because I think it gives you a, like, concrete, valuable thing to optimize for as opposed to, like, hey, let's lower coupling because then you're writing, you know, quote, unquote, "better code." And you get to feel better about yourself as a programmer because you're doing things the, quote, unquote, "right way." That's very kind of hand-wavy, and I think sometimes leads people down a bad path where they're optimizing things that they shouldn't be. But the tests give you this very concrete way to say, "Hey, we're not just trying to reach the, like, low score record for the app in terms of coupling. We're trying to reduce test pain. Tests are painful. And that pain is telling us something. It's telling us that we've crossed some sort of threshold for coupling. Let's find ways to reduce it, not so that we can feel good about ourselves, but so that our tests are actually manageable." STEPHANIE: Yeah, I am really glad you picked up on that, too, because I feel the exact same way when someone just tells me to decouple something or, like, makes a note that, like, oh, this feels really coupled. I don't know what that means necessarily. And it's not very convincing to just be like, "Oh, you should write loosely coupled code [laughs]," at least for me. What you said just now, it's like, it's not to feel good about ourselves, you know, to write code that way, but, actually, to just feel good about our code, period [laughs]. And, yeah, finding that validation through just, like, actually working with code that is easier to change that is the goal, not necessarily to, yeah, kind of pursue some totally subjective, like, metric. JOËL: So, one of the kinds of coupling that you called out, I think, was where you hardcode a class name of some other class in your object. And that feels, like, really sort of innocuous. Like, of course, my objects can talk to other objects. And maybe I want to, like, refer to a class somewhere. Why is that such a like tricky piece of coupling to work with? STEPHANIE: It's not necessarily intentional sometimes. Like, you just do it because you're like, well, I need access to this class somewhere, and I happen to already be in this file. So, why not just hard-code it here? I do think it's a little tricky because the file that you're writing might be, like, very far down in, like, your code flow or, like, your code path, like, very far from, like, a controller or any kind of entry point into your system, at least based on what I've seen in a lot of modern Rails apps. And so, I think that coupling gets really, really obscured. I have found that, like, if I have to kind of write a more, like, a higher level test, like, maybe a request spec or something, there are times when I'm, like, having to deal with a lot of classes just to set stuff up in a test like that that I didn't think I would have to [chuckles] when I first went about trying to just be like, oh, like, let's just figure out how to get a 200 response [laughs] from this request. So, you're really burying perhaps the things that are needed to set up, like, that full path of execution. And sometimes, it only comes out when you're writing a test for it. JOËL: And you mentioned briefly, in passing, the idea that oftentimes this sort of coupling manifests as a lot of extra test setup because your object that you're trying to test now also needs all these other things that are related in order to be tested. But sometimes even when you hard code a class, though, you can't even just say, "Oh, I want this particular user or something returned." So, you have to then do something like allow this class to receive class method and return, and now you're stubbing. And I don't know how you feel about stubs in RSpec. I always treat them a little bit like a code smell in the like classic sense of it's not necessarily bad, but maybe pause, take a look, and ask yourself, "Why is that there, and should I do things differently?" STEPHANIE: Yeah. I ended up having, like, a lot of examples of stubbing in my example because the code had just been set up where that was the only way that you could access those collaborators, essentially, to, like, make an assertion on them, or have them do something different because you actually needed to go into a different path, right? And I was like, yeah, this should feel weird. You should feel a little bad [laughs] or at least, you know, kind of just pay attention to that feeling, even if you can't really do anything about it in that particular instance. But on the flip side, you know, it's like, yes, it feels a bit strange, you know, but it's not all bad, right? Like, you're kind of learning like, oh, hey, like, I am coupled to this hard-coded class because I am needing to stub, like, a class method that returns it, or that constructs it. And at least you've exposed that, you know, for yourself. One thing that I was running into a lot in my example, too, was that those things, like, weren't obvious when you were just reading maybe, like, the public methods and trying to figure out what was happening in them because they were wrapped in private methods. I was a little bit conflicted about this because there were times when it was already just a single method call, but then it was just kind of wrapped in a private method that actually hid [laughs] the things, like all the dependencies that were passed as arguments. And I found that to be, sure, it looks kind of cleaner. But then all you need to do is scroll down [laughs], and then you're like, oh, actually, there's all these other things involved, but it was kind of hidden away for me. And I found that, actually, like, at least when I actually needed to change things, less helpful than I imagine what the, you know, code author intended. Do you have any thoughts about hiding details like that? JOËL: I'm kind of a big fan. STEPHANIE: Hmmm. JOËL: The general idea, I think, is called the single level of abstraction principle. Whatever sort of public method that you're calling is often implemented in terms of...let's say it does a few different things. It's implemented in terms of, like, these sort of high-level concepts. So, whoever is reading the public method doesn't need to like care about the details of how each step is implemented. So, maybe you're fetching something from an API, and then you're making a database call, and then you're doing some transformation and creating some new objects from it. Having all of the, like, HTTP calls and the ActiveRecord stuff and the, like, transformation all in the public method, yes, there's a lot of complexity happening there, and it makes that obvious. But it also makes it really hard to get a sense of what is happening. So, I like to say, "Hey, there are four steps. Let's wrap them all each in a private method then you can call all of those in the public method." The public method now sort of reads like a very simple sort of script. First, fetch data from the HTTP API, then fetch some data from the database, then apply this transformation, then create this object. And if I'm mostly caring about what this object does and not the how let's say I'm building some other objects that interact with this, that is the information I want to know. Where I care about the actual implementation of, oh, well, exactly how is the ActiveRecord stuff done when I'm doing internal changes to the object, that's when I care about those private methods. I think where it gets tricky, and I think that's the point that you were bringing up, is that if you write code in that way, it has to change the heuristics of how you read code to detect complexity. Because, oftentimes, I think a very classic heuristic for code complexity is just line length. If you have a 50-line method, probably there's a lot of complexity there. Maybe there's a lot of coupling. If it's a four-line method that is written at a high level of abstraction that just calls out to private methods, you scan over. You're like, oh, nice and clean. Nothing to see here. Move on. And so, that heuristic doesn't really hold up in a codebase where you're applying this single level of abstraction. Do you think that lines up with your experience? STEPHANIE: Hmm. As I was listening to you, I was like, yeah, like, that makes total sense to me. But then I also clearly disagreed a little bit [laughs] in my initial...kind of what I was saying initially. And I think it's because that single layer of abstraction was not very well defined. JOËL: Hmm. That's fair. STEPHANIE: Yeah. Where, in fact, it was actually misleading. Like, it wanted to be at that level of abstraction, but it really wasn't. Like, it was operating on things at, like, a lower level and wasn't designed with that kind of readability in mind. So, it was more, like, it was just hiding stuff a little bit, at least for me. And, I think, it certainly would have taken, like, more work to figure out what that code, like, really was meant to convey. It might have taken some refactoring to coalesce at that single level. And that was essentially kind of what I was showing in my talk as, like, how to get to saying, like, "Hey, we actually are operating in the lower level, but I don't think we need to." There was some amount of, like, looking at all of the how to figure out, like, oh, maybe these things we don't even need to expose in this class. And we kind of got to a place where those details weren't, like, needed in that class at all. So, it's one of those things where it's harder than it sounds [laughs]. JOËL: It's definitely an art. STEPHANIE: Yeah. JOËL: And I think what you're saying about some of the coupling being, like, scattered throughout the class, it's something that I see a lot with situations where you're coupled, not so much to, like, a single class, but to something side effectful. So, you're building some kind of integration with a third-party API, and you're going to have to make a lot of HTTP calls. And each of those might be individually simple, and they're all sort of maybe in different private methods or whatever, or they're interspersed among a larger chunk of logic. And that makes your tests really complicated. But there's no, like, one place you can point at and be like, ooh, that's the one place where there's a lot of complexity. What's happening here, though, is that your business object that's doing stuff is coupled to the network, and that coupling is going to force you to do some stubbing. It's going to force you to deal with a bunch of side effects that are non-deterministic in your code. And you used the word coalesce earlier that I really liked because I think that's often a situation where you do have to stand back and say, "Look, there's a lot of HTTP going on here. What if I coalesced it all into an object? Now I have two objects: one that's responsible for business logic, and one that's responsible for just the HTTP calls." And, all of a sudden, the tests just totally simplify. And we've removed some coupling, but that's not something that you would have seen just from reading the code. Because, as you were saying, it's sort of scattered in little bits and pieces throughout your file that don't necessarily catch your eye. STEPHANIE: Yeah. Which brings me to a blog post that I had found a lot of inspiration from in the talk that I'll link. It's called "That One Thing: Reduce Coupling for More Scalable and Sustainable Software." But it's actually about tests [laughs], even though it doesn't make an appearance in the title of the blog post at all. But this is where I kind of got the idea of necessary versus unnecessary coupling in test. Because I had never thought about how, yeah, like, when you write a test, you are very correctly coupling yourself to at least the method and class under test [laughs], if not also the arguments, right? Or anything else needed to construct what you're testing. And literally having that listed out for me in this blog post I think it's a...they use some examples in Java. And so, there's, like, a little bit more [laughs] setup involved. But I think they're like, yeah, these are six things that, like, it's mostly fine if you're coupled to these because that's kind of what needs to happen in a test. But, like, even having something to compare a test I wrote to just, like, okay, these are the things I know I need. And then, you can start to see when you've diverged from that list, when you are finding yourself coupled to some internals of your class. I really...that was actually, like, really helpful for me because, as we talked about earlier, like, it can be kind of communicated so abstractly. But here is, like, a very clear heuristic for when you should at least, like, start to pay attention or be like, oh, this is something that was needed to get the test to run but is now starting to feel a little unnecessary because it's not on this list. JOËL: That list reminds me, or the idea of a list of things to check out for when thinking about coupling, reminds me of the concept of connascence, which is a fancy word for almost a, like, categorization of different types of coupling because coupling comes in different flavors, some of which are tighter forms of coupling than others. And so, having that vocabulary has been really helpful for me when I'm looking at PRs and code review, or even when I'm refactoring my own code. Kind of like that list that you mentioned that you have, now I have some heuristics to look at that and say, "Oh, can I go from a connascence of position to a connascence of naming, and does that help me?" STEPHANIE: Yeah, I like that you mentioned the positional connascence because I also came across a really great metaphor for kind of things that need to change together, like, when that makes sense. And it was basically the idea of a dishwasher and a laundry machine [laughs]. I wish I could recall, like, what book this was from. But it was basically like, oh yeah, like, in theory, you're washing two things. So, maybe they are similar, but then you're like, no, actually, you want these to be a little bit separate because, you know, you don't want to wash your dishes and your clothes in the same machine. I don't know, maybe that exists [laughs], but I don't think it would do a very good job for either goal. And I think that was really helpful, for me, in imagining, like, the difference between kind of coupling and cohesion, like things that...even just imagining, like, kind of where I'm doing those things in the house, right? It's like, okay, that lives in a separate room. And, like, the kitchen is for the dishes, and that could be like, you know, a module if you will. And, like, laundry happens in the laundry room, and how to kind of just separate those things, even though they also do share some qualities, too. Like, they're both appliances, right? And so, that's the way that they are similar, but they're not the same. JOËL: You just mentioned the sort of keyword cohesion. And for our listeners who are not familiar with that term, it refers to an object sort of having one thing that it does well. Like, everything in that class sort of works towards the same goal, kind of similar to the idea of the single responsibility principle. So, in my earlier example, where we're sort of interspersing some business logic, a lot of HTTP requests, and pulling out an object that's focused on HTTP, like everything is based around that, now that object has higher cohesion because it's all doing one thing. So, if you read classic object-oriented literature, the recommendations that you'll typically see are that objects should have high cohesion and low coupling. STEPHANIE: Yeah. Think of a dishwasher and a washing machine next time [laughs] you come across something like that. Because I feel like those are really great, like, real-life examples of that separation. JOËL: Did you go to Jared Norman's talk on the third day: "Undervalued: The Most Useful Design Pattern"? STEPHANIE: No, I didn't. Can you tell me about it? JOËL: It felt like he was addressing a lot of the same themes as you were but from more of a code perspective than a test perspective. Talking a lot about, again, forms of coupling, dependencies, and then, specifically, one of the tools that he focused on to reduce the coupling that we see is value objects and factory methods to construct those. So, for any of our listeners who, when the talks come out, watch Stephanie's talk and are like, "Wow, I would love to learn more about this," a great follow-up, Jared Norman's talk: "Undervalued: The Most Useful Design Pattern." STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's neat because I can see that being a solution to the hard code did class names that we were talking about earlier. And I like how that is kind of, like, a progressive lesson in coupling a little bit. I'm really glad you shared that talk with me because now I'm excited to watch it when it comes out. And in general, I just love learning new vocabulary or finding new ways to speak about this topic with clarity. So, if any of our listeners have just additional mental models for coupling [laughs] different metaphors, different household appliances [laughs], or something like that, I would love to know. JOËL: You would like that, given that our first episode together was about "The Value Of Specialized Vocabulary." STEPHANIE: Yeah, it's clearly undervalued. JOËL: Haha, I see what you did there. STEPHANIE: Thank you. Thank you very much [laughs]. JOËL: On that terrible/wonderful pun, shall we wrap up? STEPHANIE: Let's wrap up. Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!! AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at: referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

Stephanie had a small consulting win: saying no to a client. GeoGuessr is all the rage for thoughtbot's remote working culture, which leads to today's topic of forming human connections in a virtual (work) environment. GeoGuessr (https://www.geoguessr.com/) Strategies for saying no by Elle Meredith (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2zWwwjnuUA) NYT Let's Ignore Each Other in the Same Room (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/well/live/parallel-play-for-adults.html) Random question generator (https://standup-questions.vercel.app/) Transcript: JOËL: And this is just where it ends. [laughter] Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, I have a small consulting win, or even just a small, like, win as a human being [laughs] that I want to share, which is that I feel good about a way that I handled saying no to a stakeholder recently. And, you know, I really got to take them where I can get it because that is so challenging for me. But I feel really glad because we ended up kind of coming out the other side of it having a better understanding of each other's goals and needs. And so, basically, what happened was I was working on a task, and our product owner on our team asked me if it could be done by next week. And immediately, I wanted to say, "Absolutely not." [laughs] But, you know, I took a second and, you know, I had the wherewithal to ask why. You know, I was kind of curious, like, where was this deadline coming from? Like, what was on her radar that, like, wasn't on mine? And she had shared that, oh, you know, if we were able to get it out before this big launch, she was thinking that it actually might make our customer support team's lives easier because we were kind of taking away access to something before some new features rolled out. And, you know, there might be some customers who would complain. And with that information, you know, that was really helpful in helping me understand. And I'm like, yeah, like, that seems like a helpful thing to know, so I could try to strive for it. Because I also, like, want to make that process go easier as well. But I told her that I'd let her know because I honestly wasn't sure if it was possible to do by next week. And after a little bit of, you know, more digging, kind of seeing how my progress was going, in the end, I had to say that I didn't feel confident that we could finish it in time for that deadline because of the other risks, right? Like, I didn't want to just release this thing without feeling good about the plan that we had. And so, that was my small, little win in saying no, and I feel very proud of myself for it. JOËL: I'm proud of you too. That's not easy to just do in the first place, and then to do it well is a whole other level. It sounds, though, that you came out of the other side with the client with almost, like, a better relationship. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think so. In general, you know, I really struggle when people do end up getting into that debate of, like, "Well, I need this." And someone else says, "Well, I need this other thing." And, you know, at some point, it kind of gets a bit unproductive, right? But I think this was a very helpful way for me to see a path forward when maybe we, like, have different priorities. But, like, can we better understand each other and the impact of them to ultimately, like, make the best decision? The other thing that I wanted to share that I learned recently was there was a recent RailsConf talk by Elle Meredith, and it was about strategies to say no, and I watched it. And one really cool thing that I learned was that the word priority, you know, when it was first created, it actually didn't really have, like, a plural form. There was really only ever, like, a singular priority. And it wasn't until, I think, you know, the recent century or something like that, that people started to use it in a plural form. And that was really enlightening to me. I think it made me rethink the word and how I use it, and it made a lot of sense, too. Because at any given moment, you know, really, you can't be doing more than one thing; I mean, you can try. I know that I have been guilty of multitasking. But that, you know, doesn't always serve me. I never end up doing all of the things that I'm trying to do well. And I would be really curious to kind of, you know, when I do feel that urge, like, think a little bit about, like, what is the one thing that I should be doing right now that is the highest priority? JOËL: I would definitely second that recommendation for this talk. I actually got to see it live at RailsConf, and it was excellent. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I got to participate in a really fun event at thoughtbot today. We got together with some other people on the Boost Team and played a few rounds of GeoGuessr. And for those who are not familiar with this game, it drops you randomly somewhere in the world in Google Street View. You can move around. And there's a timer, and you have to drop a pin on a map where you think you are. So, you're walking through the streets, and you're like, okay, well, I don't know this language. I'm not sure where we're going. You know, with the vibes going here, I'll bet, you know, this looks like maybe southern China, and then you drop a pin. And oh no, turns out it was actually Singapore. And there's all these little hints and things. People who are really into it have learned all these tricks, and they can be really good. Sara Jackson, who is our resident GeoGuessr expert, is excellent at this. But it was a good time. STEPHANIE: Yeah, it was really fun. I liked that we played a cooperative mode where we were all kind of helping each other out. And so, maybe someone is, like, exploring on the map and sees a street sign and is like, "Oh, like, that looks like this language." And someone else is like, "Oh yeah, like, that is that." Or like, "No, I think it's actually this other language," and sharing all of the different, like, pieces of information that we're finding to get closer and closer to what it might be. And then we celebrate whoever ends up getting the closest because, at some point, it's kind of just, like, just a luck of the pin, right? Where maybe you happen to click on, like, the right place. But it's always really exciting when we're like, wow, like, Sara was only 500 kilometers away in finding the exact place that we were served. So, I had a good time as well. JOËL: So, speaking of cooperative events, this was a work event that we did. We just got together and played a game. And, for me, that was a really fun way to connect with some of my colleagues. I'm curious, what are your thoughts on things that you've seen done well in companies that are remote-first that really foster a sense of connection and community among a team? STEPHANIE: I think this worked especially well today because it was kind of scheduled in regular time that we have as a team to me. And sometimes, you know, the meeting topics are a bit more work-focused. But what I really like is that anyone on the team can host one of these meetings. We have them biweekly, and we just call them Boost biweeklies. Boost is the team that Joël and I are on. JOËL: Naming is the hardest problem in computer science. STEPHANIE: It really is. But I really like that people can bring, you know, a little bit of their own flavor to this meeting. So, whoever is host just kind of comes up with something to do. And sometimes it's like show and tell. You know, other times it is more of like, you know, what's the update on some of the projects that we're doing? Other times, it's the Spicy Takes Lightning Talks that we've kind of mentioned on the podcast before. And yeah, it is just a really nice, like, time for us to get together. And I also feel like I learn something about my co-workers every time that we meet, whether it's the person who is hosting the meeting and kind of where their interests are. I think someone even did, like, chair yoga once and guided the team in doing that. Or because they are more casual, right? Sometimes we just play a game, and I really enjoy that nice break in my day. JOËL: Do you find that the particular style of these meetings makes you feel more connected to your colleagues? Would you prefer just kind of game day one, like we had today, versus maybe, like, lightning talks or a presentation on security or something like that? STEPHANIE: I actually think the diversity is what makes it special. I get to see, you know, a bunch of different sides of my co-workers and, you know, some days, the topic is a little more serious, and that can be really connecting. Another Boost Team member had hosted a biweekly where we kind of shared the challenges of, like, consulting work and, like, onboarding onto a new project and sharing what might be difficult and, like, how we might be feeling when we do join a new project. And I think that was really helpful because it was very validating for something that I thought, like, maybe I felt a little bit more alone in. And the tone was a little bit more, like, earnest and serious. But I came away with it feeling very supported by my team, right? And other times, it is just silliness and fun [laughs], which, you know, is also important. Like, we need to have fun every once in a while. JOËL: That's awesome. Do you feel like when you go to these meetings, you're looking more for knowledge or looking more for connection? STEPHANIE: I think both because knowledge sharing is also, you know, can be really helpful. Like, I have enjoyed learning that, you know, so and so is, like, a GeoGuessr expert, Sara, right? And so, if I ever, like, find myself needing [chuckles] someone to go to about my Google Street View or world geography questions, I know that I can go to her. And, like, knowing that about her, like, makes me feel more connected to her. So, I think both are true. So, we have been talking about a meeting style form of connecting in a remote workplace, but I'm really curious about your thoughts on asynchronous versus synchronous communication and how you find connection with a format that is more asynchronous, not just, you know, being in a meeting together. JOËL: That's really challenging. I think I personally find that something that's mostly synchronous with maybe a little bit of a lag works pretty well for me, so something like Slack, where it's not exactly real-time because someone could take some time to come back to me. But for working hours overlap, there's likely some close-to-synchronous conversation happening. But, you know, I can still get up and, you know, refill my cup of coffee, or it's not quite like I'm sitting in front of a camera. So, I think that, for many things, hits the sweet spot for myself. But there's definitely some things where I think you want a higher, like, information density. And that's, I think, where the synchronous face-to-face meeting really shines. STEPHANIE: Information density. I haven't heard that phrase before, but I like it. JOËL: The idea being, you know, how much information or how many words are you sharing back and forth, you know, per minute or something like that. And when you're talking on a call, you can do a lot more of that than you can going back and forth over Slack or writing an email. STEPHANIE: So, I would say that at thoughtbot, we have a pretty asynchronous Slack culture, which I think can be quite different from other, you know, places I've worked at before or other Slack spaces that I've seen. And I actually find it a little bit harder to engage in that way. We have a dev channel where, you know, people chat about different technical topics. And sometimes, you know, those threads go, like, 40 replies long. And I think you tend to engage a lot more in those. And I'm curious, like, does that scratch the itch for you in terms of that perfect, like, async, kind of some amount of lag for you to be doing other things, kind of doing your work, but then being able to come back and pick up the conversation where I left off? JOËL: Yes, that is really nice because, you know, maybe I have a meeting or something, and I'm not there when the conversation starts, but I don't miss out. And I get to join in, you know, maybe 30 minutes after everyone else. You know, sometimes you don't want to just, like, restart a conversation that's happened and is done. But some of these things will kind of be going on and off all day. And those can be really fun, especially sometimes, like, a new person joins the thread and brings in a totally new perspective or a new angle that kind of, like, breathes new life into it and kind of gives everyone a new perspective. STEPHANIE: Nice. I also think there's something to the idea of seeing more people engage with something that then invites other people to engage with it. JOËL: I would agree with that. It's definitely exciting to see a thread, and it's not like, oh, it's empty, and I'm the only one who's put a response in here. When there is a lot of back and forth, you can almost feel the excitement. And that gets me hyped to, like, keep it going. STEPHANIE: At a previous workplace in our Slack, we had a, like, virtual Jeopardy channel. JOËL: Ooh. STEPHANIE: And so, there was a little Jeopardy bot. And I guess whenever someone, you know, had a low on what they were doing, they would just start, you know, tagging the bot to pose a question. And anyone can answer, right? But once you kind of got the ball rolling, you would see other people start playing as well. And it would get really active for segments of 30 minutes or so. And I always really enjoyed that because, yeah, it was a way for me to remember like, oh yeah, there's, like, other people also, like, typing away on their little keyboards, and we're all here together. But it was really interesting to see, like, when someone got it rolling, like, oh, other people, like, joined in. JOËL: Yeah, being able to see small things like that can really build a sense of connection, even if you're not yourself directly participating. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think another thing I've been trying out lately is letting people know that I'm in a meeting space and offering to virtually co-work. So, you know, during the early days of when thoughtbot went remote, we had a lounge virtual meeting space for people to hang out with and, you know, get that face time that they weren't getting anymore since we weren't in the office. And, you know, I think that has kind of decreased in terms of engagement over, you know, several years now. And obviously, people have a lot of meeting fatigue and stuff like that. But I was kind of in a mood to revive it a little bit because, yeah, I kind of got over the meeting fatigue and was wanting more face time with people. And the unfortunate thing, though, is that, like, no one was showing up to this room anymore. So, you know, even if someone wanted to hang out in it, you know, they go in. They see no one's there, you know, maybe they stay for a few minutes, but then they're like, okay, well, I'm just going to leave now. And a couple of thoughtboters and I have been trying to revive it where we'll post in our general channel, like, "Hey, like, I'm in this meeting room. Like, come hang out for the next hour if you would like." And that's been working well for me. I have had a few, like, really nice lounge, virtual co-working hangout sessions. Even if one person shows up, honestly, like, that fulfills my want to just, like, speak to another human. [laughs] JOËL: What does virtual co-working look like? Are you just kind of each doing work, but you've got a video camera on, and you're just aware of the presence of someone else? Do you kind of have, like, random breaks where you talk? What is that experience like? STEPHANIE: Oh yeah, that's a good question. I have to say; for me, I'm just talking to the other [laughs] person at that point. I'm not really doing a whole lot of work. And, you know, in some ways, I almost think that, like, in those moments, I am really wanting to chat with someone and, like, that's okay, right? JOËL: It's like a virtual water cooler for you. STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. Like, that would be the moment if I were working in office that I would wander into the kitchen looking for a snack but also an unsuspecting victim to start [laughs] a conversation with. JOËL: I feel you. I feel you. I have absolutely done that. STEPHANIE: Yeah. And that's actually what makes me feel a little less guilty about it. Because, you know, when I was working in the office, like, that was such a big part of my day, and it's kind of what kept me motivated. And at home, I do find myself, like, a lot more productive. In fact, like, I think I am because I'm, you know, not spending that time wandering into the kitchen. But at what cost? [laughs] At the cost of, like, me feeling very, like, lonely and, like, kind of burnt out at the end of the day. So, injecting my day with some of these moments, I think, is important to me. And also, again, like, I know that I'm being really productive in my, like, heads-down-time that I want to, you know, allow myself to just like, get that dose of connection. JOËL: I know, for me, when we were doing things like this in person as well, those conversations that happen, yes, there's some random, frivolous stuff, but sometimes, it is a conversation related to work that I'm doing. Because, you know, someone who's not on my project is like, "Hey, how's your project going?" Or whatever. I'm like, "Oh, well, I'm, you know, doing this ODBC connection, and I'm kind of stuck." And, you know, we kind of talk about a few things. It's like, "Oh, did you know about this gem?" And it's like, "Wait, why didn't I talk to you earlier? Because this totally solves my problem." STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think that being a sounding board is so valuable as well. So, I guess I enjoy virtual co-working, not necessarily, you know, us, like, sitting together and doing our work separately. Though I know that there's value in that, especially in real life. Like, I remember reading an article. I'll try to find it and link it. But the idea of just, like, sharing space with someone can be, like, a form of bonding. But I do really enjoy just hearing about what other people are working on and just kind of, like, asking questions about it, right? And maybe we do take away, like, a new perspective or, like, have some insights about, like, the work itself. And, yeah, we don't really get that when we're working remotely by ourselves because there's no one to turn to and be like, "Hey, what do you think about this problem?" JOËL: I love how no matter what the topic is that we're discussing on this show, you always have a book or an article or something that you've read that you can reference. And I think that's amazing. STEPHANIE: Thank you. JOËL: So, you're talking about things that have really helped you feel a deeper sense of connection. I had a realization recently about the power of physical items. In particular, as consultants, sometimes we work with clients who, for security reasons, want us to work on a dedicated laptop for this particular client. And so, we'll have clients maybe—well, now that we're remote—ship us a laptop, and we work on that laptop when we're doing client stuff, and then on our thoughtbot laptops when we're doing thoughtbot things. And when I've been on clients like that, I have felt much more isolated from the thoughtbot team. And just, like, physically switching over to the thoughtbot laptop, all of a sudden, gives me that feeling of connection. And there's something I can't quite explain about the power of the physical item. And, say, I'm working on the thoughtbot laptop today with, you know, thoughtbot Slack in the background or whatever, and I feel more connected to my colleagues. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is really curious. Did you also have thoughtbot communication channels open in your client laptop during that time? JOËL: I did, and yet still felt more separation. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really interesting. The way you're describing it, it was almost like, you know, the main laptop that you work with, with your, like, all of the settings that you like, all of your little shortcuts, you know, the autocomplete to the whatever, like, channels of communication that you are used to seeing. In some ways, that almost feels like home a little bit. And I wonder if working on a client laptop almost kind of feels like, you know, being in a stranger's house, right? JOËL: There's definitely an element of that. Yeah, all the little things I've fine-tuned, some of the productivity software I have on there that are just, you know, I can one by one set them up on the client laptop, depending on permissions. But yeah, it's never quite the same. STEPHANIE: So, when you are in a situation where you're mostly working from a client laptop and maybe embedded in their Slack workspace, embedded in their team, how do you go about investing in connection with your client team? JOËL: So, you know what's kind of weird? Is that when I'm on a client laptop, I feel less connected to my colleagues at thoughtbot, but the reverse is not necessarily true. I don't feel more connected to colleagues on a client team on a client laptop than I would on my thoughtbot laptop. So, I'm not exactly sure what the psychology is going on there. But I feel kind of most connected to both when I'm working on my thoughtbot laptop, which is perhaps a bit strange. STEPHANIE: Oh, yeah, that is interesting. I think, in general, there's an aspect of joining a new client team and trying to figure out the culture there and how you might engage with it, right? And how what you bring to the table kind of fits in with how they do things, and how they talk about things, and how they behave. In some ways, it's kind of, like, you know, an outsider joining this, like, in-group, right? So, I've definitely realized that the ways that I engage and feel connected at thoughtbot, like, may or may not work for the client team that I'm joining. JOËL: Yeah. And onboarding onto a client team is not just a technical exercise, right? It's also a social process where you want to get to know the other people on your team, get to sort of integrate into the way they work, their processes, hopefully, build a little bit of, like, personal connection with individuals because all of those are going to help me do my job better tomorrow, and the day after, and the week after that. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I had mentioned previously that one thing that I've been enjoying on my client team is our daily sync question. So, a random question will be generated, you know, like, "What are you eating for dinner today?" Or, like, "What are you looking forward to this weekend?" And folks are able to share. And the fun thing is that sometimes the answer to the question is longer than their work update itself. JOËL: Nice. STEPHANIE: But that is actually the, you know, the beauty of it because we all just, like, get to laugh and get to, you know, chime in. And I'm like, "Oh yeah, like, that sounds delicious, like, what you're eating for dinner tonight." But, like, that would not work for our Boost Team's sync because, you know, it's a much bigger meeting with sometimes up to, you know, 20 to almost 30 people and, like, we can't quite have as much time spent talking about the fun question of the day. So, I definitely think that, you know, it depends your team size, and makeup, and whatnot. JOËL: Are those questions kind of preset, or do you all get to contribute questions to the list? STEPHANIE: We brainstormed the questions one retro when we were realizing that we were kind of getting a little bored of the existing question that we had. And we came up with a handful that is plugged into, like, a website, or, like, an app that randomly, you know, picks the question of the day. And so, I think, again, when we get a little bored of the ones that we have in rotation, we'll throw in some curveballs in there. JOËL: Have you ever considered adding "What's new in your world?" to this rotation? STEPHANIE: It's funny you mentioned that because it's actually the question that we got a little bit stale on. [laughs] JOËL: Really? STEPHANIE: And we needed to inject some new life into, yeah. It's a classic, you know. But I think the variety is nice, especially since we're meeting almost every day. And before we started recording, you and I were just talking about how even sometimes it's tough to think of something that's new in our world [laughs] because we don't always live the most interesting and, you know, new lives. And sometimes, we kind of just have to dig deep to come up with something, and we only meet weekly. [laughs] JOËL: I can definitely see how doing this daily might be more challenging. I think there's also value in questions that are a little bit more focused. Part of what's fun for this podcast is that "What's new in your world?" is so kind of broad. But maybe for something daily, having something really specific, like, what did you eat for dinner tonight? Means that you aren't just kind of drawing blanks in your mind, like, uh, uh, what is new in my world? What have I done? I don't know; I have a boring life. I don't do anything. Kind of panic mode that you can sometimes get when you hit a meeting. And so, I do know that when I've been sometimes in situations with people where you have questions like that, I've tended to really appreciate the more targeted ones. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's so interesting you mentioned that because I think in social situations, there's usually maybe, like, someone who is really good at asking those, like, specific questions to get the group talking and, like, you know, engaged in a fun conversation, and that specificity helps. One thing that I was just wondering about is the value of meeting every day in a sync kind of format, and I'm curious if you think that is important to you. If you have been on other teams that don't meet every day, maybe they have, like, a virtual check-in, right? Like, a virtual reminder to share what they're working on as opposed to meeting synchronously. JOËL: I think I've seen sort of different purposes for sync meetings. Sometimes it's very kind of project-heavy, right? You're talking about the tickets you're working on for today. The reason you're having that is specifically for status updates or because you are blocked, and you want somebody else to help unblock you. So, it's very process-focused. I think that varies team to team, but it can be really helpful. Even I've been on projects where it's maybe me and one other person, and we'll have kind of an informal just call each other up every morning and say, "Hey, here's what I'm working on today. Here's kind of roughly the strategy I plan to take on it. And we'll go back and forth." And for something like that, it inevitably also somewhat turns into a bit of a social call, so that's planning and social. And I think that can be really strong. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I like that a lot. JOËL: That's not necessarily going to be the case for every team, every project, especially with larger teams. And I feel like for something like the Boost Team at thoughtbot, we have a daily sync. We're not all working on the same project. So, I don't want to know about the specific details of the ticket you're working on. I'm more interested in getting just a little bit of face time with the whole of our team to feel a connection. And, you know, maybe if you've got something cool that you want to share, and that can be a win. It can even be a struggle. And we can all kind of empathize, right? That, like, "Oh, I dropped production database this morning, and I'm kind of freaking out," is a totally fine thing to share. But "I am working on ticket 1, 2, 3, 4 to add some text to a part of the page," that's not particularly useful to me in the kind of sync that we have for the thoughtbot Boost Team. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. I think knowing, like, who the audience is of the meeting and, like, how they might be able to support you or be there for you is helpful in making them feel a little more relevant and personal. And I had mentioned that our Boost daily meetings or daily syncs, you know, are a little too big for people to really get into, you know, sharing a fun, personal anecdote, or whatever. But one thing that I really enjoy is that whoever goes last in giving their update gets to choose the sign-off for everyone. So maybe that's like, okay, we'll just go out on a wave, and we all wave. Or maybe it's, you know, like, making a little heart with your hands. And then there's some folks on the team who go really wild and, you know, come up with something totally unexpected. And I think, you know, that spontaneity is so fun. And we all share it in this collective act of...I'm trying to think of a funny one lately, maybe, like, sinking down into your chair until you disappear from the view [laughs]. That's a good one. JOËL: Sometimes it's those, like, small social rituals that can be really meaningful. STEPHANIE: Absolutely. Do you have a favorite sign-off that you have either requested or have done? JOËL: So, I typically just go for the wave if I'm last because I've not thought about it. But I generally think it's fun to have everybody try to mimic an emoji. So, it might be like, oh, everybody do the, you know, See-No-Evil emoji, or everybody do the party parrot. Those are pretty fun to sign off on. STEPHANIE: Oh yeah, [inaudible 29:15] pausing is good. I think another one I like is, "Everyone do your best impression of a tree." [laughs] JOËL: Sometimes, too, it's fun to do something that's relevant to the particular day. If there's something special happening that day, you get something relevant. I've done before, if it's on a Friday, say, "Everybody do your best Rebecca Black impression." STEPHANIE: Yeah, also excellent. JOËL: Because, you know, it's Friday. STEPHANIE: Yeah, like, a little moment of collective celebration for the weekend. On that note, it's a Friday we're recording this episode. Shall we wrap up and look forward to the weekend? JOËL: [laughter] Fun, fun, fun, fun. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeee!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.

What you'll learn in this episode: Why Google's search results page is more important than your website homepage Why the most successful law firms are involved in their marketing, even when they hire an outside agency How a firm's intake process can make or break their SEO efforts Why content marketing today is about quality, not quantity Why consistent Google reviews are the key to ranking higher About Stephanie Chew: Stephanie Manor Chew is award-winning law firm analyst andDirector of Sales and Head of the Elite Sales Team at Digital Law Marketing. For the last 16 years, she has been helping clients build credibility and increase their visibility online through the full lifecycle of digital initiatives. From custom search engine marketing and social media positioning, to targeted content and online reputation management, she makes sure that DLM clients get what they need, when they need it. Additional Resources: Digital Law Marketing Website  Stephanie's LinkedIn Digital Law Marketing Facebook Transcript: Gone are the days when you could simply outsource everything to an SEO agency and expect results. To rank on Google today, law firms must take an active role in overseeing and executing their marketing plan. Stephanie Chew, Director of Sales at Digital Law Marketing, finds that the company's most successful clients collaborate with them to achieve the best possible outcome. She joined the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst Podcast to talk about why content is no longer king; why a firm's intake process is the most important part of lead generation; and how consistent Google reviews can boost your SEO efforts. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon:          Welcome to the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst Podcast. Today, my guest is Stephanie Chew. She is the Director of Sales at Digital Law Marketing, and she's speaking to us from Annapolis, Maryland. The company is headquartered in Nashville but is basically a virtual firm and works all over the country. Digital Law Marketing encompasses a wide range of digital aspects today, and no law firm can live without them. From SEO to PPC to social media, a law firm can make a case for each of them, especially when they work together. Today, Stephanie is going to educate us on what's new in digital law marketing, where we should start and what we can't live without. Stephanie, welcome to the program.   Stephanie:    Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.   Sharon:          Stephanie, tell us your background. How did you end up doing this? You didn't tell your mother this is what you wanted to do where you were little, I don't think.   Stephanie:    It's funny; I always wanted to be in advertising in some respects. I was just telling my daughter this the other night when we were watching the Super Bowl. Watching the Super Bowl with my father, I was always so fascinated by the ads, and I always knew I wanted to do something around advertising and marketing. After college, I started with Trader Publishing Company, which is now Dominion Enterprises. It has changed hands a couple of times, but it's basically selling advertising space to car dealers. Then it turned into apartment communities, like for-rent magazines, things of that nature, and then that led me over to the SEO world, the website world. Then I started working with law firms in 2009, and I've been here ever since.   Sharon:          That's a long time with law firms. I can relate. I wonder what would have happened if I had been in advertising when SEO started. I'm involved in SEO, but I thought advertising was my dream job and quickly found it wasn't. What would you say that lawyers have to do differently in digital marketing?   Stephanie:    They have to be a part of the partnership. In the first part of my career, we would come in and help firms and companies by putting ads in newspapers or books, and the firm or the business really didn't have to do much. Now the most successful firms out there are involved with their marketing, maybe not as much as we are, but they're a pretty big part of it. More than they ever have been. For instance, getting reviews is incredibly important now, so the firm has to work to get reviews. We can make a firm tell Google how amazing the firm is. We can create an amazing website with wonderful content, great SEO strategy, but if the firm isn't getting reviews, they're not going to get business. Now, more so than it's ever been, the firm has to be behind the digital focus and be a part of what their partners are doing to help them become successful online.   Sharon:          That's interesting, because when I read a review, the first thing I look at is, “Is this a legitimate review or is something the company wrote?” I hadn't thought about how involved lawyers have to be, how involved everybody has to be. It's not just something done in the back room.   Stephanie:    Right. The firms that are the most successful online, the lawyers are actually asking for those reviews directly themselves. We've seen firms where they've hired people to get reviews for them. They're never as successful as the actual attorney asking for that review themselves. So, asking for those reviews is one thing we always push our firms to do because, like you said, you look at those reviews to see if they're real or not. Most people look first at the newest reviews, the most recent review that was posted, and then they look at the lowest review. Those are the two categories that people care the most about. So, it's important for the firm to be involved just as much as the marketing company to make sure your reputation is good too.   Sharon:          Do you explain that from the very beginning, that they have to be involved?   Stephanie:    Yes, and we will only work with firms that will be involved. We're very lucky that we're exclusive, so we only work with one firm per practice area per geographic location. If a firm isn't a partner with us, there's only so much we can do for them. But having that partnership, we are the best in what do. We like working with the best firms. It creates the best partnership for everybody's success. But yes, it's very important that they're also a part of their own success up front.   Sharon:          When you say success, is that lead generation? Is it just what they're doing?   Stephanie:    Yes, lead generation. Our goal is to help firms become visible online organically. Our main focus is search engine optimization, which is organic placement on search engines. We do paid ads, and we're very good at doing paid ads as well, but it's that organic placement that you get the most return from. The more rankings these firms have on the search engines, the more phone calls they're going to get and then hopefully the more cases they get. It really does work that way. We can track a ranking on the search engines, and then we track their phone and work with them to hear how many cases they're getting, and it really does work in that direction.   Sharon:          Social media and the paid stuff aside, do you encourage lawyers to write articles? Does this help?   Stephanie:    With our clients, we handle all of the writing because there are couple of different ways you have to write. Number one, you have to write to make sure you're the voice of the firm and it makes sense. You're writing about cases you're looking to get, but you also have to make sure you're writing so the search engines can recognize you. For instance, a very popular search phrase right now is “near me,” like “car accident attorney near me,” “car accident lawyer near me,” “dentist near me,” “best optometrist near me.” It's making sure you get those “near me” keywords in your content, making sure your content includes questions and answers, because a lot of people are asking questions of the search engines.   We do have firms that like to write themselves. Attorneys are wonderful writers, but if they're not writing so the search engines can recognize what they're saying, it's not going to help them become more visible when it comes to these search phrases. It's a balance. We do all the writing for our clients with their approval, but if somebody does want to write here and there, we encourage that. We would just help with massaging the SEO and the content.   Sharon:          Would you massage the SEO or the stuff that makes them go higher in the rankings? If they have a website already, would you say, “It's wonderful, but we can go in and do some things”? What do you do?   Stephanie:    99% of the time, we rebuild and redesign and develop the website first. The reason we do that is because a lot of how your website is built is how you're going to perform on the search engines. For instance, if you have a very slow website, Google does not like that. Your site speed is a factor if you're going to rank or not. So, we like to go in and clean up the website so we have a good product to work with to then help with SEO. From there, we write content, build out the content, create site maps, really get to know the firm, their voice, and figure out the types of cases they're looking for. Then we write content around that to help them rank on the search engines.   Sharon:          Are you called in when they say, “We're about to embark on a rebuild of our website”? It seems to me they already have one when they call you in.   Stephanie:    Sometimes that happens, where we start working with a firm and they just rebuilt their website, and we have to give them the bad news of “I'm really sorry, but this website isn't going to perform.” We wouldn't take on that client because we want to set up the proper expectations of success for our clients. If you have a marketing company tell you, “Oh no, that's O.K. Your website's slow, but we could still work with it,” that would be a red flag because it won't work as well as it could if you redid the site. It happens sometimes.   Sharon:          Going back to the “near me,” I don't even enter that, but that comes up as a choice to click on.   Stephanie:    Yeah, that's usually right.   Sharon:          That's interesting. What do you mean by content writing? Is that what you mean when you're making sure the content—   Stephanie:    When it comes to content, you have the content pages on the website. Some of the most popular content pages on a law firm's website would be their practice area pages. You might have a page on wrongful death. You might have a page on car accidents. You might have a page on personal injury. Then each one of those pages includes content. The type of content on that page could be question and answer, could be including those words “near me.”   Google pulls from that content to determine how you're going to rank based on the way the person is searching. You'll see a lot of times where Google does an instant answer. If they're asking a question, “what is the statute of limitations in the state of California for a wrongful death case,” a law firm's content page could answer that question, so they'll bring it up as the first result.   There's also blogging. You want to make sure you're blogging on a regular basis. In the past, it was as much content as you could put on there. The phrase “content is king” is gone. That used to be the way we spoke when you would push content, push content, push content. Now, it's more about the quality of content versus the quantity of content. It's making sure it's good content that's enriched with the types of cases you're looking for, and written well so the search engines recognize you as an expert on that topic with experience and expertise in the discussion. Google will see that and help you rank better based on the content and what you're saying.   Sharon:          Is that per lawyer? Let's say on the home page of the website you have banners or badges that say, “We're the best.” Or is it in the bio?   Stephanie:    It would be in a practice area page. When somebody does a search for a car accident lawyer, let's say, Google wants to provide them with the most specific information they're looking for. So, they'll more likely pull up a car accident page from your website and show that over your home page. Your home page should be a summary of everything you do, and then the content pages are more specific on each practice area. When somebody does find you, they're going to find that practice page usually over your home page, but all of your content should include things that are easily identifiable for Google.   Sharon:          I always laugh when I see a bio that says they specialize in 20 different things, because how many can you specialize in? What would you do? Would you put everything the firm does? What would you do in order to come up?   Stephanie:    With a bio, you really want to focus on that attorney and what they've done and that's it. When it comes to the actual practice area pages, that's where you would focus on that practice area. Then maybe you could put in a little sentence or two about which attorney does that, if that makes sense. There are ways of doing it. It's not necessarily a right answer or a wrong answer. It depends on the firm, the market, the practice area. But there are ways you can incorporate that being specific to the attorney and what their expertise is versus what the whole firm does on the bio page, if that makes sense.   Sharon:          It does make sense. Should you put successes like, “We won a case that was really hard to win for $10,000 and John Smith did it”?   Stephanie:    Oh yeah, verdicts and settlements pages and verdicts and settlements in general are some of the most visited areas on the websites. People want to see numbers. There are some markets where they might not be allowed to put verdict and settlement numbers on their website, or the firm doesn't feel like it's appropriate to do that. But by the way, law firms that put their numbers on their websites get more attraction than the ones that don't.   Sharon:          The big question is do people choose a personal injury firm because they like the lawyer? It's a nice, touchy-feely firm versus one that's won all of these big numbers but they might not like as much. How do you choose? What's more important?   Stephanie:    That's a good question. Again, it comes back to the person choosing and what's important to them on why they're choosing, but if you don't have the big numbers, you definitely want to talk about what you've done. A lot of people want to feel that they can relate to that attorney. I always say talk as much as you can about things you've done to help other people. If I had a case that was specific and I read that that attorney has helped other people with the same thing I have, I'm more likely to work with them regardless of what the numbers are because I feel like they could help me. If you don't have those big numbers, you want to discuss what you've done because people will be able to relate to that.   We're also big believers in putting personal information into those bios. Talk about your hobbies, talk about your children, because people relate to things. There are so many situations where I've heard that this attorney got a case because somebody saw they had the same hobby, they went rafting or whatever it was, and their son had passed away, or that they were calling him because he had the same alma mater. Obviously that is a big one people gravitate toward. Outside of politics—I would stay away from writing anything related to politics—the more information you can humanize yourself with, it's going to help people connect with you better and they'll end up hiring you.   Sharon:          That's interesting. I've heard that both ways. I tend to relate to people, so I would like to know more about them. That's interesting that you should put it in your bio. Are you usually called in the beginning or are they already underway? Why are you called in? Tell us about your business. That's several questions, sorry.   Stephanie:    That's O.K. Usually we're called in when a firm is looking to take their law firm to that next step and they're looking for more cases. They're not showing up online. They're not getting phone calls. They're not getting cases online. A lot of times, we're called in to firms that have worked with referrals for pretty much their whole law career. They're always getting referrals, and they're tired of paying those referral fees to other attorneys. They'd like to generate cases themselves from the internet. Then we would be brought in to help them analyze what's going on in their market and what their current web presence is. Then we can put together a plan to get them to where they need to be to generate more calls that generate the cases they're looking for. It's usually somebody that wants to make more money off the internet in some way, like they're tired of paying referral fees and/or they're looking for more visibility and better-quality cases. We hear that a lot; that we help firms create better-quality cases over anything else.   Sharon:          Better quality meaning larger cases, bigger numbers?   Stephanie:    It could be anything. It could be that it's a firm that did a bunch of slip and fall cases and now they're getting bigger and better quality personal injury cases. It's medical malpractice firms that used to get a lot of junk calls and now they're getting quality calls, things like that. We're really good at SEO, and we're really good at creating more rankings for somebody organically. Usually when somebody finds a firm organically, they tend to be better qualified, quality leads.   Sharon:          Do you keep your eye on the changes in the Google algorithm?   Stephanie:    Yeah, we have a SEO specialist that works with digital marketing. We're all senior level, too. I always like to mention that because our SEO specialists are also very recognized in their SEO space. We have one Google Product Expert that works for us. She's one of 50 in the world. She's outstanding. We also have a Google Local Search expert who's been nationally recognized. They're the ones that keep up with the trends and how things are changing, and then we push that down to all of our firms. We're constantly moving in different directions with content and with SEO strategies based on the changes in the Google algorithm and changes in how we as human beings search. It is ever-changing. If you looked back 10 years ago from today, it's totally different to what we're doing. Even a year ago, it's a different strategy than what we were doing.   Sharon:          That sort of leads me to the next question. When I search, you have to skip like 10 sponsored ads. Is it possible to be high organically?   Stephanie:    Absolutely. It's interesting because Google has put a lot of emphasis on their paid ads. They have a newer ad called the Local Services Ad. It's been around for two years now, but those are the ones where there are pictures at the top of the page. They're considered Google screened, but they're driven by reviews and making sure that somebody answers the phone and other things in your budget. But the biggest driver of those is how frequently you're getting reviews, which is interesting that Google is doing that. So, there are different types of advertising they're doing, and they're pulling in an organic element with those reviews. Below that you have your pay-per-click, which is the paid advertising for Google Ad Words, and then you have your local. But yes, local SEO is still the sweet spot of getting calls. The firms we see, the majority of the calls come in through that local SEO space.   Sharon:          When you say you only take one practice area and one geographic area, do you have a map divided up? What do you call a geographic area?   Stephanie:    It depends on the marketplace, but a lot of it has to do with where the office is located. For instance, we have a state where the firm has 10 office locations throughout the state. Well, they're the only personal injury firm in that state because they have so many offices, so we're not going to work with anybody else. It comes down to who their competitors are. Our whole thing is we're not going to work with your competition. If it's too close for comfort, we go to our clients first and have them tell us if it's O.K. if we work with them, yes or no based on the competition, and we will or we won't. We do not cross that line at all. We are 100% exclusive, and that's why. We only have a handful of clients per state because it's all we want. We don't want to be the biggest SEO company out there. We want to be the best, and we feel that we are.   Sharon:          What do you do if you're in a room of lawyers, whether it's partners or not, and they say, “Reviews aren't a problem. Sally in marketing handles the reviews”? What do you do then?   Stephanie:    It depends. Maybe Sally in marketing really does do a great job and she is getting multiple reviews a week. That would be awesome. We wouldn't have a problem with that at all. But if Sally in marketing hasn't gotten a review for six months, we can see that. We can say, “Oh, that's great, but the best thing for firms is to get consistent reviews on a regular basis. Two to three reviews a week would be ideal.” We can show that they're responding to them, that they're engaging with that list, and we really push that.   We've had situations where we have gotten firms top ranked—I keep trying to say first page, but there are no pages anymore when it comes to Google. It's about rank. You can't even scroll. So, we could get somebody at the top of the rank of the search engine, but if their reviews aren't good, nobody's going to call them. We've done our job, but nobody's going to call you if your reviews aren't good. It's a two-way street. We coach our firms. We encourage them. We do a lot with intake. We can audit phone calls and help them figure out how people are handling their calls. It's a lot of coaching and encouraging and trying to do our best to get them to do their part, too.   Sharon:          I think you just preempted my next question. You can have wonderful numbers, but if they fill out the intake form and nobody sees it—   Stephanie:    Yeah, if they're not answering the phone. We see this a lot. We'll do audits with some of the most successful firms in lots of different situations. I'll never forget there was a catastrophic injury/medical malpractice firm, and a lady called very upset saying that her daughter was just diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and the woman's like, “I don't know if we do that. Hold on. Let me check. Yeah, we do that.” Now the confidence is shot. There's no way. These are not the people to hire.   Intake is such a big part of these firms. It's probably the most important part that our lawyers aren't paying attention to right now. Not all our firms, but in our industry in general. We're doing a lot with our clients to help them with that, but in our industry as a whole, I feel like intake is probably the area that can be improved the most.   Sharon:          People don't talk about that enough, I think. They talk about how much money everybody is spending on SEO and organic, but not about when the calls come in, where they were sent or what happens. Stephanie:    It's really a salesperson on that line if you think about it. As you said, firms are spending thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of dollars a month in marketing, but who's answering that phone? All your dollars are going out the window when you don't have the right person. They usually want to cut costs on those types of positions, when really it should be handled as a sales organization. Some of the more sophisticated PI firms, those large firms that are coming into different markets, are handling those as sales calls. It's changing. I've seen firms do a great job, but I do think that's one of the first things that is overlooked. Hopefully it's coming to light now. More firms are starting to do better at it, but you've got to take care of all the parts.   Sharon:          There are a lot of parts. I was laughing when you said content is king because that's what people used to say. There was a time, a long time ago, when you could tell somebody, “Just write a lot about what you do and you'll be O.K.,” but that's long gone.   Stephanie:    Yeah, it's gone now.   Sharon:          Would you say that a website is the hub of everything a person is doing when they're doing paid ads and SEO?   Stephanie:    I probably would have used to say that, but what I would say now is if you do a search for the firm's name on Google, that is the new homepage. Whatever you see that comes up there is what I would be more concerned about than even the homepage of your website. The reason I say that is because if you do a search—let's say you're a car accident lawyer and somebody finds you by doing a search for car accident lawyers. They are going to see your presence on Google pop up first. Sometimes they'll go directly to your website; sometimes they'll look at your reviews before even looking at your website; sometimes they'll look at where you are before doing that. There's a lot of information they can find out before even getting to your website.   If somebody does a Google search of your firm name, on the right-hand side of that search is usually where you'll see the Google information and Google reviews, but on the left-hand side is all those other directories out there, which could have bad reviews. That shows up before somebody even gets to your homepage. It used to be that your website is the hub of everything. It's still incredibly important, and maybe it still is the hub, but when it comes to your reputation, you really need to see what Google has on your firm. What is your brand telling people before they even get to your website? What are all these directories saying? What are all these reviews saying about you?   Sharon:          What are you seeing with all the sponsored ads? I just happened to look at your website, and there are about five sponsored ads before you even get to yours. What do you do? Is that part of it?   Stephanie:    If you were to google Digital Law Marketing, there are other law marketing companies that will bid on our name to show up ahead of us. That happens. Or somebody could be bidding on digital marketing or terms like that, but people can see that they're sponsored or paid ads. You can see that right there. Most people, if they're looking for the real website, will pass those and go directly to the organic.   Now, some people search differently. Some people would click on the first one they see, but users are becoming a lot more sophisticated than they ever have been, so they understand what an ad is. Sometimes ads are the best result. Google has also done a good job with the ad program so that sometimes the best information you're finding is in the ads. It depends, but it's hard to get away from those ads. One thing you could do as a business is bid on your name. For instance, we bid on Digital Law Marketing, so we're one of the first that pops up when somebody does type in our name. But you do want to make sure you're aware of what is on the internet about your brand.   Sharon:          It seems like the world has changed so much as a marketing person who's interested in everything you're talking about. For the firm to be at the top and on social media and everywhere, you need a bunch of experts. They need their own team. You can't be an expert in everything or just a lawyer who's interested in marketing.   Stephanie:    You're absolutely right. We touch on social media, but there's so much more you could be doing with social media. There are so many different avenues and elements of everything. You could have, like you said, a whole team. You hire a company like ours to manage the website, the SEO, the paid ads. Then you have somebody that does social media video, optimization and things of that nature. Then you get somebody that just does PR. PR companies and SEO companies work really well together because it creates good results when they do. There are so many different things. It's not just hiring one person and they can do everything.   Sharon:          But the marketing person or the lawyer who's interested should also be auditing calls or at least know what's happening.   Stephanie:    Yeah, and there are so many different tools now. We use something called dynamic call tracking where you can record every call. We're constantly spot checking and listening to our clients' calls to make sure the leads are being handled properly once we bring them to the law firm. If they don't, they're not going to see the success of their marketing dollars.   Sharon:          Have you ever had to make changes because of the dynamic call tracking?   Stephanie:    Yeah, we've had to. We've actually had to not renew agreements with clients. In almost 10 years with Digital Law Marketing, we've only lost a handful of clients, and two of those we actually let go ourselves. The reason we let them go is because they weren't helping themselves and they weren't helping to be a partner. At the end of the day, nobody would be successful. Lots of times we have these hard conversations with firms and say, “O.K., this what we found out. We did an audit and 40% of the calls aren't being answered.” The firms are very receptive to it, and they make changes quickly. That's why they hire us, because they know we'll help them with making those decisions. We've had lots of hard conversations with firms, but if firms aren't willing to help themselves, it's hard for us to help them.   Sharon:          I presume you've been in the position where you've come in to replace another SEO firm.   Stephanie:    Oh, yeah.   Sharon:          How long should a law firm wait to see results?   Stephanie:    Good question. We ask all of our clients at Digital Law Marketing to give us one year of SEO. After that, it's month to month. We don't renew clients because if you don't want to be with us after a year, then we're probably not the right fit. But we don't lose clients because we can show you within a year what we've been able to do for you. If it's not us, then try somebody else. I would definitely give it a year.   Just yesterday, I had a call from somebody who was frustrated because their marketing company had been working for three months and the results weren't showing up. I'm like, “You really need to give them longer than three months. Give them a good year. I'm not going to say you're going to be at the height of your performance in a year, not at all, but you will see progression.” We tell people all the time, “We'll be able to show you in the first 90 to 120 days how you're ranking better, how you're getting more phone calls.” We continually show that progression because it takes years to get really good visibility on search engines. You're telling Google who you are over a long, consecutive period of time of building your brand, but you will see progression quickly. You're just not going to see ultimate results for some time.   Sharon:          You must have lot of people say, “A whole year? You want me to wait a whole year before I start to evaluate?”   Stephanie:    People have figured it out now. It used to be more of a challenge five years ago, but people have figured it out. SEO takes a while. With paid ads you can see a return a little quicker, but it's still not as quick as it used to be. With paid advertising, we tell everybody to give it at least three to four months. There are so many people that are doing paid advertising, so it takes a little longer. It used to be that you were able to see results in a day, but it's different the way things are working now. It just takes time, but if you're consistent and you're doing the right thing over a consistent period of time, you will see the right results with the right company. You have to make sure you trust who you're working with, too.   Sharon:          That's probably a big factor. One of the last questions, if you can tell us, is about how people find you. Do they only find you because of a web search, or do they find you other ways? How do they find you?   Stephanie:    The law firm?   Sharon:          Yeah, how do your clients find you, so they call you versus another company?   Stephanie:    They could do a web search and find us that way. We are Diamond Sponsors of the American Association for Justice, the AAJ. It's a national organization. We're also sponsors of the National Trial Lawyers. We do travel a couple of times a year to conventions and meet new firms. A lot of our clients come from other clients because our clients tell our story a lot better than anybody else. On our website, we have a bunch of FAQs and testimonials from our clients, but they can look us up on Google, social media and through our website.   We have a form on there so we can do free SEO audits for firms. We'd love for them to fill that out and see if it's something we can help firms with. We are working with firms all over the country, but we do have markets available, so we'd love to hear from anybody that's interested in not having to hire a company again. A lot of times, people come to us and say, “I'm tired of switching companies every year or every two years.” Our clients don't have to do that anymore. So, come to us and you don't have to continually look further.   Sharon:          That's a big point of differentiation. For everybody listening, we'll make sure to have the website link and any other links. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it, Stephanie.   Stephanie:    Thank you for having me, Sharon. It was fun.   Sharon:          Thanks. Stephanie:    Take care.

Get in the hot seat! Anne & Lau put on their casting director hats as they host live auditions with members of the BOSS community. There is something magical about a live audition…especially when the casting directors switch up the script at the last minute. These auditionees were on their toes, reading cold & nailing it. Anne & Lau share their favorite tips for before the audition & reflect on all that went right (and wrong). Stay tuned to hear who got a callback + will be featured in next week's episode. Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Anne: Woohoo!. Hey everyone. Welcome to the Vo BOSS podcast and the Business Superpower series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, along with my very special guest co-host Lau Lapides. Woohoo. Lau: Hey everyone. Anne: Hey Lau. Lau: Happy Saturday. Anne: Lau, we have a extra special podcast edition today. We are doing live auditions for the very first time, and I am so excited. Lau: I love it. I love it. It's my specialty. I can't wait, Anne, can't wait. Anne: And we are going to be having people come on doing live auditions as well as people in the audience and will be joining us later on for a Q and A. So I am so very excited. Now, live auditions. Remember back when before the pandemic, when we would go into studios and audition for direct -- casting directors? Ugh. Lau: And that required us to actually see other human beings and talk to them and maybe even shake their hand? Anne: I know. And you know what? And you know what? One of the most important things about that is, is that we would not see the script until we walked into that studio. And there was always the possibility when we actually got into the room, they would change the script on us. Lau: Yes. Anne: So guess what, Lau? Lau: What, Anne? Anne: The client has changed the script. Lau: Ooh. Anne: So for our auditioners out there, and everybody in the audience, I'm sorry, but we had to throw the wrench into the, the loop of things. And we now have a different script that we will be sending to you to live audition with. So I know that Carol is out there waiting to send that new script out with new specs, and we will continue on with the auditions. And I have to say, I just love, I love the Internet and I love technology because it allows us to really do something really cool like this. Lau: Yeah. It's totally amazing. Completely amazing. And you know, just a moment on that real cold impromptu, last minute script, because I know so many voice actors are like, what do you mean? What do you mean? What do you mean? Meanwhile, you have to calm down and take a breath because so many of us are either on a pay-to-play site, or we're on hold with our agent, or we're working with casting on a project, and it's happening fast. It's coming and going really fast, and you guys are really getting used to turning things around fast. So the idea of a cold script should not put you out at all. It should be kind of like a fun challenge for you and really in your wheelhouse as a pro VO of something that really you need to be able to do. Anne: Yeah. And I can't tell you the countless number of times I've been on a live session where, you know, in the moment they're changing the script. And so you really have to be able to have those muscles to be able to quickly adapt and give the client what they're looking for. So I will say that this was a, a kind of a, a completely different script , but you know, remember we are here for educational purposes, and we hope all of you are going to really enjoy and reap the benefits of this exercise that we're going to be doing. I will go through the specs. Because this is for educational purposes, the specs for this script, uh, are open to all genders and ethnicities. And I will read the specs out loud here. Our FVO is a great actor, there we go, who can effortlessly imbue meaning and nuance into the story. They have lived a rich full life, having seen the world with all its wonders and is able to speak about their experiences with confidence and authority while their delivery has a poetic cadence . And by the way, you guys are all getting this. Um, this is done subtly and with a light touch. They never come across as dramatic, performative or as if they are laying on the gravitas. They are natural and have an air of lightness to the read that balances out their connection to the emotion perfectly. And as always, nothing smooth, nothing polished or announcery at all. . So we've got, that's a big paragraph of specs, Lau. What do you, what's your thought about specifications and when talent, you know, read the specs? Are they, you know, are they trying to match those specs exactly? Or what's important, uh, when it comes time to actually doing this audition? Lau: Great question. And I'll tell you, there's a lot of theories and philosophies about your descriptions, your breakdowns, and how to handle them. One of my favorites as a coach that I use all the time is to ask the talent to not read the specs up front. Now, this -- I'm not talking about today, because today's session is a live session, and so time is of the essence. But if you were at home and you had a day or two days to turn around an audition, it's a really interesting and telling exercise to not read the specs at all and give your takes and give a whole bunch of takes. And then go back and read the specs and see what did I bring from my point of view, from my interpretation and what kind of matches what the vision of the producer is? Am I in that realm? Am I not in that realm? Anne: Excellent points. Yeah. Let's have Michelle come on in. Hey, Michelle. Lau: Hey Michelle. Michelle: Hi. Can you guys hear me okay? Anne: We can, we can. Thank you for being the first one. I'm excited. Michelle: Oh my goodness. Okay. I just I'm excited to be here as well. Anne: Okay. So would you like a second, because you just got it? I mean, Lau and I can just discuss one other thing quickly about once you're in front of the mic and you're doing a live cold read, Lau, what is your best advice? Oh, for talent? Lau: Oh, wow. That's, that's a great question. First of all, have fun. Enjoy it. You're gonna get very few of those, right, Michelle? I mean, it's just like an exciting, energized, kind of dopamine experience. And for those of us who live on high octane junkies, we love that stuff. It's real time interaction, which I love. And so I would say make sure you're breathing. Make sure you're nice and warmed up, and you take breaks when you need to take breaks. Well, you'd be given a break after you read -- and make specific clear, active acting choices, Michelle, like, don't, don't, uh, generalize it. Don't just fly through it for the sake of time. Really make specific choices that you can change. And you should always have a good two to three really unique interpretations that you could do if they said, yeah, that's good, but can you change it out? You can change it out. Michelle: Got it. Thank you. Lau: Awesome. Anne: So when you're ready, feel free to slate and audition please. Michelle: Michelle Dillard. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you very much. Michelle: Thank you. Anne: Okay. Onto our next auditioner. Uh, on my list. I have Ryan, I hope it's Geiser. Lau: Hello. Anne: Hello, Ryan. Ryan: Oh, cool. I'm in. Lau: Hey Ryan. Ryan: Hi. Lau: Welcome. Ryan: Thank you. Uh, so I'm Ryan Geiser, non-union, MCVO. Um, our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you. I was, uh, taking notes, just so you know that if I'm not responding right away, I'm taking notes. So thank you very much. Our next contestant , our next auditioner, I have, uh, Rosie, uh, Roberson? Lau: Yes. Anne: All right. Rosie. Rosie: Hello, everyone. Anne: Hello, Rosie. Nice to see you. Rosie: Well, I'm glad I got in . It's a little tricky there. Just let me know when to start. Anne: Okay. Well, we're ready. Rosie: Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with Expedia membership, you, you can save up at 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors and even more places knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Awesome. Thank you very much. Okay. Our next, I have Manny Cabo. Manny: Hey ladies, how are you? Anne: Welcome. Manny: Welcome. Anne: Thanks for, thanks for joining us. Manny: Oh, thanks for having me. This was a last minute thing. I was, I just got off Covid for like two weeks, so believe me, this is a breath of fresh air. Anne: Oh, lovely. Well, I'm glad you're feeling better. Manny: Yeah, me too. Anne: All right, well, we are ready when you are. Manny: All right, let's do this. Here we go. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors and even more places knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you so much, Manny. Awesome. Next on my list, I have, uh, Josh Wells. Josh. Josh: Hi. How's it going, Anne? Nice to meet you. Hi Lau. Anne: Hi. Nice to meet you too. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. Josh: Yeah. Super excited. Anne: We are ready when -- we are ready when you are. Josh: Heck yeah. Cool. All right. Josh Wells, non-union, Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. Um, up next, we should have Kelly White. Kelly White. You are next for the live auditions on VO BOSS. Kelly: Hello. Anne: Hi, Kelly. Kelly: Hi there. Nice to meet you Anne. Hi, Lau. Anne: Yes. Wonderful to see you. Kelly: Thank you. Anne: All right, well, we are ready when you are. Kelly: Okay. Kelly White. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Fantastic. All right. Who do I have next? I have Alicia Hiller. Alicia: Hello. . Anne: Hello. Welcome. Alicia: Good -- good to meet you. Hi, Lau. Anne: Yes. Thanks for joining us today. All right, we're ready when you are. Alicia: Alicia Hiller. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Fantastic. Thank you so much. Ah, Aria. Fantastic. Real cold read. All right. So we are ready when you are. Aria: Okay. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever they are. And with a new Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a new hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places when we know a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. All right, cool. Thank you, guys.wor Anne: Thank you. All right. Um, and now Carole. Carole, we're ready when you are. Carole: All righty. Thank you. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors and even more places knowing we got great deal -- knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you. Carol. Just remember a lot of times we have auditions with instructions, right? It's important to just go through those instructions too. And I know like you know, there's a lot of people who like, you know, and the forms we'll talk about, well, you know, should I get SourceConnect and then, you know, or should I wait until I get my first client? And this would be one of the reasons why , why you wanna make sure you test out all those tech things first. I am proud to be able to to give you this technical -- these technical issues to help you to learn because you know, it's all our mission, right, Lau -- our mission is to educate. Lau: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm like, you know, I'm not a negative Nelly at all. But I'm very much a realist and I say to folks, even if you've used your program, even if you've used your booth a million times, get in there early. Because anything that can go wrong probably will. And you wanna be able to have time to troubleshoot that and not miss out. So it is a good lesson. It is. Anne: Nicole. Nicole: Hi. Anne: Hi. Welcome. Nicole: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited. Anne: Yes, absolutely. Well, we are ready when you are. Nicole: Okay. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. There you go. Anne: Thank you so much. Nicole: Thank you. Anne: I remember being in the LA area, and of course, Lau, I mean, maybe if you ever had to run into the city to do a live audition, right, traffic, traffic. And so when the audition time was slotted right, you would I -- you would pray that there was no traffic jam that would be holding you up. And if you did hit a traffic jam and you got there late, sometimes you missed the audition. Sometimes you got there way early and that therefore you had the script. So I kind of like how we're really mimicking this. You would, you know, you'd be able to practice with the script a little bit longer if they had a, if you had a line in front of you. So, you know, I feel that there's all these -- this tech issues are kind of mimicking the traffic that we would hit when we would be, you know, in the car on the way to the studio. And thankfully now, we can, you know? Lau: The, the one, the one element of this that I think is really different and unique to the circumstance, that is sometimes we can't help tech glitches when they happen, and sometimes we can. And so just kind of knowing the difference. Like I'll give you an example. For instance, if someone knows that they have to be on a laptop and have to go through Chrome in order to do the audition, it's really on that person to go on a laptop and go through Chrome. That's something that could be avoided, but all of a sudden my transmission is bad because the hurricane, all of a sudden, you know, my lights go out. You know, that's something I can't help. So I think being able to determine what I sort of have control over and I sort of don't have control over -- and then the other thing too, and this is just me, you and I are exactly alike in this way, Anne, I will leave four hours early to get to an appointment, knowing that if I'm three hours early, I can do my work, I can have coffee, I can shop, I can do whatever. I don't wanna do the last minute thing ever. Like that really stresses me out. And so just for everyone coming in, like leave yourself plenty of time. Anne: Oh, fantastic. Stephanie. Stephanie: Hi. Anne: Welcome. Stephanie: Thank you. Shall I? Anne: Thanks for being here. Yes, we are ready when you are. Stephanie: Okay. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors even in more places, knowing we got a deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you so much. So Lau, I have my notes ready and you have your notes ready. Let's talk. Lau: I do. And I am wondering whether it's now or maybe later, if we could also go over some of our top kind of rules of the road in this kind of an audition. We talked a little bit about it throughout, but like, what are our top, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8 things that we wanna see people be prepared to do or not do that happened today? Like, because here's the thing, from the talent's point of view, they see nothing. Like they know nothing and see nothing. You, I ,and Sean we're doing this whole massive thing -- and Carol -- this whole massive thing to make this session run. Anne: Right, behind the scenes. Lau: I would love to share a little bit of that so that again, we can go back to what is in my power to change and control and prepare for and what is really not. Anne: Fantastic. Lau: Are you okay with that? If we like just throw a few rules of the road in? Anne: Yeah, absolutely. So let's go ahead and start, Lau. Lau: Okay. I'm gonna start. So one of the things that is -- and again, I'm sharing this educationally, I don't want anyone to feel like we're chiding you or, or, or, you know, cussing you out or anything. It's not about that. This is about education. So that when you're on the real deal in the real scene, a lot of this will sort of dissipate, and you'll be able to work streamlined like a pro. So this entire time, and you'll see my head was down a lot when you see the video of this -- why? Not because I was falling asleep, because I was constantly texting, constantly emailing and helping people troubleshoot all along the way. Now I'm not the tech person to help you troubleshoot. I was expediting those emails and texts over to Anne, over to Sean, over to Carol where they needed to go. In the real world, you won't be able to do that. This is not the real world. This is our educational fun forum. But in the real world, there will be no one to text, no one to email, and no one to help you tech troubleshoot. So, simple things to avoid, I really want y'all to avoid is knowing the device you have to be on, knowing the, uh, uh, application or the program you need to be on, testing it through, preferably the day before rather than the day of. And also being in a solid space where you've got some audio integrity. You're not in the middle of a huge room or in a car or in a big living room to get the best quality that you can get. So those are all, in my mind, things you can somewhat control so that you can get to the next step, which is your talent, your work, your audition. Many of you couldn't get to it fully, 'cause I know most of you. You just couldn't get to it fully because you were so concerned about the tech, about all the tech stuff that was going on. Anne: And, and also, I do wanna say that those instructions were sent out a couple of days in advance, even though our, we changed the script on you. The instructions were sent out. And, and look, most people, if it's going to be a technical, you know, if it's going to be something technical like this where you're joining, uh, remotely via, you know, SourceConnect, ipDTL or some other form like Riverside, it is definitely advantageous to, uh, to test that technology out. You know, it's always wonderful to have a group of, you know, of, of colleagues that you can work with at any given time and say, hey, look, can you help me test? I mean, there's a lot of you know, forums and groups out there that say, hey, I need to do a SourceConnect test right now. Can you help me somebody test with me? So make sure that if this is something that you need to, to do, to do it in advance. And especially if, you know, a lot of times we're asked to record as well, and this could just be something maybe we're recording in, you know, through, uh, SourceConnect Now, or we're recording locally or whatever it is, Make sure that you hit that button and test it in advance. And so not having the technology throw your performance, which I'm sure it probably did for some of us a little bit, and I feel like, I feel like I might have heard that in some of your reads. Um, and as well as, you know, everything that you can possibly do to make that session go smooth. And also, you know, trying not to let that show when you get in the room to actually do the audition. Right? It's in and out and no excess. Nothing necessarily in terms of like, not too much small chat because -- Lau: Anne, you took it outta my head. You took it right outta my mouth. That was my next point, was like, there used to be an ad campaign many years ago for a deodorant, never let 'em see you sweat. That's where like, we're an actor. We're an actor, we're an actor. And what do actors do? They have to act. And that doesn't mean in the role all the time, that means as a business person, like you have to make your client feel like everything's okay. Anne: Oh yeah, absolutely. Lau: Don't worry about it. The sky isn't falling, even though it may not be okay. And you may not be able to audition and they may be disappointed. Don't let them feel like you are disappointed, you're upset, you're worried, you're scared, because that, that mirrors onto them. And then that, that becomes a, like a, you know, a, a slippery slope as they say. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Lau: You know? Anne: Absolutely. Lau: But then being said, Anne, I do wanna congratulate everyone for the ones that -- actually most people were able to get in and show up and do -- almost all. And I just wanna give you a huge round of applause in kudos for doing that, despite your issues and your tech glitches and your confusion and your craziness. Look, you did it. You showed up. You went through it. That's the pro that we wanna build onto. Anne: Yeah. And I, and I wanna say thank you, really. I mean, this is, this was the first time that we've done this. And I think that it's, I like to believe that it's educationally valuable to, you know, the community. And I thank you for being a part of that, uh, from the bottom of my heart, really. Um, I'm really proud of all of you. Number one, it's a Saturday. So thank you for coming out and doing that and then dealing with tech frustrations. And so let's talk a little bit, Lau, about selections. Do you, do you -- Lau: Let's. Do you want to create our shortlists? Anne: I think we should create our shortlists. So first of all, I'm gonna say uh, you know, for, for a lot of the people, I feel that because it was a cold read, there were a lot of reads that sounded a little bit cold read. Um. And so if you had time, right, if you were not the first person, literally, or even if you were the first person, like the, I think my suggestion would be out of the mouth immediately once you get that script. Um, you know what I mean? Get that, get those words out of your mouth because that becomes muscle memory. That's gonna help you make it not sound like a cold read. It's gonna help you get the context of the script quickly. And remember, we are storytellers. We need to tell the story. Even though this was a short script, there was a definite story there. And I needed to feel, above the words coming out correctly, I needed to feel the warmth, the emotion, the point of view. Lau: Mm. I love all that. And as an actor, I mean, I think, you know, we have to choose very specific, very quick actor choices. We don't know if they're gonna work. We don't know how they're gonna land, but we have to be connected to something that's real. We have to know who am I speaking to and what am I connecting to. I like to use props. I mean, I'm a big prop -- like even if I'm, you know, if I'm doing a, a makeup ad, I might have my lipstick ready to go. You may never see it, right, 'cause I'm a voiceover. So you may never see it, but I feel it. I smell it. It's in my hand. There's something, you know, visceral about stuff that is real, that I can hold, I can use, I can feel. I like that. And engaging the body as well. So whether I'm sitting, I'm standing, whatever I'm doing is like, how does this translate within my body? Where's the energy coming from? You know, some of you came in with really warm, rich, textured sound, and that felt right to me. It felt like a way to go. It felt like a path. And as I watched you, I could sort of see where that vibration was coming from. I could sort of see where that was coming from today. So I think not disconnecting your head and your voice from the rest of your body and your spirit is super important. Anne: Now I'm also gonna point out that, you know, part of the specs and, and I think part of what I think innately most people are looking for in this style of, of script is something, you know, uh, not, uh, nothing smooth, polished, or announcery at all. Okay? So that's hard when you're doing a cold read. So the sooner I said, the sooner you can get that script outta your mouth -- and by the way, if you weren't one of the first few that came on board, you know, maybe that's something you were doing in the background right? Until we called you, because we definitely had enough time now through this whole process where people towards the end had a good, ample amount of time to kind of get a feel for that script, you know, and, and really, and do and, and just really feel the copy, understand the copy, know what story you're telling. Natural, and again, I'm looking at some of the specs that we were looking for, you know, natural, not performative, not laying on the gravitas, um, an air of lightness to the reed, which I liked. Um, there was some really nice light reads in there that I liked. Um, what else can I say about, you know -- and I think following the specs is one thing, but then adding something different, right? In addition to making it that non-announcery, telling the story, there, there, I think trying to incorporate something that's a little bit different, a little bit unique, uh, something that you think no other talent is going to give, right? That might surprise us. So I had a couple of, you know, as I was typing madly my notes, a couple of melodies that I heard in there that were really nice, There was like a, a, a lilt on one of the words or maybe a little point of view that was different than I was anticipating, which made me stand up and take notice. And guess what I did, Lau? I actually starred those, uh, those reads. And those are the people that I am, I have on my list to call back. So. Lau: They got Anne's gold star. That means something. Anne: They got my stars. Lau: That means something, right? I love that. That's great. I love that. Oh, there's a point I was just gonna make and I forgot what I was gonna say, but, but I'm hearing you on what you're saying, Anne, because I think that the, that that disappointment, if you will that word disappointment of, I'm ready, I'm prepared, I'm doing this -- wait a second, I'm not doing that. I'm doing something else. Whatever that is, that disappointment, that surprise, that let down that, that confusion, like, it's really important to feel that and be in that space. Certainly as casting as you are, as agent as I am, we're constantly dealing with that. Just when I think it's one thing and I know it, it turns into something else and I don't know it. And typically it's because of priority. So if someone switches a script or someone switches an audition, it's typically, typically because another audition came in that's much more time sensitive. So we have to, I might love say Manny or Kelly or Stephanie, but I also kind of love them for this new one that came in. So I want them to put that on hold just for a second and take this script and do it. So being able to improvise, impromptu, shift fast, interpret fast, I think is really important. Anne: Yeah. And, and before we actually I think reveal, because you and I, I mean, I have my list and you have your list, so we need to agree upon five people that we're gonna be calling back. Uh, I, I really just wanna say that, that it's something, that's something different, right? Uh, the more that you can practice reading your scripts, I mean, I can't say enough how, how important it is to just find different scripts, read, practice all the time, audition -- it, it just helps you to be stronger. And get feedback from, you know, from coaches and, and people that you trust that have been in the industry, that can really help you to, to, you know, uh, perform better and make those bold moves, and workout groups I think are so important. Um, like I have my VO Peeps group and every month, you know, we are working out, and, and, and I know that Lau, you have the same thing. Uh, those are so important to help you get that practice under your belt so that you can -- you need to experience all the different styles, all the different reads in order to make mistakes and grow from them. Lau: Absolutely. Anne: Think it's all about growth, all about growth as an actor. And, and if you're not doing something every day that is voiceover, that is, uh, you know, looking at different scripts, scenarios, practicing, working, uh, I, I think you're, you're missing the boat on growing as an actor. Lau: Right, right. And I think it's also the how we deal with stress. How do we balance, how do we manage time? How do we manage our crazy lives when this stuff comes in? Because you -- you know, I always say be careful what you wish for. You might get it . And when it comes in, it always comes in at the most in inopportune times. It always comes in at the time when you're the busiest, and you're working, and you have events, and you have kids. It always does 100% of the time. So you kind of always have to set your life up that I can go in the space, I can do this quickly, I can make it happen even though I've got a whole bunch of layers going on around me. They don't need to know about it. As we always say, uh, leave your trash at the door. You can come get it on your way out. Don't bring it into the studio. Um, and, and being able to really practice that, really practice that skill along with your actual delivery skill. 'Cause it's a whole other skill, that's an executive functioning skill. That's like, how do I manage 25 things at once and how do I make those 25 things all feel important and all feel like I'm not getting crazy? Like, that's, that's a functioning skill that we have to practice and we have to really work on every day along with the actual acting skills. Anne: Yeah. Right. Lau: That is, we work -- Anne: On, Oh, I'm sorry. I, I was just, I was thinking, I was thinking, uh, while you were talking. Now as we reveal -- Lau, I'm gonna have you read, you know, maybe a list or a couple of people that you, that you kind of have selected and we'll see if we agree. Lau: Yeah. Actually, can I ask you, Anne, just to crosscheck, how many out of our list do we have that actually auditioned? Or maybe I should say how many did not audition? 'Cause it seemed like most auditioned. Anne: Three, uh, three did not. Um. Lau: Okay, great. Yeah. So we had 12 -- Anne: Well, actually, actually two out of the list did not, and then you added, uh, Brit, so. Lau: Okay. So we actually had 12 or 13? Anne: Yep. We actually had 12. Lau: Fantastic turnout. Anne: Out of the original list we had 13. Yeah. Lau: Don't you think that's -- Anne: That's fantastic. Lau: That's a fantastic turnout because we always have, in any audition, a percentage of people who do not audition. There are no shows where they just don't audition for many reasons. So that's actually very high, that level of -- Anne: And they didn't even know their script. Well, they -- Lau: And they didn't know anything and they still showed up. Anne: Yeah. That's good. So. Lau: But see, I think that's a testament. I wanna, I wanna make mention, I think it's a testament to Anne, to myself, and to the nature of this whole group, this whole community of how much we trust each other, we care for each other. And you're just getting to know Anne, many of you, and, and she's part of our community now. And like, like-minded people hold each other up, motivate each other, inspire each other, and through the difficult moments, get each other through it. And that's exactly what happened today. Exactly. And so I just wanna call attention to that from a, a, a social and, and professional friend network, but also a community, sort of inspirational, motivational, holding each other through this. You guys did that, even though you may not have talked to each other. You may not have met with each other. You did that in the space, you did that in the online space. And that's -- Anne: And in the chat. Lau: -- so important to do. Absolutely. The chat. That was great. Okay. So how many, Anne, you think are we gonna shortlist here? Would you say six? Anne: I've, I've got five marked. Lau: Okay. Anne: I've got five marked. Lau: Okay. Anne: Um, so that I'd like to hear, and I, and I just wanna say one other word. Not only was it how I wanted to hear that script in terms of the specs, because consider I am the client or I'm, I'm with the client or I'm representing the client, how I wanted it to be that non-announcery warm feeling with all the, with all the feels, uh, in that description. It's also water. I feel like the voice also, if it hadthe sound that I was looking for. And so there are some that I feel out of the five, I feel some did one better than you know, the other. Um, but they all had something that made me put them on the short list. Lau: So, Okay. So, uh, uh, first of all, everyone had something that I could potentially work with. I would just wanna say that I'm not just saying that to butter people up. I'm saying everyone has a unique quality that I could really direct and work with, but based on what we were looking for and what our vision is, here's some of my top peeps. Okay? I'm just looking my list. Okay. So Manny is one of my tops. Okay? Anne: Agreed. Lau: And I have Kelly, who's one of my tops. Anne: Okay. Lau: And I have Nicole. Anne: Yes. Lau: And I have Aria, and I have, uh, Josh. I wasn't sure how many we're looking for. So -- Anne: Five. Lau: So that's, that's five. I have more. But we'll stop at that. We, we'll stop at that. Anne: Okay. So I have -- I agreed with you on Nicole, Manny, uh, Josh, and then I also had, uh, marked Alicia and uh, Carole. Lau: Good. Three outta five ain't bad. . Anne: Yeah. So, uh, we definitely have the three. Now let's just discuss. Let's just discuss because I think, uh, for me, Nicole had a nice hush that says some of the, the notes that I wrote about Nicole that I really liked. And, and Nicole was also second, so she didn't have a ton of time to prepare. Um, and she came through even with that. Now -- Lau: And you know what I loved about Nicole is when she delivers, there is something that is transfor -- transports me when she speaks that I'm in a different world. I'm in a different mode, I'm in a different world. There's something a little bit magical about her sound that I caught right away. And about her essence, because we were meeting her and seeing her on camera, there's very calm, sort of meditative, logical head on the ground feel to her. And I, that all kind of went together as this really lovely package of someone who I felt really safe with, I felt really good with. Anne: Awesome. Uh, uh, Manny, like from the first few words, I kind of had him marked already. He started off, he started off with a real warm, nice, friendly, uh, not announcery style. And that's what I really, you know, I immediately wrote, you know, stars there. Lau: Yeah, he's super pro. He has a pro sound. There is a polish there without sounding overly announcery. Um, there's a clarity there, and there's also this kind of like sexiness to it that I didn't expect, uh, because I wasn't looking for that. So there was this, uh, appeal to it that, that I really liked. It was almost essential appeal without asking for that, which I liked. Um. Anne: Uh, fantastic. Lau: And he seemed very sure of himself. 'Cause I had not met Manny at all. Anne: Very confident. Lau: He was brought over by a dear friend. And we literally met today when he came in, and I just, I just loved his presence. I just loved his confidence, and I just loved his kind of chill, laidback, but professional guy persona. He had a persona that was very strong that I heard his sound. Anne: Yeah, I agree. I completely agree. Um, Josh, now I have Josh. Um, there was a word of course I was typing so furiously that I couldn't type the word correctly, but he had a word in there that caught my attention, and it was the timbre and the lilt of the word. So as I was mentioning before, sometimes it's just something a little bit different that captures your attention. Um, and so that's one of the reasons why I marked him. Uh, and then, so there's where our three agree upon, and so now we just have to talk a little bit about our ex, our next two. Lau: And I wanted to make mention about Josh too Because Josh, and I don't know, I don't know if this is age related or, or what, but there's, he's right in the middle. There's an interesting gray zone that he's in between that cool -- Anne: Yes, I agree. Lau: -- surfer dude, laidback guy. And someone who's a little bit more professional and on it, someone who's a little bit more with it, the guy in the know. So he has that standup comedy, funny, fun appeal to him, but he has the serious enough that he can land it and have some ethos there. Anne: Agreed. Agreed. Lau: That's why I love Josh. Okay. Um, okay. The two outside of that, yours was Carol and Alicia. Anne: Carol and Alicia. Yes. Lau: You know, close second, this is what people spend fighting behind closed doors about for like hours or days is like you're kind of fighting over people who are all talented. Anne: And that's it. I think, you know, and, and here's the deal, here's where it comes in. So Lau and I are gonna discuss who those other two are gonna be. And, uh, this is probably what happens in most casting , right, offices or whoever's fighting you for the client. And we'll just go back and forth, uh, on the reasons why, you know, we either want this for the callback, right? And, and even what during the callback we'll be figuring out, well, you know, what is the reasoning for any one particular voice? And sometimes you just don't know what that is, and it's not always based on performance sometimes. Lau: No. It's just sometimes it's just like an instinct, a feeling, an impulse. And, and in my mind I'm thinking some of these people are like, oh, okay, so if this person can't do it, they're booked, or they get sick or whatever, then this person could easily go in. Totally. So it isn't the case where I really love this person and I really don't love this -- It's not always that case. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Lau: There's a lot of like, gray zones of people that kind of fall in the same grouping, but that just don't make it to the booking, you know? Um, so Carol's voice is fantastic. I mean, it's very, to me, very corporate sounding. It has very businessy, corporatey, flight attendant-ish, finding the exit kind of sound. I like it. I love it. It's, I felt it was a little bit too objectified, a little bit too removed for the level of warmth that I was, was looking for this 'cause it is travel. When I think about travel now, and I think about number one, trying to reach the younger people, the younger generation, I think about a slightly, you know, not younger -- younger is a mythical word. It's just like a slightly more, more energized or more youthful kind of thing. Anne: Sure. I get that. I get that. Lau: And then also a, a, a little bit of like boxy or squareness in terms of it. Anne: But now when I, of course, Carole, as you said, more corporate and of course, you know, I'm very attuned to the corporate ear because I do a lot of that myself. Now, I'm also gonna say for Carole and thinking of travel, I was thinking, oh, she would make me feel comfortable on a plane, like if she were the flight attendant and so Expedia. So that was one of the reasons I thought it fit. But I'm going actually, and I'll cede you Aria because I love Aria. Lau: You'll raise me Aria. Anne: I'll raise you Aria because even though I didn't check her, I do love that voice. She's got that youthful, that youthful style if that's the market we're looking for. Um, she, you know, we did give her a different script immediately. Like she literally had no time to even voice it and have it come out of her mouth. So I have to take that with, you know, a little bit, uh, you know, a grain of salt because she really didn't even get it out of her mouth, except that was the first time. So for me, I had written that it was a little fast, but I understand why, because it was the first time coming out of her mouth. Now if I'm going on my gut and saying, you know, could you convince me, Aria, um, yeah, you could because of, because I like the timbre, the tone of her voice, the demographic is there for the script. And, uh, so yeah, that's my, that's my thoughts. Lau: And, and you know, I just wanna point out that, you know, if we don't forget about who are really, who's our target demographic for this, and is like both of these women could absolutely deliver this script. But when we get back to, you know, who the client really wants us to be looking at, it's really that, you know, 18 to 35 demographic. Because let's be honest, that's most of the people that are on like Travelocity, Kayak, Expedia, and going up-up-up -- not to say the 40 and up are not doing it, but for this particular one, one of the goals is to kind of find someone who has a bit more energized or youthful presence. Anne: All right. You've convinced me. Lau: So anyway, so that's one issue there too as well. Okay. Anne: Yep. You've convinced me. Lau: Okay, so Alicia kind of fits that. Anne: Okay. Lau: Alicia kind of fits that. Anne: Oh yes. Lau: Um, and I love her quality. She's got a rocky, dirty sort of like textured young sound. So I do like it. I, I felt like it was a little slow, like it wasn't as energized. Anne: Yes, I agree with you there. Um, and I wasn't, I wasn't thinking slow in terms of the read, but more contemplative and thoughtful. And she was another one who had a really nice different sound on the word -- she interpreted the word color toward the end of the script a little bit differently than most other people too, so we can find our colors. And I feel like that the, the operative word obviously in, in any story that we're telling, right, there's some operative words in there that really need to kind of hit the, the listener. Color is one of those words. And she really had a different, a slightly different pitch on the word color, which is why I I marked her. So. Lau: Right. Now, here's the thing that you and I both skipped over. And you guys listening in, this happens all the time. Um, you guys both, ironically we both skipped over the fact that the client does want diversity for these roles. And I don't know how I could skip that over, but I got excited with the switch out of script, but -- Anne: Well, we did change, we did change it for this purpose to all genders and ethnicities. But you're right. I mean, diversity is something that has to be a consideration and -- Lau: Right, authentically, right, diverse. So whereas like someone like Kelly, who I know very well and is a total pro, and can do this in her sleep fits that bill in so many ways and the voice is so layered and rich and textured -- Anne: Oh, I agree with that. Lau: -- and seasoned -- Anne: I agree with that. Lau: You know, it's, we're gonna have to go back and forth on, you know, the age thing and the youthful-ness thing because she's much more of a mature sound in my mind. Anne: My only, my only comments, I mean I did, I did like Kelly, I, my only comments was that she was a little too fast on the read I thought on that. And so, but you know what I'm -- Lau: But we can direct her. Anne: I could -- okay. Lau: Where she's directable. Anne: I feel that she -- all right then, then. Alright, so then I think we have our five then. Lau: And you know how I know she's directable, for those listening in? Because we know her personally. We have a relationship with her. Anne: Okay. Now -- Lau: Normally I couldn't say that if I don't know her. Anne: That's what I'm gonna say. So, and only, and only in this instant, right, if, if you know a casting director, here's an advantage, right? Um, if a casting director has heard you before or hired you before or has worked with you before, you know, it's, it behooves you to have, you know, a, a, an excellent relationship. Or when you work with them, make it as smooth as possible. Make it easy for the casting director. Make it easy for them to work with you, and they'll remember and have you coming back. So. Lau: And quite oftentimes, the casting, we see this all the time at the agency, we'll come back to the agents and go, love it. Great. Good. Need some retakes. It's too slow, I need it, da da da da. Right? And then we can go back to those people and we know that they can do it. They're capable of it. They're willing to. Anne: Yep. All right, So then we have our list, our callbacks. We're gonna call these five people back. Nicole Fikes, Aria Lapides, Manny Cabo, Josh Wells, and Kelly White. Congratulations. I would like to give a great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and network like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys were amazing. I can't wait for the next episode. Lau, love you. Thank you so much, guys, and we'll see you soon. Lau: Great job. Anne: Bye-bye. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voBOSS.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

For our final holiday special podcast episode, we want to help you feel as physically prepared as possible when going for your VBAC!Stephanie of My Essential Birth joins Meagan to share her wisdom from her own two VBAC births as well as what she has helped women learn through her many years as a birth worker. You will hear tips on how to choose and vet providers, three free exercises that might just make all the difference during your labor, and the secret lesson Stephanie has learned that she wants all of our listeners to know. Additional LinksStephanie's Website and CoursePregnancy and Birth Made Easy PodcastBebo Mia's WebinarHow to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsFull Transcript under Episode DetailsFull TranscriptMeagan: Turn your love of babies and bellies into cash. If you love babies and bellies and want to provide care and support to families, then Bebo Mia's webinar is the right place for you. Get answers to those burning questions like how to be the voice you wish you had at your birth and how babies and families can be supported by doulas. Learn all about the different kinds of doulas. You can work in fertility, pregnancy, birth, postpartum, or just enjoy working with those squishy babies. Supporting families by becoming a birth worker, aka doula, is perhaps an option that hasn't even crossed your mind. That's why we want you to join this webinar. You can have great earning potential while doing something you love. Bebo Mia is the one-stop shop for education, community, and mentorship. Reserve your spot today at bebomia.com/freewebinar.Meagan: Hello, hello you guys. It is the end of the year. This is Meagan with The VBAC Link and I have another holiday edition for you. Today is one that I am so excited about because this is someone that I know personally. She's a dear friend of mine and we have taken similar journeys through our doula careers, so it's really fun to be with someone that I already know and that we have the same mindset and goals for all of you out there. This is Stephanie and she is amazing. So amazing. She is a mom and a doula. She's had a VBAC and she actually has an amazing course through My Essential Birth. That's correct, right? My Essential Birth? Stephanie: Yep. Meagan: It's a course on how to prepare and get ready for birth. She has the same drive, I feel like, and passion as I do to get the information out to all of you and to help you know what is best for you whether it be, again, scheduling a repeat Cesarean or having a VBAC or maybe you're a first-time mom and you just want to know how to go along the way, seriously, Stephanie is going to be that person for you. So I'm so excited today to have her on. Welcome, Steph. Stephanie: Thank you. That's quite an introduction. I love it. Come to my podcast. Do the same thing. Meagan: No, no seriously. I was going to say, she has a full-on introduction here too. But you are amazing. You are so amazing and I love what you have done with My Essential Birth. You're busy. You've got three kids. You've got three kids and something too that is really fun is every single birth has been so different which I think just broadens your knowledge and passion, even more, to do what you do because for me, my births were all so different and I don't know, I really don't know if I would be here today if I didn't have all of those births. Stephanie: Yeah, 100%. Yes. Meagan: Don't you feel like these experiences in our lives have brought us here today and have brought passion to our hearts? But yeah. On top of that, you homeschool. You do so many things. You wear so many hats, so I'm so grateful for you taking the time today to talk to us about all of the amazing things that you do. But I think one of the really cool things right off the bat is, let's talk about your VBACs and how you really got started in all of this. Stephanie: Yeah, I think you really hit the nail on the head because 100%, if I hadn't had the experiences with the births that I have had, I wouldn't have not only the passion but the knowledge from seeing things go wrong. It makes me think of when I was 16 and I got my first car and it was a piece of crap and everything broke down on it so I had to learn about things [inaudible]. Meagan: Yes. Stephanie: No, I'm not comparing my body to a car, but I will say that those experiences totally shaped the way that I do what I do today and the passion behind it. My first baby– now, mind you, in my head, this was my goal. I wanted to go unmedicated. It was what I wanted to do. I just wanted to have that experience for myself for no particular reason. That's just what I wanted to do. We got around 34-35 weeks and I was reading a birth story online. Mind you, this was 13, 14 years ago, so it was a little bit ago not like what we see today with birth stories and stuff, but I'm at work and bawling because I'm super pregnant. I'm like, “That's what I want my birth to be like,” so I researched the classes that kind of went along with this book and I reached out to some local birth educators. It was this 12-week series and I had four or five weeks left to go. There was this one lady that was like, “Okay, I'll do these intensive courses on the weekend if you could make it.” I'm over like, “My husband works every weekend. We're super broke.” She was going to do it for this bigger prize. I'm like, “It's fine. I'll wing it. It's going to be fine.”Fast forward to that birth and missing some red flags, things like my provider telling me when first of all, he didn't want to have the conversation until 36 weeks about what the birth was going to be like, so I told him early on, “I don't want to have an epidural. I want to go unmedicated.” He was like, “We don't talk about that until 36 weeks.” That was a red flag, but I didn't know any better. Meagan: Interesting, yeah. Because that's what they do. Stephanie: Uh-huh and I was like, “Okay. Sure.” Totally. He was super old school. There were a couple of things and just the way that he talked to me that I should have caught on, but when 36 weeks came and I said, “I really want to go unmedicated,” and whatever and he was talking about, “Well, I actually let my patients get their epidurals much earlier than others. Why be in pain?” And I'm like, “No, it's really important to me.” And then he continued with, “Well, women with size 5.5 shoes and smaller tend to have Cesarean births.” Now, mind you, I'm a small person. I'm 5'0”. My shoe size is 5.5 and I'm sitting there just, “You've got to be freaking kidding me,” because my grandmother who was 4'10”, and her grandmother. I'm just going down the line like, “Nobody would be here. What are we talking about?” But at the same time, I'm a new mom. It's my first birth. I'm scared, so I stayed with him, and anyways, the cascade of intervention that happened was my water broke with just a trickle. I didn't have contractions. The provider ended up telling me once I was at the hospital that I needed to have Pitocin and I say that because I remember asking the nurse, “Did he say that word need?”She was like, “I'll come back.” But she was like, “He said need.” So I said, “Okay, well then I must need Pitocin.” So we took Pitocin. That baby did not do well with it. He couldn't crank up the Pitocin enough to make the contraction strong enough to actually make labor progress because my baby's heart rate would drop. That was, in my opinion, a medically-caused Cesarean because yes, when I have a baby in distress, then there we are. So that was my first experience with birth. I didn't connect with my baby right away. On top of being a new mom and figuring out life, I had just had abdominal surgery. I was a mess of emotions and then the next two births are where I found some redemption and healing and passion and power for women's bodies and what we can do. During my second birth, we had moved overseas to Germany and I was meeting with a doctor. I'd met with an OB but it was actually midwives who you give birth with. I had taken a really good birth course and I had been practicing a lot of stuff. I did not understand a ton about positioning though for my baby and so I had two days of prodromal labor which is not that big of a deal. Two days of prodromal labor, then finally things kicked in and I was in full active labor, but then I had pushing contractions at 4 centimeters, so now, my doula brain goes, “Oh, it's a positional thing. I have all of these ideas,” but then, I was like, “Oh my gosh. I'm not going to make it.” And then too, the wonderful German nurse there– there was a little bit of a language barrier for sure, but I was like, “I really want to get into the water.” She was like, “Oh, later. And also, I have something, honey, that will take all of that away. You just let me know if you want a little bit. We'll just stick it in the bum. A little bit of pain meds.” At the time, I was like, “Yeah, that's a good idea. Let's try that.” But I had the pain meds. That ended up being like, I was comfortable before two contractions before my water broke. It took the edge off enough that my body was like, “Let's get things started,” but then the contractions were right back on. I did end up with an epidural for that birth. My baby did fine with the Pitocin. I pushed that baby out vaginally. I wasn't forced into another Cesarean or anything and that birth was amazing. I was very, very pleased with the way that that birth went. And then we were moving from Germany back to the United States, particularly to North Dakota. If you know anything about North Dakota, they don't even have– my midwife was not a licensed midwife on purpose. You cannot be a licensed midwife and deliver babies outside of a hospital setting. They can get arrested. Meagan: Yeah. Yeah. It's illegal. Stephanie: It's not the black market, but she's not licensed. She was a direct-entry midwife. So we were moving back from overseas to North Dakota and I called the hospital first before I met with a home birth midwife. They told me, “Well, we don't really care that you've had a vaginal birth after Cesarean. You had a Cesarean before, so you need to plan for another scheduled Cesarean birth,” so talk about my red flags now. Meagan: You're like, “Nope. Nope.” Stephanie: No way. I'm going to do whatever I have to do. So I did. I reached out to a home birth midwife. I found a doula and all of those things that I probably should have done with baby #1. We planned for me to have an unmedicated experience at home. I was really excited about that up until 35, 36 weeks. I had a breech baby for one and that breech baby, we were able to get him turned, so that part went away, but then it was the mental game of, “Can I actually do this? You've never not had an epidural.” All of that self-talk starts happening and it's not good. My doula was like, “Here's a list of affirmations. Take what you like. Leave the rest and start saying them out loud several times a day every day.” And so I did that and within a week or so, I was like, “Oh my gosh.” I went from being scared and nervous to confident and excited. I was like, “I can do this.” So that baby had a week of prodromal labor. It was about 5 or 6 days of prodromal labor and then things get moving and I have some active labor that hit, but my contractions never really got closer than about 6 minutes apart. They would last a minute to two minutes long, but they were never those super crazy close, consistent. Things kept going off in my head like, “If I was in the hospital, I definitely would have been offered a Cesarean birth.” It wouldn't have been a question, especially in that hospital. These contractions were coming. My midwife, we finally call her and I'm like, “Look. I've been in prodromal labor and now it's active labor, but they're not closer than 6 minutes.” She checks me and I'm 6 centimeters. I was like, “My labor is progressing on my own.” It was so cool. And then it was another 12 hours from that point and I had my baby. But it was incredible. Those contractions and just knowing that my body was doing what it was meant to do. There was a point where I was like, “Oh my gosh. I'm so tired. I need to sleep.” For sure, we went upstairs. I slept for 45 minutes. I had two contractions. It was another moment where I was like, “Yeah.” If I was at the hospital, somebody would say, “Oh, she's stalling. We've got to do something.” Whatever. But those two contractions and the second one, I woke up and I was like, “Oh my gosh, what is happening? I can't do this anymore.” Sure enough, I'm thinking, this better be transition. My midwife comes in. She had heard me. She was sleeping downstairs. She comes to the door. She's like, “Do you want me to check you?” I'm like, “Yes, please. Let's see where I'm at.” She's like, “You're 9.5 with a bouncy lip of cervix. You're good to go. Let's get you to go to the bathroom. You can get in the birth tub now.” So we did that and i can laugh about it now, but I went downstairs. I went to the bathroom and after I was done peeing, I had my first pushing contraction. I remember telling my husband, “I don't want to give birth on the toilet. I have to get out of here.” 4.5 hours later because of the mental blocks that I had– we can laugh about that now, but at the time, it was very serious. Like, “I'd better get to the birth tub.” Meagan: Yeah. I'd better get out of here. Stephanie: Yeah, but it was wonderful. I will tell you the differences. The major differences for me in the spaces that I was in for being able to give birth unmedicated and as a VBAC, my birth team made the biggest difference. When I was at home and feeling like, “Oh my gosh. I can't do this anymore. Oh my goodness. I've been pushing so long. I'm so tired,” everyone was like, “But you are doing it. You're doing great. Keep it up.” I'm like, “Oh. I can take that in and chill and feel supported.” So I did. We kind of joke about, first of all, I was making noises that my husband the next day told me, “You sound like the screaming goats.” I was like, “Oh my gosh. I do.”Meagan: I was called a cow. My husband was like, “You're a mooing cow in there.” I'm like, “Thank you so much.”Stephanie: Well, the best part of this story, I actually love this story, the next day, my husband is sitting at the table and showing our little boys the screaming goat video. His mom's walking down the stairs and goes, “You recorded her?!” Meagan: Uh-uh!Stephanie: So I'm like, “Okay, yeah. I get it. I get it. I really did sound like that.” Meagan: You really did sound like that. That is so funny. Stephanie: But anyways, I'm pushing all this time and I do remember hitting a point even during pushing, I'm like, “Oh my gosh. I can't do this.” I was scared. I had never pushed a baby out before. Instead of holding my breath and bearing down, I was purposely breathing through my nose and not leaning into that pushing. My husband was finally like or I told him, “You need to make the bed. I need to get out of the tub,” because in my head, all I'm thinking about was, “If I can't do this, then I'm going to have to go to the hospital. We're going to have to call an ambulance. The lights are going to be on. There's going to be people I don't know.” I had to walk myself through all of those things. Meagan: You were really deep in that space. Yeah. Stephanie: Yeah. I was like, “No. This has to happen here because I can't deal with all of that.” So I told my husband, “Go upstairs. Make the bed.” I was like, “Make sure you get the lining down so we don't mess up the mattress and all of that.” When he went upstairs, it was the first time that I paused and tuned into myself. I just said a quick prayer and for me, I call God Heavenly Father. “Heavenly Father, please. I can't do this alone. I'm scared.” My husband comes down the stairs. I'm just finishing that prayer. He's ready to lift me out of the water. He was like, “Come on. Let's go. Let's go now.” He went to lift me and I'm like, “No. It's happening.” Two pushes later, that baby was out. Meagan: Oh, that just gave me major chills. Stephanie: It was the most spiritual experience of my life. I love everything about it. Yes, it was probably one of the hardest things I've ever done physically. Mentally, how it pushes you to your limits, and then you feel like you are the strongest woman alive. You can do anything. You're a good mother. You're all of the things. It was that feeling and looking at what I had done through having good support that I was like, “No. We're lying to women. You know what? If I could do this, anyone can. So now I'm going to become a birth educator and now I”m going to work with women one-on-one. I know that you can do this.” So that's where the passion came from. Those were my birth stories. Meagan: I love it. I love it. Oh, that just gave me such chills. You know what's interesting is I don't think I've ever even heard all of your birth stories like that. Stephanie: Oh really? Meagan: I don't think I have. We have some similarities. We have some similarities. Stephanie: I know. I've read through some of yours too. I love it. Yeah. Meagan: Even more. I don't think I realized. Yeah, maybe I have and it was a long time ago and I forgot, but there are a lot of similarities. I love it. You've had these VBACs. You found this passion and here you are today. So in past episodes, we've talked about mentally preparing and mentally getting into that space. You just did that. You just talked about that which is so important. It is so crucial to be in that space because when we're out here, we can't dive into birth. I feel like I did the same thing. I wish that it was recorded so I could really show people how big of a tantrum I was throwing, but I was legitimately throwing a tantrum in my driveway pacing back and forth saying, “If my water wouldn't have just broken, this would be totally different. This is happening all over again.” I was really spiraling and everyone just sat there. My neighbor was seeing me. She was like, “Oh!” I'm like, “I'm in labor.” She stopped and was like, “Is she okay?” Rick was like, “She's just gonked or something right now.” I had her watching me. My mom was watching me. The kids were like, “Mom!” I'm throwing my hands and voicing everything that was in my head out loud getting it out there but I needed to do that. I needed to do that but as soon as I could get that out, I remember the drive. We were getting in the car to go to the birth center and meet my midwife. I had my baby later that night, but it was the morning before I had my baby and he was just like, “So, how did that feel?” I was like, “So good.” I just remember labor coming on so much stronger. You have to get in that head space. We know there is the headspace, but what about the physical? I feel like there is so much goodness that you talk about. The physical aspect of preparing for birth and not even just preparing to actually give birth, but preparing and creating that team and creating that environment. One of the first things is knowing your stuff. How can our listeners know their stuff? Right now, they are listening to this, so this is what you can do to know your stuff. But yeah. When you say ‘know your stuff', what would that all entail? What would you suggest?Stephanie: Yeah, this is kind of the tricky thing that I'm always weighing one thing against the other where it's knowing what you want for your birth and how to get there and then making sure that you're vetting your provider. They really do go hand in hand but it's really tricky because just depending on what order you take, you may have to change up one or the other. But when it comes to understanding what you need in order to have the birth that you desire, one of the things that I tell moms to do is, “Take a meditative moment. Close your eyes and take some deep breaths. Picture yourself from that very first contraction through to when you give birth. What does that look like? Where are you? Who is around you? What are the lights like? What do you smell? What do you see?”That will help you decide. It gives you some idea of how to get there or what you're going to need in order to get there. I'll do this exercise with moms and moms that were planning to give birth at a hospital but never make it there in their minds. They're at home. They don't ever get in the car to go to the hospital. They've had their baby at home. So I think really understanding what you are looking for. And even for a mom that has that experience, she's planning to give birth at a hospital, but she has this really calm, relaxing thing at home, it doesn't necessarily mean that she needs to be giving birth at home although it could, maybe it's more of, “So I need to have control over my body, control over the situation. I need to be in my own clothes,” and those sorts of things. Meagan: Oh, I love that you just said that. Stephanie: And really understanding what is creating that image in your mind. But of course, I'm going to talk about taking a good birth course because not only is that what I did that was so life-changing for me but that is what I help moms do today just like you have a birth course where you talk about preparing for VBAC. A good birth course is going to include all of those things like how to stay healthy and low-risk with nutrition, and good exercise that you can do not just moving your body and keeping your heart rate, but what are things positionally that you can do for yourself and your baby? How are you going to stretch the perineal area or use the specific muscles that are going to be used for birthing and labor time? That's going to be all the way through understanding each phase of labor, how to work with your birth partner, how they can support you, how relaxation can be so important and meditation, all the way through to birth and postpartum. That includes every situation that can happen on the way. When you walk into your birth space, are you going to have an IV or wear your own clothes? Do you want to have intermittent fetal monitoring or do you want to be on the monitor the whole time? If you're talking induction, what are your options? So I think really understanding what your options are, and some of that changes as your birth changes or as other options are provided whether or not you have gestational diabetes or if you're GBS positive. Those are different decisions you have to play with and make, but if you like listening to podcasts, taking a good birth course, watching birth videos, if you're gathering all of that information and coming together for yourself deciding what you want for yourself, then you can move into asking the right questions to help that provider because that really is the next step. You can have this wonderful birth that you have thought of and dreamed of in your mind and if your provider is not on the same page, if they are not supportive, you might not get it at all and it's not even your fault. Meagan: I know. That is so hard because sometimes we don't know what it looks like to have that supportive provider. We don't know what it looks like because for me, with my first birth, I went to my OB and he was really nice and welcoming, and charming. I was like, “Cool. He's rad. He's great,” and then there were the red flags but I didn't see those red flags. It's so hard to know how to find that provider and you say to vet your provider. What do you mean by vetting your provider and what tips would you give to start that process and know right away what you really want to look for? Stephanie: Yeah. I'm glad you asked that. I think probably one of the best things you can do is meet with more than one and different practices. Meagan: Yes. Yes. Different practices are such a big thing because even the one provider in the same practice, they're going to have similarities so it is so important to branch out. When I was going that with my VBAC baby, I did. I went to multiple people and I could physically feel the difference without even speaking to anybody. Stephanie: Yes. 100%. I always said that I didn't believe I was intuitive at all just as a person, I don't feel like I am in touch with myself. If that's you, you're wrong. Just like you explained right there, we do. You know when you have conversations with other people or you walk into a room. There's a feeling there and how you're treated matters. The problem is, I think and I mean, I'm guilty of it too. I think we put providers on this pedestal and they're kind of untouchable. They're above us in some way because they're gone to school and they've got knowledge about things that we don't. In some ways, maybe that's true. That's why we hire them because they have skills that we need that we can't meet while we are in our vulnerable state. The other side of that is that they are also a person and how they treat us matters. And so when you are asking questions and meeting with providers, how are you feeling? Were you respected? Were you rushed when you bring up something? Providers will actually eye roll or laugh at some of the things that you say. That's a red flag. Meagan: It's so true. Yes. Stephanie: I say too, you know what? Go meet with a birth center out-of-hospital provider. You don't have to plan on giving birth there at all. Pay attention to how you are treated. How does that feel for you? For people that are maybe interested in that and they are like, “Oh, that's so scary and my husband doesn't want to or my birth partner really doesn't want me out of the hospital,” great. Go take him and have a free interview with an out-of-hospital care provider and just see how you feel. If you hate it or it's not for you, then that's great but I think that you need to have the contrast. I think you deserve to have the contrast. It's the same with doulas. I'm like, “You don't know if you want a doula? Great. Go meet with one anyways. It's a free consult and then you can decide.” But vetting a provider, like I said, you have to have some questions going in. VBAC-specific moms, they're going to want to know things like, “Okay. For a mom like me, I'm healthy and low-risk. It's my second baby and I've only had one Cesarean birth. What does it look like for someone like me in your practice having a vaginal birth after a Cesarean? What are your percentage rates? Do you use the VBAC calculator or how do you decide? Do you induce? What are your reasons for induction and can I say no?” You always can but it's always fun to ask a provider, “Can I say no?” The answer should always be yes but it might not be. “We'll talk about it when we get there.” So you have to have some specific questions that you're bringing in to decide if this is somebody that you can handle and you are probably maybe not going to match up on every single thing. That's okay too, but are those big things being met? I think that's what helps you decide, “Is this going to be a good match for me or not?” Meagan: Yeah. I love that. And just tuning into your overall feeling. Like you said, providers can eye roll and they can be subtle. They can be subtle, really subtle, right? Even midwives can do that too. Stephanie: Oh totally, yes. Meagan: OBs, midwives, it's so important to really tune into that. I think it's so important to do that even before becoming pregnant too. Sometimes to find an OB—if you are thinking that you want to become pregnant soon and you have an OB or a midwife, start there. That's totally fine, but it's okay to branch out and say, “I'm not expecting yet. I'm preparing. I want to find that provider right from the beginning.” Sometimes that doesn't happen, but I think it's good to do if you can. I mean, I wasn't pregnant and I went to 12 providers. Stephanie: I love it. Meagan: 12 providers which were maybe excessive. Maybe, but that's what I needed. I needed to go and I needed to hear all of their things and feel all of that in those environments. I chose the provider that I thought was totally amazing. He still is. I'm not saying he's not, but for me, I thought he was perfect. He was exactly what I needed out of everybody and then I still changed at 24 weeks, right? And so a lot of people are like, “Why would you change? He's so supportive.” I'm like, “He is so supportive and I still feel all the good, but something is not resonating.” That's okay too. Even if you do find your provider. Say at your appointment, you find your provider and you're not feeling it or you're getting things like Stephanie where it's like, “Hey, this is what I want to do.” “We don't talk about that yet.” Those types of things, if they are not willing to hear you and they don't want to know how they can help you in this birth experience, are red flags. Don't feel like you have to stay like both Stephanie and I did because I felt like I had to stay too. I felt like I was cheating on my provider if I left him. He had gone this far with me. He had supported me this far, but at the same time, I truly believe I probably wouldn't have had that second Cesarean. I really don't believe that if I would have changed, but it's okay because it's my birth story and that's why I'm here, but it's okay. It's okay if you're feeling off and you want to change. It's okay to do that. Stephanie: Yeah. I think you can't shout that from the rooftops enough because it's true. You do feel like, “Oh, I'm going to hurt their feelings or something.” No, you're not and if you do, who cares? You're never going to see them again. Let it go. Meagan: Exactly. Stephanie: It's so important for you and your future. It's such an important moment for you. It doesn't matter. It should trump that. Meagan: It should trump that. Someone else's feelings. That's the hardest thing. We have so many people out there. If you are a people pleaser, you're not alone and it's easy to please your provider. You want to please your provider, but remember, they are working for you. They are there for you. If they're not pleasing you, it's okay to leave. It is okay to leave and so yeah. It's a hard thing to do, but I do encourage people to tune in, follow their hearts, tune into that and do what's best for them because if they don't truly vet their provider, it can make or break an experience. Stephanie: Yeah, it can. A good provider is going to help make it just like you said. My midwife and my doula who were in that third birth, oh my gosh. They are a part of my life forever whether they like it or not. You are bonded with those people forever and you need that kind of support in your life. Meagan: Right, yes. Yes. Okay, so we're talking about knowing your stuff and vetting your provider. Now, let's talk about putting in the work. We've got these things. Now, going for it. What things would you suggest? Stephanie: Yeah as far as putting in the work, I really recommend– and I have it on my website as well and you can tell me if you like these ideas or not, but I recommend these three exercises that you can do every day. First is the forward-leaning inversion. You're literally—you get up on a low-lying chair or couch probably with support. Put a pillow down in front of you. Get your elbows on the ground with your bum in the air and you hold that for three breaths. You do that once a day. If you're somebody who has heartburn or something, obviously, you're maybe going to want to not do that depending on how the heartburn is or there are a couple of people who shouldn't do that. Basically, that is really good because it releases certain ligaments. It allows more room for baby. It allows for really good positioning. That's something that you can do to make sure baby is in a good position. Meagan: Every day. Stephanie: Every day. An easier, more comfortable labor. The other thing you're going to do is pelvic tilts. You can choose to do how many you want, but I like to do them at least when I get up in the morning and before I go to bed. That's 20-40 tilts. That's in the hands-and-knees position. You're tilting your pelvis forward and into a flat back, forward and into a flat back. Again, that's strengthening certain areas. It's helping baby's position. Those are really, really good for you to be doing. The third one is the squat. This is a deep-seated squat. It's not like we are going to grab weights and do a weighted squat or anything like that. This is like how you see people in third-world countries who don't have chairs or new babies, toddlers when they go down to squat and play with something, look at that squat because that's the one that you are going for. The reason for that is because it stretches the perineal area. It strengthens the muscles in your legs. Chances are when it was pushing time, you're going to be in some kind of squat. Now maybe not, but chances are the majority of us are going to end up there. The other thing about squatting is that it shortens the birth canal, it makes it easier to be able to push baby out and that's why we end up in that position but if you're practicing that squat specifically, and this is where my husband was so good. “I'll tell you what, for every minute you squat for the day, I will give you a minute of massage at the end of the night.” I was like-- Meagan: Oh my gosh. Done. Done, done, done. Stephanie: An hour a night, I am not joking. So he was so good supporting me that way, but I'll tell you what, when I started squatting and it was probably later in my pregnancy like 34-35 weeks. When I started squatting, it was 1-2, maybe 3 minutes before my legs were numb, my feet hurt and I had to stand up. Everything was tingling, but a couple of weeks in, I could hold it for 15 minutes comfortably. So when I was telling you before that I was pushing for 4.5 hours, I was in a birth tub in a squatted position for that amount of time— Meagan: Wow. Stephanie: --and I remember thinking, “I'm so glad I practiced these squats because I wouldn't have had the stamina.” As far as physical prep, those are things that you can do every single day. Meagan: I love that. Stephanie: Thank you. I know and I'm like, you and I have taken some similar training and stuff. It's valid. It's real. Meagan: It really is. Stephanie: The other things that you can do are, let's stay healthy and low-risk. That means you're eating a high-protein diet. You're drinking a lot of water. You're taking your prenatals, well-balanced. That matters because it can keep things like preeclampsia at bay. It's also going to make you feel better and give you more energy, so there are a lot of benefits to that. But my favorite part of staying healthy and low-risk is that you remain in charge of your birth decisions. That's why it matters to me so much. It's not even just for the health of myself and my baby. It also comes down to, “I want to have a say as to how all of this goes.” So those are some of the physical things. Then we move into the, once I understand how birth works, what are the signs that I'm in labor? What are the signs I'm in active labor? How do I work with my body? Learning things like relaxation and I do that through relaxation practice. Even just a simple one, and you can do this with your birth partner or by yourself, but you set up this stage. So use your senses. You should be leaning back in a chair or in your bed lights dimmed with essential oil or a consistent smell that your body gets used to smell. You just practice breathing deep into your belly. Imagine how you breathe when you wake up in the morning. First thing, pay attention to how you breathe when your eyes first open. It's really deep belly breaths so try to aim for that. Do that for 10 minutes. Just go from your head to your toe and be like, “Okay. I'm going to feel the hairs on my head relax, and then my eyebrows, and then my jaw.” All the way down. The thing is, it's not easy to do when you're not used to relaxing but when you utilize all of those senses, then it becomes something called muscle memory. So if I know my body knows because I've been doing this for the last several months that every time the lights are dimmed and I smell lavender essential oil and I'm breathing into my belly, then when you do those things during labor, it's like, “Oh, lights are dimmed and lavender,” then you don't really have to think about it. Meagan: It's intuitive. Stephanie: Yes. “I'm supposed to relax now.” And then obviously you need to practice relaxation. Once you get good at that, you can practice it with the lights on, with the TV on, with your husband or kids walking through the room because that's the reality of birth and especially if you're in a hospital. Meagan: Yes, yes. Stephanie: But learning relaxation is really important. And then you move into—there's a lot more to do with that like meditation and the mental stuff and all of that. Labor rehearsal where you practice with ice and other things. There is plenty that you can do, but I would say relaxation, your three exercises, and staying healthy and low-risk are probably just top of the list things that you can do on a daily basis. Meagan: Oh my gosh. I love it. So good, so good. I love that you talked about preparing and then it becomes muscle memory. It's so true. It's so, so true. I encourage if you're ever in a moment where you're feeling stressed or overwhelmed to dive into that because there are going to be moments in labor and birth when you might feel stressed and overwhelmed. If you can practice doing that in those moments, oh my gosh. It's going to be so beneficial. So I know we're almost out of time, but I wanted to ask you what is a secret lesson or something no one really talks about that you wish you would have known ahead of time when preparing for time? Stephanie: That would be that you can say ‘no' to anything. I feel like I teach this all day long and I talk about it a lot. I don't know how often moms let that register because they will know that and then you'll get with their provider and they're doing non-stress tests or whatever and it's like, all of a sudden, oh crap. I need this and this and this. No. You can actually say ‘no' to literally anything. Meagan: Anything, yeah. Stephanie: Anything, yeah. They can't do anything. The best that they can do is make you sign, what is it? Meagan: An AMA. Stephanie: A medical release, yeah. AMA, against medical advice. Meagan: Against medical advice. Stephanie: Sign it. Sign it. It's your body. You get to choose. And then kind of like I talked about, when I talk about health and nutrition, I think a lot of times, moms don't register. “Okay, yeah. I get it. I'm supposed to be healthy.” But it's so you can be low-risk and in charge of your birth. I think that's a really important part of that. Meagan: Yes. I think so too. It's so hard. It's so hard to be in that moment and be like, “Uh, okay.” When you're like, “I really wanted to say no. I had a prenatal last night with a client and they were like, “One of the biggest things that we don't want to do is go in and just say yes to everything. That's one of their biggest goals is not to just say yes to everything. They're not saying, “We want to refuse everything,” they're just saying, “We want to be educated and we want to know what we're saying yes to.” It's so important to know. If you are saying yes, know why you are saying yes. And if not, it's okay to say no or “One moment. Let me think about it.” It's okay because there are times where things are going to be thrown at you and it is hard to say, “No” or actually, “I want more time” or “I'm not sure about that right now” but you can. You can. You have the right to say no. You have the right. So it's so important to know. I love that. Any last final tips for someone preparing for VBAC that you would like to give to our listeners? Stephanie: I think we've kind of touched on this before. It just really matters who you pick for your provider. I know we kind of talked about some things that warrant a red flag or time to interview somebody else or something, but really, if you've got that education and you've got that provider piece, you're setting yourself up for success. It should be somebody that supports you, not tolerates the opportunity to try for a VBAC, but somebody who believes in the natural process of birth and that having a vaginal birth after a Cesarean is more healthy and safer for mom and baby than having another abdominal surgery. I think that matters that you've got somebody that believes that way. Meagan: Totally. I love that. Oh, well thank you so much for being here with us today. I want you listeners to know that she has the three free, that's what you say, right? Stephanie: Yes, three free exercises. Meagan: Three free exercises. I'm having a hard time lately with tongue twisters. Three free exercises, so we are going to be providing that in our email. If you're not subscribed to our email, please check it out because we are going to be providing so many new things and some really exciting upcoming things with The VBAC Link are going to be happening. We are going to be providing that and then will you tell everybody where they can find you? Because everyone needs to know where you're at and follow you. Stephanie: Thank you, yes. So I too have a podcast. It is called Pregnancy and Birth Made Easy. Pregnancy and Birth Made Easy is the podcast so anywhere you listen to podcasts, you can take that in. I'm also on Instagram @myessentialbirth, Facebook, TikTok, all the things, and then if you are looking for information on the birth course or anything else in regards to where some of the podcast show notes and some of that live, it's myessentialbirth.com. Meagan: Yes and all of these will be listed in our show notes today so if you want to go follow her which I promise you that you do, go click that and give her a follow because her content is amazing. Her podcast is amazing and it's been such an honor to have you here today. Stephanie: Thank you, Meagan. I love what you do too and I love that we get to do this together. Meagan: Me too. Yeah, so before we let everyone go, I didn't really give a full, “Hey, we know each other,” but we actually were in the same doula course. We became doulas together which seems like forever ago, but it was so fun to be there and to learn. You had already had your VBACs, hadn't you? Stephanie: I did. Meagan: Yes and I hadn't yet. I had only had my two Cesareans and so I just remember you being so inspirational to me and motivating me. I was like, “Okay. She could do it. She's here. She is doing this too. We have the same interests,” and I just connected to you so much. Stephanie: Same, yeah. Well then, and now look at you with The VBAC Link. You just took off. I love it. Meagan: I love being here and I love being here with all of our listeners, so again, listeners, thank you so much for being here with us today, and thanks again, Steph. Stephanie: Thank you.ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Tell us about your experience at thevbaclink.com/share. For more information on all things VBAC including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Meagan's bio, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In this episode, I have the opportunity to talk with a self made entrepreneur who's followed the footsteps of her amazing dad, and in the journey has discovered what the tips are that the wealthy use to invest to change your life. Grant Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of Financial investing radio. So I have been trying to track down this person multiple times and admitted it was my fault. I could not get my calendar right to meet with Stephanie Walter. So glad to have her here with me today. I'm fascinated with her background, what she's done in terms of growing wealth. But before I go any further, Stephanie, welcome. Stephanie Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.  Grant Yes, this is fun to have you here. Your journey is a fascinating one to me, because it's this journey as I reviewed it, of gathering some financial capabilities, but then not resting on that, but rather using it to leverage for future wealth. So I don't want to give that away because I want I want our listeners to hear this cool journey that you've gone on. But let's rewind. Okay, let's uh, we won't go back to where you were raised as a kid. But let's go back to you get out of school, and you're thinking I'm gonna go do some work. And that led you down a certain path? Would you talk about that? Yeah, I did what like most people do, I got it. I just got a regular job with a corporation. Stephanie I had some interest in insurance. So I became a claims adjuster. And, and I sort of moved up the ranks pretty pretty quickly to where I was working kind of as a liaison between the attorneys in that represented the insurance companies and, and the insurance company. So that was, that was really interesting, but just, you know, working in a corporate setting, I remember that, you know, my pivotal point was I was getting a 2% Raise after my superiors had said, what a fantastic job I was. You're welcome all 2% Did you get to keep all that 2%? Or did you know you got to keep?  Grant That's impressive. Yeah. Stephanie And I went home to my Dad, I just bought a house and was like, Dad, I just, you know, look at how much gets taken out. But with taxes, it was a big learning experience. I mean, well, as you know, I did put, you know, seven years into it, but just realize that, you know, if I'm making these 2% races for the rest of my life, you know, what is that going to look like? And my dad was an entrepreneur, actually, he's a second generation entrepreneur. And he's like, Well, you know, what you're gonna get if you stay in this, but if you go out on your own, you know, really what you build will be up to you. And it's your choice to do what you want to do. And I gave my my two week notice probably the next day, did you really? Oh, wow. That's okay. Wow, a woman a decision and action. That's awesome. Grant So, all right, so you gave you gave the two week notice you left, and then you didn't go to the pool? That's for sure. What did you go though? Stephanie Well, I have a I have a lot of relatives and insurance. And that's kind of how I started in doing in claims to begin with. And so I just knew, you know, the company I was really familiar with, went and signed up with them, took all the classes to become an agent and and just, you know, started started working, you know, right off the bat, state and insurance agent for about 16 years.  See, I started that I'm trying to think of like timeframes, I think it was 2004. And then right around that same time, I kind of decided, you know, with the when the bottom fell out to buy some real estate, single family homes, right in an area in Denver, I'm a native, as I mentioned, where I felt like if there would be growth, from Denver that, you know, over time, these would probably be good, good investments to have. And that was in the Sloan's Lake area if people are familiar. And so I became, you know, a untrained landlord, as well as a business owner at the same time, all in one shot. So quick question. So when you did this transition out of the corporate world, into the entrepreneur going to do myself. Grant How many entrepreneur books did you read before you got started? Stephanie You know, I? I didn't read that many.  Grant Yeah, that's like I could tell you just jumped in and went after it. Right? You got going on. Stephanie I think also my my step up in that area was I'd see my dad growing up who had never, who had always had businesses and so to I never saw him work a nine to five job, you know, have a two week vacation or anything like that. So I had a very good example of what an entrepreneur looks like. And so that's probably why I didn't need to read books. I have since read a lot of books.  Grant But yeah, yeah. But you had a role model, you had a mentor to follow after. Alright, so you go through this journey, you run your real, or excuse me, your insurance agency for 16 years. What happened? Stephanie I mean, as time went on, there was you know, also some distaff dissatisfaction. Because you, you know, you really like your clients, and they're doing business because of you. But then there's this big, you know, corporation behind you, mine was Farmers Insurance, who, you know, ultimately makes the decisions based on, you know, the claims and the the rate changes and things like that. So that became kind of frustrating. But then also, you know, again, my dad was, you know, pretty. He passed away, actually, shortly after I started my agency, but I'm sorry, yeah, thank you. But I had, I remembered a lot of things as time went on. I was like, Oh, I remember when Dad said that. And one of the things he always said was, don't put all your eggs in one basket. And that was for me, that meant just, you know, don't continue, farmers was very big on, take a loan out, to keep running your visit business, make it bigger, make it better, all these things, where I just sort of directed my money in my growth into real estate, because I felt like it wasn't so attached to to the business. And I loved real estate. I didn't know much about it. I certainly wasn't very educated about it. Oh, I think it was 2016 I had gotten an invitation to a boot camp and about buying apartments, which I had always been curious about, oh, cool. Went into there. And that's where I first heard the term syndication. And I was I was just blown away, I'd never heard that I loved the idea of a group of people buying something that no one could do on their own. And I from that point on, I was all in there. I did about three years thing me maybe it was only No, I think it was only two years of education, which, you know, was an investment, but you come out of that bait being able to be very knowledgeable about commercial real estate, which is very different than residential real estate residential.  Grant So if I hear you, right, I think you said that this transition to real estate, it was a diversification strategy for you following your dad's counsel, right not to have all your eggs in one basket. You still had the insurance company at least for a while, right? And then then you started investing in the real estate, is that right?  Stephanie Yeah. i And well, I had all I had invested, you know, in the single family homes and they're, you know, through the last crash and then wanted to do the apartments and then in 2016, that really was probably, I mean, I kept running my agency obviously, until actually last year when I Um, my investing had my income from investing had exceeded my, my business income. So I was able to retire, or in my case, just do do a different career for a while. Grant I love that when I saw that in your profile, I thought that was the ultimate, which was to sort of break away. It's that, hey, I'm no longer just going to be a business sort of operator, right? I'm actually going to step aside and let let your income or your assets generate that income for you, right. It's the money's working for you. And I saw that in your notes too, which was a, you said some interesting about the way the wealthy do it, which is the wealthy have their money working for them? Was that always at the forefront of your mind? Or did you sort of discover that along the way?  Stephanie No, that's a that's a big, I think it was big, the aha moment for me. And how I describe it is that I believe most people, and I was one of those most people believed in an accumulation model of money, which meant for most people is I'm going to accumulate the money in my 401k. I never really, you know, went down that path from owning my own business, I wanted to accumulate my money in real estate. But yet my idea was the same, which is I'm going to buy this property and manage it for 30 years until the loan is paid off. And then I will live off of the rents or whatever at that time. But when I started raising money for the syndications, I started becoming friends and, you know, meeting really, very interesting, you know, wealthy people, and just notice that they were doing stuff differently than than I was, I couldn't quite put my finger on it. But after a while of working with them, I realized that they look at their money as a good word is utilization. They're always using their money. They're using their money to give them cash flow. And there was kind of the light bulb that came on for me. Later on. You know, I started doing syndications in 2018, and I think it was the end of 2019 that I started to sell my properties one by one, and invest them in syndications. Because I realized I had these this great big chunk just sitting in and it's really not doing much as far as you know, cash flow, helping me out at all. Whereas, you know, if I just shifted my focus and where I put my money, the returns as far as cash flow, were really significant. Yeah, Major.  Grant Have you ever played that game called cashflow there? I've heard about the Robert Kiyosaki Robert Kiyosaki game. Yeah, I've never played it, you shouldn't play I have a feeling you do really well with it.  Stephanie Yeah.  Grant Excellent with cash flow is king, as you're as you're pointing out, and the ability to get that cash flow lined up and consistently look at money as a tool to deliver the cash flow is critical. So that 401k experience, I've had that same journey where I was putting money I was putting money in in a 401k. And then the first time the market in my career, you know, did this massive dive down, right, and I'm sitting there thinking, I know that there's someone on Wall Street's buying puts against my investment making a ton of money while I'm losing a ton, wait, who came up with this strategy, right? You know, also you could keep your you know, 2% Raise, it is it is a disservice to the working class for sure. So, did you did you ever get involved in the 401k strategy? Or, or did you ultimately just leave it wouldn't? What happened there?  Stephanie Eight, actually, I have my series six, when to be a n 63. So for the audience, that just means that I was registered to sell products, you know, mutual funds and things like that to my database of clients. I never really like to that I never really, I felt the variability and that the training that I was given never seemed to give me a lot of anxiety. And so I never really did much with that. And inevitably let those those licenses go. But though the 401k Actually, I'm in the process of writing a book and there's going to be there's one chapter that's dedicated to the 401k, which I do a great deal, you know of research on and you you pit. You know some really good points on on that. And but it's just letting people question it because there are so many things about the 401 K that are, you know, you're giving you're giving your money to someone else to watch. And they're not doing it for free. And financial institutions want to hold on to your money for as long as they can and give it back, as you know, little as they can. And so you're you're using your money to subsidize things that you probably don't even know your money's doing. And I know, these are hard things to come to in this day and age when it's just like, can I just give my money to this person and have him manage it? Or have the 401k make those decisions? Why do I have to be involved with everything, it really is a significant amount of money that you pay to these financial institutions. And you can do much better on your own. But I won't go into that. That's a whole nother discussion.  Grant That but that's your journey, though. I think your journey is you figured out Wait a minute, I can do something differently with this. And you took control of it right? You did the education you put in the work, you discovered cash flows. The secret to this, let my money work on just building even small incremental cash flow growth and how critical that is in the strategy. Stephanie One other point just quickly is I was watching something on TV last night, and there was several commercials that came on. And they were women. They were geared to women and there they were talking about, you know, women and finances are bad with finances. And the whole message in this commercial was save your money for retirement or whatever. And I was like, I want to just get out the message that it's not saving your money. It's investing your money and learn how to be a good investor, because those are the things that are going to allow you to retire early or retire in not a poverty situation. But in you know, invest and learn how to invest because it isn't as hard as people think it is, you know?  Grant Yeah, absolutely. I love that and are good. I understand. You're right. Did you say the messaging in that TV ad was that women are bad with finances? Is that what you say?  Stephanie Yeah, I think well, they were trying to you know, women were kind of trying to empower themselves by saying, I'm not bad with finances, even though you know, I've been told that women are bad with finances, but it seemed like the solution for them in that commercial was save. Save your money. You say? Like, no, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. Ah, good. Good. Debt should produce cashflow. Right. That's, that's actually that's actually the message right there. One of the things I noticed as I was looking at your background, and the things you've done, as you had made a comment if I if I've got this right. Grant Money myths, you talked about money myths, and I think you just touched on one of those. What other money myths? Have you learned that we hold on to that? Are these incorrect notions that actually hurt us financially? What have you found?  Stephanie There's one very significant one, which is people will say, well, the wealthy people, you know, I've talked to people and they'll be like, Oh, but the reason the people you work with have so much money is because they're willing to take these crazy risks with their money, and stuff like that high risks. That's that's why they got where they are, they are and I say actually, nothing could be further from the truth. The majority of wealthy people invest in extremely conservative things. They, the other myth is, you know, put put your money into the stock market. Many people can't tell you in their mutual funds, what they're invested in, what even one company is that they're invested in, let alone who's who are the team members on that, you know, on board or who's the CEO of the company, they can't tell you anything. Whereas wealthy people they tend to invest if they do invest in businesses, they invest directly in a business, either for themselves or they understand the dynamics of the business and the business plan and they invest that way. If they invest in real estate, they largely do the syndications and they get to know the team that's running, running the syndication. They know what kind of experience they have, what kind of past returns they've done. They do their homework in that sense. But then once they've invested in the team, they tend to invest again and again. And these are very conservative things that they're investing in things that are tangible in value. That's another. That's right. Three things I'm hitting is wealthy people tend to invest in things that have tangible value, which means, you know, an apartment complex Well, let's say, for some reason, it's terribly mismanaged and it goes out of nobody wants to be in it anymore. Well, you still have the building and the land in which you can sell. So there's, there's tangible value there. Grant Okay, so the tangible piece, that's interesting, too, especially in today's world, where digital assets are becoming more and more of a thing, right. In fact, I saw recently, someone talking about digital real estate on one of the online ads, you know, doesn't feel tangible, right. Are all the NFT stuff going on? Right are the crypto so many intangibles today as well? It Do you have any position or thoughts when they do that?  Stephanie I don't because I guess I always take the line if I if I don't understand it, or if it's not something that I want, you know, I guess it comes down to really understanding it. I've had a lot of people explain it to me, but I still don't, you know, the ups and downs, you know, lately, it's been a pretty big crash, you know, people are saying that's a good thing. Okay, I still don't really understand it. And I know that they're planning on, you know, digitizing, then that's, that's probably, you know, not too far away in real estate, you know, 10, I would hope it's going to be 1015 years in the future. I don't know what that looks like. But that's definitely something in the future. I don't think that is wrong. And when I say that the wealthy people invest in, they probably do have some investments in cryptocurrency, but that's probably less than 5% of their portfolio. Great majority of what they're invested in, probably 30% Every year. If you go on to the name of this group is called Tiger 21. And it's, it's for wealthy, wealthy people, I think they have to show a net worth of at least five or $10 million to get in the group. But every year, by agreeing to be in this group, they agreed to release as a group, kind of a asset allocation of all of their investments, and every year, there doesn't change that much. And over 30% is in real estate.  Grant Really. Okay. All right. That's interesting. That's fascinating. One of the things that I noticed as I looked at it now Now the name your company, you're gonna have to help me because is it Erbe Wealth? This Erbe?  Stephanie Well, Erbe Wealth, okay, everybody. Well, thank you Erbe Wealth.  Grant Well, so I'm on your site, I was on your site. And I was checking out. This is really cool. erbewealth.com. And I went to the about page and told my listeners, you should check this out. Stephanie's got this thing called the 15% Plus community. Can you talk about that?  Stephanie Yeah, well, I mean, my partner and I started working together in 2018. And we both realized, as many successful pairings go is that he had some skills in in this in the certain areas, and I had skills in certain areas. And together, we have really done very well together, and we just closed on our 12th deal about two weeks ago. And every single deal that we put together has returned over 15%. But truthfully, every every one that we've done up to this point has returned over 20%. So the person designing my website said, I don't know you might want to just put that down to 15%. But every deal that we have done has had an annualized rate of return of over 20%. So if you're we, our goal is when we hold the money for three to four years, then we'll double your investment in that time. And we have we've done that successfully, and we have a system and we're will we're continuing with it.  Grant That's amazing and that's that's leveraging the syndicated real estate strategy.  Stephanie Yep, that's we buy apartment complexes and a very specific market in the country, we have a very specific buying strategy that allows us to get in and make money when we purchase it, purchase the property. And then we just find areas where there's there's been a lot of growth, and there's been a lot of rent growth and population growth. And I think if anyone's been listening to the news is we know that there's a housing shortage. So we buy in areas where, you know, there's a great deal of population growth and not enough housing,  Grant What is your what is your perfect client look like? What's their profile? Like? Stephanie I mean, I would like it to be more broad than than it is, it's usually, you know, well, to invest in our deals, you need to be accredited, which, you know, that means you need to have a net worth of a million, or you have a $200,000 salary. And so I love working with business owners, that's kind of my thought to I tend to attract a lot our business owners, because, well, one is, they're so busy trying to make their business work, and I'm talking more like smaller business owners, you know, and, you know, trying to manage their company, which they're very passionate about, but business owners tend to not really plan that well for their retirement, because they're just, you know, they're thinking all about this. Yeah. Run on the business constantly, right? Yep. Right. So those are, you know, those are the people I love to work with, just to you know, get them some cash flow, that that is nice, but as well as just having, you know, great returns that they don't have to manage, you know, at all.  Grant So, okay, very good. While you've been very generous with your time, can you give our listeners a place to go to to learn more about you? Yeah, to your website?  Stephanie Yep. That's my website, which is erbewealth.com. There's, I have I think, right now, it's not a lot, but it's about 15 articles that I've written, that just I try to really educate the newer investor that isn't familiar with this type of investing. And then there's a track record of of all of our Not, not cherry cherry pick deals closer, every single deal that we've done together, up until this point, and then you can join, you know, the list the email list to get notifications, I like to really educate my investors, as well as then they get the first, you know, chance of getting the new investment when it comes out. But air Bay, actually is the German word for legacy. And my dad was a second generation, my grandfather came over on the boat right from Germany. And he became an entrepreneur after he paid his dues and did everything he needed to do to become a citizen. And then my dad, you know, followed in his footsteps and was an entrepreneur.  Grant So I was gonna ask you about the backstory on that name. I was trying to figure out Erbe. What is that? Yes, that's awesome. I appreciate that.  Stephanie Yeah, not to my dad, who never you know, saw any of this, but definitely, it's because of him that this has happened. I can tell you have an awesome dad. Really cool.  Grant That's awesome. Stephanie, any final comments that you want to share? Stephanie No, no, but I'd say you know, just just check on my website. I'm trying to, like I said, working on a book and that that'll be my next. I'm hoping to have it done by the end of summer. So when when it's available, it will be available on my website as well.  Grant That's awesome. Stephanie, thank you so much for taking the time with us today, everyone.  Thanks for listening to another episode of Financial Investing Radio. And until next time, check out erbewealth.com.  

In this episode, I have the opportunity to talk with a self made entrepreneur who's followed the footsteps of her amazing dad, and in the journey has discovered what the tips are that the wealthy use to invest to change your life. Grant Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of Financial investing radio. So I have been trying to track down this person multiple times and admitted it was my fault. I could not get my calendar right to meet with Stephanie Walter. So glad to have her here with me today. I'm fascinated with her background, what she's done in terms of growing wealth. But before I go any further, Stephanie, welcome. Stephanie Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.  Grant Yes, this is fun to have you here. Your journey is a fascinating one to me, because it's this journey as I reviewed it, of gathering some financial capabilities, but then not resting on that, but rather using it to leverage for future wealth. So I don't want to give that away because I want I want our listeners to hear this cool journey that you've gone on. But let's rewind. Okay, let's uh, we won't go back to where you were raised as a kid. But let's go back to you get out of school, and you're thinking I'm gonna go do some work. And that led you down a certain path? Would you talk about that? Yeah, I did what like most people do, I got it. I just got a regular job with a corporation. Stephanie I had some interest in insurance. So I became a claims adjuster. And, and I sort of moved up the ranks pretty pretty quickly to where I was working kind of as a liaison between the attorneys in that represented the insurance companies and, and the insurance company. So that was, that was really interesting, but just, you know, working in a corporate setting, I remember that, you know, my pivotal point was I was getting a 2% Raise after my superiors had said, what a fantastic job I was. You're welcome all 2% Did you get to keep all that 2%? Or did you know you got to keep?  Grant That's impressive. Yeah. Stephanie And I went home to my Dad, I just bought a house and was like, Dad, I just, you know, look at how much gets taken out. But with taxes, it was a big learning experience. I mean, well, as you know, I did put, you know, seven years into it, but just realize that, you know, if I'm making these 2% races for the rest of my life, you know, what is that going to look like? And my dad was an entrepreneur, actually, he's a second generation entrepreneur. And he's like, Well, you know, what you're gonna get if you stay in this, but if you go out on your own, you know, really what you build will be up to you. And it's your choice to do what you want to do. And I gave my my two week notice probably the next day, did you really? Oh, wow. That's okay. Wow, a woman a decision and action. That's awesome. Grant So, all right, so you gave you gave the two week notice you left, and then you didn't go to the pool? That's for sure. What did you go though? Stephanie Well, I have a I have a lot of relatives and insurance. And that's kind of how I started in doing in claims to begin with. And so I just knew, you know, the company I was really familiar with, went and signed up with them, took all the classes to become an agent and and just, you know, started started working, you know, right off the bat, state and insurance agent for about 16 years.  See, I started that I'm trying to think of like timeframes, I think it was 2004. And then right around that same time, I kind of decided, you know, with the when the bottom fell out to buy some real estate, single family homes, right in an area in Denver, I'm a native, as I mentioned, where I felt like if there would be growth, from Denver that, you know, over time, these would probably be good, good investments to have. And that was in the Sloan's Lake area if people are familiar. And so I became, you know, a untrained landlord, as well as a business owner at the same time, all in one shot. So quick question. So when you did this transition out of the corporate world, into the entrepreneur going to do myself. Grant How many entrepreneur books did you read before you got started? Stephanie You know, I? I didn't read that many.  Grant Yeah, that's like I could tell you just jumped in and went after it. Right? You got going on. Stephanie I think also my my step up in that area was I'd see my dad growing up who had never, who had always had businesses and so to I never saw him work a nine to five job, you know, have a two week vacation or anything like that. So I had a very good example of what an entrepreneur looks like. And so that's probably why I didn't need to read books. I have since read a lot of books.  Grant But yeah, yeah. But you had a role model, you had a mentor to follow after. Alright, so you go through this journey, you run your real, or excuse me, your insurance agency for 16 years. What happened? Stephanie I mean, as time went on, there was you know, also some distaff dissatisfaction. Because you, you know, you really like your clients, and they're doing business because of you. But then there's this big, you know, corporation behind you, mine was Farmers Insurance, who, you know, ultimately makes the decisions based on, you know, the claims and the the rate changes and things like that. So that became kind of frustrating. But then also, you know, again, my dad was, you know, pretty. He passed away, actually, shortly after I started my agency, but I'm sorry, yeah, thank you. But I had, I remembered a lot of things as time went on. I was like, Oh, I remember when Dad said that. And one of the things he always said was, don't put all your eggs in one basket. And that was for me, that meant just, you know, don't continue, farmers was very big on, take a loan out, to keep running your visit business, make it bigger, make it better, all these things, where I just sort of directed my money in my growth into real estate, because I felt like it wasn't so attached to to the business. And I loved real estate. I didn't know much about it. I certainly wasn't very educated about it. Oh, I think it was 2016 I had gotten an invitation to a boot camp and about buying apartments, which I had always been curious about, oh, cool. Went into there. And that's where I first heard the term syndication. And I was I was just blown away, I'd never heard that I loved the idea of a group of people buying something that no one could do on their own. And I from that point on, I was all in there. I did about three years thing me maybe it was only No, I think it was only two years of education, which, you know, was an investment, but you come out of that bait being able to be very knowledgeable about commercial real estate, which is very different than residential real estate residential.  Grant So if I hear you, right, I think you said that this transition to real estate, it was a diversification strategy for you following your dad's counsel, right not to have all your eggs in one basket. You still had the insurance company at least for a while, right? And then then you started investing in the real estate, is that right?  Stephanie Yeah. i And well, I had all I had invested, you know, in the single family homes and they're, you know, through the last crash and then wanted to do the apartments and then in 2016, that really was probably, I mean, I kept running my agency obviously, until actually last year when I Um, my investing had my income from investing had exceeded my, my business income. So I was able to retire, or in my case, just do do a different career for a while. Grant I love that when I saw that in your profile, I thought that was the ultimate, which was to sort of break away. It's that, hey, I'm no longer just going to be a business sort of operator, right? I'm actually going to step aside and let let your income or your assets generate that income for you, right. It's the money's working for you. And I saw that in your notes too, which was a, you said some interesting about the way the wealthy do it, which is the wealthy have their money working for them? Was that always at the forefront of your mind? Or did you sort of discover that along the way?  Stephanie No, that's a that's a big, I think it was big, the aha moment for me. And how I describe it is that I believe most people, and I was one of those most people believed in an accumulation model of money, which meant for most people is I'm going to accumulate the money in my 401k. I never really, you know, went down that path from owning my own business, I wanted to accumulate my money in real estate. But yet my idea was the same, which is I'm going to buy this property and manage it for 30 years until the loan is paid off. And then I will live off of the rents or whatever at that time. But when I started raising money for the syndications, I started becoming friends and, you know, meeting really, very interesting, you know, wealthy people, and just notice that they were doing stuff differently than than I was, I couldn't quite put my finger on it. But after a while of working with them, I realized that they look at their money as a good word is utilization. They're always using their money. They're using their money to give them cash flow. And there was kind of the light bulb that came on for me. Later on. You know, I started doing syndications in 2018, and I think it was the end of 2019 that I started to sell my properties one by one, and invest them in syndications. Because I realized I had these this great big chunk just sitting in and it's really not doing much as far as you know, cash flow, helping me out at all. Whereas, you know, if I just shifted my focus and where I put my money, the returns as far as cash flow, were really significant. Yeah, Major.  Grant Have you ever played that game called cashflow there? I've heard about the Robert Kiyosaki Robert Kiyosaki game. Yeah, I've never played it, you shouldn't play I have a feeling you do really well with it.  Stephanie Yeah.  Grant Excellent with cash flow is king, as you're as you're pointing out, and the ability to get that cash flow lined up and consistently look at money as a tool to deliver the cash flow is critical. So that 401k experience, I've had that same journey where I was putting money I was putting money in in a 401k. And then the first time the market in my career, you know, did this massive dive down, right, and I'm sitting there thinking, I know that there's someone on Wall Street's buying puts against my investment making a ton of money while I'm losing a ton, wait, who came up with this strategy, right? You know, also you could keep your you know, 2% Raise, it is it is a disservice to the working class for sure. So, did you did you ever get involved in the 401k strategy? Or, or did you ultimately just leave it wouldn't? What happened there?  Stephanie Eight, actually, I have my series six, when to be a n 63. So for the audience, that just means that I was registered to sell products, you know, mutual funds and things like that to my database of clients. I never really like to that I never really, I felt the variability and that the training that I was given never seemed to give me a lot of anxiety. And so I never really did much with that. And inevitably let those those licenses go. But though the 401k Actually, I'm in the process of writing a book and there's going to be there's one chapter that's dedicated to the 401k, which I do a great deal, you know of research on and you you pit. You know some really good points on on that. And but it's just letting people question it because there are so many things about the 401 K that are, you know, you're giving you're giving your money to someone else to watch. And they're not doing it for free. And financial institutions want to hold on to your money for as long as they can and give it back, as you know, little as they can. And so you're you're using your money to subsidize things that you probably don't even know your money's doing. And I know, these are hard things to come to in this day and age when it's just like, can I just give my money to this person and have him manage it? Or have the 401k make those decisions? Why do I have to be involved with everything, it really is a significant amount of money that you pay to these financial institutions. And you can do much better on your own. But I won't go into that. That's a whole nother discussion.  Grant That but that's your journey, though. I think your journey is you figured out Wait a minute, I can do something differently with this. And you took control of it right? You did the education you put in the work, you discovered cash flows. The secret to this, let my money work on just building even small incremental cash flow growth and how critical that is in the strategy. Stephanie One other point just quickly is I was watching something on TV last night, and there was several commercials that came on. And they were women. They were geared to women and there they were talking about, you know, women and finances are bad with finances. And the whole message in this commercial was save your money for retirement or whatever. And I was like, I want to just get out the message that it's not saving your money. It's investing your money and learn how to be a good investor, because those are the things that are going to allow you to retire early or retire in not a poverty situation. But in you know, invest and learn how to invest because it isn't as hard as people think it is, you know?  Grant Yeah, absolutely. I love that and are good. I understand. You're right. Did you say the messaging in that TV ad was that women are bad with finances? Is that what you say?  Stephanie Yeah, I think well, they were trying to you know, women were kind of trying to empower themselves by saying, I'm not bad with finances, even though you know, I've been told that women are bad with finances, but it seemed like the solution for them in that commercial was save. Save your money. You say? Like, no, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. Ah, good. Good. Debt should produce cashflow. Right. That's, that's actually that's actually the message right there. One of the things I noticed as I was looking at your background, and the things you've done, as you had made a comment if I if I've got this right. Grant Money myths, you talked about money myths, and I think you just touched on one of those. What other money myths? Have you learned that we hold on to that? Are these incorrect notions that actually hurt us financially? What have you found?  Stephanie There's one very significant one, which is people will say, well, the wealthy people, you know, I've talked to people and they'll be like, Oh, but the reason the people you work with have so much money is because they're willing to take these crazy risks with their money, and stuff like that high risks. That's that's why they got where they are, they are and I say actually, nothing could be further from the truth. The majority of wealthy people invest in extremely conservative things. They, the other myth is, you know, put put your money into the stock market. Many people can't tell you in their mutual funds, what they're invested in, what even one company is that they're invested in, let alone who's who are the team members on that, you know, on board or who's the CEO of the company, they can't tell you anything. Whereas wealthy people they tend to invest if they do invest in businesses, they invest directly in a business, either for themselves or they understand the dynamics of the business and the business plan and they invest that way. If they invest in real estate, they largely do the syndications and they get to know the team that's running, running the syndication. They know what kind of experience they have, what kind of past returns they've done. They do their homework in that sense. But then once they've invested in the team, they tend to invest again and again. And these are very conservative things that they're investing in things that are tangible in value. That's another. That's right. Three things I'm hitting is wealthy people tend to invest in things that have tangible value, which means, you know, an apartment complex Well, let's say, for some reason, it's terribly mismanaged and it goes out of nobody wants to be in it anymore. Well, you still have the building and the land in which you can sell. So there's, there's tangible value there. Grant Okay, so the tangible piece, that's interesting, too, especially in today's world, where digital assets are becoming more and more of a thing, right. In fact, I saw recently, someone talking about digital real estate on one of the online ads, you know, doesn't feel tangible, right. Are all the NFT stuff going on? Right are the crypto so many intangibles today as well? It Do you have any position or thoughts when they do that?  Stephanie I don't because I guess I always take the line if I if I don't understand it, or if it's not something that I want, you know, I guess it comes down to really understanding it. I've had a lot of people explain it to me, but I still don't, you know, the ups and downs, you know, lately, it's been a pretty big crash, you know, people are saying that's a good thing. Okay, I still don't really understand it. And I know that they're planning on, you know, digitizing, then that's, that's probably, you know, not too far away in real estate, you know, 10, I would hope it's going to be 1015 years in the future. I don't know what that looks like. But that's definitely something in the future. I don't think that is wrong. And when I say that the wealthy people invest in, they probably do have some investments in cryptocurrency, but that's probably less than 5% of their portfolio. Great majority of what they're invested in, probably 30% Every year. If you go on to the name of this group is called Tiger 21. And it's, it's for wealthy, wealthy people, I think they have to show a net worth of at least five or $10 million to get in the group. But every year, by agreeing to be in this group, they agreed to release as a group, kind of a asset allocation of all of their investments, and every year, there doesn't change that much. And over 30% is in real estate.  Grant Really. Okay. All right. That's interesting. That's fascinating. One of the things that I noticed as I looked at it now Now the name your company, you're gonna have to help me because is it Erbe Wealth? This Erbe?  Stephanie Well, Erbe Wealth, okay, everybody. Well, thank you Erbe Wealth.  Grant Well, so I'm on your site, I was on your site. And I was checking out. This is really cool. erbewealth.com. And I went to the about page and told my listeners, you should check this out. Stephanie's got this thing called the 15% Plus community. Can you talk about that?  Stephanie Yeah, well, I mean, my partner and I started working together in 2018. And we both realized, as many successful pairings go is that he had some skills in in this in the certain areas, and I had skills in certain areas. And together, we have really done very well together, and we just closed on our 12th deal about two weeks ago. And every single deal that we put together has returned over 15%. But truthfully, every every one that we've done up to this point has returned over 20%. So the person designing my website said, I don't know you might want to just put that down to 15%. But every deal that we have done has had an annualized rate of return of over 20%. So if you're we, our goal is when we hold the money for three to four years, then we'll double your investment in that time. And we have we've done that successfully, and we have a system and we're will we're continuing with it.  Grant That's amazing and that's that's leveraging the syndicated real estate strategy.  Stephanie Yep, that's we buy apartment complexes and a very specific market in the country, we have a very specific buying strategy that allows us to get in and make money when we purchase it, purchase the property. And then we just find areas where there's there's been a lot of growth, and there's been a lot of rent growth and population growth. And I think if anyone's been listening to the news is we know that there's a housing shortage. So we buy in areas where, you know, there's a great deal of population growth and not enough housing,  Grant What is your what is your perfect client look like? What's their profile? Like? Stephanie I mean, I would like it to be more broad than than it is, it's usually, you know, well, to invest in our deals, you need to be accredited, which, you know, that means you need to have a net worth of a million, or you have a $200,000 salary. And so I love working with business owners, that's kind of my thought to I tend to attract a lot our business owners, because, well, one is, they're so busy trying to make their business work, and I'm talking more like smaller business owners, you know, and, you know, trying to manage their company, which they're very passionate about, but business owners tend to not really plan that well for their retirement, because they're just, you know, they're thinking all about this. Yeah. Run on the business constantly, right? Yep. Right. So those are, you know, those are the people I love to work with, just to you know, get them some cash flow, that that is nice, but as well as just having, you know, great returns that they don't have to manage, you know, at all.  Grant So, okay, very good. While you've been very generous with your time, can you give our listeners a place to go to to learn more about you? Yeah, to your website?  Stephanie Yep. That's my website, which is erbewealth.com. There's, I have I think, right now, it's not a lot, but it's about 15 articles that I've written, that just I try to really educate the newer investor that isn't familiar with this type of investing. And then there's a track record of of all of our Not, not cherry cherry pick deals closer, every single deal that we've done together, up until this point, and then you can join, you know, the list the email list to get notifications, I like to really educate my investors, as well as then they get the first, you know, chance of getting the new investment when it comes out. But air Bay, actually is the German word for legacy. And my dad was a second generation, my grandfather came over on the boat right from Germany. And he became an entrepreneur after he paid his dues and did everything he needed to do to become a citizen. And then my dad, you know, followed in his footsteps and was an entrepreneur.  Grant So I was gonna ask you about the backstory on that name. I was trying to figure out Erbe. What is that? Yes, that's awesome. I appreciate that.  Stephanie Yeah, not to my dad, who never you know, saw any of this, but definitely, it's because of him that this has happened. I can tell you have an awesome dad. Really cool.  Grant That's awesome. Stephanie, any final comments that you want to share? Stephanie No, no, but I'd say you know, just just check on my website. I'm trying to, like I said, working on a book and that that'll be my next. I'm hoping to have it done by the end of summer. So when when it's available, it will be available on my website as well.  Grant That's awesome. Stephanie, thank you so much for taking the time with us today, everyone.  Thanks for listening to another episode of Financial Investing Radio. And until next time, check out erbewealth.com.  

Welcome back to Artbeat Radio! In this episode, Stephanie gives us a sneak peek on an original play she wrote. You'll hear a couple scenes being acted out with the help of the podcast class, as well as a reinterpretation of “Maybe” from Annie sung by Stephanie and Jillian. Check out the synopsis below and enjoy the episode! Synopsis: “Come Away with Me, Annie Twist: The Musical” is set somewhere in the USA. It's an inspired piece based off of two critically acclaimed musicals “Annie” and “Oliver!” However, there's a twist, and it's not just in the title! This original musical is a romantic comedy that follows two orphans who meet under unusual circumstances. As their injuries improve so does their love! Audio Transcription: (Please listen on Podomatic or Spotify to view the full transcript)  *Intro music by Artbeat Radio staff*   Music, stories, and more! You're listening to Artbeat Radio, a program of Able ARTS Work.  Stephanie: Hello ladies and gentlemen. My name is Stephanie J. Monis. Welcome to my sneak peek of my original written play episode of “Come Away with Me Annie Twist: The Musical”. It is a love comedy between two orphans, Annie and Oliver. They randomly meet at the hospital. Last February, I decided to write and direct this musical. I sat down and started brainstorming ideas. From then on, I started the process of my musical. Writing and directing has been fun. Stay tuned for it. Find me on YouTube and enjoy! Cast for the podcast version of the musical: Narrators – Brian, Tim, and AaronAnnie – StephanieMs. Birch – ReneeService Assistant – ReneeNurse – AlisonOliver - BrianACT 1 - SCENE 1 Ms. Birch's Orphanage for Little Orphan Girls A fourteen-year-old girl named Annie and her dog Sandy arrive at “Ms. Birch's Orphanage, for Little Orphan Girls.” The loud sound of a car driving off is heard in the distance, and becomes faint. Ms. Birch, a cruel woman who drinks often, greets Annie and Sandy at the orphanage's creaky patio doorstep. Ms. Birch, without a word, opens the squeaky door for Annie and points to the staircase. With Sandy in her arms Annie looks into the foggy distance as she sees her parent's car's tail lights become dim. She sighs. Annie: (to herself) Why did they not say goodbye to me? Am I not important enough? Ms. Birch “clears her throat” and points to the staircase. Annie slowly walks up a long, dark, and dreary staircase which leads up to her room. Annie enters the room. The door immediately slams behind her. Ms Birch: (yelling from the stairwell) Annie you must be appropriate in your room, and obey all the rules like a good little girl. (picks up a bottle of whiskey from a cabinet beside the stairwell and takes a huge “gulp”) Whatever you do (hiccups) don't start singing! Annie: (looks around the dark scary room) Why am I here? Why is it that my Mom and Dad don't want me anymore? Is it because I was difficult to take care of? Did I cost too much? We always enjoyed getting ice cream together. (She looks at Sandy in her arms) I know you always enjoyed that too, Sandy. (giggles) Annie walks over to the window with Sandy and they both stare into the empty distance Annie: I really wish that someday I will see them again. *the song Maybe begins* Lyrics:  Maybe if I prayI'll see them once againDad would be giving me a bear hug Mom would be braiding my hair  Maybe if I'm good In a cottage is where we'll be Mom is cooking us dinner Dad is payin' the bills!  Betcha they're creative And they collect art Bet they makes things Like cookies and tarts  Betcha they're great Why wouldn't they be? They're a heck of a bunch Why'd they give up me?!  So maybe now it's time When Sandy and I will wake They'll be calling me Baby... (she whispers) Maybe.  Maybe far away Or maybe real nearby He may be pouring her coffee She may be straightening his tie Maybe in a house All hidden by a hill She's sitting, playing piano He's sitting paying a bill Betcha they're young Betcha they're smart Bet they collect things like ashtrays and art Betcha they're good, why shouldn't they be? Their one mistake was giving up me So maybe now it's time And maybe when I wake They'll be there calling me baby, maybe *end of scene*ACT 1 - SCENE 4 Hospital Annie is sitting in a loud waiting room of an unfamiliar hospital. She picks up a “Home and Garden” magazine from the coffee table, and begins flipping through the pages faster and faster. She comments on what she sees in the magazine and fantasies of what this “magazine life” would be like for her. Nurse: Excuse me Miss. Annie? It's time for you to go to your room. (Nurse brings a wheelchair over. Nurse helps Annie onto the chair and notices her bandages) What happened to your ankle? Annie: I tripped over my suitcase at the orphanage. Ugh, I wish someone was here to take care of me. Nurse: Well, miss you're in the right place. We'll take good care of you, don't you worry. Annie: Thank you.Nurse: That's my job!Annie is wheeled to her room. She is helped onto her bed. Nurse: We'll call you in for an X-Ray soon. Then we'll know exactly what's wrong. The Nurse leaves. Annie discovers the “Service Button” beside her bed.Annie: (Annie presses the button.... repeatedly) Oooooo. I'm livin' the life! Service Assistant answers the call. Service Assistant V/O: (Urgently) Hello? Hello! This is Sue Ann, how may I help you? Annie: (nervous) I was just testing this thing ...umm, to see if it works. Oops.Service Assistant: Kids. Annie's door is open to her room and she can hear someone talking outside her room Oliver: (Nervously) I was in my workshop. I fell back and happened to fall on me arm first, and then I heard this big crack and I just couldn't help but cry! Will I be okay Nurse, will I? Nurse: Well, can you move it?Oliver: No. I already tried to move it, but it just really hurts. It's dreadful. Nurse: Well. We will get you in for an X-Ray and see what's wrong. (Nurse is paged) Sorry, I'm needed at the front desk. You're in room 224B. It's right down the hall. Oliver looks for his room, but forgets the exact room number.Oliver: (talking to himself) Wow this hallway sure is long. 224... 224. Oh dear, 224 what?! He takes a guess and blindly enters the room. Annie is in a hospital bed with her ankle resting on a bunch of pillows. Oliver: Oh, excuse me. I'm sorry. I must be in the wrong room. Annie: (tongue tied) It's okay. Ummm...Annie and Oliver: What's your name??They giggle. Oliver: (walks towards Annie) Hi, my name is Oliver. What's your name?Annie: My name is Annie. Nice to meet you. (she notices his arm) Hey, what happened to your arm?Oliver: Oh, I just hurt it in the workshop. Annie: In a workshop? (interested) Wow. (kindly apologetic) Well, I'm very sorry to hear that. Oliver: Yeah. Thanks. (observant) Looks like you hurt your leg, what happened to you? Annie: My ankle. Ummm. I tripped over a suitcase. Don't ask. Nurse notices Oliver is in Annie's Room.Nurse: Looks like you made a friend.Annie: (quietly) We'll see. Nurse: Well Oliver, it's time for your X-Ray.Oliver: Alright. Cheerio Annie. Pleasure to meet you. Annie: See you soon. (to herself) Probably. (smiles big) Nurse escorts Oliver to the X-Ray Room. *end of scene* Stephanie: Thank you for listening. If you would like, you can go to my YouTube channel for more information, which you can find in the bio. Have a beautiful and wonderful day and stay tuned next week for our next episode. Bye! *Outro music by Artbeat Radio staff*   We hope you enjoyed this episode of Artbeat Radio. For more information, please go to our website. Ableartswork.org. Thanks for listening and tune in next time!  Stephanie's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYbeh02WxD7GLBMMKK0lndA  

Welcome back to Artbeat Radio! You're listening to our 100th episode! We started in 2012, posting about one episode a year. In September of 2020, quarantine inspired us to find a way to interact more with our greater community. Unable to go on community outings or leave our homes, we decided it was time to post on a weekly basis to maintain our connection. Listen in as we share our favorite moments, our hopes for the future, and interview one another on our accomplishments!  Thanks for listening and tune in next time! For more information about our organization, please visit our website www.ableartswork.org  Audio Transcription: (Please listen on Podomatic or Spotify to view the full transcript) *Intro music by Artbeat Radio staff*  Music, stories, and more! You're listening to Artbeat Radio, a program of Able ARTS Work. Stephanie: Hello and welcome to Artbeat Radio! My name is Stephanie! This is our 100th podcast episode. Wow, that is crazy. Our 100th episode! Looks like we made it! Thank you for listening to our podcast. Hope you like the episode. Alison: Okay, now I remember there was one time when we were doing something and it didn't turn out right and somebody dropped a box. I don't know what was in the box but somebody accidentally dropped a box and then in class somebody got the words backwards. Like they accidentally screwed up the words and that was my favorite part. Brian: Well, I loved Katie Jo also. Interviewed her about her country music and she actually performed for us live. My favorite was interviewing the guy who played Spiderman. He was really interesting. Eric: Guess what folx, the interview with spiderman will be available as of next week! Brian: Stephanie. Stephanie: Yes? Brian: What podcast did you enjoy? Stephanie: I liked “Summer Sounds” because it was really upbeat and it was really nice and I also like that I have my professional headphones. I would like, in the future, to meet my goal, which is to be a person on the radio but talk about my play, which is going to be awesome. Hey Renee. Renee: Yes? Stephanie: What's your favorite part of the podcast? Renee: I loved interviewing Spider-man, Ricky because we have a lot in common and are the same age. Brian: Yeah, I really enjoyed the interview with Ricky Mena, who played Spiderman. Stephanie: I think the interview with Julianna and Matthew was my favorite. And I just like podcast because I just like it. I like it because I get to produce the episode about my play. That's why. My goal is to be on a radio station and be the head podcast talker and to talk about my musical and my jewelry business. And that's going to be fun. Go podcast class! Brian: What I love about working with KLBP a lot is getting my voice heard. Getting my thoughts across. To have some of my thoughts that I have not illustrated before and that's very important to me. It's a terrific radio station to air what we've learned. Tim: Well, I like the guests that we have and then talking about our program and sharing all our details. I enjoyed interviewing our staff and then others from- different staff from different sites and music instructors. I like the most about it how we come together as one. Alison: This is our 100th episode! Well, what do you think of it? Stephanie: I think that it's amazing so far. Alison: I didn't think we'd go this far. Stephanie: I know right? Brian: Aaron, what do you think about the 100th podcast episode? Aaron: I like it. Brian: Did you think that we would make it this far? Aaron: Yes. Brian: It's a real honor to interview you, Aaron. Stephanie? Stephanie: Yes, Brian? Brian: What do you think of the 100th episode? Stephanie: I think it's cool. Brian: Did you think that we would make it this far? Stephanie: No! That's crazy, Brian! Brian: Yeah! Stephanie: Wow. Brian: I'm-I'm with you. I can't imagine that we're up to the 100th. Stephanie: We gotta' keep going. It'll be 101! Brian: Yeah! *laughs* and maybe 102, 3, 4, 5 and so on. *laughter* Stephanie: How do you like this class? Brian: I love it. So much so that I took it last semester and I'm taking it this semester. I can't remember if I took it the semester before. Stephanie: Yeah. Brian: How do you like this podcast? Stephanie: I think it's great! I like- I like my first- I like my classes this year. They're fun! Renee: How long have you been on the podcast, Stephanie? Stephanie: Um...not very long but I think I like it. How long have you been in podcast? Renee: I'm not sure. I just started *laughs* Stephanie: Just started? Renee: Yeah. Stephanie: I wanna keep working on podcast! Renee: Me too! Stephanie: Sorry, I'm just stoked! I'm so sorry *laughter* Artbeat Radio was created in 2012 at the TAP II location in Gardena California. Brian: Here's a clip of our first podcast!  *Dead Man's Bones cover plays softly behind voices* Alison: This was made in 2012. This was the first podcast of Artbeat Radio. it was posted on October 18th 2012. *Dead Man's Bones cover plays louder* *Song fades out* Stephanie: I thought it was awesome. The way that it was presented and the way that they were singing. Brian: I liked it! Alison: It was beautiful. I think the song was great considering it was our first one. Brian: Hope you enjoyed our 100th episode! Have a wonderful day and thank you for listening to our podcast.  Stephanie: Thank you! Renee: Thank you for listening and thank you for coming. Have a beautiful and wonderful day. Brian: Here's to 100 more episodes! Thank you very much ladies and germs. *laughter* Renee: Gentlemen! Stephanie: That's so funny, Brian! Renee: I like that Brian: Thank you! Renee: “germs” that's so funny! I like that *laughter* *Outro music by Artbeat Radio staff*  We hope you enjoyed this episode of Artbeat Radio. For more information, please go to our website. Ableartswork.org. Thanks for listening and tune in next time!  

About StephanieStephanie Wong is an award-winning speaker, engineer, pageant queen, and hip hop medalist. She is a leader at Google with a mission to blend storytelling and technology to create remarkable developer content. At Google, she's created over 400 videos, blogs, courses, and podcasts that have helped developers globally. You might recognize her as the host of the GCP Podcast. Stephanie is active in her community, fiercely supporting women in tech and mentoring students.Links: Personal Website: https://stephrwong.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/stephr_wong TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. And—let me be clear here—it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free, you can do things like run small scale applications or do proof-of-concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free, no asterisk. Start now. Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. One of the things that makes me a little weird in the universe is that I do an awful lot of… let's just call it technology explanation slash exploration in public, and turning it into a bit of a brand-style engagement play. What makes this a little on the weird side is that I don't work for a big company, which grants me a tremendous latitude. I have a whole lot of freedom that lets me be all kinds of different things, and I can't get fired, which is something I'm really good at.Inversely, my guest today is doing something remarkably similar, except she does work for a big company and could theoretically be fired if they were foolish enough to do so. But I don't believe that they are. Stephanie Wong is the head of developer engagement at Google. Stephanie, thank you for volunteering to suffer my slings and arrows about all of this.Stephanie: [laugh]. Thanks so much for having me today, Corey.Corey: So, at a very high level, you're the head of developer engagement, which is a term that I haven't seen a whole lot of. Where does that start and where does that stop?Stephanie: Yeah, so I will say that it's a self-proclaimed title a bit because of the nuance of what I do. I would say at its heart, I am still a part of developer relations. If you've heard of developer advocacy or developer evangelist, I would say this slight difference in shade of what I do is that I focus on scalable content creation and becoming a central figure for our developer audiences to engage and enlighten them with content that, frankly, is remarkable, and that they'd want to share and learn about our technology.Corey: Your bio is fascinating in that it doesn't start with the professional things that most people do with, “This is my title and this is my company,” is usually the first sentence people put in. Yours is, “Stephanie Wong is an award-winning speaker, engineer, pageant queen, and hip hop medalist.” Which is both surprising and more than a little bit refreshing because when I read a bio like that my immediate instinctive reaction is, “Oh, thank God. It's a real person for a change.” I like the idea of bringing the other aspects of what you are other than, “This is what goes on in an IDE, the end,” to your audience.Stephanie: That is exactly the goal that I had when creating that bio because I truly believe in bringing more interdisciplinary and varied backgrounds to technology. I, myself have gone through a very unconventional path to get to where I am today and I think in large part, my background has had a lot to do with my successes, my failures, and really just who I am in tech as an uninhibited and honest, credible person today.Corey: I think that there's a lack of understanding, broadly, in our industry about just how important credibility and authenticity are and even the source of where they come from. There are a lot of folks who are in the DevRel space—devrelopers, as I insist upon calling them, over their protests—where, on some level, the argument is, what is developer relations? “Oh, you work in marketing, but they're scared to tell you,” has been my gag on that one for a while. But they speak from a position of, “I know what's what because I have been in the trenches, working on these large-scale environments as an engineer for the last”—fill in the blank, however long it may have been—“And therefore because I have done things, I am going to tell you how it is.” You explicitly call out that you don't come from the traditional, purely technical background. Where did you come from? It's unlikely that you've sprung fully-formed from the forehead of some god, but again, I'm not entirely sure how Google finds and creates the folks that it winds up advancing, so maybe you did.Stephanie: Well, to tell you the truth. We've all come from divine creatures. And that's where Google sources all employees. So. You know. But—[laugh].Corey: Oh, absolutely. “We climbed to the top of Olympus and then steal fire from the gods.” “It's like, isn't that the origin story of Prometheus?” “Yeah, possibly.” But what is your background? Where did you come from?Stephanie: So, I have grown up, actually, in Silicon Valley, which is a little bit ironic because I didn't go to school for computer science or really had the interest in becoming an engineer in school. I really had no idea.Corey: Even been more ironic than that because most of Silicon Valley appears to never have grown up at all.Stephanie: [laugh]. So, true. Maybe there's a little bit of that with me, too. Everybody has a bit of Peter Pan syndrome here, right? Yeah, I had no idea what I wanted to do in school and I just knew that I had an interest in communicating with one another, and I ended up majoring in communication studies.I thought I wanted to go into the entertainment industry and go into production, which is very different and ended up doing internships at Warner Brothers Records, a YouTube channel for dance—I'm a dancer—and I ended up finding a minor in digital humanities, which is sort of this interdisciplinary minor that combines technology and the humanities space, including literature, history, et cetera. So, that's where I got my start in technology, getting an introduction to information systems and doing analytics, studying social media for certain events around the world. And it wasn't until after school that I realized that I could work in enterprise technology when I got an offer to be a sales engineer. Now, that being said, I had no idea what sales engineering was. I just knew it had something to do with enterprise technology and communications, and I thought it was a good fit for my background.Corey: The thing that I find so interesting about that is that it breaks the mold of what people expect, when, “If someone's going to talk to me about technology—especially coming from a”—it's weird; it's one of the biggest companies on the planet, and people still on some level equate Google with the startup-y mentality of being built in someone's garage. That's an awfully big garage these days, if that's even slightly close to true, which it isn't. But there's this idea of, “Oh, you have to go to Stanford. You have to get a degree in computer science. And then you have to go and do this, this, this, this, and this.”And it's easy to look dismissively at what you're doing. “Communications? Well, all that would teach you to do is communicate to people clearly and effectively. What possible good is that in tech?” As we look around the landscape and figure out exactly why that is so necessary in tech, and also so lacking?Stephanie: Exactly. I do think it's an underrated skill in tech. Maybe it's not so much anymore, but I definitely think that it has been in the past. And even for developers, engineers, data scientists, other technical practitioner, especially as a person in DevRel, I think it's such a valuable skill to be able to communicate complex topics simply and understandably to a wide variety of audiences.Corey: The big question that I have for you because I've talked to an awful lot of folks who are very concerned about the way that they approach developer relations, where—they'll have ratios, for example—where I know someone and he insists that he give one deeply technical talk for every four talks that are not deeply technical, just because he feels the need to re-establish and shore up his technical bona fides. Now, if there's one thing that people on the internet love, it is correcting people on things that are small trivia aspect, or trying to pull out the card that, “Oh, I've worked on this system for longer than you've worked on this system, therefore, you should defer to me.” Do you find that you face headwinds for not having the quote-unquote, “Traditional” engineering technical background?Stephanie: I will say that I do a bit. And I did, I would say when I first joined DevRel, and I don't know if it was much more so that it was being imposed on me or if it was being self-imposed, something that I felt like I needed to prove to gain credibility, not just in my organization, but in the industry at large. And it wasn't until two or three years into it, that I realized that I had a niche myself. It was to create stories with my content that could communicate these concepts to developers just as effectively. And yes, I can still prove that I can go into an hour-long or a 45-minute-long tech talk or a webinar about a topic, but I can also easily create a five to ten-minute video that communicates concepts and inspires audiences just the same, and more importantly, be able to point to resources, code labs, tutorials, GitHub repos, that can allow the audience to be hands-on themselves, too. So really, I think that it was over time that I gained more experience and realized that my skill sets are valuable in a different way, and it's okay to have a different background as long as you bring something to the table.Corey: And I think that it's indisputable that you do. The concept of yours that I've encountered from time to time has always been insightful, it is always been extremely illuminating, and—you wouldn't think of this as worthy of occasion and comment, but I feel it needs to be said anyway—at no point in any of your content did I feel like I was being approached in a condescending way, where at every point it was always about uplifting people to a level of understanding, rather than doing the, “Well, I'm smarter than you and you couldn't possibly understand the things that I've been to.” It is relatable, it is engaging, and you add a very human face to what is admittedly an area of industry that is lacking in a fair bit of human element.Stephanie: Yeah, and I think that's the thing that many folks DevRel continue to underline is the idea of empathy, empathizing with your audiences, empathizing with the developers, the engineers, the data engineers, whoever it is that you're creating content for, it's being in their shoes. But for me, I may not have been in those shoes for years, like many other folks historically have been in for DevRel, but I want to at least go through the journey of learning a new piece of technology. For example, if I'm learning a new platform on Google Cloud, going through the steps of creating a demo, or walking through a tutorial, and then candidly explaining that experience to my audience, or creating a video about it. I really just reject the idea of having ego in tech and I would love to broaden the opportunity for folks who came from a different background like myself. I really want to just represent the new world of technology where it wasn't full of people who may have had the privilege to start coding at a very early age, in their garages.Corey: Yeah, privilege of, in many respects, also that privilege means, “Yes, I had the privilege of not having to have friends and deal with learning to interact with other human beings, which is what empowered me to build this company and have no social skills whatsoever.” It's not the aspirational narrative that we sometimes are asked to believe. You are similar in some respects to a number of things that I do—by which I mean, you do it professionally and well and I do it as basically performance shitpost art—but you're on Twitter, you make videos, you do podcasts, you write long-form and short-form as well. You are sort of all across the content creation spectrum. Which of those things do you prefer to do? Which ones of those are things you find a little bit more… “Well, I have to do it, but it's not my favorite?” Or do you just tend to view it as content is content; you just look at different media to tell your story?Stephanie: Well, I will say any form of content is queen—I'm not going to say king, but—[laugh] content is king, content is queen, it doesn't matter.Corey: Content is a baroness as it turns out.Stephanie: [laugh]. There we go. I have to say, so given my background, I mentioned I was into production and entertainment before, so I've always had a gravitation towards video content. I love tinkering with cameras. Actually, as I got started out at Google Cloud, I was creating scrappy content using webcams and my own audio equipment, and doing my own research, and finding lounges and game rooms to do that, and we would just upload it to our own YouTube channel, which probably wasn't allowed at the time, but hey, we got by with it.And eventually, I got approached by DevRel to start doing it officially on the channel and I was given budget to do it in-studio. And so that was sort of my stepping stone to doing this full-time eventually, which I never foresaw for myself. And so yeah, I have this huge interest in—I'm really engaged with video content, but once I started expanding and realizing that I could repurpose that content for podcasting, I could repurpose it for blogs, then you start to realize that you can shard content and expand your reach exponentially with this. So, that's when I really started to become more active on social media and leverage it to build not just content for Google Cloud, but build my own brand in tech.Corey: That is the inescapable truth of DevRel done right is that as you continue doing it, in time, in your slice of the industry, it is extremely likely that your personal brand eclipses the brand of the company that you represent. And it's in many ways a test of corporate character—if it makes sense—as do how they react to that. I've worked in roles before I started this place where I was starting to dabble with speaking a lot, and there was always a lot of insecurity that I picked up of, “Well, it feels like you're building your personal brand, not advancing the company here, and we as a company do not see the value in you doing that.” Direct quote from the last boss I had. And, well, that partially explains why I'm here, I suppose.But there's insecurity there. I'd see the exact opposite coming out of Google, especially in recent times. There's something almost seems to be a renaissance in Google Cloud, and I'm not sure where it came from. But if I look at it across the board, and you had taken all the labels off of everything, and you had given me a bunch of characteristics about different companies, I would never have guessed that you were describing Google when you're talking about Google Cloud. And perhaps that's unfair, but perceptions shape reality.Stephanie: Yeah, I find that interesting because I think traditionally in DevRel, we've also hired folks for their domain expertise and their brand, depending on what you're representing, whether it's in the Kubernetes space or Python client library that you're supporting. But it seems like, yes, in my case, I've organically started to build my brand while at Google, and Google has been just so spectacular in supporting that for me. But yeah, it's a fine line that I think many people have to walk. It's like, do you want to continue to build your own brand and have that carry forth no matter what company you stay at, or if you decide to leave? Or can you do it hand-in-hand with the company that you're at? For me, I think I can do it hand-in-hand with Google Cloud.Corey: It's taken me a long time to wrap my head around what appears to be a contradiction when I look at Google Cloud, and I think I've mostly figured it out. In the industry, there is a perception that Google as an entity is condescending and sneering toward every other company out there because, “You're Google, you know how to do all these great, amazing things that are global-spanning, and over here at Twitter for Pets, we suck doing these things.” So, Google is always way smarter and way better at this than we could ever hope to be. But that is completely opposed to my personal experiences talking with Google employees. Across the board, I would say that you all are self-effacing to a fault.And I mean that in the sense of having such a limited ego, in some cases, that it's, “Well, I don't want to go out there and do a whole video on this. It's not about me, it's about the technology,” are things that I've had people who work at Google say to me. And I appreciate the sentiment; it's great, but that also feels like it's an aloofness. It also fails to humanize what it is that you're doing. And you are a, I've got to say, a breath of fresh air when it comes to a lot of that because your stories are not just, “Here's how you do a thing. It's awesome. And this is all the intricacies of the API.”And yeah, you get there, but you also contextualize that in a, “Here's why it matters. Here's the problem that solves. Here is the type of customer's problem that this is great for,” rather than starting with YAML and working your way up. It's going the other way, of, “We want to sell some underpants,” or whatever it is the customer is trying to do today. And that is the way that I think is one of the best ways to drive adoption of what's going on because if you get people interested and excited about something—at least in my experience—they're going to figure out how the API works. Badly in many cases, but works. But if you start on the API stuff, it becomes a solution looking for a problem. I like your approach to this.Stephanie: Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think also something that I've continued to focus on is to tell stories across products, and it doesn't necessarily mean within just Google Cloud's ecosystem, but across the industry as well. I think we need to, even at Google, tell a better story across our product space and tie in what developers are currently using. And I think the other thing that I'm trying to work on, too, is contextualizing our products and our launches not just across the industry, but within our product strategy. Where does this tie in? Why does it matter? What is our forward-looking strategy from here? When we're talking about our new data cloud products or analytics, [unintelligible 00:17:21], how does this tie into our API strategy?Corey: And that's the biggest challenge, I think, in the AI space. My argument has been for a while—in fact, I wrote a blog post on it earlier this year—that AI and machine learning is a marvelously executed scam because it's being pushed by cloud providers and the things that you definitely need to do a machine learning experiment are a bunch of compute and a whole bunch of data that has to be stored on something, and wouldn't you know it, y'all sell that by the pound. So, it feels, from a cynical perspective, which I excel at espousing, that approach becomes one of you're effectively selling digital pickaxes into a gold rush. Because I see a lot of stories about machine learning how to do very interesting things that are either highly, highly use-case-specific, which great, that would work well, for me too, if I ever wind up with, you know, a petabyte of people's transaction logs from purchasing coffee at my national chain across the country. Okay, that works for one company, but how many companies look like that?And on the other side of it, “It's oh, here's how we can do a whole bunch of things,” and you peel back the covers a bit, and it looks like, “Oh, but you really taught me here is bias laundering?” And, okay. I think that there's a definite lack around AI and machine learning of telling stories about how this actually matters, what sorts of things people can do with it that aren't incredibly—how do I put this?—niche or a problem in search of a solution?Stephanie: Yeah, I find that there are a couple approaches to creating content around AI and other technologies, too, but one of them being inspirational content, right? Do you want to create something that tells the story of how I created a model that can predict what kind of bakery item this is? And we're going to do it by actually showcasing us creating the outcome. So, that's one that's more like, okay. I don't know how relatable or how appropriate it is for an enterprise use case, but it's inspirational for new developers or next gen developers in the AI space, and I think that can really help a company's brand, too.The other being highly niche for the financial services industry, detecting financial fraud, for example, and that's more industry-focused. I found that they both do well, in different contexts. It really depends on the channel that you're going to display it on. Do you want it to be viral? It really depends on what you're measuring your content for. I'm curious from you, Corey, what you've seen across, as a consumer of content?Corey: What's interesting, at least in my world, is that there seems to be, given that what I'm focusing on first and foremost is the AWS ecosystem, it's not that I know it the best—I do—but at this point, it's basically Stockholm Syndrome where it's… with any technology platform when you've worked with it long enough, you effectively have the most valuable of skill sets around it, which is not knowing how it works, but knowing how it doesn't, knowing what the failure mode is going to look like and how you can work around that and detect it is incredibly helpful. Whereas when you're trying something new, you have to wait until it breaks to find the sharp edges on it. So, there's almost a lock-in through, “We failed you enough times,” story past a certain point. But paying attention to that ecosystem, I find it very disjointed. I find that there are still events that happen and I only find out when the event is starting because someone tweets about it, and for someone who follows 40 different official AWS RSS feeds, to be surprised by something like that tells me, okay, there's not a whole lot of cohesive content strategy here, that is at least making it easy for folks to consume the things that they want, especially in my case where even the very niche nature of what I do, my interest is everything.I have a whole bunch of different filters that look for various keywords and the rest, and of course, I have helpful folks who email me things constantly—please keep it up; I'm a big fan—worst case, I'd rather read something twice than nothing. So, it's helpful to see all of that and understand the different marketing channels, different personas, and the way that content approaches, but I still find things that slip through the cracks every time. The thing that I've learned—and it felt really weird when I started doing it—was, I will tell the same stories repeatedly in different forums, or even the same forum. I could basically read you a Twitter thread from a year ago, word-for-word, and it would blow up bigger than it did the first time. Just because no one reads everything.Stephanie: Exactly.Corey: And I've already told my origin story. You're always new to someone. I've given talks internally at Amazon at various times, and I'm sort of loud and obnoxious, but the first question I love to ask is, “Raise your hand if you've never heard of me until today.” And invariably, over three-quarters of the room raises their hand every single time, which okay, great. I think that's awesome, but it teaches me that I cannot ever expect someone to have, quote-unquote, “Done the reading.”Stephanie: I think the same can be said about the content that I create for the company. You can't assume that people, A) have seen my tweets already or, B) understand this product, even if I've talked about it five times in the past. But yes, I agree. I think that you definitely need to have a content strategy and how you format your content to be more problem-solution-oriented.And so the way that I create content is that I let them fall into three general buckets. One being that it could be termed definition: talking about the basics, laying the foundation of a product, defining terms around a topic. Like, what is App Engine, or Kubeflow 101, or talking about Pub/Sub 101.The second being best practices. So, outlining and explaining the best practices around a topic, how do you design your infrastructure for scale and reliability.And the third being diagnosis: investigating; exploring potential issues, as you said; using scripts; Stackdriver logging, et cetera. And so I just kind of start from there as a starting point. And then I generally follow a very, very effective model. I'm sure you're aware of it, but it's called the five point argument model, where you are essentially telling a story to create a compelling narrative for your audience, regardless of the topic or what bucket that topic falls into.So, you're introducing the problem, you're sort of rising into a point where the climax is the solution. And that's all to build trust with your audience. And as it falls back down, you're giving the results in the conclusion, and that's to inspire action from your audience. So, regardless of what you end up talking about this problem-solution model—I've found at least—has been highly effective. And then in terms of sharing it out, over and over again, over the span of two months, that's how you get the views that you want.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. Its both useful for individuals and large enterprises, but here's what makes it new. I don't use that term lightly. Cloud Academy invites you to showcase just how good your AWS skills are. For the next four weeks you'll have a chance to prove yourself. Compete in four unique lab challenges, where they'll be awarding more than $2000 in cash and prizes. I'm not kidding, first place is a thousand bucks. Pre-register for the first challenge now, one that I picked out myself on Amazon SNS image resizing, by visiting cloudacademy.com/corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That's cloudacademy.com/corey. We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: See, that's a key difference right there. I don't do anything regular in terms of video as part of my content. And I do it from time to time, but you know, getting gussied up and whatnot is easier than just talking into a microphone. As I record this, it's Friday, I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and I look exactly like the middle-aged dad that I am. And for me at least, a big breakthrough moment was realizing that my audience and I are not always the same.Weird confession for someone in my position: I don't generally listen to podcasts. And the reason behind that is I read very quickly, and even if I speed up a podcast, I'm not going to be able to consume the information nearly as quickly as I could by reading it. That, amongst other reasons, is one of the reasons that every episode of this show has a full transcript attached to it. But I'm not my audience. Other people prefer to learn by listening and there's certainly nothing wrong with that.My other podcast, the AWS Morning Brief, is the spoken word version of the stuff that I put out in my newsletter every week. And that is—it's just a different area for people to consume the content because that's what works for them. I'm not one to judge. The hard part for me was getting over that hump of assuming the audience was like me.Stephanie: Yeah. And I think the other key part of is just mainly consistency. It's putting out the content consistently in different formats because everybody—like you said—has a different learning style. I myself do. I enjoy visual styles.I also enjoy listening to podcasts at 2x speed. [laugh]. So, that's my style. But yeah, consistency is one of the key things in building content, and building an audience, and making sure that you are valuable to your audience. I mean, social media, at the end of the day is about the people that follow you.It's not about yourself. It should never be about yourself. It's about the value that you provide. Especially as somebody who's in DevRel in this position for a larger company, it's really about providing value.Corey: What are the breakthrough moments that I had relatively early in my speaking career—and I think it's clear just from what you've already said that you've had a similar revelation at times—I gave a talk, that was really one of my first talks that went semi-big called, “Terrible Ideas in Git.” It was basically, learn how to use Git via anti-pattern. What it secretly was, was under the hood, I felt it was time I learned Git a bit better than I did, so I pitched it and I got a talk accepted. So well, that's what we call a forcing function. By the time I give that talk, I'd better be [laugh] able to have built a talk that do this intelligently, and we're going to hope for the best.It worked, but the first version of that talk I gave was super deep into the plumbing of Git. And I'm sure that if any of the Git maintainers were in the audience, they would have found it great, but there aren't that many folks out there. I redid the talk and instead approached it from a position of, “You have no idea what Git is. Maybe you've heard of it, but that's as far as it goes.” And then it gets a little deeper there.And I found that making the subject more accessible as opposed to deeper into the weeds of it is almost always the right decision from a content perspective. Because at some level, when you are deep enough into the weeds, the only way you're going to wind up fixing something or having a problem that you run into get resolved, isn't by listening to a podcast or a conference talk; it's by talking to the people who built the thing because at that level, those are the only people who can hang at that level of depth. That stops being fodder for conference talks unless you turn it into an after-action report of here's this really weird thing I learned.Stephanie: Yeah. And you know, to be honest, the one of the most successful pieces of content I've created was about data center security. I visited a data center and I essentially unveiled what our security protocols were. And that wasn't a deeply technical video, but it was fun and engaging and easily understood by the masses. And that's what actually ended up resulting in the highest number of views.On top of that, I'm now creating a video about our subsea fiber optic cables. Finding that having to interview experts from a number of different teams across engineering and our strategic negotiators, it was like a monolith of information that I had to take in. And trying to format that into a five-minute story, I realized that bringing it up a layer of abstraction to help folks understand this at a wider level was actually beneficial. And I think it'll turn into a great piece of content. I'm still working on it now. So, [laugh] we'll see how it turns out.Corey: I'm a big fan of watching people learn and helping them get started. The thing that I think gets lost a lot is it's easy to assume that if I look back in time at myself when I was first starting my professional career two decades ago, that I was exactly like I am now, only slightly more athletic and can walk up a staircase without getting winded. That's never true. It never has been true. I've learned a lot about not just technology but people as I go, and looking at folks are entering the workforce today through the same lens of, “Well, that's not how I would handle that situation.” Yeah, no kidding. I have two decades of battering my head against the sharp edges and leaving dents in things to inform that opinion.No, when I was that age, I would have handled it way worse than whatever it is I'm critiquing at the time. But it's important to me that we wind up building those pathways and building those bridges so that people coming into the space, first, have a clear path to get here, and secondly, have a better time than I ever did. Where does the next generation of talent come from has been a recurring question and a recurring theme on the show.Stephanie: Yeah. And that's exactly why I've been such a fierce supporter of women in tech, and also, again, encouraging a broader community to become a part of technology. Because, as I said, I think we're in the midst of a new era of technology, of people from all these different backgrounds in places that historically have had more remote access to technology, now having the ability to become developers at an early age. So, with my content, that's what I'm hoping to drive to make this information more easily accessible. Even if you don't want to become a Google Cloud engineer, that's totally fine, but if I can help you understand some of the foundational concepts of cloud, then I've done my job well.And then, even with women who are already trying to break into technology or wanting to become a part of it, then I want to be a mentor for them, with my experience not having a technical background and saying yes to opportunities that challenged me and continuing to build my own luck between hard work and new opportunities.Corey: I can't wait to see how this winds up manifesting as we see understandings of what we're offering to customers in different areas in different ways—both in terms of content and terms of technology—how that starts to evolve and shift. I feel like we're at a bit of an inflection point now, where today if I graduate from school and I want to start a business, I have to either find a technical co-founder or I have to go to a boot camp and learn how to code in order to build something. I think that if we can remove that from the equation and move up the stack, sure, you're not going to be able to build the next Google or Pinterest or whatnot from effectively Visual Basic for Interfaces, but you can build an MVP and you can then continue to iterate forward and turn it into something larger down the road. The other part of it, too, is that moving up the stack into more polished solutions rather than here's a bunch of building blocks for platforms, “So, if you want a service to tell you whether there's a picture of a hot dog or not, here's a service that does exactly that.” As opposed to, “Oh, here are the 15 different services, you can bolt together and pay for each one of them and tie it together to something that might possibly work, and if it breaks, you have no idea where to start looking, but here you go.” A packaged solution that solves business problems.Things move up the stack; they do constantly. The fact is that I started my career working in data centers and now I don't go to them at all because—spoiler—Google, and Amazon, and people who are not IBM Cloud can absolutely run those things better than I can. And there's no differentiated value for me in solving those global problems locally. I'd rather let the experts handle stuff like that while I focus on interesting problems that actually affect my business outcome. There's a reason that instead of running all the nonsense for lastweekinaws.com myself because I've worked in large-scale WordPress hosting companies, instead I pay WP Engine to handle it for me, and they, in turn, hosted on top of Google Cloud, but it doesn't matter to me because it's all just a managed service that I pay for. Because me running the website itself adds no value, compared to the shitpost I put on the website, which is where the value derives from. For certain odd values of value.Stephanie: [laugh]. Well, two things there is that I think we actually had a demo created on Google Cloud that did detect hot dogs or not hot dogs using our Vision API, years in the past. So, thanks for reminding me of that one.Corey: Of course.Stephanie: But yeah, I mean, I completely agree with that. I mean, this is constantly a topic in conversation with my team members, and with clients. It's about higher level of abstractions. I just did a video series with our fellow, Eric Brewer, who helped build cloud infrastructure here at Google over the past ten decades. And I asked him what he thought the future of cloud would be in the next ten years, and he mentioned, “It's going to be these higher levels of abstraction, building platforms on top of platforms like Kubernetes, and having more services like Cloud run serverless technologies, et cetera.”But at the same time, I think the value of cloud will continue to be providing optionality for developers to have more opinionated services, services like GKE Autopilot, et cetera, that essentially take away the management of infrastructure or nodes that people don't really want to deal with at the end of the day because it's not going to be a competitive differentiator for developers. They want to focus on building software and focusing on keeping their services up and running. And so yeah, I think the future is going to be that, giving developers flexibility and freedom, and still delivering the best-of-breed technology. If it's covering something like security, that's something that should be baked in as much as possible.Corey: You're absolutely right, first off. I'm also looking beyond it where I want to be able to build a website that is effectively Twitter, only for pets—because that is just a harebrained enough idea to probably raise a $20 million seed round these days—and I just want to be able to have the barks—those are like tweets, only surprisingly less offensive and racist—and have them just be stored somewhere, ideally presumably under the hood somewhere, it's going to be on computers, but whether it's in containers, or whether it's serverless, or however is working is the sort of thing that, “Wow, that seems like an awful lot of nonsense that is not central nor core to my business succeeding or failing.” I would say failing, obviously, except you can lose money at scale with the magic of things like SoftBank. Here we are.And as that continues to grow and scale, sure, at some point I'm going to have bespoke enough needs and a large enough scale where I do have to think about those things, but building the MVP just so I can swindle some VCs is not the sort of thing where I should have to go to that depth. There really should be a golden-path guardrail-style thing that I can effectively drag and drop my way into the next big scam. And that is, I think, the missing piece. And I think that we're not quite ready technologically to get there yet, but I can't shake the feeling and the hope that's where technology is going.Stephanie: Yeah. I think it's where technology is heading, but I think part of the equation is the adoption by our industry, right? Industry adoption of cloud services and whether they're ready to adopt services that are that drag-and-drop, as you say. One thing that I've also been talking a lot about is this idea of service-oriented networking where if you have a service or API-driven environment and you simply want to bring it to cloud—almost a plug-and-play there—you don't really want to deal with a lot of the networking infrastructure, and it'd be great to do something like PrivateLink on AWS, or Private Service Connect on Google Cloud.While those conversations are happening with customers, I'm finding that it's like trying to cross the Grand Canyon. Many enterprise customers are like, “That sounds great, but we have a really complex network topology that we've been sitting on for the past 25 years. Do you really expect that we're going to transition over to something like that?” So, I think it's about providing stepping stones for our customers until they can be ready to adopt a new model.Corey: Yeah. And of course, the part that never gets said out loud but is nonetheless true and at least as big of a deal, “And we have a whole team of people who've built their entire identity around that network because that is what they work on, and they have been ignoring cloud forever, and if we just uplift everything into a cloud where you folks handle that, sure, it's better for the business outcome, but where does that leave them?” So, they've been here for 25 years, and they will spend every scrap of political capital they've managed to accumulate to torpedo a cloud migration. So, any FUD they can find, any horse-trading they can do, anything they can do to obstruct the success of a cloud initiative, they're going to do because people are people, and there is no real plan to mitigate that. There's also the fact that unless there's a clear business value story about a feature velocity increase or opening up new markets, there's also not an incentive to do things to save money. That is never going to be the number one priority in almost any case short of financial disaster at a company because everything they're doing is building out increasing revenue, rather than optimizing what they're already doing.So, there's a whole bunch of political challenges. Honestly, moving the computer stuff from on-premises data centers into a cloud provider is the easiest part of a cloud migration compared to all of the people that are involved.Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, we talked about serverless and all the nice benefits of it, but unless you are more a digitally-born, next-gen developer, it may be a higher burden for you to undertake that migration. That's why we always [laugh] are talking about encouraging people to start with newer surfaces.Corey: Oh, yeah. And that's the trick, too, is if you're trying to learn a new cloud platform these days—first, if you're trying to pick one, I'd be hard-pressed to suggest anything other than Google Cloud, with the possible exception of DigitalOcean, just because the new user experience is so spectacularly good. That was my first real, I guess, part of paying attention to Google Cloud a few years ago, where I was, “All right, I'm going to kick the tires on this and see how terrible this interface is because it's a Google product.” And it was breathtakingly good, which I did not expect. And getting out of the way to empower someone who's new to the platform to do something relatively quickly and straightforwardly is huge. And sure, there's always room to prove, but that is the right area to focus on. It's clear that the right energy was spent in the right places.Stephanie: Yeah. I will say a story that we don't tell quite as well as we should is the One Google story. And I'm not talking about just between Workspace and Google Cloud, but our identity access management and knowing your Google account, which everybody knows. It's not like Microsoft, where you're forced to make an account, or it's not like AWS where you had a billion accounts and you hate them all.Corey: Oh, my God, I dread logging into the AWS console every time because it is such a pain in the ass. I go to cloud.google.com sometimes to check something, it's like, “Oh, right. I have to dig out my credentials.” And, “Where's my YubiKey?” And get it. Like, “Oh. I'm already log—oh. Oh, right. That's right. Google knows how identity works, and they don't actively hate their customers. Okay.” And it's always a breath of fresh air. Though I will say that by far and away, the worst login experience I've seen yet is, of course, Azure.Stephanie: [laugh]. That's exactly right. It's Google account. It's yours. It's personal. It's like an Apple iCloud account. It's one click, you're in, and you have access to all the applications. You know, so it's the same underlying identity structure with Workspace and Gmail, and it's the same org structure, too, across Workspace and Google Cloud. So, it's not just this disingenuous financial bundle between GCP and Workspace; it's really strategic. And it's kind of like the idea of low code or no code. And it looks like that's what the future of cloud will be. It's not just by VMs from us.Corey: Yeah. And there are customers who want to buy VMs and that's great. Speed up what they're doing; don't get in the way of people giving you their money, but if you're starting something net-new, there's probably better ways to do it. So, I want to thank you for taking as much time as you have to wind up going through how you think about, well, the art of storytelling in the world of engineering. If people want to learn more about who you are, what you're up to, and how you approach things, where can they find you?Stephanie: Yeah, so you can head to stephrwong.com where you can see my work and also get in touch with me if you want to collaborate on any content. I'm always, always, always open to that. And my Twitter is @stephr_wong.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:40:03]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.Stephanie: Thanks so much.Corey: Stephanie Wong, head of developer engagement at Google Cloud. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment telling me that the only way to get into tech these days is, in fact, to graduate with a degree from Stanford, and I can take it from you because you work in their admissions office.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The RailsConf Scholarship Program (https://railsconf.org/scholarships) 03:12 - Tram’s Superpower: Getting 8 Hours of Sleep Per Night! 04:08 - Leah’s Superpower: Being a Companion to Long-Distance Runners 04:55 - Stefanni’s Superpower: Doing Things She’s Terrified of Doing 05:34 - Being Afraid and Grappling with Self-Doubt * Asking Questions and Being Vulnerable * Call-Out Bad Behavior 12:34 - Team Psychological Safety 17:20 - Education & Learning Environments; Tech Journeys * Ada Developers Academy (https://adadevelopersacademy.org/) * The Turing School (https://turing.edu/) 27:52 - Making & Noticing Progress; Comparing Yourself to Others * The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance---What Women Should Know (https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Code-Science-Self-Assurance-What-Should/dp/006223062X) Reflections: John: Finding new ways to be of service to other people. Leah: What can we proactively do to make our space safer and more conducive to diverse thought? Mando: It’s okay to make mistakes and not be perfect. Steffani: How common it is to openly talk about these things in the Rails Community ❤️ Tram: Representation matters! Humanization and inclusivity. Calling people out. Lending Privilege -- Anjuan Simmons (https://anjuansimmons.com/talks/lending-privilege/) Transcript: JOHN: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 235. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Mando Escamilla. MANDO: Thanks, John. And I'm here with three RailsConf scholars who are going to be joining us today, which I'll like to take turns introducing yourself, maybe starting with Leah? LEAH: My name is Leah Miller and I’m a Platform Engineer at Highwing, which is an insurtech startup based out of Denver. Before making over the switch to tech, I spent almost a decade in the insurance industry primarily working as a production underwriter. In my spare time, I enjoy running and craft beer and frequently, the careful combination of the two. I’m also a new dog mom to a rescue pup named Orla. MANDO: Great. Tram, you want to go next, please? TRAM: Yeah. So hi, everyone. I'm Tram Bui. I’m currently attending Ada Developers Academy, which is a tuition-free coding program for women and gender-diverse folks in Seattle. The program includes an internship match with a Seattle tech company. So currently, for my internship, I work as a Developer Relations engineer and what this means is that I try to make it easier for Rails developers to deploy their apps to the cloud. Outside of coding, I try to maintain it and improve my high school tennis skills. I also like to read books and also, thinking about my next great public transportation adventure and volunteering for local nonprofits. And then Stephanie, I can pass it on to you. STEPHANIE: Hi, I'm happy to be here. I'm Stephanie and I've been working with Rails for the past 4 years, but now I'm trying to transition from dev full-time to having my own projects. And besides software, I also like to talk about plant-based diet, financial independence, and mental health. Also, if you have noticed my accent, I'm from Brazil, but I live in Vancouver, BC and yeah, I'm really happy to be here. JOHN: Awesome. Welcome to the show, everyone. So this is just a little setup here. Not every year at RailsConf, but most years at RailsConf, we do have a special episode where sometimes, we've got many of the panelists are together and so, we can record in the same room, which is obviously very novel for us. This year of course, it's all online. One of the things we’ve also done is bringing in some of the people who are part of the RailsConf Scholar Program, which is the program to expand access to tech conferences to people that are underrepresented and to give them some guidance on how to make the most of their experience at the conference. We always think it's great to get the opinions of people that are brand new to this industry and see what their perspective is on everything. So we're going to start off with our usual question which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? We can go really in any order. Who would like to go first? TRAM: I can go first. So my superpower would be the ability to get 8 hours of sleep a night [chuckles] and I think I acquired this power – I think I was very just like, I loved nap time as a kid and I grew up knowing the importance of a good night's rest. I think for me to be my best self, that’s one of the big things that I need to have. I think growing up and going to college, it was very like, “Oh, sleep is not important,” but I always had noticed the importance of sleep and I think it does hustle economy, too. People are very fast to just cast aside and was like, “You can sleep when you're dead,” but I'm like, “No, if you don't sleep, you will die faster.” So I'm going to take every opportunity that I can do at least get a full night's rest. LEAH: I am so jealous of that superpower. [laughs] I think mine feeds into a little bit of the opposite of that, but my superpower is the ability to keep people company when they're running through the night during a 100-mile races, or ultra-marathons. So people running it 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM, getting really down, needing someone to lift them up, I can run alongside them and sing, or just be a companion to keep them motivated. I think I acquired this skill from being a middle child. I spent a lot of time just entertaining myself and being pretty independent and if you can entertain yourself, it's pretty easy to extrapolate that to others, keep people going, so. [chuckles] STEPHANIE: I would say that my superpower currently is a work in progress actually, but it's doing things even if I'm terrified of the way I always struggled a little bit with self-confidence. How I acquired that, I actually had to go to therapy first to build the foundation, but now I think I've been getting pretty good at it and the feeling of doing the things that you're scared at the end is a really good feeling. You feel like a superwoman. [chuckles] JOHN: Oh, those are all such great answers. I want to dive into each of them, I think oh, my thoughts are jumbling up because I want to ask questions to all of you. Well, I think I'll start with Stephanie. That's an amazing superpower and it's definitely going to serve you well. It's something that I've had to learn as I develop my speaking career at the same time. Even just thinking that it was possible for me to get up on stage and do that, that took a while to get there and then actually doing it also took a lot of practice. So certainly, that's going to be awesome. MANDO: Yeah. It's so easy to just keep doing the things that you're good at and try to ignore, or maybe push off the things that you're not so good at, or you don't have that confidence in, Stephanie, like you were saying. It's funny, I keep relearning this lesson over and over again, there's this project at work that I've been putting off and pushing the JIRA ticket over just because I kept telling myself that it wasn't important and that I could do – other things were higher priority. It's just because I was kind of scared, but I wasn't going to be able to do it as well as I could do the other things. I just had to sit down and do it and then I pushed up the PR and it got ripped to shreds by the other wonderful, [laughs] amazing engineers that I work with. But it's good. I didn't die. [laughs] So it’s funny how we have to keep learning these lessons over and over again sometimes, I think. JOHN: Yeah, that reminds me that there's a related skill in there also, which is realizing when you were afraid of something. Sometimes you think, “Oh, it's just not important that happened right now.” MANDO: Yeah. JOHN: As an excuse, but once you realize, “Oh, I'm actually afraid of how this is going to go.” It allows you to approach it differently. You can be like, “Oh, okay, well that's what this is. All right, then now I know how to like face it, head on rather than pretending it's some other reasons.” So I think that that's really important as well. MANDO: Absolutely. Yeah, and it took me a couple of days to [laughs] realize that that's what I was doing and it wasn't until that was the last thing I had to work on for the sprint after I had reshuffled and moved everything over and then looked at my other teammates, JIRA boards to see if they had any stuff that I could help out with [laughs] that finally I was like, “Well, okay, I guess I'll just do this one.” TRAM: Yeah. I think sometimes for me, the anticipation, or the thought of it is even scarier than actually doing the task itself. I've had this happen to me so many different times. For instance, with the podcast, I'm like, “Yeah, this is something that I want to do because I like listening to podcasts,” but I was like, the nervousness and the scariness of putting myself out there and just thinking about it leading up to this moment, it's so much scarier than actually being in the moment and talking with y'all. So yeah. LEAH: I think part of it, too is recognizing that your feelings are not existing in a vacuum. There's other people that experience the same insecurities, or just going through what you're going through. We were interviewing someone a couple weeks ago at my company and just talking about the stressors of being from a bootcamp and being hired into an engineering organization as either a junior developer, or a mid-level developer, or whatever level, but just knowing that your background isn't a CS degree, or it's just a little bit different than what other people have. And then having that insecurity of I'm pushing up a PR and then are 20 people going to make comments on this and then that gets pushed to Slack and everyone sees all 20 comments. Am I going to be laughed at, or looked at as less than? So it's just nice to express that to someone else and have them regurgitate the same feelings, or just reflect back to you that you're not the only one who's having self-doubt in that way. MANDO: Yeah, and it's tough for me at least to remember sometimes that I come from a very different place privilege wise than other folks on the team. So it can be a lot easier for me to do stuff like, just push this PR up and ask for comments because my experience may be very different than someone who doesn't have my same background, or the amount of experience that I have, or the kinds of relationships that I may have with other folks on the team. I strive to help create spaces whether at work, or wherever where people can feel comfortable asking questions and not worrying about people coming in and being overly critical, or negative, or whatever. But my lived experience is very different than others. That's something that I need to keep in mind that you can't always just assume good faith that everyone's going to treat you the way that you would maybe treat them and I have to actively work and actively communicate to people that this is that kind of place. JOHN: Do you find that there are specific things that you do to communicate that, or at least to make that ambiently knowledgeable to the other people in the team? MANDO: That's a good question. I think the easiest thing you can do is make sure that you're modeling both sides of that behavior like, asking a lot of questions, putting yourself in vulnerable situations, and then also, making sure that you always jump in and respond positively when others do that so that you can help set a baseline. I think of what the behavior should be and what behavior is expected, and then the second thing is always making sure to call out behavior that doesn't hit the bar. I can't remember where I first heard this, but my buddy, Jerry, he's the one who always drops the phrase to remind me, he says, “It's as simple as saying, ‘We don't do that here.’” It doesn't have to be a big deal. It doesn't have to be a huge problem, or anything. Just when there's behavior that you don't do here, you say, “We don't do that – [laughs] we don't do that here.” It's as simple as that. LEAH: I love that. MANDO: Yeah, Jerry's awesome. JOHN: I think this is a really interesting topic because I'm always looking for examples of ways to make that easily communicated in a team environment. So have any of you had experiences where maybe someone else on the team was able to communicate some thoughts of psychological safety, or things that made you more comfortable being who you were on the team? LEAH: So I can speak to the team where I work. We're a startup. We have about 15, I think maybe officially 16 people now and we have, I think just hired our fifth female to join the team, or a fifth non-male to join the team. We have created just a private channel for all non-males on the team in Slack where we can communicate with each other and we've set up a happy hour once a month where we can meet. You don't have to drink alcohol. You can just sit and chat and we just have an hour set aside where no conversation topic is off limits. It's just really helpful to just set aside that time where there's no outside influence and it's just the five, or six of us, or however many there are right now [chuckles] who can join and just chat through what's a win for the week, or what's a struggle for the week. I think part of it is giving each other the space to express what's going well and also, express what's going wrong, and then see if others of us on the team can be a champion for the other person and just offer support where possible, or step in when something's happening that we need to maybe put a stop to. Our private channel is lovingly called The Thundercats, [laughs] which I'm pretty fond of. MANDO: [laughs] That's fantastic. You make it almost sound like a union kind of [laughs] where y'all can have this place where you have this ability to do collective action, if necessary. I think that's just fantastic. That's amazing. LEAH: And I should say that the men on our team are fantastic. So this is not like a – [laughs] [overtalk] MANDO: Of course, yeah. LEAH: Escape hatch like, we're all upset about stuff, but it's just nice. Regardless of how wonderful the men on the team are, it's nice to have a space for not men. [chuckles] STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think that for me, from my experience, the one that I was more comfortable with was at my first Rails job. It was still in Brazil and the team was totally remote and they did lots of peer programming. They did a great job in onboarding people, but peer programming was way more than onboarding. It was a common practice and I was just like, “Wow, this is so cool.” You could learn so much more beyond just a code and besides that, I felt really comfortable in seeing that no one was scared of doing anything wrong like, there was a really good communication. So I think that the main thing that needs to be worked at, when you're working in a team, is to make sure that everyone feels safe to do their stuff and they don't feel like, “Oh, I'm going to be judged,” or “I don't want to try this because I don't want to have to handle with anything from management,” or whatever. So maybe having that feeling, “Oh, we make mistakes here. We are humans, but we try to make the best to learn from them.” That's a good way to improve this team behavior, I guess. [chuckles] JOHN: So you were able to see the other people on the team, that you were paired with, making mistakes and being okay with it and just that became obvious to you that that was the thing that happened all the time and it was fine. Right? STEPHANIE: Yeah, and especially because I was also self-taught. I actually went for computer science for one year, but I dropped out. I always had this idea that people with more experience, they know everything. [laughs] That was like a mindset that I changed and it made me feel way more human, more than anything at first, and that's when I started seeing how much it's important to think of your team and how much that affects everyone and in your company as well. MANDO: First of all, shout out to comp sci dropouts. I made it just a little bit farther than you, but I know exactly where you're coming from. I had that same thing in my head for a very long time that these folks with their degrees obviously must know so much more than me and I have no idea what I'm doing. That's one of the things that I've always loved about the programs, like the RailsConf Scholars, is that for me, one of the things that helps combat that imposter syndrome thinking is working with folks directly who are earlier in their careers, or have less experience. So not only do you get to help them, guide them, and show them things and stuff, but it really does help serve as a reminder of all the stuff that you do know. There's nothing better than talking about something with someone, being able to explain it to them and help them, and then you walk away and you're like, “Oh yeah, I do know some things, that's kind of nice.” TRAM: I think in talking about dropping out of a major, or switching majors, my experience and my journey into tech. In college, I was quite afraid. I had a requirement to take a CS class, but hearing all these horror stories from other people made me delay taking it. I actually took my first CS class, my junior year of college and while it was really challenging, I definitely enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. But since I took it too late in my college career, I couldn't switch my major, or couldn’t minor, or major in it and that really stuck with me because, I think going and finding the ADA Developers Academy, which is a coding program, it’s like it was my second chance at doing something that I wanted to do, but didn’t have the time, or didn't have the confidence to do in college. One thing that is nice, that I keep thinking about, is that even if I did do a CS major in college, that environment instilled with the competition of it and instilled with, I guess, people who may think that they know more than you may have not been conducive for my education. But what I really enjoy about the current coding program that I'm in is that it's all women, or gender diverse folks and we all come from all different walks of life. But one thing that we have in common is being really empathetic to each other and that environment, I think made all the difference in my ability to learn and to see that there is a community that would champion me and that would also try to uplift other people. JOHN: Yeah. I think that highlights the importance of that initial learning environment. If your first exposure to tech is a weed-out course when you’re trying taking CS in college, you're probably never coming back to it. But having an environment that's specifically designed to actually be supportive and actually get you through learning things can make all the difference, really. MANDO: Yeah. My oldest son is going through a computer science course, or computer science curriculum at UT Dallas here in Texas and his experience is a little bit different, I think because of the pandemic and he doesn't have that in-person structure. Everything's different. He's not having in-person classes. So it's forcing it to be a little more collaborative in nature and a little less kind of what you were saying, John, like waking up at 8 o'clock in the morning to go to some 300-person weed-out class. I think it has served him a little bit better having things be a little weird in that regard, but it is funny to see how little the curriculum and set up around getting a computer science college degree has changed in the 20 years since I took it. That's a shame and I think that that's why the places like ADA Developers Academy and other folks who are showing people and especially employers, that there's different ways for people to get these skills and get this knowledge as opposed to a strictly regimented 4-year, whatever you want to call it, degree program. Leah, you came into technology, you were saying, through a different path other than your traditional computer science degree? LEAH: Yeah. So I majored in math in college and wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do with that and when I graduated, it was 2009, to age myself. [chuckles] It was 2009 and the economy was not doing very well and a lot of my peers were really struggling to find jobs. I went for a leadership program at an insurance company and ended up staying there and moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, which I had no desire ever to go there, [laughs] but it worked out fine. I ended up in this insurance company for almost 10 years. Met some really wonderful people and I got to do a lot of really great things, but just kept having that question in my mind of if it hadn't been a poor economy and if it hadn't been whatever factors, could there have been another path for me? I just kept thinking about what I enjoy doing at my job had nothing to do with the insurance side of things. I found that I got really into writing Excel formulas, [chuckles] those were the days that I was having the most fun and I was working remotely, living in Charleston, South Carolina at the time. After chatting with a few friends, I found the Turing School of Software & Design out in Denver. So I quit my job and moved out to Denver and two days after I moved there, I started the bootcamp program. After an entire week of school, I still hadn't unpacked my bag of socks and several other things from my car. So it was just kind of a whirlwind, but I picked Turing because they had an emphasis on social justice and that was really important to me and I think it served me very well as far as being able to meet a lot of people who are like-minded—who also picked Turing for similar reasons—just wanting to better the community and be a force for good with technology. So yeah, that was my rambling answer. [laughs] MANDO: I know that I struggle a lot with knowing the “good programs” and the not-so-great bootcamp style programs. Like anything else, when stuff becomes something that's popular, it attracts folks who are speculators and usurious, I guess, for lack of a better word. [chuckles] So you hear these horror stories about people who go through and spend all this money on bootcamp programs and then can't find a job, don't really feel like they learned the things that they were supposed to learn, or were told they were going to learn. It's nice to hear good stories around those and some good shoutouts to solid programs. LEAH: It was definitely stressful and we had a hallway that we deemed “the crying hallway.” [laughs] But I think it did serve me well and has served many people well in the several iterations that Turing has had over the years. MANDO: Yeah. Just because it's a solid program, or a positive program doesn't mean that it's easy by any stretch. LEAH: Totally. MANDO: I remember one time I was talking with an old coworker and she was telling me about her experience going through the CS program at Carnegie Mellon. This woman, Andrea, she's easily one of the smartest people that I've ever met in my life and she's fantastic at everything that I've ever seen her do. So to hear her talk about going through this program and finding stairwells to cry in and stuff as she was a student really shook me and made me realize that the stuff's not easy and it's hard for everybody. Just because you see them years later being really, really fantastic at what they do doesn't mean that they spent years trying to build those skills through blood, sweat, and tears. LEAH: Yeah, I think one of the things that was hard, too is you have no idea what playing field everyone is starting from. It's easy to really get down on yourself when you're like, “This other person is getting this so much faster than I am,” and come to find out they've had internships, or have been working on random online courses teaching themselves for years, and then finally made the decision to go to a school versus other people who haven't had that same amount of experience. It's another lesson and [chuckles] just level setting yourself and running your own race and not worrying about what other people are doing. TRAM: I totally agree with that, Leah. I feel like sometimes I compare my starting point to someone's finish line and I'm like, “Oh, how did they finish already? I'm just starting.” It can be really hard to think about that comparison and not get down on yourself. But I think it's also really good to keep in mind that we only know our journey and our race and it's so hard to have all of the other information on other people, how they got there. So it's just like, I try to remind myself that and it's like, I think the only one that I'm trying to compare myself with is me a month ago, or me a year ago instead of someone else's journey. LEAH: Totally. JOHN: Yeah, that's actually something I'm trying to build into a conference talk because it's so hard to see your own progress unless someone points it out to you. Especially as you're grinding through a curriculum like that, where it's like you're always faced with something new and you're always looking ahead to all the things you don't know. Like, when am I going to learn that, when am I going to get to that, when am I getting to know all these things like everybody else? It takes extra work to stop and turn around and look at, like you said, where you were a month ago, where you were three months ago and be like, “Oh my God, I used to struggle with this every day and now it just flows out of my fingers when I need to do a git commit,” or whatever it is. Being able to notice that progress is so important to feeling like you're not completely swamped and struggling the whole time; that you're always looking to the things you don't yet know and never looking at the things you do know, because you don't have to struggle with those anymore. They don't take up any space in your mind. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I can relate to that as well. Something that I've been doing that it's working a lot is okay, I look to others, but I try to see what they did that I can try to look forward. Like, “Oh okay, so they did this and this looks like something that I want to do,” but I only compare myself to my past self because it can be really – I don't think it does a lot of good to anyone, in fact, when you compare yourself to others, just for the sake of comparing. But if you do see that as an inspiration, “Oh, look, this person is showing me that what I want to do is possible and that's great because I have now more proof that I'm going the right path.” It definitely takes some time to change this little key in your head, but once you do, it gets so much easier and so much lighter. You see even people in a different way because you start asking, “I wonder if this person is struggling with this as well because it's not easy.” [laughs] So this is something that it's helping me. MANDO: Yeah, that's something that I'm struggling with right now with my daughter. She plays high school softball. She's fantastic, she's an amazing athlete, and she's really, really good, but she's a freshman on the varsity team at the highest-level high school team. So she continually compares herself against these other girls who are like 2, 3, 4 years older than her and have a lot more playing time and playing experience and they're bigger and they're stronger. I keep trying to look for a way to help her understand that, like you said, Stephanie, she can compare herself to herself yesterday and she can look to these other players as inspiration as to what's possible. But what she can't do is get down on herself for not being there yet. That's just not fair at all and she may never get there. There are a lot of other factors, outside of how hard she works and what she does, that will contribute to how she's going to finally be. That's another thing that I have to [laughs] work on just me personally is that we all have our own built-in limitations and we all make choices that set us down only so far down a path. I choose to not keep my house completely spotless because there's only so many hours in a day and I would rather go watch my daughter's softball game than deep clean a bathroom. I'll eventually clean the bathroom, but today, [laughs] it's not going to be cleaned because that's the choice. But yet for some reason, I still get down on myself when I come home after the game and I'm like, “Ugh, why is this house so dirty?” STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think now that you mentioned that you have a daughter, I remember this chapter from this book called The Confidence Code. It’s a really, really good book and it talks about all the reasons women are the ones that more self-confidence and how we can put ourselves to compete. There is a chapter for parents and how you can help your daughters to not go through the normal route because it will happen. Not that much anymore, but we are still, in terms of society, expected to behave differently and the book brings you really good tips for parents. I think you would be nice for you. It looks like you want to learn more about that? MANDO: Yeah, for sure. Thank you, Stephanie so much. I'll take a look at that and we'll include a link in the show notes for that and some of the other stuff. Any and all help [chuckles] is very much appreciated. JOHN: We've come to the time on the show where we go into what we call reflections, which are just the takeaways, or the new thoughts, or the things we're going to be thinking about that we've talked about on this episode that really struck us. So for me, it's a couple of different things. First Leah, you were talking about being a companion to long distance runners, which is something I had never thought about being a thing, but of course, the moment you say it, I'm like, “Oh yeah, if you're running a 100 miles, it'd be nice to have someone keep you a company.” That sounds great and it's something you need to be suited to. You need to be able to run and talk and so, finding new ways to be of service to other people, I think is really interesting part of that. I think the other thing that struck me is we're discussing different ways of increasing psychological safety on the team and the ways that you can communicate that to the people that are there. Those are the things I'm always keeping an eye out for because I always want to be able to provide those to my team and so, hearing your examples is just always good for me just to have even more different ways of doing it in the back of my head. LEAH: Well, thanks, John. Yeah, I think the big takeaway for me is just what can we proactively do to make our space safer, or just more conducive to diverse thought? I think, Mando, maybe you asked the question of what we were explicitly doing at our companies, or if anyone had ever done something explicit to make us feel safer, or invite us to participate fully in the community of developers? I think there is a lot more that can be done to help people feel as though they're a part, or that their opinion matters, or their belief matters and their contribution will only make the team better and stronger. MANDO: Yeah. I think that was John who asked that and then I rambled on for about 20 minutes afterward, so. [laughter] LEAH: Sorry. MANDO: But that reminds me, or that that leads into my reflection. Stephanie was talking about the one of the things that helps reinforce that psychological safety for her was seeing people make mistakes and having it be okay, and having that general attitude that we're going to make mistakes and bad things are going to happen and that’s okay. It's something that Leah, like you, I work at a really, really small startup. There's five people at the company total. So the pressure to make sure that everything is done right the first time is pretty high, the pressure that I put on myself, and it can easily spiral out of control when I start thinking about how long I've been doing this and then the should start to come out. “You should know this,” “You should be able to do this,” You should get this stuff done quickly, or faster,” or “It should be perfect.” I need to keep reminding myself that it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to not have it be perfect the first time, it's okay to not be perfect. So thank you for that reminder, Stephanie. STEPHANIE: You're welcome. I have to remind myself every day as well. [chuckles] It is a daily practice, but I can guarantee you that it's so much better, things like life in general is so much better, so it is worth it. I think that my takeaway here, not only from this talk with everyone, but also from the RailsConf in general and the Rails community is how common it is to talk about these things at our community. Like, yesterday at the keynote, I saw the diversity numbers and I was like, “Whoa, wait a second. I think this is the first time that I go to a conference and someone is talking about this openly.” I think that's one of the reasons why the Rails community is so important to me and I want to continue the legacy. I think that talking about these names is what makes our community unique and I'm really grateful to be part of the community. TRAM: Yeah, I think my main takeaway is what I've been reflecting on the past few days and this conversation is one thing following the psychological safety theme of how can we have more inclusive and safe environments and like Leah said about representation matters. The people you see around you and the environments that you are in can help you to feel a certain way and when there's such a monolith of people in a certain company, that can make me feel very scared and open up to what I think, or my thoughts are. So I think the diversification of type is very, very important, but also just humanizing people and that's one thing that we can do today is highlight, be open about our mistakes, but also have an environment that is inclusive enough where people can speak up about their mistake and that inclusivity begets inclusivity. You're not going to just say that you're inclusive and don't have actions to back it up. Also, I think what Mando said about calling someone out. Sometimes being a newcomer to a company, I don't feel like I have the power to do that and sometimes, it's uncomfortable for me to do that. So having someone who is in upper management, or someone who has a little bit more power showcase that that's something that they have the power to do, but something that I can do also is really helpful. So that's something that I would try to reflect more on and act upon because it's been a really wholesome conversation and I'm glad to be a part of it. JOHN: Wonderful. Yeah, and to your point, Tram, there's a talk that was actually at RailsConf a couple of years ago by Anjuan Simmons called Lending Privilege. One of his points is that those of us who have the higher levels of privilege, we can wield it for good and we can do things like putting ourselves out there to say, “No, that's not okay on this team,” or to lift someone else up and say, “Hey, you just talked over, what's her name.” Like, “Please Stephanie, say what it was you were going to say,” or like, “Stephanie mentioned that idea tenured 10 minutes ago and we ignored it.” So using that privilege, or the position on the team. I've been at my company for 10 years so I have a lot of social capital; I can use that for a lot of good. I'll post a link to that talk as well in the show notes because I think it's really important concept. All right. Well, we've come to the end of our show. Thank you so much to all of our scholars who were able to join today, Leah, Stephanie, and Tram and thank you, Mando for being here. This was a wonderful conversation. MANDO: Yeah, thanks everyone. LEAH: Thank you. MANDO: It was fantastic. STEPHANIE: Thank you! TRAM: Thanks, ya’ll. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Special Guests: Leah Miller, Stefanni Brasil, and Tram Bui.

Word of mouth is still the best marketing tool, even in today’s digital world. And in this time of the ecommerce boom, brands are constantly working to build buzz for their products. Whether that’s through ratings, reviews, social posts, or unique ad campaigns. But there’s one highly coveted strategy that’s been bubbling to the top of the stack, and every ecommerce leader knows it is the way of the future. User generated content. And a company called Yotpo is here to help with that. Yotpo is one of the top platforms that companies such as IKEA, 1-800-FLOWERS, Chubbies and more lean on to help them build communities, generate UGC, and create loyalty programs that yield the kind of engagement most brands only dream of. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I asked the co-founder and CEO of Yotpo, Tomer Tagrin to give us an inside look at how Yotpo is generating 5X more engagement and content creation than is typical. Plus, we also dove into the future of loyalty programs and personalization. My one-sentence takeaway: definitely start leaning heavily into loyalty and maybe let off the gas a bit on personalization. Why? Tune in to find out! Main Takeaways:Do What You Know: Success in ecommerce is becoming more about the community you can build to support you. So the question founders are asking themselves — and Yotpo — is how do you build that community? The answer is pretty simple actually, you just have to follow your own interests. A founder starts a company for a reason, and they typically personify the exact target customer their company is going after. So dig into that link and create content and strategies that would resonate with you, the founder.  Long Live Loyalty Programs: Every brand should have a loyalty program, otherwise there are opportunities and dollars being left on the table. The only way to access those opportunities and cash, though, is through a very brand-specific program. There are no one-size-fits-all loyalty programs. Brands need to understand what they want to incentivize for in their loyalty programs, who they want to target, and how they will reward the behavior they are trying to generate through the loyalty program.  Partial Personalization: By deploying personalization tools, you can sometimes open Pandora’s box of never-ending adjustments and adaptations in order to create individualized experiences. At a certain point, the return on that investment starts to diminish. Customers are all different, but they don’t all need to be treated as unicorns. Create segments of customer types, and personalize the experience to those subsets.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone, and welcome back to up next in commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission.org. Joining us today is Tomer Tagrin. The co-founder and CEO of Yotpo. Tomer, welcome.Tomer:Hey, thank you for having me.Stephanie:I'm excited to have you. You might not know this, but a couple of guests who've come on the show actually have mentioned you guys. We had the CEO of Live Tinted come on, and a couple more. They said your company-Tomer:In a good way or in a bad way?Stephanie:In an amazing way. They said it was game changing.Tomer:Thank you, thank you.Stephanie:Yeah. When I saw you coming on, I told our producer Hilary, I'm like, "This is awesome. So serendipitous." But in your words, I'd like to hear what is Yotpo, and why did you start Yotpo?Tomer:Yeah. You want the short version or the long version?Stephanie:Long if it has a lot of little interesting tangents.-Tomer:You got it, you got it. I'll give you maybe the opening gambit about your points, then I'll tell you maybe the story in a more detailed way.Stephanie:Yeah.Tomer:The best way to think about Yotpo if in retail, it was about location, location, location, online, it's about consumer attention. In a world where every brand is an ecommerce brand, right from Miss Stephanie in Tomer t-shirtcompany.com, up to PNG, everyone is fighting over consumer attention. That's what we do. We help ecommerce brand win over consumer attention by consolidating the marketing stack and really enable them to build great experiences for consumers, because that's the only way to win over consumer attention. We actually started as a reviews company, and we started from a very ... 10 years ago from a personal story that we had a friend in my group of friends that each year made fun of us, that we didn't buy him anything for his birthday.Tomer:11 years ago we decided to do something, and he was big on photography back then, so we bought him photography [inaudible] and because I'm the geek, I [inaudible] online and I find him a fancy SLR camera. We bought him that, he was super happy. But what happened is that the teacher, after the second lesson told him that we bought him the crappiest camera we could have bought him. And all of my friends made fun of me. Then I went back and we saw that my decision was based on reviewers name like Stephanie 123, and I don't know anything about it. That is okay. Let's do that. Very, very good, and basically find authenticity of reviews. So, we built our entire technology based on that, and making sure that whoever writes reviews is a real person that actually bought a product.Tomer:If she or he are an expert in the field, we'll also let you know. We really ... wherever to disrupt let's call it the reviews in ecommerce, especially on the SME, it was also a great time. We were much luckier than small. It was a great time to enter ecommerce, or ecommerce marketing. We grew with a lot of the Shopify, the B commerce. We were very focused on the lower end at the beginning, and now we have Ikea and PNG and 1-800-Flowers, but we were for years focused just on the lower end. I think five years ago, we understood that the bigger problem for ecommerce brands is that they're super busy, they're very small and nimble, and they have just too many point solutions to deal with, so we need to consolidate everything because the consumer experience actually flow through each one of them. I'll give you one example.Tomer:I remember one of our customers telling me a few years ago, he said, "Look, Tomer, when someone gives me a one star review, I still ask for a referral, and that's the dumbest thing I can do as a brand." Right? Of course, but they just weren't able to connect those dots together before [inaudible]. We completely re-architecture. We went through a lot of different things to make sure that it's one platform to really help you win over consumer attention. It was something very, very important. That's our mission in life today. Since then, we built two more products, we acquired two more companies, we completely re-architecture the platform itself. We changed the go-to market, we've been through a lot. Now we're in the face of adding a new product every let's say 18 months.Stephanie:Wow. That's a lot of new products, because yeah, I was looking through everything you did. I'm like, okay, you do reviews, you do referral programs, you do smart loyalty programs, and everything seems every time I talk to a commerce brand, I do always think, wow, you guys have so many tools and technologies you have to plug into. How do you keep track of it all? What does the marketing tech stack look for someone when they come to you? What things are they, "Hey, can you help us consolidate all these crazy processes?"Tomer:Yeah. Usually customers don't come with us to consolidate, it happens, but not a lot. We actually build the company that we commonly just ... we can have five different products in the market, use the general reviews, what we call VMS. It's a Visual Marketing Suite, a referral product, a loyalty product, and an SMS marketing product. Walking on two malls, one of them is going to be launched let's say in two quarters, another one in four quarters, and sorry. Basically you start with the ones that you can start with just loyalty, or actually SMS now is our fastest growing part of the business. Then we show you that through the synergies in the product, it actually makes sense for you too ... I'll give you an example. If you launch a loyalty program, the best way to communicate with your most loyal customer is through SMS.Tomer:We make it very easy for you. If you want to send a loyalty campaign for customers that are likely to buy in the next 90 days, and gave you a five star review, and referred a friend, to send them an SMS with a new loyalty offer, we make it very, very easy for you. Where in the other architecture, it literally use [inaudible] taking weeks to orchestrate all of that. For us, you can start with whatever product you want, it doesn't matter for us. That's how we build everything because we don't want to force the customer to consolidate. Once you start seeing the synergies and it makes sense, that's where the exponential value starts. Actually, in our high touch customers, we see now that more than 60% of the customers actually use buying and using two plus product, so they are multi product customers, and that's something super, super important for us. From time to time, customers come to us to consolidate, but not always.Stephanie:Yeah, awesome. Just to give a little context too, tell me about some of the recent news around funding that maybe you guys just went through. How big are you, and who are some of your clients. Name drop some people if you can. So our audience knows you all are legit, you're on the unicorn status. I'll call you that. You might be like, "Don't call me that." I just did.Tomer:I actually have a joke in the fundraising that we did. We just closed a $210 million round at a $1.4 billion valuation, from great investors and definitely on our path for the next stage to become a public company. I always had a slide actually in the fundraising deck that said that despite of the valuation, we are not a unicorn, we are Flamingo. We are building a Flamingo. Why is that? Because Flamingo is a real animal and we are building a real business to provide real value to customers over time. It's a very unique animal.n It's actually part of our culture. It's a joke, but it's actually something very, very ... that we take very seriously.Stephanie:I love that.Tomer:Some of our customers, Ikea, Unilever, 1-800-Flowers, we also have 30,000 paying customers. A lot of the cool brands, the Chubbies, the away, the movement, all of the poster Childs of D to C are as well usually choosing Yotpo, but also some of the largest brands in the world. I think they come to us usually because our products are really ... we like to call it easy to start, easier to scale, and really trying to think about merchant, and really trying not to use buzz words, not to use fancy things, just really helping those brands grow faster in a very direct way. We are 500 people, or a little bit less, and I don't know any other group of people that are so focused on helping brands win over consumer attention. That's literally what we think of every day.Tomer:Also, I think that ecommerce is one of the largest changes of our generation, and we believe that we have a real shot to become one of the most important companies in the history of commerce. I always tell the company telling me that ... I have two young boys, and one of the things that for me I want them to think about Yotpo is they were a huge driver forward for that something that called digitization of retail, or the shift to e-comm, or whatever you want to call it. Very much we are super, super passionate about helping those brands.Stephanie:That's amazing. Congratulations. That's awesome funding-Tomer:Thank you.Stephanie:...awesome investors. You're really cool. I love that Flamingo reference. I want to use that just for myself now.Tomer:We call it be a Flamingo in a flock of pigeons. That's our phrase internally.Stephanie:That's good. It seems like the perfect time right now too, because customer acquisition is getting really expensive. Everything I've heard on the show is that, organic, natural, UGC, that's what's working now. Tell me a bit about how you think about the customer acquisition world, and why organic natural content or reviews, helps more than anything else right now.Tomer:It's a great question. First of all, I'll maybe share a funny story. Let's say six months before COVID started, we actually had a customer advisory board. We meet customers and we ask them questions. One of the phrases I add that stuck with me is that one of our customers said that buying a Facebook ad is more expensive than a fifth Avenue store. Definitely you know Instagram, Facebook, Google are extremely, extremely expensive, and I don't think it's going to slow down. They want to be like a lot of other consumer fronts, at least in the near term horizon. When you add on top of that, Amazon, so the question is how do you win? You win by building a community. You win by giving your customers a great experience.Tomer:Part of that means social proof, part of it means making sure that you are very transparent, part of it means that you need to focus on customer lifetime value, because it's so hard to bring, and you need to make sure they're coming back. Loyalty, I can tell you it's really top of mind. Then for us, we entered loyalty in 2018, we are now the fastest growing loyalty platform for ecommerce brands, and we power some of the most sophisticated loyalty programs out there, and it's just amazing to see that even in the election, there were brands that giving points for customer to show that they voted, and there are customers that hate the point system because it's they lose their brand and they just have a VIP tier experience, which is super awesome. There's so much to do with that, which is fascinating to see how much brands are able to innovate.Tomer:I think we definitely live in a world to your question, I'll circle back that whatever walks, you cannot win just by being great in paid anymore. It doesn't scale. It can scale to a certain number but it won't forever. Now the question, how do you build your brand? You build your brand by your community. That's what we are very, very focused on as a company.Stephanie:What are the ways that you advise your brands to build that community? Especially if you come and you're like, I don't have a community. Where do I even start with that? I would think you need to acquire customers first, but then that's pricey. Then you're not even thinking about retention yet because you don't have anyone to retain. What are the maybe building blocks even get to that next level?Tomer:Yeah. I'll share a story. Are you familiar with Chubbies, the brand?Stephanie:Yeah.Tomer:Chubbies they have a great story on how they started. It started from an email that they used to send. I don't know if you ever saw one of those emails. Super straightforward, so targeted to the buyer persona because they will, the buyer persona. It's a really great group of founders that were just able to provide great content, and their customers actually want to buy Chubbies because they feel that this is the brand for them. You have movement that were very, very early on, very, very good on Instagram ads. I think today it probably means that you need to do everything well, there is not a hack, so you got to at least experiment with paid, you got to experiment with content, with organic. You have to invest, but in general, when you look at mission-driven brands, the founders are usually, they are the buyer persona, or they know the buyer persona very, very well.Tomer:Then it just become easy. Do stuff that are interesting for you. Do stuff that you would like to buy from. I think that's where we see the brands that are growing the fastest at the moment. I think there was also probably a year, a year and a half ago, there was a huge trend in drop shippers that's now actually declining, which is a good thing. I think it's easier for brands now to stand out. I think that the bad news is that you need to do good in multiple fronts, but the good news is there's so much demand at the moment for great brands that you just need to focus on your buyer persona.Stephanie:Yeah, that makes sense. Another interesting thing that I was reading about was how ads that have reviews in them are the highest converting ones. Which makes sense. I even think about, if I see someone's picture with a review on it, an organic picture, I don't want just the product picture, or even if that came on and she'll be five stars, check it out. I would go there all day versus a normal ad.Tomer:It's actually something we built a few years ago, and the hypothesis was, it was also based on our customer feedback that they think that social ads with social proof will work great on social media. That makes sense. Then what we did is we made it super easy and we work with Facebook and Instagram to make it easy to incorporate your user generated content, and then we started to experiment with that. We learned that, the studio photos that you have actually work like walls then real authentic and customers' photos, so, we really build a lot of technology to encourage customers, and how do you get more photos, and then make it just very, very easy for you to use it on your social ads. It works phenomenally well. I think in general, one of the key learnings that we learn as a company that we're established to establish trust between brands and consumers. That's what we founded the company.Tomer:I think that, especially if you're a newer brand and you're just now starting, you have to focus on how do you create trust? The best way to create trust is by what real people are saying. I can share with you endless amount of data showing you that products that just have five star reviews convert much worse than like 3.8. Which is insane, but it makes sense, because nobody believes everything is perfect. Authenticity, transparency are so key in a world where again, customer acquisition cost is super expensive because if you were able to bring a customer and she or he had a bad experience, it's bad unit economics. You cannot scale that business.Stephanie:Yeah. I think the interesting thing too, about organic reviews, even if they have a 3.8, is that you can oftentimes go in there and find, oh, this person's talking about something that I really don't care about. I'm even thinking about this and maybe Tomer you're in the same place where it's looking at daycare's, preschools, and all this. Some of them have a four-star and people are complaining about the wait list. I didn't want to pay a wait list fee, and you're, 'Okay." That shouldn't have brought it down, but that's real, and now I trust it a bit more, and now I'm interested in exploring it, and not just looking at a high level review. What I wonder is, how do you get people to review? How do you get them to submit photos? I don't have the time a lot of times, even though I love products, I just don't have time for it. How are you incentivizing customers to do that?Tomer:Yeah. I'll share a few stories that I think you'll find they're funny.Stephanie:We all have funny stories.Tomer:When we started, we didn't know a lot on the reviews industry. So what we did, Amazon, Amazon has a page called Amazon top reviewers. These are people that wrote, I don't even know how many reviews. We looked at their names or handlers, and we searched those people on Skype and Twitter, and we bombed them, and wanted to interview them. We spent hours and hours interviewing Amazon top reviewers, and I think it was eBay top reviewers, just trying to understand why people write reviews, what incentivize them to write reviews, and why other people are not writing reviews, and that's how we formed the new approach and the reviews industry. I think definitely we make it easy for you. You talked about, you don't have time. We build a technology called email review that you can leave the review inside the email.Tomer:It's one step, it's really easy to do. That's super, super important. The second thing that's really, really important is knowing when to ask for reviews. For example, when you buy a mattress, you need to experience with the product a little bit more before you will be willing to give a review versus a t-shirt. I think those are important. The last thing that I can tell you, which is really, really interesting, and this is why user generated content is so connected to loyalty, is once you identify who are customers that are likely to be loyal, those customers are much more likely to generate content for you, photos, video. After someone upload a photo, I can tell you now, if you're not a Yotpo customer, ask them to join your loyalty club. There's five X more chance that will happen. How do you take one interaction of the consumer with your brand, and translate it to the next step, and how do you take them in the customer journey step by step by step.Tomer:That's why we are big believers you need to consolidate the marketing stack because it is one customer, one journey, and it's not silo. I think it's a frictionless experience, is knowing when to ask, and knowing who to ask. It's super, super important. I think when we started Yotpo, we always heard the phrase of 1% of people write content, 9% of people reply to that comment, and 90% are just reading that content. Today we are more closer to five to 6% are generating content almost, which is a five X or six X improvements when we started. A lot of it is that consumer behavior, a lot of it is our technology, and a lot of it, I think is just brands are evolving and understanding the importance of that. But it's just fascinating when we ask about photos for example. There are brands that you would never imagine, never in your life, that people will ... I remember I was scrolling through one of our website, and they will say they are selling metals. Literally blocks of metals. That's what they said.Tomer:They have thousands of reviews, thousands of reviews. People write reviews and super passionate reviews. We also have an NLP engine, a natural language processing that can give us and the merchant, positive sentiment, negative sentiment, and show you the score. People are super passionate about it, and apparently people are passionate for ... Different people are passionate for different things. You just need to find those people that are passionate about what you build. That's what I always find super, super inspiring.Stephanie:That is a really interesting take though around how you just need to have that passionate audience and finding them. But what also is interesting is how you guys are ingesting the data in ways that, I think I've been there for a while, but you keep saying consolidating it. I've always thought okay, you get all these good reviews, but oftentimes, I might not want to see their review for 99% of the products that I'm not looking at. If I'm looking at stocks at a company that has a hundred skews, I really just want to be able to zoom in on the reviews of those stocks and not see everything else.Tomer:Even more than that, what we did now, if you go to Yotpo customers, is we build an NLP engine, Natural Language Processing that can pull up topics from the content. Let's say if you ... I don't want to take your pre-school example. If you want to just read about the waiting list, you can click waiting list and read just all the content talking about that. You want to read about the teacher, about the food, about whatever you want, you can. Especially on mobile, I can tell you that really, really increases conversion because who has the time to scroll through 300 reviews? No one. Once you have the relevant topic and a search bar, and the topics are actually accurate, then you start to really improve the quality of content that you are able to read, and you as a consumer really are able to get the information that you need in order to make a buying decision.Stephanie:Yeah. What do you think about curating reviews from other platforms? Do you guys also incorporate Amazon and walmart.com? How do you show in a holistic way? Or I also think a lot of those consumers are very different people who shop at Walmart, are different than Amazon versus on your website.Tomer:Yeah. In general, we are big believers that we need to authenticate. I mentioned how we started that these are real people that actually bought your product, so we just do it from the content we generated. I can tell you in our photos, we curate from Instagram or Pinterest, because we think that makes sense actually from specific hashtag, or specific accounts of the brand. I can tell you ... I'll give you another example that's been explosive for us. Let's say if you are a brand that want to increase your review count. Let's say you sell a lot on Amazon, you sell a lot direct, but you want to increase your review count on your direct SMS, the best example. Our integration, when you can send review quiz through SMS, amazing. Just amazing results.Tomer:I highly recommend it for anyone that wants to increase their social proof, is to leverage SMS and SMS marketing. This is why when for us it's you use our SMS marketing product and reviews under the same data platform. That's what we work. Our platform theme works on is to make that experiences literally a click of a button. Send review request, and that's it. I think in general, we are not a big believer from curation of content. It's more about generating that content and giving you more tools to generate authentic content that we can authenticate.Stephanie:Yeah, that's great. I think just thinking about making things frictionless for the end user. That's going to change everything. Especially with reviews, I'm thinking if you send me a text, an SMS, that just said, just review it and you don't pop me around a million other places-Tomer:Exactly.Stephanie:-I'll hit the start count. If I don't feel adding in words right now, I won't, but making it easy to where I'll actually interact quickly, I think is the way of the future. Even earlier on Amazon, it was asking me to review something on my homepage. I tried to click five stars then it shot me over to another page and wanted me to write stuff, and then I just exed out. I'm like, "No. It's too much work. I have two minutes before this interview." I was just trying to say, “I liked my pair of shorts I bought."Tomer:I can tell you it's the same thing in loyalty by the way. We see that loyalty, because loyalty you also see that in brand. But loyalty is a very complex problem. In order for a brand now to launch a loyalty program, they need to give it some thought. It's not a cookie cutter, because every brand has their own thing. On the flip side, if the experience won't be dead easy for the consumer, or frictionless for the consumer, consumers won't engage with the loyalty program. This is why we really focused on building an experience that it's going to be really easy for your consumers to understand what's in it for me, and how to engage with your loyalty program. Because if not, if it's like you said, a link to another page and then I need to ... it's not going to happen. They're not going to join your loyalty club. In general, in every product that we have, we are very, very focused on a very frictionless consumer experience, because we learned so many times, it won't work if it's complicated. It just won't.Stephanie:Yeah. How do you think about building up a good loyalty program? I'm sure a lot of your clients ask, what are some pitfalls that you've seen before, and how do I make it frictionless, and fun, and engaging? How would you advise them on creating one from scratch?Tomer:Yeah, there's a lot actually and it's a complex topic that we are super passionate about. But, if I need to summarize it, I'll say that one, like I mentioned complex problem, but it has to be an easy consumer experience. Second it's not one size fits all. You really need to understand, okay, why do you want to incentivize for? Let's take Chubbies, another example that we started. Chubbies has a great loyalty program across categories. Let's say if you buy shorts, they want you to buy a t-shirt, they will incentivize you with points to do that. That's super, super important. For Chubbies the point system it's basically a mechanism to incentivize certain behavior that you want, that works extremely well. You need to figure out what behaviors do you want to encourage. Another example is ThirdLove. I don't know if you're familiar with that brand.Stephanie:Yeah, I do know them.Tomer:They also use our loyalty program. For them it was all about the brand, meaning they didn't want to use a point system, they actually wanted to use a VIP tier system. You do a certain action or you spend a certain amount, and then you get certain VIP tiers level that you can get different parts from free shipping products, discounts, whatever you want. That's been working phenomenally well for them. I think early on just in 2021, you have to have a loyalty program. I think we are past the days that, yeah, I'm not sure. You are losing a lot of money, you're leaving a lot of money on the table, but you need to first figure out what do you want to incentivize for? What is the behavior you want to encourage?Tomer:That's super important. Then, what are you willing to give, and how do you make it easy for consumers to engage onsite? You can send different emails, you can run different social campaigns, or social contests. There's a bunch of things, but eventually it's all about how do you build a relationship with your most important customers? With the customer that you care the most on? It's a very emotional experience on one end, on the other end, it's that simple. You need to see ROI. It's all about customer lifetime value. The analytic needs to be if you're not sure if your loyalty program is not working or not, it's probably, it doesn't work, because it's very easy to understand that it's working, and it's about increasing customer lifetime value.Stephanie:I think that's a good point too, about knowing your customer and what they're going to want to see. For something like a ThirdLove, I can see why they want to be seen as it's more premium, you're part of the club. We're so much more higher end than a Victoria's Secret or whoever else they're competing with, versus the Chubbies, their client probably doesn't need to see that to feel like they're part of the club. They just want the product.Tomer:Exactly. It's such a strong brand that if you buy Chubbies you're already part of the club. It's one of the best ways definitely. I'll give you another example. Maybe I can give you also to share some light about the connectivity. Let's take another one of our customer that you probably know, Steve Madden. Let's say you are a junkie of sneakers, that's your thing in life, Stephanie. You are the number one in their VIP tier program. Literally number one. Then you get sneakers and you give them a negative review because the shoelace was off or whatever. They want to know about it.Stephanie:Sounds like me.Tomer:They want to know about it and they want to treat you a little bit differently. Taking that loyalty data, or the review data and injecting it back to loyalty and help desk, and doing all of that, is so, so important in order to provide a great consumer experience. That's the only way to do so. We see that time and time again, you can not live with silo. That's one of the biggest tips that I can give is that whenever if you're a Yotpo customer, you're not a Yotpo customer, it matters less. It's about the connected experience.Stephanie:Yeah. Personalizing it is huge, and having a customer not feel they're talking into a black box. If I say, “Hey, I'm not happy with something," and then like you said, they're like, "Here's some points to just buy some more of it," or something, that's probably-Tomer:I'll tell you another joke that we use internally. Personalization, I hate it when product managers come to me and talk about personalization because I won't call it the graveyard of ecommerce, but I think the problem with personalization, it's an endless problem. There is always something to improve, but eventually for the consumer, there is a diminishing value in keep on personally up until the point. For us, it's more about look at sub segments of your customers and how you treat them differently, and how do you help the marketer really test and try certain things, but trying to personalize it. You can do that all day long and it won't move the needle necessarily. It's just about understanding from that specific customer, what sub segment they belong to, and then how do you treat that sub segment differently?Stephanie:That's really interesting. I like that. It's not like everyone is a unique snowflake. However, they probably do fit in some buckets, and you can treat those segments pretty similar, and now we have methods for them. I liked that.Tomer:Exactly.Stephanie:I'm thinking about all this data that you guys are getting, and the way that you're reacting to it and making new products and helping these brands, what data is out there that I guess you could call it dark data, that you feel could be tapped into, but you're like, we just haven't gotten there yet, but there’s always data that's out there that you feel you're still not fully utilizing. What are brands usually have access to, but they're just not fully capitalizing on it?Tomer:From the brand or from Yotpo perspective?Stephanie:I say brand perspective.Tomer:Brand perspective, I think the most interesting thing is actually analyzing the content itself of the reviews. I can give you two examples. One of the best examples which I love. Are you familiar with [inaudible].Stephanie:No.Tomer:From these scores they're actually doing phenomenally well. A phenomenal brand. For them, we actually were able to analyze the content. We have a engine called insights from the natural language processing, and we learned something really interesting. That a lot of the content was written "I'm so happy. My boyfriend bought me that and that." "I'm so happy. My husband did..." We actually told them, "You know what? We think you should launch a couples line, because a lot of your buyer persona, it's not the sheets He buying for his girlfriend, for his wife, it doesn't matter." It's one of the most successful launches they ever had. Or we have another furniture brand that I won't mentioned their name, that we showed them that the number one reason for returns of the product is actually the smell of the sofa, and they need to fix that, because they have a real problem in that.Tomer:Actually looking at reviews as a let's call it [inaudible] and that your ability to analyze on scale, and have a really smart again NLP engine that can show you what customers are saying in slice and dice, it's fair. All the volumes per a customer behavior, per location, per segment is so, so important. You can get so much in product teams, marketing teams, service teams for sure. You can get to learn so much from it. I think that's a dataset that a lot of brands are not spending enough time looking at.Stephanie:Yeah. It makes me think gone are the days where you would have people come into a room, and they try out your product and you hear feedback. It's why. Now you can just get thousands of data points, use NLP, digest the data and figure out how to change your product going forward.Tomer:Exactly that.Stephanie:Makes it funny thinking about that. What about from a Yotpo perspective? What data do you want to get access to, to inform either your current products or new ones?Tomer:Something that we think about a lot is it's very clear that commerce is going to be like Omni channel. Or is. Some of it will be marketplaces. Most of it will be direct to consumers. Some of it, maybe it will be on social, some of it maybe will be on Google, who knows. Everyone is trying that transaction will happen now at Instagram, on Google shopping, or whatever. For us, it's how do you give more value when you sell on Amazon? How do we give more verdict? We just launched a partnership with Walmart that you can syndicate all your content with a click of a button. If you sell also on Walmart, all of your content will be there as well, so you'll sell more on watermark. For us, it's really about how do we take more data? We're now working with Facebook and Google on a bunch of really, really interesting stuff, and how do we just help you to be a better Omni channel brand? I think.Stephanie:What data then are you looking at to be a better omni-channel brand? What things are you tapping into that maybe you weren't able to a couple of years ago?Tomer:For us, with every new product that we add, there was a huge data injection. Just think about, let's take SMS and loyalty. It's so valuable that you have the two products under the same data platform that you can really for the first time send new SMS'es for just your loyal customers. Just your highest VIP tier, you want to send them an SMS because you know that SMS will convert the best because they are your most loyal customer. You can do that. I can tell you sending an SMS just saying, thank you, thank you, after someone referred a friend. You would be surprised how much that increased customer lifetime value. I always give our product team our ideal experience is let's say Stephanie, one store will start opening up again. Think about you going, buying at the store that you are one of the most loyal customers, buying a ThirdLove offline store once they'll have one, and then the second you walk out the door, you get an SMS, "Thank you for buying with us again. We really appreciate that."Tomer:How awesome is that? Who doesn't want to build that brand? I think from a data standpoint, the more products that we have, we really understand better the different segments of your customers, and make it easy for you to launch different campaigns. For us, SMS, for example, was a huge vision. That's something that we didn't have, a new execution layer. Loyalty was a huge addition. I think every product that we keep adding, we are learning much more on the brand. We're learning much more on the customers of the brand.Stephanie:I like that. It definitely seems there's a lot of room, especially for in-person retail experiences to complete that journey and to also be helpful as you walk into a store. But to a point where it doesn't get creepy where it's "I see you in the makeup aisle right now, and I would go with this one over that one," that's probably is taking it a little too far, but it still seems there's room for brands to interact more because I don't get many messages right now, and the ones that I do are very generic and not helpful. I sometimes wonder, why don't my, a customer service rep, take a picture and send it to me and be, Hope your day is going well." I think I would like something personal and funny like that, more than just come in and get 20% off today.Tomer:I can tell you what we're hearing now from brands is that they are sending so many generic SMS that they actually... an SMS is ... it's not a cheap channel. It's not like email. You need to actually pay for the message for the carrier. You really need to think carefully, “Okay, maybe for customers that gave me one star review, I need to ask a different SMS and send them, 'Hey, how can I change the experience? I'm sorry, what can we do?' versus customers that raved about the price, and maybe send them an SMS talking about a discount of customers that talk about the service, say send a picture of the customer service that helps them. That connectivity is I think what's really, really important.Stephanie:Yeah, I agree. Where do you see the world of UGC in general transforming to over the next couple of years?Tomer:I think UGC will definitely move towards a place that how do you take the content you're able to create, and leverage that in multiple places in your email marketing, in your SMS marketing, on your social ads, on Walmart, on Amazon, on Etsy, wherever you are as a brand, how you interact with consumers, that's where you need UGC to be at. I think that's super, super important. The second thing is that, what do you understand from that UGC? That's something that I feel that as a company, we are just at the tip of the iceberg. There's so much to be done there because these are the most important signals from your customers. That's something that we are very, very excited about. The question is, will there be a new form of UGC? Stories, voice.Tomer:There's a lot of things that we play around with in our hackathons to really trying to help pave the way of what's next in UGC. I can tell you it's very early, like videos actually for now for us now is a new format that's also been growing really, really quickly. Will there be a new format? That's also really, really interesting.Stephanie:How do you view influencers versus UGC? Because the way the market's headed right now, I wonder if the whole influencer scene will start to die off, because people will keep wanting more authentic interactions and relationships, and they want to buy from people that feel more like them. How do you see influencers playing out all that?Tomer:The influencer is another really interesting field. First of all, I think it depends. Again, it's not a one size fits all. It really depends on, what do you want to achieve with influencers? I think people understand today that just giving the Kardashian your product doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to increase sale. They can really, really help, and you can see Kylie cosmetic. But the top influencer was actually building their own brands because they understand that's where the vast majority of revenue is, and that's something we see a lot in. Now you see micro influencers. I think you probably need to do both, and different purposes. I think a UGC is more let's say the basics. You need to have social proof. For me, influencer it's more about another channel like paid.Tomer:Like a Google ads, you now have influencer ads, if you want to influence attacks, and it works, and you need to do it very, very well, but it's actually not related to UGC. UGC it's the foundation of your brand. You cannot do Google ads, you cannot do influencer ads without it. I think in general influencer is really interesting, but I also think that brands and influencer today, they see that in order for it to work, they need to be authentic. Stephanie:I completely agree. All right. The last question before we jump into the lightning round, do you integrate with awesome platforms like our sponsor, Salesforce Commerce Cloud?Tomer:Yes, definitely. We are a big partner of Salesforce Commerce Cloud. We're actually I think one of the fastest growing solution on Salesforce Commerce Cloud at the moment, and they've been great partners of ours. We have really amazing brands. We started with reviews, now with loyalty, SMS is coming in just a few weeks I think. Yes, definitely. I think it's one of the best platform for the enterprises that we see in the market.Stephanie:I completely agree with that. With that, let's jump into the lightning round, which is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask a question, and you have 30 seconds or less to answer. Are you ready Tomer?Tomer:Of course. I was born ready.Stephanie:If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about, and who would your first guest be?Tomer:What a great question. I think if I need to do a podcast, it will be just some great ecommerce stories, and I think just like one of the best people I know from the industry, his name is Scott Perry. He's now the leading everything related to ecommerce in Jerome, before that he was involved with furniture, he's just freaking awesome. He's just really, really awesome. The other one that I really, really love is actually Lauren from Shopify. He's another really awesome person to spend time. He basically found the Shopify plus.Stephanie:I like that. It might be a little competitive with our podcast. However, competition is healthy, so I'll accept it.Tomer:No, I think what you're doing by the way is super, super cool. It's really, really interesting, and anyone in ecommerce should ... these are exactly the type of content that people should be listened to, if you care about ecommerce.Stephanie:Thank you. I love that. Man, it's good thing I brought you on. What is the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Tomer:The nicest thing that anyone ever done to me. I think definitely I'll say my wife. We have two young boys. She saw me in some really, really tough nights, and she was there to really help me pass through those tough nights. I would definitely give it to my wife.Stephanie:Shout out to your wife. I hope she listens to this. That's great.Tomer:Of course she will.Stephanie:Yeah, she will. What one thing do you not understand today that you wish you did?Tomer:I don't know. How do you get a crying baby to stop crying?Stephanie:I, after three boys, I still don't fully know that one. That's just a question that can't be answered.Stephanie:All right. The last one, what is the last ecommerce purchase you made that you're most excited about?Tomer:I'm actually super excited. I don't know if you can see my background, but I bought from a society six. It's one of our customers, and it's actually a great story to end with. I think I can share about the Yotpo culture. When we founded Yotpo, you know that how every startup is saying that they started at a basement and yada yada. Our office was a real basement, meaning it was an apartment building, you would go down, turn left. There was no lights, no nothing. Even for people that were willing to interview for two people start startup, we got some feedback that their office is too hardcore. We didn't have money for furniture, and we didn't know what to do. I stole for a different time. I had a bunch of Sesame street puppets at my apartment. So I brought them to the office and that started to be our vibes.Tomer:Then when we moved to a real office, we took them with us, and then when we started opening offices across the globe, people thought that they need to bring Sesame street stuff with them. Then when we moved to the home office in COVID, I said, "Okay, we need to bring Sesame street stuff." I bought from society six. We never forget where we coming from, where we came from. Sorry. I think that's maybe one of the things I'm most excited about, and I just bought ... Actually there's another one. Because I keep buying from our customers. That's my thing in life. I buy just from our customers. There's an Oura ring that helps you sleep better and analyze your sleep. I don't know if you're familiar with that.Stephanie:No. What's it called?Tomer:Oura ring. It's really, really ... I don't know if people can see, but it's-Stephanie:You can explain it to anyone who [inaudible].Tomer:It's a ring that basically tracks, with an app tracks, how you sleep, how you need to give you let's say guidance on how to better sleep. I'm super excited to test it. It just arrived today, and I'm going to test it. Excited about that.Stephanie:What things do you think it'll tell you? To sleep better, quarantine your kids off in a room where you can't hear them, or?Tomer:I wish. I wish someone would tell us that, yes, yes.Stephanie:You got that. Tell me how that works. That sounds awesome. Well, Tomer, thanks so much for joining the show. It's been a pleasure. Where can people find out more about you and Yotpo?Tomer:First of all, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure, and I think we in Yotpo are big fans of the podcast, by the way. We have a few episodes that we mentioned, it's actually a thing. You can just go to Yotpo if you want to meet personally. It's tomer@yotpo.com. It's nothing too special, and feel free to reach out.Stephanie:Amazing. Thanks so much.Tomer:Thank you for having me.

My guest in this episode is Colin Gray, he's a podcaster, international speaker, PhD and founder of The Podcast Host and Alitu: The Podcast Maker. Colin started out in Astrophysics, before realising, to his dismay, how much maths you had to do. Podcasting has less maths, but just as many puzzles, and fun ones at that.He started ThePodcastHost.com in 2011, and it's now one of the biggest and oldest Podcasting blogs on the web, dedicated to helping you create a successful show.He went on to found Alitu.com in 2018 to help podcasters create their shows more easily. It's a web app that takes care of the tech, by polishing, branding & publishing for you. It offers a custom set of tools for building and editing epic podcasts.Episode Links and Mentions:https://alitu.comhttps://www.thePodcastHost.com/academy/Did you Enjoy this Episode?Subscribe to this Podcast Here Prefer to Read? Here's the Transcript:Stephanie:Hello, thank you for joining me. You're listening to the profitable content marketing show. In this episode, I talk to Colin Gray about podcasting. If you've not heard of Colin before he is known as the podcast host, and he is a speaker, as well as the owner of a podcasting school. I met Colin in London around three years ago. He was speaking at the Youpreneur summit event. I believe it was actually the first event. And I got talking to Colin after his speaking gig. And I just love his down to earth approach. And the way his tips are just so doable. And this interview, we talked about, you know, how to stay consistent and how to improve your productivity as well as you know, it's not just the tips very often. It's also the tools we use. So Colin also shares this amazing tool. So if you are planning to start a podcast or you're podcasting already, but want to get faster and more productive, well, this episode is for you. So thanks for joining. Let's jump right in and hear what Colin has to say to him.Colin:Hi there. Thanks for having me on,Stephanie:Thank you very much for joining us. So Colin, I know that you actually teach podcasting, so you have a wealth of information to share with us. So I wanted to start by asking you one of the most common questions I hear, as you probably know I work with a lot of bloggers and content creators, so, and business owners. So we talk a lot about finding your voice when it comes to writing and making sure that you are authentic. Whereas with podcasts, of course, the actual voice can be heard. So we're talking also about, you know, perhaps excellence or lack of accent sometimes. Yes. What kind of advice do you give about this? Usually?Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, it's a tricky one and it's one of, it's definitely one of the most common things that come up. Like you say, it applies to just any content out there, but with podcasting, obviously voice, voice is so important because it's your voice that's actually been recorded. The advice I generally give is that podcasting is such a great medium because just about anyone can find fans for their voice. They can find somebody that will like the way they speak, the way they act, their ethos, their personality, all of those aspects. So the key thing really is to be yourself. And it's easy to say that I know, but the being yourself thing is so important because it's so much hater, so much harder to hight behind the mic. And it's so much easier, to be honest, transparent, open behind the making. I think the thing is with, you know, with blogging, you're kind of, you're hiding behind your typewriter.Colin:It's hard to get your typewriter by going back to the 1950s ranger keyboard. And...

When Christiane Lemieux was looking to sell her first company, she knew she wanted to find a buyer that understood that the future revolved around Ecommerce. She found that buyer in Wayfair and for the next few years, she worked with the company to cultivate as much knowledge about the eComm space as possible before venturing out on her own once more. Today. Christiane is the founder of The Inside and the author of numerous books, including her newest called Frictionless. The idea of her new company and the book revolves around the concept that in order to have success in the world of Ecommerce, you need to give your customers an experience that is so easy and efficient, that they never have a reason not to buy. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Christiane explains why that frictionless experience is so important, and how to make it a reality. Key Takeaways: Thanks to innovators like Bezos and Jobs, the world shops in a different need-it-now way. As a result, the biggest challenge Ecommerce platforms face is creating a frictionless experience By leveraging the design community to be consultants, The Inside is targeting customers who can buy with more frequency and create predictable, repeatable conversions Getting online quickly and the businesses who have a digital-first strategy are successful For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript:   Stephanie: Christiane, welcome to the show. How's it going? Christiane: Hey. It's going really well, Stephanie. How are you doing? Stephanie: Doing great. So, for all of our listeners, I want you to pronounce your own name since I did not do it this time. Christiane: My name is Christiane Lemieux. It's very French and a huge mouthful, so I completely give you a pass on that. Stephanie: Thank you for doing that, so I did not have to. So, you are the founder and CEO of The Inside, a direct-to-consumer home furnishing brand. I love to hear a little bit about that and how you started it? Christiane: Well, this is my second foray into the world of home furnishings. I started my first company, it was called DwellStudio, out of college. I went to university at Parsons School of Design here in New York. And I started a home furnishings brand from my New York apartment. 13 years later, I sold it to Wayfair. And speaking of what's up next in commerce and the digital landscape, part of the reason that I did that was that... Oh, you know what, I should cut my nail Hold on. Sorry. Let me just cut this so it doesn't ding on you. Stephanie: Okay. Christiane: Sorry, I'll go back to Wayfair. So, I sold my first company to Wayfair, and part of the reason that I did that was that I got to be entrepreneurial fork in the road where I had never really raised money before. And I realized that if I was going to continue down, the growth trajectory that I was on, it would involve me opening more than the one store I had in New York. It would involve me raising money for the first time, substantial amounts of money for the first time, to roll out stores. Christiane: And at the end of the day, I sat and thought for a very long time about the business model that I was on, that was growing, that I had started, and I realized that it didn't feel right to me. I really believed that all businesses were going to, at some point, in the near term or distant future, transition to eCommerce. And what I wanted to figure out was, who could I either partner with or sell to that would understand that idea and philosophy? Christiane: And so, I hired an investment bank in New York and they actually had me meet with a whole bunch of home furnishings companies, most of them, you would probably know. But when I walked into Wayfair's office in Boston with 1,800 people and 800 engineers, I realized that we were really aligned from a conceptual point of view in terms of what the future of DTC look like, direct-to-consumer look like. And so, it wasn't the best offer financially but, to me, it was the best offer intellectually and philosophically. So, I sold my business to Wayfair in 2013. Christiane: And then, I went on their executive committee. I mean to say that it was a learning would be doing a disservice. It was like a full immersion into eCommerce with one of the best teams in the country, and by far, the best team in my particular category. And so, I learned so much from them. Christiane: And as I was sitting there, I was like, "What would make me start another business? What in the world after building one from the ground up and selling it, what would I do?" And so, I realized that if I could take my first business, which is really design-first and brand-first, and then merge that into what I had learned at Wayfair from a digital commerce-first perspective, that I might be crazy enough to do it again. And that's what I did. Stephanie: Yeah, that's amazing. So, what were the key learnings that you took away from Wayfair, and maybe the pitfalls that you saw where you're like, "Oh, I should avoid that."? Because when I was looking into Wayfair, I think they're still very unprofitable. And so, did you see things like that and you're like, "Oh, if you just adjusted this part of the model or this part of logistics, I wouldn't have to worry about that."? Or what kind of things do you take away from that experience? Christiane: So, I would say there's almost nothing wrong with Wayfair. And I'm saying that, I mean that honestly. First of all, Niraj, their CEO is one of the smartest digital executives in the country, if not the world. I think that he's very much following the taking market share approach pioneered by Bezos, of course. And so, I think we're just very much on the same path. He will own the furniture category online and he will very quickly, if not even now. I mean, the last quarter was insane for them because now we're all sheltering at home and [inaudible] in a very different way than we did maybe nine weeks ago. But he'll take market share and he will be very profitable, and he'll own furnishings online. Christiane: There are other companies that have pursued that line of growth that weren't necessarily as equipped as he is. And he's equipped to do that. So, as relevant as that is in the post-WeWork discussion, I think in his particular case, he's already got the groundwork done to be able to do that and do it fairly flawlessly. I think for me- Stephanie: I mean, definitely still... The first company that comes to mind when I do think about buying furniture or looking for anything, even above Amazon and Walmart... I mean, they're the first ones I would go to so I agree. Christiane: Also, because they've got the best selection and they've also got the back-end figured out. And so, they taught me things like overpack centers. I was like, "What is an overpack center?" And so, they take- Christiane: They have overpack centers where they take in the goods from the manufacturers and they overpack them, so they don't break. And by diminishing the chance of something being damaged, not only do they make the customer experience better, which is really necessary in this day and age, but they also ensure that their margins don't get completely depleted by goods that arrive damaged. And so, it's not a crazy thing to do, but at the end of the day, it's totally crucial. Christiane: So, I mean, they taught me so much about, first of all, UX, customer experience, and then the logistics and the profound necessity to really think about delivery in a way that is beyond just parcel delivery or white glove delivery. They really think about it from a 360 perspective all the way from margin protection to a really flawless customer experience. Some of the things that you don't necessarily learn when you're building a design brand, I learned at Wayfair, so I'm forever thankful. Christiane: The difference is that they're like Amazon, they're a marketplace. And so largely, they don't design and produce their own SKUs or their own products. And they don't need to because their value prop is that in COVID-19 when every single person in the country, all of a sudden, needed some kind of a home office and/or home school. I mean, you went right to Wayfair and you ordered a desk and they came to you perfectly, right? Christiane: I wanted to take the ideas of brand and design but apply the Wayfair rigor of digital thought around how I executed this next brand, some of the things like having no inventory, having exclusive product, having a 3D studio to do the photography, dropship, largely dropship the product. So, instead of sending it through a more expensive white glove delivery, have it lightly assembled so that UPS or FedEx could do the delivery. And so, all of these things add up to really beautiful customer service, exclusive custom product to the customer, and then margin improvements around delivery, around no inventory, around a decreased cost in photo assets. Christiane: So, what I wanted to do is I challenged myself to think of all of the substantial problems with a home furnishings business, solve them first, and then start the business. And so, that's how I did it this time. Stephanie: That's super smart. So, how long has The Inside been operating and how's it doing today with everything going on? Christiane: So, I left Wayfair in 2016 and I called up my favorite supplier. She went into business with me on a B2B beta way. And so, we did that for close to two years. And then, I met the extraordinary, Kirsten Green of Forerunner, and she said to me, "This is really interesting, Christiane. Why don't I write you a pre-seat check and you go figure it out." Christiane: And so, we came out of beta in July of 18th. We're a year and a half in, and it's going very well. It's going very well. In this pandemic, I did not have the category breath that Wayfair has which made this a very interesting business time for them, but enough of a product breath that I think that we're helping people improve their homes on a daily basis right now, which is what we set out to do. Christiane: And listen, I feel extraordinarily lucky that it's a digital-first company. I don't have stores, I have a very lean staff. We were working from a work kosher, which we closed down at the end of April. So, we are going to be dispersed until, at least, the beginning of 2021, so we won't have an office. We can do all of this virtually. We hold no inventory, so we have no warehouses. Essentially, we had to let go two people just to preserve the business. But we've come through this, I think, as well as you can. My whole MO right now is making sure that nobody loses a job, really, because that's the scariest part of all of this is the unemployment numbers. I mean, that just keeps me up at night. Stephanie: I know. Yeah, seeing how high they're trending is definitely that's scary. Was there any big digital pivots you had to make or that you made quickly when COVID-19 started, or right now? Christiane: Well, I think that what we did... Apparently, from my digital marketing, either cohort or people that we work with, there are three DTC areas that have done very well in this particular pandemic, I mean, the Starling pandemic, so this pandemic, but it's athleisure, home, and alcohol. So, those three things had extraordinary growth. We happen to be in one of those categories. Christiane: I think one of the things that we did, which I think, anybody in a growth category in this particular time, we stayed the course with marketing. So, a lot of people caught their marketing. And what we're seeing is customer acquisition costs have come down, the cost for all of these paid marketing initiatives across all the platforms have come down. And so, we really leaned into that. Christiane: The other interesting thing that's sort of trend that's come out of this is not the digital marketing, I don't know if you've noticed this, but a lot of people are doing direct mail. Direct mail a huge resurgence obviously, depending on the category you're in, but people are home, and they're reading their direct mail. Stephanie: You shifted into that space of it? Christiane: We're looking into it now. Stephanie: Cool. Yeah, that's great. When you were first building The Inside, were there certain key technologies that you leaned on to build up the website, or are there any favorites that you utilize? I mean, I saw you have quizzes on the website, which seemed amazing. Is there anything specific where you're like, "This is my favorite piece of tech we use or a plug-in how we build our website." Any details around that? Christiane: Well, it's funny, this is our third iteration of our website. Christiane: So, we actually had to build our site from the ground up, which has its challenges. Christiane: One of the things that happened to us is we were on a really new version of Java, and Google couldn't index our site in the beginning so we had to do all kinds of back-end hacks to fix that. But for like three weeks, we're like, "Why is our traffic so bad?" And then, we realized that we weren't showing up at all. Stephanie: That's not great. Christiane: No, it's so horrible. So, just all these learnings along the way have been really interesting. So, because of the customizable aspect of our business, we had to build our own site from the bottom up, and that's given us the ability to keep growing our SKU count and keep allowing people to customize each and every one of the pieces. Christiane: I think that there's plug-ins. Everybody loves the Affirm or any kind of extended payment plan. There are things that are so unbelievable like Apple Pay and Amazon Wallet and all these things. If you don't have them, I mean, you're putting yourself at a huge disadvantage. I mean, they're not necessarily plug-ins, they're more payment tools. Christiane: I think the name of the game now is, it goes right to the core of my book, is making the experience frictionless. I mean, this is philosophical, but I think if frictionless extends even beyond that digital aspect of our lives, people are used to getting what they want, when they want, at the price they want, with the look they want, because of... Christiane: And I would say that Bezos might be the grandfather or the father of the frictionless experience. I mean, he changed the way we consume, and buying, shopping, whatever, fundamentally, in the same way that Steve Jobs changed the way we think about media. I mean, Bezos changed the way we shop, and he made it frictionless for us, and he keeps going beyond. Because if you think about Amazon Prime, he made everything accessible to us in two days. I mean, not necessarily right now, but generally speaking, and that just removes the friction from everything. Christiane: And philosophically, it's given us time back in our lives, right? Especially, let's think about others, me as a mom, I never have to take two hours of my day to go to the toy store to get the Lego for my son, William's friend, Gray's birthday party ever. It gets delivered to my house and it takes me no time. And that time that I get back, I mean, pre-COVID, I think the digital generation looks at time in a completely different way and the generation that preceded that, right? Stephanie: I absolutely agree. Christiane: Yeah, because there is all of this found time, and I think the digital generation also understands that it is the only non-renewable resource, right? If you have money, you can throw it on almost anything, right? I mean, you can have a jab for a trainer or whatever, or if you're clever and you have to be resourceful like me, you can find, I don't know, a meal delivery service or the stretch class on Mindbody, or whatever it is you're looking for. There's ways to hack almost anything. The only thing we can't hack is time. Christiane: And so, the more frictionless your experiences are across every single thing you need to do every day from like your healthcare all the way down to your grocery shopping, the more of this found time essentially you get back or digital time. Christiane: Pre-COVID, the people were applying that to travel, experience, I don't know, wellness, self-care, working out, all these things. Because it's the first generation that doesn't have to wait in line to get their license renewed at the DMV. Stephanie: Yeah. I mean, that's definitely a very different generation now who knows nonsense and they're not going to put up with the old way of doing things. How did you think about designing your website and your customer journey to create that frictionless experience? I mean, like I said earlier, I love seeing the quiz. I actually took it to see what kind of bedframe I should buy. How did you think about designing things to make it easy for people to buy? Especially furniture, that's kind of tricky. People are usually used to testing it out. Christiane: They're used to testing it out. So, my caveat is the following, that is definitely a work in progress. We look at this every day in every way, I don't think we've made it frictionless yet but we're trying to. And I think that for home furnishings, in some ways, we have to act as your decorating friend, as well as your place to buy the product. And so, to the extent, we can make your choices easier, so the quiz or you can text us or email us or set up an appointment for a design consultation with us. If we can help you be your trusted friend and design advisor, that I think is one of the tools to a frictionless experience. Christiane: Like every other eCommerce site, there's table stakes things like, "If you don't like it, you can return it," and you have 30 days to return it. Because you know what, that's just the name of the game today. And also, we have to ship it to you for free because that's also the name of the game today. Christiane: So, there are things that have been institutionalized, I'd say, by Amazon first and then adopted by everybody else that are just table stakes. And so, we started out with those and that was, I think, like 1.0 of frictionlessness online. And then the companies that are really forward thinking are the ones that could build on that on a near constant basis. So, yeah, that's very much where we are philosophically and trying to make the UX better every day. Stephanie: Got it. What kind of metrics are you focusing on when you're making all these iterations and trying to make the experience even better? Are there certain things you pay attention to or that you sync up with your team every week and go over? Christiane: A lot of it is Google Analytics and then we look at the Facebook metrics for the paid marketing, all of these things. But some of the things we look at are, obviously, like the really basic ones like bounce rate. One of the things that people are looking at now is, they call it dwell time, how long people spend on each page and how in-depth they go. So, we look at that. Christiane: We look at who designs a piece of furniture, and then transacts, and then who abandons the cart and why. And so, we're trying to finesse the experience all the time so that people feel they're not stuck with paralysis of choice. Because I think the thing about customizing is that, especially if there's 16,000 different iterations you can possibly make, you might get paralyzed by choice. Christiane: So, the quiz is very helpful there because you may have learned that you like coastal mid-century, your favorite color is blue, here are three patterns that you like that are foolproof for you. And then, you can go from there. You can iterate from there. So, you can choose a brass leg or wood leg or whatever that works for the rest of your interior. But at least you've narrowed down to the extent you can, algorithmically what you like. And so I think that, I mean, all of those things are super important. Stephanie: And I think less choices is definitely key. Especially I've seen a model where they're populating an entire room for you of like, "Here's the whole entire bundle, so you don't even have to think about it. You can swap things in." And like you said, having someone that you can text is so super important, where you feel like you have a friend where you're like, "How would this look? What do you think about this? Show me something that's similar." I think all of those are really strategic. Stephanie: But when it comes to some of those metrics, how do you... For dwell time, for instance, I think any of these might lead you down the wrong path based on what's happening right now with the current environment where I heard that, well, times are up, but then conversions aren't maybe up at the same rate. Is there any metrics where you're like, "Oh, they might be reading into that the wrong way, and we shouldn't maybe take a quick action based on that right now." Christiane: I think that's right. I think people are... Because we have so much time, and content looks different from one person to the other, the content they like. So, if you're in the middle of decorating your house, you might be on all these sites, and because you have, all of a sudden, more disposable time at your fingertips than you have in the past. So, I think dwell time is important, but add-to-cart is really the thing you want to see, and then the final conversion. Christiane: So, we look at where people are hanging out from a GA perspective and then look at the add-to-cart and then look at the conversion on that add-to-cart. Of course, for us, the metrics that we want to focus on are getting from add-to-carts to conversion to the extent we can, and so trying to make the PDP and the the checkout page as flawless as and as inviting as possible to really get people to transact. Christiane: I mean, in front of that is as much inspiration as we can possibly allow people to consume, whether it's through Instagram or through Facebook Ads or through whatever means to get them inspired. But really, our job, especially on a site level, is to make it so easy that why wouldn't you buy it? And to the extent we can quell your paralysis of choice. That's really where we're focused right now, is really helping you design the space of your dreams digitally. Stephanie: Very cool. So, you just mentioned Instagram. I saw that you launched an Instagram Live series called Go Inside. Can you speak a bit about how you're utilizing that to potentially drive sales and the strategy behind that, and ROI that you've seen on that content or how you measure that? Christiane: Well, I think, for us, part of this... The interesting thing about the home furnishings business is that there are two distinct consumers, there is the DTCs, so the consumer you think about who wants to buy an upholstered headboard and goes on and chooses their fabric, and executes on that, but there's also the trade. Christiane: And so, our particular category has interior designers, and many of them who, at the end of the day, are a very big part of this business, and a very, very important customer to anybody in the home furnishings business because they are buying on behalf of multiple people. And if you make the whole experience frictionless for them, it's not just one bed every five years, it could be five beds every month. Christiane: And so, I think part of our Instagram strategy is really letting the rest of our community meet the interior designers that really work with our product, not only so that they can see what this community does, but also, at the end of the day, we would love our interior designers to get business and to really think about this, not only as a home furnishing company, but as a community that we're growing for people who love design and who want to, as we call it, live beyond the beige. And for us, that's really people who want to personalize their spaces, and think about their spaces as something that is theirs and that is customizable, in a way that's frictionless. And so, by going live with our interior designers, we're introducing the world to this great community of people who can service that. Christiane: A little early for ROI right now, but if we circle back in a little bit of time, I can let you know, because data has to have like a decent subset, right? So, we just launched a home design 30-minute consultation, and that's really helpful in terms of conversion. Because if people get you on the on the line and walking through their spaces and really helping them, chances are it's the kind of help that they're looking for. So, we find that useful. Stephanie: Well, how do you think about scalability when it comes to having those one-on-one interactions with the customer and consulting them on the products and whatnot? Christiane: Well, that's where these two things dovetail together, right? And so, if we build a really beautiful, robust design community that is local... Because every different area has a different design philosophy. In California, you can live indoor or outdoor, in New York, a lot less. And so, if I can introduce you to a design in your area via Instagram Live, and he or she is showing off some of the projects they've done, there's a good chance that you will then reach out to them and let them know that you were introduced to their work on The Inside. Christiane: And the rest, I think, is just great for everybody involved. I mean, that's my business philosophy. I love a win-win-win, so the customer wins there, the designer wins there, and we win there not just because of a sale, but because we've made somebody's home and life better. Stephanie: Yeah, that's a really good strategy. And this thought that you are partnering with the designers and having them do the consultation, that's super smart, where you don't really have to worry too much about hiring a bunch of people and customer support to do it who don't really have good design principles probably. Christiane: Yup. That's how we'll scale. So, we're just at the inception of this, but you get it, right? So, they can meet Maureen Stevens on Thursday night or tomorrow night, and if she's in New Orleans and if they love her design, they can call her up. And when she finds out that they were sent to her via The Inside, then she'll most likely, I mean, hopefully, use one of our upholstered beds in her next project. But even if she doesn't, if somebody gets a better interior because of something we did along the way, then I feel pretty good about that. Stephanie: These micro-influencers and designers who are helping with these consultations, are they starting to request metrics and wanting to see data and things that your team will have to start supporting eventually? Christiane: I hope so, but not yet. I hope that... Listen, that's part of that frictionless post-COVID change. I think everybody is going to need data, digitally-driven data, so that they understand exactly what the reach is beyond this traditional business models that they've had prior to all this. Stephanie: Yup. I think that because of COVID, a lot of people are definitely putting on their entrepreneurial hats and they're going to want to see those metrics. And I think it'd be really interesting to have some type of leaderboard that would show which designer is doing the best and who's helping customers, and just gamify it a bit. Christiane: That'd be so much fun. It's almost like you're at, whatever it is, flywheel and who's biking the fastest. Stephanie: Yeah, I know. Just implement that tomorrow. Easy. So, are you- Christiane: Stephanie, I'm going to take a note right here and actually do that. That's pretty interesting. Stephanie: Yeah. I think that's where a lot of the world is going when it comes to gamifying certain purchases and making it more fun. Well, when it comes to gamifying, are there any pieces of tech that you're thinking about? I was just playing around with IKEA's app where they have AR that you can put the product in your room, which was really fun to play with. I was just putting full-on dressers on top of the bed and just being silly with it. But have you thought about doing that since your products are so unique, it seems like it would be really good to get them in the room where people are trying to design it? Christiane: Absolutely, yes. And in fact, we were talking to a company in Palo Alto, who was on the forefront of this, probably right around the corner from you. Stephanie: Oh, we're neighbors. Christiane: Yeah. And they are pioneering this incredible drag and drop. So essentially, you can take a picture of your room, and then you can drag and drop furniture into it. It's so well done. It's so well done that they can tell where your window is and they can have a shadow underneath the furniture so that it looks perfectly real. Interestingly, a lot of the technology that people use for gaming is really applicable here. So, it can create a really unique and kind of true-to-life experience. Christiane: So, yes, we're looking to this all the time. I think that as a brand spanking new startup, we're trying to make sure the fundamentals are frictionless before we add all kinds of layers of complexity to the customer experience. So, we want to make sure that it's really easy for you right now to go in and say like, "I love the modern platform bed and I like it in polka dot. I'm going to transact," versus... Because I think that we got to make sure the customers where we are in terms of technology, too. So, I think we're taking baby steps there, but the answer is absolutely yes. And all of that technology is fascinating to me. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. I'm definitely watching that market closely and it seems like people are leaning heavily in, but agree that until you understand how you want the customer journey to work and the product to work and everything, I think... Stephanie: We were just talking with someone from Lenovo who's saying that after years of being in business, you have to just start killing a bunch of things because too many things build up and it starts worsening the customer experience. So, it's probably good to figure everything out first before pulling in a bunch of new trendy tools. Christiane: Yeah. We need to have a really beautiful conversion rate indicating to us that the customer journey is frictionless before we can start throwing pretty complex essentially gaming ideas at them. Stephanie: Yup. And it would seem like you would need a pretty large catalog as well if you're going to develop an entire AR app for your company. I mean, people probably slip through placing furniture. I mean, at least that's what I was doing. I was like, bang, bang, bang, bang. I was putting in front of everywhere. It seems like I would need a pretty large catalog for that, too. Christiane: I think that's right. I think that's absolutely right. And so, somebody like IKEA touches every part of your house. I mean, we're too young to have that kind of SKU count. It has to be in every single category, right? You can't just have the dining room chairs, you have to have the dining room table too. So, we'll get there. We're not there today. And so, I think that you're right. That's a very good point. And so, IKEA is a layup for them. It's a layup for Wayfair as well. Stephanie: Yeah. Are there any specific follow ups you do with your customers to keep them coming back, or ways that you're acquiring new customers that is maybe unique? Christiane: What's great about our category is that design is a process, right? I mean, even if you hire an interior designer, it usually takes quite a while. And also, people are thinking about their homes in a different way than they used to. It's all these things where it's done, you live in it, and that's it. I think people are constantly upgrading or adding in seasonal elements. And so, once we know you, Stephanie, are coastal mid-century from your quiz, we can keep sending you design ideas that- Stephanie: Did you just see my quiz? Christiane: No. Is that- Stephanie: That's what I was. I'm like, "Did you see me?" Christiane: But I have a feeling. Well, first of all, I can see your personal file from our Zoom earlier today, so I- Stephanie: You mean, hoodie and sweatshirt? Just kidding. Christiane: I also know where you are. I know how old you are. I know where you went to school. But this is all I do all day long, so I can pretty much- Stephanie: You're good. Christiane: ... figure it out. So, since you are coastal mid-century, I would know what to send you as a follow-up. I don't know if you have outdoor space or not, but I might send you some really cool outdoor furniture that would work with the bed you had. I will try and assist you in decorating your space, getting the home of your dreams pretty subtly until one day, you pick up the phone and say, "Hey, Christiane, will you just call me back because I want to do my entire living room?" And I will say, "Of course," and I will call you back and you'll FaceTime me through your living room and we'll decorate it. Christiane: But until then, I'm going to show you all the beautiful things you can have at very reasonable prices to make your space exactly the mid-century coastal dream you want it to be. Stephanie: That's great. It's a good process. So, to pivot a little bit, you've written a couple books and I'd love to dive into them because they're all around everything eCommerce, it seems. And so, if you want to maybe start with your most recent one or your first one, whatever one you want, I would love to hear about them. Christiane: Well, so I've written three books and I'm working on two other ones right now. But the first book I wrote was called Undecorate and it was really, for me, that watershed moment in design when I realized that the way people approach their interiors was no longer going to be like, "I design it. I live in it for 25 years. My kids take a few things when I die and that's the end of it." I realized that people were approaching their interiors the way they were approaching fashion. And that was largely because for the first time ever, things like Pinterest, that was right after Instagram launched... But all these things, all of a sudden, we were surrounded by content and media in a completely different way. So, you didn't have to buy a magazine to look at a beautiful interior, you got to see it all day long on your phone. Christiane: And so, what that did was, I believe, it raised the design IQ, not only of our audience in the United States, but globally. And so, all of a sudden, people are interested in interiors, they're interested in design history. They're interested in all these things that they weren't before and they think about their spaces in a less static way. So, I wrote that book. Christiane: And then, I followed it up with a book called The Finer Things, which was my first Instagram-generation encyclopedia of the decorative arts on the same day, and I'm writing right now the Instagram-generation encyclopedia of important furniture. This one's take me a long time, I think, four years to write. It's a big project. [inaudible] is the one I'm writing about furniture right now. Will probably take me between two and a half and three. Christiane: And then, I wrote Frictionless, which is really my first business book. Because I realized that I had started a business out of college in 2000. I grew it organically for 13 years. And if I hadn't written a book at the end of that journey, it would have been useless. It would have been fire-starting kindling at this point, because everything had changed, every single thing. Stephanie: It makes you wonder if you can rely on books these days anymore because, I mean, especially around eCommerce, everything's new and so quick. It's like what sources should I even look at to stay up to date with things? It's definitely probably not a book. Christiane: Yeah. I mean, I sat and thought what is the underlying differentiator? What makes something win or something lose here, right, if I look at all the incumbents in my industry. But just generally, what is it? What's the winner or loser? And what I realized was that it was the frictionless experience that allowed somebody to get into a, it could be a crowded category. Christiane: But if you can do in the least invasive way, you will win because all people want is as few clicks as possible to get exactly what they want with the commerce table stakes and have it delivered to their home and they don't want somebody calling them up with a delivery time. They don't want 37 phone calls. They don't want a helpline where nobody helps them. When you get into those scenarios, you're like, "I'm not doing this. I'm never coming back." Stephanie: Whenever someone wants to call me, I'm like, "Oh, can we not? And don't leave me a voicemail. Can you just text me, please?" Christiane: Yeah, just text me. Or my favorite thing is Slack. Just Slack me. Christiane: Slack is frictionless. I mean, it's beautiful. Christiane: And so, experiences like that, I don't know, equal parts art and science, I think is the big differentiator. We, as human people, now that we've experienced it, that's what we want. We want the Slack experience in every single facet of our life. And if it's not- Stephanie: No one's going back after that. Christiane: No, no. And if it's not that, then you're like, "Why does this suck so badly?" And then, you find the experience in that, I don't know, that milieu that you need, and you can find it. I mean, if you can't find it today, you'll be able to find it soon. And that's what every business should go after. Christiane: Because all the rest of it is table stakes, right, like fast and free delivery, great design. You can do those things, but to do it in a frictionless way is what's going to change your business or give you the competitive advantage you need to take market share. I mean, that's what Wayfair taught me. And when I sold to them and I understood how far ahead of the commerce game they were, it was amazing to me. Stephanie: Yeah, that's such a good experience. When you were doing your research for Frictionless, was there any surprises that you found or companies that you're following that were doing something surprising that you hadn't thought of? Or just a good process that you were like, "Oh, that's really neat. I can see why it works for them."? Christiane: There's so many nuggets in this book. I mean, I find just talking to the founder of Ixcela, she does a gut biome. You send in your... I'm obsessed with that. You send in your blood sample through the mail. I mean, the idea that we can have MIT science level help digitally is amazing to me. I mean, all of these... That is going to be the outcome of this particular pandemic because what we're realizing is that all of the things we thought we needed to do like endless in-person meetings, we just don't need to. I mean, I will never take 60 subways in a day in New York again to go to in-person meetings unless they're absolutely necessary. Christiane: So, I'm thinking about my life through the lens of frictionless experience. Those things, that's a lot of friction, like running around, being late, being stressed, when we don't need to do it. I mean, Zoom has also changed our lives, all of these platforms. Christiane: And the interesting thing is that I believe the entire world, regardless of what generation you are, just got schooled in technology, right? We all just got fully immersed in what it means to be a digital citizen. Christiane: Even my 75-year-old mom in Ottawa, Canada knows how to use Zoom now and thinks it's the greatest thing ever, and I'm like, "Mom, I told you so." But sometimes it takes being forced into something to realize how extraordinary it is. And now she realizes she can have all of her grandkids all over the world on one Zoom call and everybody can talk to each other. How amazing is that? Stephanie: That sounds very similar to my parents as well. They were teaching me how to put backgrounds on Zoom. I'm like, "Mom, I got it. But thank you." Actually, she did send me a pretty funny article that showed how to loop a video on Zoom so it looked like you were moving around and paying attention in a meeting, which I guess her... She's a teacher, so I think some of her students were doing that. They were looping themselves just moving around a few times, and it looked like they were really on board with the whole lesson. Christiane: Oh, my God. That is hilarious. Stephanie: I'm like, "That's good. Thank you for sharing that wisdom." Christiane: One of the partners that we're working with at The Inside, it's a very big home furnishings company and they are pretty sophisticated digitally, and all of them have a constant Zoom competition of who has the coolest background. Apparently, somebody had something like a 1980s workout video. That was fantastic last week. These guys are thinking about this on a near constant basis like your Zoom background now is a reflection of who you are and how creative you are, how digitally savvy you are. I think it's hilarious. Stephanie: So to zoom out a little bit, what do you think the future of online commerce looks like after the pandemic's over? Do you think things are going to shift back a bit to how they were? What kind of disruptions do you see coming down the pipe? Christiane: People would think "we're going back to normal," I think normal has changed. And I firmly believe that the companies that weren't thinking digitally are thinking digitally very seriously now. Christiane: Because as I told you, here I am in SoHo, New York and it turns out when there's a pandemic, nobody lives here. At 7:00 at night is when we all cheer. I mean, there's now six of us on my block who I see every night, and everyone else is gone. And there is one coffee shop that's open, and that coffee shop very early on had a contactless app. So, you could order your coffee in advance and then go and pick it up. Nobody touched anybody with gloves and a face mask on. I've gone there every single morning for the last nine weeks because I want to get out of my apartment and I want to see some of the world, and they have really good coffee. Christiane: And across the street from them is the fanciest coffee place in New York that people are die hard lovers of, and you know what, the doors are closed and they never came up with a contactless app and they never figured out how to digitally bring themselves into this particular pandemic and keep their business going. And I think that that's only like a neighborhood version of what the rest of commerce is going to look like, and not only commerce, just like service as well. I think that people are going to have to think about how to pivot their particular businesses digitally as quickly as possible. Stephanie: I don't think this will be the first event where businesses have to come online quickly and figure it out. And we'll definitely see the people who did do that this time and the ones who didn't. Christiane: Yeah, especially some of the ones that didn't and who are waiting for things to go back to normal might not make it through this. And that breaks my heart because there are fairly... You could probably scrappily do something fairly quickly, but you have to want to. And I think that people that didn't have their head in the sand... Is that what the ostrich does? Stick their head in the ground? Stephanie: I think so. Christiane: If your head wasn't in the sand, and you were iterating, or at least pivoting during this, it's going to serve you really well on the other side. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, it seems like it'll be, well, it is an environment right now where people have to learn quickly, but they'll probably look back and be like, "Glad I did that." We learned and we moved at the pace that normally would have taken us maybe on a five-year roadmap, we were able to get it done in a week or two weeks. We got pushed into that, but I'm sure they'll look back and be happy they did. Christiane: But also, look at the very fast category options. I look at the home furnishings category where, I don't know, it'd be those between 20% and 25% of consumers were willing to buy the category online. I think, in the last ten weeks, it went up to 60% or 70%. I mean, that is massive, world class adoption in a very short period of time. And I would imagine that that is universal across some of these categories. So, it'll be really interesting to see what happens post the pandemic. Christiane: But the people that are listening to the CDC won't be rushing out and shopping and going to the beach as quickly as... Some people will and some people want. So, I think that digital adoption is going to be extended, at least for 18 to 24 months, if not, forever. Stephanie: Yeah, I completely agree. So, before we move into the lightning round, which I'll explain, is there any other thoughts or ideas you have that you want to share? Christiane: No, I think we've covered up everything. I mean, I could go off... You and I are philosophically aligned that this is the way of the future. I mean, I could talk about this for days, but we need a whole Round 2. Stephanie: Yeah. It'll be really interesting to see what the landscape looks like in 8 to 10 months, if not, and then again in 24. Because I think you're right, I think that the people that are thinking on their feet and iterating constantly and really pivoting their businesses to be digital-first in whatever, incumbent-second are the people that are going to win here. It'll be a really fun way to look back. Stephanie: All right, then the lightning round, which is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud, who sponsored this podcast, of course. Christiane: Excellent. Stephanie: This is where I... Yes, they are great. They're amazing. Christiane: They are. Stephanie: This is where I ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Does that sound good? Christiane: Sure. Stephanie: All right, what's up next on your reading list? Christiane: What's up next on my reading list? Oh, I have a really good friend in New York City who just wrote a book, Lauren Sandler, and I'm going to read her book next and it is called Christiane: Her new book is called This Is All I Got, and it's A New Mother's Search for Home. She is an investigative journalist. She writes for The New Yorker and New York Times. And she actually followed a single mother through the shelter system in New York. But I've just started it, it's pretty amazing. Stephanie: I'm going to check that out. Christiane: Yeah, it's pretty amazing. I'm trying to think what else? What am I reading that's like business-related? What is it? Harder Things? I just started it. Stephanie: The Hard Thing About Hard Things? Christiane: The Hard Thing About Hard Things is the business book that I'm reading right now. My editor at Harper who did Frictionless, also was the editor on Ben Horowitz' book. Stephanie: Oh, cool. I got to read that. Christiane: Yeah. I highly recommend that one. Stephanie: Highly recommend? Christiane: Yeah. I think that there are probably universal truths. And also, we're going through hard things right now. And I think it's people that are accepting and fluid in the hard things that end up being okay. Stephanie: Yeah, I completely agree. What's up next on your podcast list? Christiane: On my podcast list? Oh, my God, there's so many on my podcast list, but I'm stuck on the daily right now, if I'm honest, because, first of all, the news is so completely crazy and riveting. And also, I'm obsessed with all the COVID data. You know, I just had the test because my son was exhibiting some symptoms, and all three of us are negative. Stephanie: That's good. Christiane: Yeah, it's really good. But as a parent, the whole Kawasaki manifestation of this is very scary. Because the first bill of goods we got sold was that, "Oh, if your kids are under 20, you're fine." I was like, "Great." I don't care if I get it, I'll figure it out. But if my kids get it, I don't know what I'm going to do. And now, that's not the truth at all. So, that's generally where you'll find me. It's hard to take your ears away from the news right now. Stephanie: I know. Yeah. I have to, every once in a while, take a break because I have three kids under two and a half. Christiane: Wow. You're like me. My kids are 21 months apart. Stephanie: So, who do you follow in the industry or any newsletters or sources that you go to to stay up-to-date on all things eCommerce? Christiane: Wow. I mean, everything, like Crunchbase and TechCrunch. Oh, and I've been watching some of the podcasts, some of the live stuff on Extra Crunch. I'm trying to think eCommerce. I mean, there's just so much of it. I don't know, where else do I follow? Stephanie: Or if nothing comes to mind, we can also skip this one. Christiane: Okay. I mean, all of the above. And also, all the inbound newsletters and things like that. But just generally, the newspaper. Stephanie: Oh, newspaper. Okay. The last harder question is what's up next for eCommerce professionals? Christiane: What's up next for eCommerce professionals? Wow. Stephanie: Big shift. Christiane: Well, I think that everyone is going to have to become somewhat of an eCommerce professional first of all. I don't think digital and analog are going to be two separate things anymore after this particular pandemic, and I think that everybody out there is understanding that in a pretty profound way. I think that digital immersion is not only necessary, I mean, I think it's the only way to actually stay relevant and push your career forward. Christiane: Part of the reason that I wrote the book was also to try and understand being the parent of two children, what the future would look like for my kids and what does that mean for college and all these things? Because I wanted to understand 72% of people want to be entrepreneurs, and what does that mean? And so, I think that if they think about that from a digital perspective, it's actually a pretty great place to be, right? It means you're immersing yourself in the digital aspect of things. I think that it's not just eCommerce professionals, it's going to be every single professional. Christiane: I do think when I look at the landscape, that the content part of this is really important, right? Because even when I was at Wayfair, I mean, we did content but it wasn't merged the same way. So, your AR question I think is really important. I think that we're going to shift online for a lot of the things that we did in analog ways before this. Christiane: So, if I'm an interior designer, I'm not thinking about what my career looks like when I come into your house, I'm thinking about what can I learn online so that I can do it for you from a distance, right? And I would apply that to every single aspect of every single job out there. If I have an analog job, how can I digitize that? And I think everybody's going to have to think about that. Christiane: I mean, look at doctors are doing it through telemedicine and designers are doing it through FaceTime. You can go down every single career. I mean, pharmacists are doing it through telemedicine as well. One of the people that I profiled in the book is Eric Kinariwala from Capsule in New York. And I mean, that's a genius business because he's delivering everything from the drugstore, all of your pharmaceutical needs, anything that your doctor has prescribed, you can get delivered to your home. I'm talking to him next week, but I think he probably crushed it in this particular scenario. Christiane: So, I think there's no... You're not on one side of the fence or the other, like this silo in the company does eCommerce and this one does regular commerce. I mean, I think that the two now are going to be forever conjoined. Stephanie: Yeah, that's such a good point. Completely agree. Well, this has been such a fun interview. We definitely need to be back for Round 2. Where can people find out more about you and The Inside and your upcoming book? Christiane: Well, my upcoming book is at frictionless.pub, and you can get a copy of it there. It links to Amazon and Barnes and Noble and every other great book place to buy books. The Inside is theinside.com. And the rest, there's an endless breadth of information on Google. Stephanie: Yup. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been such a blast. Christiane: Thank you. Thanks, Stephanie.  

In this episode, I release an interview I did with the Nonfiction Authors Association Founder Stephanie Chandler. We shed some light on some financial aspects of both writing and publishing. So the guest and host tables are turned for this particular episode, which is always a fun twist on a concept! I’ve provided the complete transcript of our interview instead of “fun nuggets”. I’ll also provide you with the links to the FREE courses on publishing in my Teachable school: Make Publishing Profitable and Fun Make Publishing Fun Summit I also have an excellent course (priced at $197) with 5x #1 NYT bestselling author Carol Kline for authors writing transformational non-fiction. I highly recommend checking that out if that is your genre. If you are looking for the report of the author survey which I discuss in this interview, it is contained in both of my free teachable courses on publishing, so I’ve got you covered. Here is the transcript of our conversation: Stephanie: Well. Hi everybody. Welcome to the teleseminar series for the Nonfiction Authors Association. We are excited to welcome Kathryn Guylay today and we're going to be talking about the financial side of publishing and understanding what that is all about. I am your host, Stephanie Chandler. Always happy to have you join us. As a reminder, we do have the phone lines muted and this session is recorded. This event will last 30 minutes and recordings are available to authority and VIP members of the Nonfiction Authors Association and if you're new to us, in addition to event recordings, members receive many additional benefits including exclusive templates, checklists, and other content released every week. Stephanie: Access to our active member forum on LinkedIn, free admission to local chapter meetings across the US, discounts off the Nonfiction Book Awards, The Nonfiction Writers Conference, as well as our online courses and author toolkits and discounts with our partners including Office Depot, PR Newswire, Gabby Press and VSP. For more visit nonfictionauthorsassociation.com to join us. Sorry, I'm fumbling this morning, but now I'm thrilled to introduce our guest. Stephanie: Kathryn Guylay comes to the publishing industry with a background in management consulting as well as nonprofit management, a numbers girl, she received her MBA in 1995 and went on to work with dozens of multinational corporations across diverse industries. She stumbled into the publishing world many years later after writing her first book, Mountain Mantras, Wellness and Life Lessons from the Slopes. She has since written two children's books and her latest nonfiction book was released just weeks ago and it's called Look Before You Leap: The Smart Authors Guide to Avoiding the Money Pit and Achieving Financial Success in Publishing. Her books have gone on to achieve nine awards and Amazon bestseller status. Kathryn, thanks so much for joining us today. Kathryn G.: I am so thrilled to be here. I'm a big fan of yours, Stephanie, so thank you so much for all the great work. Stephanie: Thank you for that. I love that you're helping authors understand the financial side of publishing. I think it's something we certainly don't talk about enough here. So, and you recently put together a survey to gather some information about that. Who is your audience for this survey and what was your goal in creating that? Kathryn G.: Well, yeah, I think it's important to go back to why I even started to do this project. It took three months and several thousand dollars of my own invested money in terms of some VA time and using some survey tools and advanced survey tools because it was a very in-depth survey. We got some incredible data. So my goal really was, because I'm a numbers gal, I wanted to find out if some of the horror stories that I had heard were true. So I'm part of lots of different author groups and even some masterminds where people have confessed their financial woes to me, I even heard of someone going bankrupt. So it's like really? And then Stephanie, I'm sure you've heard, you hear these get rich quick pitches from people saying, go write a book and get rich quick. Kathryn G.: So there were these two stories that I was trying to reconcile the horror stories and then the get rich quick. And so I said, you know what? I'm going to collect data that I know is real and I'm going to work with the data. I've done lots of surveys in my work as a management consultant. So that was my goal was to find out what the real truth is, and so you also asked about the audience. The participants in the survey were actually across three groups. So I did a different survey for traditionally published authors for self-published and for hybrid because the questions were a little different in terms of asking about advances and investments into the company for hybrid. And then just out of pocket spends for self-publishing. Kathryn G.: So it was about 40 authors that bared their souls. I'm deeply grateful to all of them because there was a lot of questions on the survey across eight different sections that they really had to spend sometimes up to an hour going through the survey. And the idea was that I shared all the results with everyone and we all learned a lot. So it was a great process really to get behind these big stories that I was hearing. Were they true? Were they not true? Stephanie: Wow. Interesting. Well, so let's go through some of that data. What were some of the key takeaways you got from the traditionally published authors? Kathryn G.: So traditionally published authors, I have to say that was the hardest group of authors to enroll in the survey. It was pretty evenly spaced, those 40 participants were pretty evenly spaced, but it was harder to get the traditionally published authors even though it was completely confidential. It's really tough to admit to what is happening with advances today. So I was really surprised to hear that most of the authors are not getting advances or are getting very small advances. Kathryn G.: And in general I also ask them happiness or satisfaction questions. And this is really crazy, Stephanie. I wasn't expecting this, but the traditionally published authors were the least satisfied across all three groups. And I would say what I would attribute that to is that, and this is in reading the comments, is that the expectations were really high from the traditionally published authors and what their results were in the end, probably they just weren’t as high as their expectations. Stephanie: That makes a ton of sense to me that expectations in general for authors are a tricky thing because we all want to be super successful and the reality of publishing is it's so much harder than people realize. How about the self-published authors? What were your findings there? Kathryn G.: They are the happiest group, isn't that great? I was so happy to hear that or to see that. And actually, I also asked about some time questions but traditionally published authors, I couldn't believe it because they have these huge teams behind them. They spent a whole lot more time on their book and this is across development and the distribution and the whole marketing and publicity side of things. I totaled up all the hours and considerably more hours for the traditionally published authors. So when we were talking about self-published, they're actually a little more efficient, which is amazing because I always think of self-publishing as being very entrepreneurial. And so you think it's going to be this crazy time investment and it is. Kathryn G.: It was about a thousand hours on average across all three groups. We're talking about a lot of time, but their satisfaction with higher the self-published authors, and here's the downside is that the self-publish author group, as I looked across the data, they didn't save enough money in their budget for marketing and publicity. So the self-published author groups spent the least amount on marketing and publicity and guess what? They sold the fewest amount of books. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense as well. It reminds me of the school science fair where your hypothesis actually matches the results. Unfortunately, that's the tricky reality of all this. What about the hybrid authors? And by hybrid, what is your definition of hybrid? It's a little different for everybody. Kathryn G.: So good to ask that first. What do we mean by hybrid because going back to, you said science, you take a red flower and you mix it with a white flower and you get a pink flower. Well, you can't really mix traditional with self and come up with hybrid. It's actually an animal of itself. I like to use publishing services company as a way to describe the hybrid. It just basically means consulting model or an author investing model into a company. And what I saw there with the hybrid group was the biggest dramatic differences. Kathryn G.: If you looked at a curve, it wasn't normal in terms of happiness factors and things like that. It was really lumpy on one side versus the other. So what I would say about hybrid publishing is that you really need to do your homework before you invest in a hybrid publishing company. There are some excellent ones out there and there were some really great stories and great results in the survey from the hybrid published group. But there are also a couple of horror stories. So it's about doing your homework really in that area. Stephanie: Did you find that some of those horror stories were with the bigger, I call them the big box publishing firms? Kathryn G.: I took out all the names of any companies or any coaches or anything that gave away anything. I took those all out of the findings report. But I know when I was doing the survey was when Tate Publishing went out of business and I knew this for a fact because I was in touch with the author, there was one author that she was just empty-handed. She had paid in already to Tate publishing. I don't know if you consider them... They are a big company, but they are financially unstable. They took no money from authors and then authors got nothing out of it. Kathryn G.: So it was one of those things where you have to really, you do your homework, you talk to people that have used the services before. You make sure that you are investing in the right company and if you can make sure that they're financially stable. And that can be true also of traditionally published authors. And this wasn't necessarily somebody in my survey, I just heard about this as a friend of mine. Their traditional publisher went out of business and so her book was no longer available. So there're all kinds of things with the financial stability of the company itself. Stephanie: So did you discover any financial traps that maybe authors could avoid? Kathryn G.: Oh definitely. And I would say at the top of the list would be to be really careful about a contract. And so that's going to be in the case of a traditionally published author or a hybrid. You are typically signing a contract upfront and I would definitely suggest that you get a lawyer and yes, that is an investment. But there was one very, very clear story from the survey where this person was trying to get out of a contract and it was costing her probably a whole lot more than if she had just negotiated an escape clause into the contract in the first place. I'll read a quote from, this is from my traditionally published author group. It says, be careful negotiating the contract. Find out all you can about using a traditional publisher before you sign. Kathryn G.: And I know the background story to this author, it turned out that she had signed a contract and they weren't going to distribute her book digitally. So her book really wasn't available anywhere as an ebook and she had to buy the rights back for her book. And so it was just a crazy story from that perspective. So contracts involving a lawyer upfront and then going really back to what I was saying about the self-publishing group, not budgeting ahead of time and not having enough for marketing and publicity. That's just another trap is that you just charge ahead and you don't do a complete budget across all the areas of publishing. And then you run out of money, and in the case of the self-publishing group who sold the least number of books, they also spent by a significant amount, the least amount of money on marketing and publicity. Stephanie: Yeah. I always think back when I got my first book deal, I got it myself and without an agent and when they sent over the contract, I wanted to literally cry. It was so overwhelming. It was 23 pages and I didn't understand half of it and I didn't know what I could ask for or not ask for. And so I ended up hiring a professional who helped me negotiate by contract. But boy, that is something you definitely don't want to navigate alone. And the same side on the hybrid publishing, you want to make sure that your agreement is cancelable. I've heard this from a number of authors who've gone with firms that even though they've paid five or 10 or even 15000 or $20000 to have their books produce, they're locked into a contract for up to two or three years, that is outrageous. So that should never be allowed in a hybrid contract. Kathryn G.: Agreed, yes. Stephanie: Yeah, for sure just great data you uncovered. What are some of the positive results for authors who invest in publishing? Kathryn G.: Oh, I got so many great stories and most of it is in the quotes and I'll just pick one. I think this is from myself published group and it starts out with go for it. And then she had a couple of other things that she put in here and then she said, "After I published my book, I had been out there promoting it. I started getting calls from people saying we're looking for someone to come speak to our organization, we're looking for the experts. You've authored a book, we want you." So the idea is that really book publishing is it changing people's lives and it's making them the authority. It's making them the experts and those are the inspiring messages that I got from the survey. And again like the science experiment that you expect it, but I wanted to see that happy satisfaction results. Stephanie: Yeah, that's exactly what we aim for in the nonfiction world here. What about setting a budget for authors who are embarking on self-publishing and traditional publishing and hybrid? Are there different types of budgets for each of those that you recommend? Kathryn G.: Yes, definitely. And again, this is based on the averages and medians and highs and lows and you're looking at the 25th and the 75th percentile and what it did in terms of book results. But I would say to create a professionally produced book, which is really the goal. If you're going to self publish this yourself, you really need to set aside around $7000 for the book development. And that's everything from logistics to the multiple stages of editing. So developmental editing and copy editing and proofreading, and then really getting a great cover and the interior design, all that needs to be budgeted. And I saw the numbers come out to be about $7000. Now if you want to get a coach that it's not included in that number, so you want to make sure that you include any kind of coaching. Kathryn G.: And I saw on average about three to $5000 in coaching across the different groups. Mostly, again, this is paid in for hybrid or out of pocket for settle. And so that's just the development side. But then as you look at the marketing and publicity, Stephanie, I know we've talked about this before and how marketing and publicity time-wise can end up being even more by a huge factor than your writing time, and I've heard everything from four times to 10 times should be spent a time-wise on marketing and publicity. Kathryn G.: Now, if I said that for cost, like you had to spend four to 10 times the budget on marketing and publicity, I think everybody would just completely shut me out because those are huge numbers. But I would say based on what I saw in the results, that if you can set aside another 7000 for the rest of your whole journey, which is your marketing and publicity and you add the website, the blogs, getting on TV, radio, that's where I saw the best results were actually about $7000 there. So we're talking about $14000 in total. Stephanie: Yeah. And I would think, especially if you're talking about developmental editing, that number could actually be a lot higher because depending on the amount of developmental editing you need, not every author needs a higher level of editing, but I've seen that get pretty expensive. So that's interesting. And the other thing about investing in marketing, I always think this is a tricky part for authors because it's really hard to earn back your investment in marketing because books have such a low-profit margin. And that's why I really encourage the nonfiction authors to think about other ways their book will benefit them. Like that comment you just read about the author who is suddenly invited to speak and got these other opportunities. I just want to call this out and encourage authors to be thinking about the ultimate goal and the bigger picture and can you market beyond your book? Are there other ways you can make it earn money? Where are you hearing from authors that any of them were actually making money? Or are there any earnings reports? Kathryn G.: Well, the sad story is that most books do not earn-out. And I have to say, we didn't even talk about the one component which people might be thinking about, and that's also ghostwriting. And so my survey data said that even traditionally published authors are spending around $25000 out of pocket and that's what the traditional deal. So that's another huge component of the budget that one needs to think about if they want to get help there. But no, the answer is that most books are not actually going to earn out on the book sales themselves. But as you teach, Stephanie, and then I hope everybody is learning today, it's all about the back end, it's the products and services that we can sell to our audiences because they really get to know, like and trust us. Kathryn G.: And that's what a book does. I always encourage people when they're thinking about their book and they get all hung up on the price of a book, I always say, you know what? You're not trying to actually just get somebody to spend $10 or $15 on you. You're trying to get them to spend maybe 10 hours or 15 hours on you to consume your content. That's actually the struggle today, so we just need to get into that mindset of it's about building relationships with our audience for the longterm and the know, like and trust factor. Stephanie: Well, and I'm thinking about our memoir authors and a lot of times they don't have companion services and things to sell. So in that case and really for everybody that's a time to focus on book sales. Can you sell a thousand books to corporations or non-profits or other large agencies that will distribute or give away your books and maybe you add their company logo to your cover, things like that. Did you happen to cover any of that with your survey? Kathryn G.: Oh, that would be the specialty sales. That wasn't in the survey, but you're right, that is whether you want to call it selling books by the truckload or just those specialty sales channels. That is really where I'm hearing again, this is more anecdotally, but then I'm hearing success stories and where people actually, when you're starting to sell books by the thousands, you make your money back, for sure. Stephanie: Yeah. What other insights have we not covered that you gained from publishing this survey? Kathryn G.: Well, I just think it's important for people when they start out, they just need to, again, I really believe that happiness or satisfaction, whatever you want to call it, it's like an equation. It's the reality minus your expectations. So if you have super high expectations and the reality is not so great, then your satisfaction is going to be low. So it's important to think about your goals, about your why in general, what your writing in your nonfiction project. But it's also important to set out your financial budget and then be visiting it, at least on a monthly basis. So I would suggest people create a spreadsheet and they say, okay, what are the parts of development whether it's coaching and ghostwriting, which are some of the big numbers to logistics and editing, and design and cover copywriting if they were going to do some of that for the back of their book. Kathryn G.: Some people hire copywriters as well for the back of their book. Just put the numbers in there, take a look at them and make sure you're okay with them. And if you end up spending that, that you're okay. And then for marketing, the website ads it giveaways, awards, review copies. Stephanie, you talk all the time and I think it's so important about, people they need to set aside a number in their budget to have books that they can give people. And that is a cost, it's actually not a soft cost, it's a hard cost. And so from the get-go, having that number in there I think is really important. And the same thing with publicity, just set it out there and you know what? If your book, it just takes off like a rocket and I'm so excited it does. Then you can adjust those numbers up, but at least you have a way to gauge, again that satisfaction equation you've set some expectations. Stephanie: Yeah. And I know you're not an accountant, but the other thing about all these expenses is that you're really creating a business. So these expenses can largely be written off during tax time. Kathryn G.: Absolutely. In fact, I think anyone that's writing a book, especially a nonfiction book, they need to be treating this book, this project, their set of books like a business. And that means getting to know the industry. When I was in management consulting, I didn't just start working on a project without really getting to know the industry well. And we always budgeted that into our whole project, and our process was spending time up front, getting to know, and if I was going into the telecommunications industry and I had just been in a manufacturing industry, I needed to know how that new industry that I was entering, how it works. And what some of the success stories are and what are the pitfalls. It's the exact same thing, if we're treating our books like our business, we need to know the industry in which we're operating. Stephanie: Yeah. And not only that but also just learning some basic fundamentals of starting a business. Because if you aren't already an entrepreneur, which many of our members are, but if you're just starting with your first book, you really are launching a business from the ground up, which has its own pros and cons. Because then you're talking about factoring in writing off utilities and things like that. If you've got a dedicated office space in your home and I think neither of us is an accountant but think that IRS will let you go for, I think it's two or three years before they start to view an unprofitable business as a hobby. So a new business is expected to lose money in the first couple of years. So that really does help to offset some of these expenses. Right, Kathryn? Kathryn G.: Oh yes. I have been in situations where I needed to do that. Stephanie: Yeah. I think every new business owner has been there and so, but that also gives you some incentive to make that spend because it is going to help you offset it at tax time and you're tracking those things and maybe you're hiring additional help with a virtual assistant and it's a great time to get a bookkeeper if you're like me and you absolutely hate numbers. Keeping track of all of that is really important. Are there any mistakes that you recommend that authors try to avoid from all of this? Kathryn G.: Well, gosh, I'm just piggyback off your comment there of finding people to help you. A big mistake is, especially if you're self-publishing is to literally think about it as self. Self-publishing, it's everything but self. Meaning you need a team, you need people to help you. You will be miserable if you try to go this path alone. And I think there is some romantic feeling around getting a cabin in the woods and writing. And we've heard about that, it doesn't work today and whether you want to look at it just like you were saying like, "Oh, I really wanted to find somebody to help me with these tasks." Kathryn G.: You can look at it in almost as a matrix. I look at things on one axis, like what am I good at? And then high, low, and then what do I love to do? High, low. And I can tell you that if I get a low in terms of I like, I don't like to do it and I get a low in terms of I'm not good at it. That's the thing to outsource, so people, do not go it alone. Stephanie: Well, not only that, but I just don't think we should be in charge of any of the protection of our own books. As a former bookstore owner, every day, local authors walked in with their books, wanting to get them placed in the store. And honestly, I think that's what led me to the path of becoming a publisher and working with authors. Because I saw so many books with homemade covers and that old saying we judge a book by a cover is completely true. That can repel readers that make it look like an amateur job and then it's skimping on the editing which will show up in reviews. If you haven't had thorough editing, people are going to notice and they're going to put it in reviews, doing your own typesetting. Stephanie: I met an author a couple of years ago who couldn't wait to show me his book at an event and I literally just flipped through the pages and there were like six different fonts used throughout the book. One paragraph was one font and the next was another font because he thought that looked good and it was so distracting, it was so unprofessional. It was not the way to approach it. So this discussion about the budget is not just a pie in the sky discussion. It's a really important one that if you want the world to take your books seriously, you have to be prepared and maybe start saving now for your future goal of getting your book produced. Would that be a safe piece of advice, Kathryn? Kathryn G.: Absolutely. And a good interior designer and having a budget line item for that would have saved that person's book. The person that gave you that book could have been saved by an interior designer so easily, so quickly. Stephanie: For sure. And I always think back, I came from the Silicon Valley, and I had just made a plan that I was going to quit my job and I was going to open this bookstore and it was a crazy plan. I could admit it looking back now, but I spent a year and a half building a business plan, putting money aside, building a budget and planning for that. And if you're listening to this and you're in the middle of writing your book right now, this is the time to start this planning and prepare for getting the best production possible for your book, and hopefully also investing in good marketing. Kathryn, this has been so helpful. Can you remind everyone where they can connect with you and where we can access your survey data? Kathryn G.: Absolutely. I'll start with the survey data. So that's at my website, makewellnessfun.com and so it's just makewellnessfun.com/authorsurvey and that actually gets you to a 40-page report that summarizes all of the data across this huge survey. And I hope everybody enjoys looking at all the nitty-gritty information there. And then I have a website, makeeverythingfun.com and there, people can access a summit with 27 publishing experts including Stephanie, some great information there and a new podcast called a Positive on Publishing. And then I've got a new course coming out that goes through some of this financial preparation, but just basically industry preparation in general. Stephanie: Fabulous. Well, thank you so much for being our guest today. Kathryn G.: Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for your great work. Stephanie: Thank you. And thanks to everyone listening, we conduct our teleseminars every Wednesday. You can check out the schedule or sign up for the mailing list to get notified about events over at nonfictionauthorsassociation.com I hope you all have a wonderful day.

Major Points: Meditation is for everyone; but the introduction of meditation should be tailored to the audience. One of the major benefits of meditation is postponing an immediate response to a stimulus. Jay started meditating as a child and has continued meditating to the present (with certain breaks). Stephanie: This is Changing the Face of Yoga and this is meditation month. I am going to be talking to people who have different takes on meditation. And I have a very interesting guest today. His name is Jay Cole. Jay has written a book called Calm the Fuck Down meditation for Blue Collars. I have to admit that's a little bit different than we usually think about it. Jay and I are going to talk about his experience with meditation and why he wrote this. Jay's a RYT 200 level yoga teacher. He started with Yoga with Adriene and then went to some classes. He's since decided that he really enjoys yoga and became a teacher. He's also been meditating for 20 years and we're going to ask him why he chose to make this book and why he chose to target blue collars. So welcome Jay. Glad to have you on the podcast. I think you're going to add some stuff that most people wouldn't and I'm looking forward to it. So do you have anything else to add to your introduction? Jay Cole: Well, first of all, thank you Stephanie for having me here. This is a great honor to be on your podcast and a part of anything in the Yoga community. Definitely a fan of this kind of stuff. The intro was great. You've done your research. I don't know. Geez, So, yeah, yoga is like one of like the newest things, I guess to come into my life. So before that, if it helps anybody, I started out as an artist and doing graphic design and I still do that on the side. And I probably did graphic design for like 20 years, the last before getting into yoga even. But then alongside of that I was a musician in a hip hop band. I think I've had three different like rap crews. Yeah. And then I've had my own solo music that I make too. And I dunno, I just, you know, I lived such a hard life and then it was just so interesting to like kind of go from the sex, drugs, rock and roll kind of lifestyle, like live fast and free and hard and, and then, flip flopping completely into a more of a soft kind of existence, you know, in the whole world of yoga. Anyways, the reason I got into that was, oh, I think it was like 2007 I had been talking to my grandfather when he was still alive and I was trying to find out what the illnesses were in my family so I can be proactive about that stuff and kind of get a handle on it early, in my youth, my twenties. So he was saying how the worst thing in our family is arthritis. And so I definitely did not want to get into arthritis cause my dad has it pretty bad. And his arthritis went all the way to rheumatoid, so it's pretty bad for him. It's nasty stuff. So rheumatoid, for anybody who thinks that rheumatoid arthritis is arthritis. It's not, it's literally your immune system. It's like eating itself from the inside out so it your immune system goes, oh, what are these bones doing here, let's get these out of here and it will start to eat away at your bone. They are so brittle, they will break, shatter, release. My Dad's had so many operations. He shattered his ankle and he had like 52 pins put in his leg all the way up to shinbone. It's been reconstructed; he's part robot. Now I call him the cyborg father. Yeah. So yeah, I was like, how am I, what am I going to do about this arthritis thing? And any research that was available online back in 2007 was yoga. That's what everybody said. You know what? It won't make it better, but it'll stop it from getting any worse. And I said, okay, sign me up. But you know what, I don't feel the pain, so not right now. It was probably 10 or so years later, 2015 when I was living in Los Angeles, which was great because the humid, the climate and everything was great. But then something miraculous happened. It actually rained in LA. Well it hadn't rained in probably six months. When that rain hit, the contrast, just the humidity in the air, it just hit my bones like a bag of bricks. I couldn't get up out of bed. I was just in so much pain and I knew what it was. I was like, well this is it. This is the day I have to start doing yoga. And that's when I just started following yoga videos on Youtube and I was falling over all the time and hurting myself. It wasn't working out. I must've watched a hundred different videos and a friend of mine said, Oh, you need yoga with Adriene. That'll fix everything. So I started watching Adriene and, it's still a part of my daily routine. Even though I teach my own stuff and I write my own classes, I still follow yoga with Adriene. It is just amazing and it's good. I mean in between I went to real classes, you know, to learn, okay, am I actually doing downward dog properly? I don't know. In my room by myself, I didn't come in here to look at a mirror on the wall. Okay. So, yeah, taking a few classes, you know, getting some alignment and whenever you're going to a yoga class, whenever you tell the teachers like, Hey, I'm new at this, they're just like, oh yes. I love that. And I love it too because that's your person. This is your demonstration person you're going to use for the whole class, I think it's just  a good bonus to have somebody who's there to be taught to learn. So you're like, no micromanaging every little move that they make. They're like, oh, you could, this could go over here and that could go over. You really, really help someone deepen their practice. I love it when students say that, and they definitely loved it when I came in there saying that I didn't know what I was doing either, and that was it. So 2016 on the end of 2016 I decided I love this. I love doing it every day. I would love that. If this was my life, that's all I had to do. And I went and took the training on Vancouver Island. Stephanie: On your blog, you tagged your book as meditation and mindfulness. Do you equate those two things? Jay: I feel like people who meditate become more mindful after. I wouldn't say that it just happens right away and I wouldn't call meditation mindfulness. It's like a by-product or an after effect that happens.  I find all the benefits of meditation are that way. Whereas you start doing it and over a period of time you start to notice it expanding. It's not just in that hour that you're meditating or 20 minutes or 10 minutes when you're meditating before it starts to creep out into the rest of your life, seeps into everything. So then you get cut off in traffic. You're not freaking out about that person. You're not being reactionary. As a very reactionary person. Back in the day before I meditated. And even when I did meditate, it wasn't full time for the last like 22 years. It was an off and on kind of thing. I would go like little bursts of months, days, but it's been the last two years, two, three years, I've really just gone hard at it. And by doing that now I'm really noticing the benefits of it. I don't know if it's because I'm older, I'm more mature, I have a better head for these kind of things and I can recognize them. But I wasn't seeing it before for what it really was in my youth. Now, today I can definitely feel the benefits of it. Stephanie: So how did you get interested in the beginning? Jay: So an interesting story. When I was about nine or 10 years old, we would vacation at my grandparents cottage on a lake. So it was me and my brother and my sister and then two grandparents would be there. Usually they would have us and my parents wouldn't be there. So sibling rivalry starts happening, little bickering, a little bit of fighting. Next thing you know, it's all out war. All Day, every day. Fighting with my brother and sister and I wasn't having fun. I didn't like it. My grandparents didn't like it. You know, back then they still had jobs. They weren't retired. This was their vacation too. One day I was like, I'm just going to stop fighting. I'm just going to just get away from this and I'm going to go sit on this rock. There are these, that's the other cool thing. There are these giant stones coming up out of the earth. They had pulled as many as they could out with bulldozers and tractors, but a lot of giant rocks are like an iceberg, a piece sticking out on top. But the piece below is far bigger. And I climbed up on this rock. I folded my legs into a full lotus. My Dad taught us how to do full lotus when we were really young. So all of us kids could easily do that at least. I crisscrossed my legs in a little pretzel, close my eyes, I was in it. Fighting went away. Everyone stopped bickering. My grandparents were happier. I was happier. Brother and sister are happier. Neighbors weren't listening to us all yelling and running and there's this calm washed across the land. And that was the beginning of meditation, I didn't know what it was. I didn't know what I was doing. I had seen Ninja movies. You would see like a monk in a monastery meditating before the Ninjas attack and just little glimpses. The Ninja Turtles, a popular cartoon in Canada, they have Master Splinter, he was always meditating. He would tell the Ninja Turtles, oh, I have to go meditate on this problem that we're having. So I okay, all I need. So I sat down on that rock, close my eyes. That was it. People laughed at me and my brother and sister would run over at first and try and get me out of it. And then after a while they realized, oh, leave him alone. And then, my grandmother would step in like, leave Jay alone. He's meditating. Right. They didn't know what it was. Nobody knew what it was, but everyone knew that something peaceful and quiet was happening. That's all that really mattered. And from there I had read, we used to have these like Buddhist magazines, can't remember the name of it, but I would read these magazines. I didn't know any of the Sanskrit terms, words. We're talking like early nineties here. There is no internet to research with, so I was reading these books, not having a clue, but kind of gleaming little bits of information here and there. And I don't know if they helped or just confused things more. The fact is that the existed and I read them. Maybe that stuck somewhere in the back of my head. Now I understand a little bit more. I don't want to say I know it all.. Stephanie: It sounds like you might've had a family though, that you know your dad taught the lotus position and you had these Buddhist magazines around. Jay: No, not at all. My dad had taken karate and so I guess that's where he learned it. He's young and he just taught us how to do this fun thing where we cross our legs and then you could even flip up onto your knees in full lotus and then try and walk on your knees and walk around the living room. My brother would crisscross his legs and I'd cross mine up and then we would like have wrestling matches the first person to like break their legs open would lose. So that's where the Lotus came from. And yeah, the magazines were just something I bought myself. The store, I remember walking in, I remember the first time there was a little magazine store and that's all they sold was magazines and newspapers from all over the world. And I just saw this, somebody was meditating on the cover and I was like, oh, I wonder what that's about. Bodhisattva, that might've been the name of the magazine. Anyways, that's where it all began. I just kept doing it throughout life, like I said, on and off. So throughout my twenties and in my early twenties to late twenties that's when I really got into music. That's when like the sex, drugs, rock and roll started. So there was a lot less meditation happening. I found it really became one of those things like prayer. So you'll hear about people who pray only when shit is going wrong. Right. That's when they reach out and that's when, for me, that's when I would, I would pray. I'm like, okay, I got to meditate on this. You know, go sit down and close my eyes; have a good meditation session. Usually I would come out of it with some kind of like revelation and accomplished something. It wouldn't always be for nothing. I mean there are, there are many days nothing happens, that's for sure. Yeah. But what I like to tell everybody is that those are days also you're training your mind to know that it can be in this state. Doesn't have to be like it says in my book and nail trying to hit a hammer, I mean a hammer trying to hit a nail on the head. Your mind is always looking at everything as if it's a problem. So your mind is this hammer and everything is a nail just constantly trying to bop these nails. When I finished yoga teacher training and I'd gone back to the east coast to Atlantic, Canada, everyone, I guess had seen this like difference in me. Something had changed like, man, your different You're so much calmer now and so much more peaceful. You're grounded and centered and can you teach me how to meditate? I'm like, yeah, I can. But logistically it never worked out that I could teach 40/50 different people how to meditate. Going to their house, each of them. There's thousands of videos online if you're watching. When it got to that point of like maybe 50 people had asked me how to meditate, I'm like, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to write a workshop. So I sat down, I got a PowerPoint presentation and I started writing everything I knew about meditation. And then anytime I had a question I would just do a little bit of research and try and fill in some spots here and there. And then I was like, well, maybe I'll teach people about different kinds of meditation. So then I'm like, okay, now I got to really research. I got to really know my shit. I started figuring out like, what is a mantra meditation , what's entailed with that? What is loving kindness meditation? Was that all about? What's a Kundalini Meditation? I wanted to know what all the different styles do just to get people with a bit of a foundation to go off of if they want research further later on. Kind of like a course. And I put up flyers all over town. I bought Facebook ads, I rented out a center, I had a TV and a big screen set up and PowerPoint ready to go and three people showed up. I was like a little disappointed. Like, man, everybody's been asking literally daily to teach them how to meditate and I told everybody I'm going to do this workshop and everybody's so interested in it and then nobody showed up. So I did a few more of those workshops. It's still literally like three people would show up at the most. Okay, this isn't maximizing the value of my time here or anyone else's to have like three people because in the workshop I had things like I'm sitting there and I'm bouncing a ball and I would throw the ball at someone in the crowd like this is, these are part of the things that I was gonna teach with. I had little puzzles, games that required more than three people to be in the room. So I said, okay, I'm going to just put this on the back burner for a little while and just kind of let it sit there.  It sits for probably a year. And then I decided, oh, I know I'm going to take all the speaking notes from my excel or PowerPoint presentation because with excel you have the stuff that's on the screen. Then you have your own private screens, your speaker's notes and no one else gets to see . So I took all my speaker’s notes with the bullet points, combine those, I'm going to make this into a book. I started typing; got It all formatted, put it into a book. I sat there and I looked at it, I read it and I was like, Oh crap, I've gone and I've written just another generic old meditation book. There are millions of these things. It will end up in the new age section and a discount bin at the bookstore. And I could just see it like, you know, stacks of these books piling up in my house, unable to sell them. So rather than doing anything about it, I just kind of, again, I put on the back burner. I said I'll find a way to do something with this eventually here in Victoria. It is weird for here because it's kind of stuff, it doesn't generally happen here. I find there's more of a high vibe kind of a people that live here. So you don't really find a lot of views that you find in the rest of the country. Especially with like the blue collar workforce. I was walking by a job site and they're doing construction. I heard wrenches being thrown and hitting the wall. Yeah. People cussing, freaking out and fight noises and fists. Then a circle gathering of employees and all stopped what they're doing and form a circle around these two guys fighting and yelling, calling each other down to the lowest. Productivity had completely stopped everybody's on edge. Everybody's tense, the eyes are fighting, wrenches are flying through the air. Like this is a dangerous environment to be in. And almost as a joke it ran through my mind; if anybody needs meditation, these guys do. And that was it. That was my like light bulb moment. So I ran home, hopped on the computer busted opened my meditation book and I just started re-typing the whole thing from scratch. And almost as a joke. I had this voice in my head so it was like a light southern accent. Like, la Matthew McConaughey kind of accent. I don't know why most people associate that with those kinds of jobs and it was in my head so that that's like the first line of text in the book is: this book is best read with a light southern accent, think Matthew McConaughey. You put that in your head and you started reading and then I threw in like there's lots of swear words. But also there's a lot of allusions to the construction industry, labor jobs, things like that. Yeah, I've done a lot of that work myself with my dad growing up and I've worked a few jobs sites and I really, I really hate it. I don't like it. And I wouldn't call myself a worker. I know a lot of people spend entire lives working in these industries to become the best at it. I would go in and I'd put it in my like six hours and okay, I've had enough of this. Not For me. So I know I have the knowledge anyways how to do all the things. At least I had that. So I know about building foundations and building upon structures. How to put up drywall or pouring concrete. Putting shingles on roofs. I've done tons of stuff. I've mixed my own concrete poured it, added extensions on two houses. I've cut down trees in the forest, run the trees through a machine that turns the trees in the boards that you can then build with. We've done it all. So I have a lot to go off of here and I just sat down, and started typing away at this book. It probably took another few, probably six months, to get it all finalized and then sent it out to Amazon and they do their little thing with it. And here we are today. Stephanie: Do you have an idea of what the responses to it is from the blue collar community? Jay: So far it's been pretty good. Stephanie: So you changed the language to attract your target market? Did you do anything else to massage the information to make it more palatable or easier to understand for this group? Jay: Yeah, so I took out all the Sanskrit words, kind of said everything at face value for what it is. Okay. It was a couple times I put something in. If I do, I explain it, that means this. I find when I read a lot of books they'll say like, so like even in Yoga poses and Asana. Asana means pose, right? So I'll find that you'll be reading a book and they'll explain that. They'll be like such and such asana and asana means pose. But then they won't ever tell you that again and they'll just continue using the word asana throughout the rest of the book. You have to constantly keep flipping back. What does asana mean again? Oh yeah. It means pose. I didn't want that to happen, so I figured I would completely remove it. Frequent swear words placed throughout the book. And then the allusions and the metaphors in relation to building and constructing things. Okay, a little bit of humor. My own humor. I mean I did that. I was a comedian for five years. I did stand up five, six years so that never goes away. Stephanie:  If you were giving advice to someone who wanted to do a meditation book that was not going to end up in the bin at the bookstore at half price, what were the most important things that you did that you think made it more successful? Jay: Just because of the process and the progress of it. Like it started out as a workshop and then became a book, then became a second book. Finding your target market is probably the best one. You can write a book about anything. Who is your market? Who are you aiming it towards? What do you know a lot about? Those should be some of the things you should think of if you are going to write a book and I mean any kind of book. I'm working on another book right now. This one I started writing back in 2004, I finished in 2011 and it's just been sitting there. I like it. It's a fantasy book and I like it, but I was like, yeah, I dunno. It's not, it's not anything that I would read. Like I would never pick this up and go, wow, this is awesome.  So I'm in the process now rewriting up, which is thousands of pages longer than my meditation book. I just got through chapter one and it's already the past what my meditation book was. Think about who the end user is. Think about who you want to read this. Who do you think would enjoy it? What do they want to read? What do they want to see? What are ssome of the imagery. What is the age range? You don't want to be using old timey words from back in the forties if trying to reach the new millennials. I feel like it will just hit you one day  and you'll go, oh, I know what to do now. Okay. But they weren't necessarily things I thought of on purpose. Applied it on purpose. Yeah. I guess we could probably use it almost as a business model for other things. Stephanie: When you first started out, you did all these different kinds of meditation, Kundalini Meditation, and is that still in there giving them kind of a broad overview of the different kinds of meditation? Jay: Oh, definitely. I'll bring the book up. There's an introduction. There's a couple stories. Just personal life stories goes into the benefits of meditation. A little section on don't get caught up. Tried and true techniques, physical techniques, positioning of your body, mental techniques, kind of some of the things that you, that people like to think about when they're sitting there, does it, we all know, we've all heard. Everyone thinks that, oh, it's all about just completely emptying your mind and then nothing, just go into this white space. Oh, now you're just the white space. It's not really about that. It's about witnessing the thoughts. There they are. There they go. I don't own them. I'm not getting attached to them, and now they're gone. Whoosh - that kind of idea. There's a few guided meditation ideas there. Uh, some potential hindrances like roommates, neighbors making noise. When you sit down and meditate, it's kind of like running. You start running; you're not really in the groove yet, but after about five, 10 minutes of running like you're okay. Yeah. Now I've got it. Yeah. Then you're in that flow state and just going with it. And it's kind of the same with me with meditating. There's this like rocky road, grumbly challenge to get through it at first and then your through that. For me it's about 20 minutes in and then it's like smooth sailing. Okay. First 20 minutes - oh, what's that itch? Or I gotta do something. So for about 20 minutes, there's a lot of that nonsense going on. But after 20 minutes, it's like smooth sailing. Stephanie: So how, how long do you meditate if 20 minutes is just getting you into it? Jay: I do an hour every morning. That's just what I built up to when I first started getting back into meditation. okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to hit it hard and I got through, you know, five minutes. I was like, okay, I'll build up to it. I understand why people say that. So even when I recommend to people just do a minute. Just do one minute. Set your alarm a minute earlier before you wake up this morning. Get up a minute earlier. Just close your eyes. Just be awake and sitting. And people are like, oh, I'd meditate when I'm sleeping. I'm like, no, it's not the same. It's not the same. You're not training your body that it's okay just be sitting there and not doing anything. Being okay with just being in the room at first. Just be there. Eventually you'll have to be there with your thoughts. Eventually, you'll get through some of the other processes. Yeah, it took awhile. I built up and do an hour. I mean, I've done two and three and four hours. But yeah, at what ends, you know? At what point is this becoming a drug? At what point are you tapping out of life? When are you procrastinating? You can meditate all day', it's not gonna to pay the bills. Stephanie: That's an interesting thought though, that you can really take meditating to an extreme that's not beneficial. Jay: Yeah, so like there's monks who sit and meditate all day. They'll do a 14 hour meditation. That's what they do, right? No, they're not doing, they're not doing yoga all day. They're not working out in the gym. They're not doing pushups. They're not doing a lot of physical, strenuous activity. They're not cleaning houses. They're not biking and running and jogging, just sitting. It's easy to just sit. Your body really doesn't use up that much nutrients or energy when you're just sitting and when you tackle the whole breathing thing. So everything starts with the breath. Then the breath dictates to the heart. Everyone here in Western medicine thinks that it starts with the heart. Actually it starts with the breath. Breath tells the heart what to do and then the heart works for the rest of the body. So when you can tackle the breathing, you can get the heart rate really lowered down to almost nothing. That is the key I guess for long term meditations, and heart health and all that kind of stuff, which I kind of go over that in the book too. Yeah, the benefits. Stephanie: So what would you say was the best benefit for you? Jay: For me, I would say not being so reactionary. Like I was someone that would react, I would react right away. Not really fly off the handle, but, and there's certain people who know, especially with family. People know how to push your buttons. My Dad and my brother could very easily just like make up funny joke about yoga or something about stuff that I'm into. And I would just be so defensive about it and aggressive. No, you don't understand. Oh, it's like this. And they sit back and laugh. We've got them again. Look at Jay's getting all red in the face. Okay. Mr Yogi. Oh, I'm like, Damn, they got me. Through all the meditation that's really just kind of melted away. And I don't just mean with my family. I mean with anything. Get cut off the traffic, beeps the horn at you. I'm like, yeah, whatever. I know we're driving and he keeps going. You can attach to that. You get grumpy, you have all these angry thoughts, you can grab onto those thoughts. You can hold them, keep them with you all day long. You could bring them to work with you and be angry and pissy with everybody. Well, you don't have to, and I feel that meditation is really what has taught me that it's okay to have thoughts. It's okay to let them go. It's like, yeah, anger. Of course, you are angry. You almost got in an accident and all of the problems that are associated with that accident, you don't have to think about them right now because it didn't actually happen. The other issues, so much stress, so much cortisol in your body that is so damaging to everything inside of you. Cortisol is like one of the worst things. Cortisol is there for fight or flight. So when we used to live in the woods, you hear a twig snap your heart rate goes really fast And you get jolted with some cortisol and some adrenaline and you can either run away from the animal or you can stay and fight it. Today, you're sitting in traffic and didn't get hit and your heart's going through the roof and you're angry and this is not supposed to be happening. People watching the news, they’re in their own home, totally safe. Nothing is happening, especially here in Canada. And they're watching all this bad stuff about terrorism bombs going off and violence and people are dying and all this aggression and they're sitting here and they’re clutching the arm chair and they're getting all aggravated and they're yelling at the TV and the cortisol's coursing through their body and all the stress is reacting, it's so damaging. Stephanie: Thank you, Jay. I really think that you've educated us a lot, but you've done it in a very entertaining way, which I always think is helpful. And I love the idea. I love the idea that a meditation book together for people that perhaps we haven't thought of as meditators. So I appreciate you looking beyond what we usually do and adding some new people in. Jay: There's nothing worse than preaching to the choir. Stephanie: So if you would like to talk Jay or ask him a question or something. His website is www.jcoleyoga.ca. His Facebook is jcoleyoga and his book Calm the Fuck Down; Meditation for Blue Collars is on Amazon. Thank you Jay] it was great talking to you again and I think you've really added something to our discussion on meditation. Jay: Oh, thank you Stephanie. It was a blast. Contacts: www.jcoleyoga.ca, FB: jcoleyoga, Amazon: Calm the Fuck Down; Meditation for Blue Collars

Carol Goulding: @Carols10cents | GitHub | Blog | Integer 32 Show Notes: 00:58 - Going Into Business Using Rust 03:42 - Getting Paid to do Open Source 05:31 - Prototyping Projects in Rust 06:21 - Why Rust? (Benefits) 09:58 - The Language Server 14:52 - Error Messages 19:46 - The Rust Programming Language Book 23:35 - Crates.io 27:41 - The Backend 31:11 - Working with Rust and Ember Together 33:31 - Rust Belt Rust Conference 35:59 - Integer 32 Resources: The Rust Programming Language Book The Frontside Podcast Episode 51: Rust and APIs with Steve Klabnik Rust For Rubyists Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers Clippy Cargo rustlings Python Koans Rust - exercism.io No Starch Tokio Diesel Rocket Nickel Iron Pencil Rust Belt Rust Conference RustFest.EU RustConf Transcript: STEPHANIE: Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Frontside Podcast. This is Stephanie Riera. I am a developer here at The Frontside and with us, we have some very special guests. We have Chris Freeman who is a former Frontsider. He is a developer at a startup here in town in Austin called OJO. I'm going to let Chris introduce Carol Nichols. CHRIS: Hi, everyone. Today we've get Carol Nichols. She is involved in a lot of different things related to the Rust programming language. She is on the Rust community team. She is the co-author of the Rust book. She's the co-founder of a Rust consulting company called Integer 32 and she's the maintainer of Crates.io. How are you doing today, Carol? CAROL: I'm great. Thank you for having me on the show. CHRIS: Thanks for joining us. I have a lot of questions for you. I'm very interested in Rust but I am especially interested in some of the stuff you're doing that's kind of ancillary to it, namely you decided to go into business using a pretty new programming language that in some ways, I think is a little bit niche-related to some other things that people might go into business for say, web development. I was hoping maybe you could talk about what is Integer 32? What led you to starting this business? What kind of consulting work do you find working in something like Rust? CAROL: Integer 32 is my husband and I, Jake Goulding and we decided to form this company because we really wanted to get paid to work on Rust. We think Rust is really interesting and that is moving the industry forward and we see a future in Rust. As far as we can tell, we are the first Rust-focus consultancy in the world, which either makes us trendsetters or really stupid. I'm not sure about that yet but we're figuring it out. We consider ourselves pretty qualified to be running a Rust consultancy. As you mentioned, I'm the co-author on the book. I've been working with Rust for a couple of years now. Jake has the most points on Stack Overflow in the Rust tag. We've got a lot of experience in getting to know Rust. We've been watching the development, helping people learn Rust so we are offering a bunch of different services. One is to build an MVP or a prototype for Rust so that companies can evaluate whether Rust would be a good fit for their problem, without diverting their whole team to be able to learn Rust enough to evaluate it properly. We've done some prototypes. We're also interested in doing training and pairing so we have some training, things in the works. We've also gotten some jobs that are adding to open source libraries in Rust. The ecosystem is still being built up and there's a lot of libraries that do whatever the person who wrote them need them to do but they're not feature complete so if someone else just needs that extra feature on some library, they can pay us to add it if they'd like. One of the things I really want to do with my consultancy is have our proprietary work subsidize our open source work because I really wanted to get paid for open source stuff. We have a different rate that we charge for a proprietary versus open source. We've had a few gigs that are adding stuff to open source libraries and I love those because we're not only benefiting the company who needs something but we're benefiting the entire community. CHRIS: When you say you work on an open source thing, do you mean like a company that happens to be a consumer of an open source library would pay you to add a feature? Or is it the maintainers of the libraries themselves are coming to you and hiring help? CAROL: So far, it has been the former but we have talked to some people about the latter but open source projects typically don't have much funding. I think that's a little rarer but definitely, were open to companies paying us to add what they need to a library. CHRIS: Has there been any friction there like you kind of showing up and say a company is paying us to try and add features to your project? Do the maintainers ever pushback or are they very happy to just have someone helping? CAROL: Yes, so far no. All the maintainers we worked with have been amazing. We're not going to come in and rewrite the whole project. We're going to come in and work with their style and make any modifications they want to be able to incorporate into their library. But as I said, a lot of libraries are gotten to a certain point and I think the maintainers would like their libraries to become more feature complete but everyone only has so much time and you don't necessarily know what's useful to people but this is a very, very strong signal that this library would be useful to someone if only it had this little extra thing. I think most maintainers are open to making their libraries more feature complete to be more useful to more people. CHRIS: Yeah, that is a pretty sweet deal from the standpoint of an open source maintainer. It's nice enough when people show up to help at all. It is especially nice to show up to help and aren't motivated by money. CAROL: Yeah. CHRIS: That's very cool. When it comes to prototyping things with Integer 32, what kind of projects are people coming to you and asking you to prototype in Rust? CAROL: A lot of them are existing projects that they have and written in something else that they want to either perform better and be safer as opposed to rewriting it in C or C++ to get performance out of it. Sometimes, they want something to interface with other Rust things. We're starting to see projects like that but mostly, they have a hunch that Rust will be good for their projects and solve some problem they're having with their current implementation. We scope their projects way down to whatever will let them evaluate, whether Rust is a good fit or not and we go with that. CHRIS: Cool. STEPHANIE: Going from there, the question that I have is why Rust? I don't know a lot about Rust so I'd like to know what would be some of the benefits of using Rust, if you're familiar with programming. If you are in web development like I'm familiar with Ember, why would I like to use Rust or learn Rust? CAROL: I could talk all day about this. I really love working with Rust. I feel like it is adding more tools to help me to write better code and taking care of little details that usually I would have to spend a lot of brainpower thinking about to get right all the time. But now I can actually concentrate on whatever it is I'm trying to get done and let the compiler take care of those details for me. The way it's implemented, it happens really fast. The way I got into Rust was I'm a Rails developer previously to this job and I spend a lot of time optimizing Rails, looking for places where essentially too many Ruby objects and memory leaks and [inaudible] a lot of trying to make Rails go faster. At some point, you can't. There's only so far you can take Ruby and Rails so I look at where I want my career to go next and I love making things go faster but I'm terrified of C. I should be nowhere near production C. You have to spend years learning all the quirks and all the ways that C can go wrong and crash and be insecure. Around this time, I know you had Steve Klabnik on the show, in the previous episode. Steve is from Pittsburgh, where I am and he came home for Christmas one year and came to a Ruby meet up and was talking about this new language called Rust and how awesome it was. Steve gets distracted by new awesome things all the time so I was like, "Yeah, yeah, okay, whatever." The next year, he came home for Christmas again and was still talking about how awesome Rust was. At that point, I was like, "There's got to be something to this." At that point, he was writing his book, 'Rust for Rubyist' which has lead into his work on the Rust programming language book. I was like, "Rust for Rubyist? I can handle this. This is something I can do and capable of," so I started reading his book and submitting corrections and things which is again, how I got involved with the Rust programming language book. If you've ever gotten the error 'undefined method on nil' or 'undefined is not a function' in JavaScripts, like in production at runtime that happens all the time. That's just normal in Ruby and JavaScript land. Rust prevents those problems at compile time so there's no null, there's no nil. It's strongly typed so it checks that you have the thing you think you have before your code even can run. There's no garbage collector so you don't have memory leaks. The system of ownership and borrowing and the borrow checker and lifetimes which is weird. It's tricky to get your head around at first because it's different than any other language. But once you get that that's the part that enables your code to go faster without needing the garbage collector. You actually don't have to think about your memory management as much as you would in C, where you have to say, "Please give me some memory." Okay, I'm done with it now. You are manually managing your memory but you don't have to think about it as much because the compiler is thinking about it for you, if that makes sense. CHRIS: I have a follow up question, kind of related to the fact that Rust is kind of performing at the level of C or C++ but a lot more friendly in the fact that both you and Steve and I think a lot of other people, have come to Rust from scripting languages, from higher level languages. I remember at first that I started paying attention on Rust like right before the 1.0 happened, I thought it sounded interesting and wrote it off because it was just insane and I had only ever done Python and JavaScript and higher level things. In a relatively short time, it has developed a level of ergonomics that I'm envious of, even in the 'more comfortable' languages, things like Cargo, things like the compiler is really great but now the compiler has really friendly and informative error messages so that 'undefined is not a function' never happens but when you try to make it happen, it now shows you like, "No, no, no. On this exact line, in this place, this is where you're doing it wrong." But I recently heard it and I'm curious if you know anything about it that there's also development on a Rust language service, kind of like I guess TypeScript test, where it's a whole set of tools that you can run under the hood that any editor can plug into so that you just get this tool box of things to help you develop in Rust that are all packaged up and handed over and all you have to do is hook into it. Have you try that at all? Are you familiar with that? CAROL: I am not. I've been watching but I haven't worked on it and I haven't tried it out yet. I am excited for the language server because it's going to enable IDEs to do more interesting things. Coming from Ruby where it's so dynamic that you can't do things like ensure that you renamed all of the places and method it's called because you can't know that. I've read books like Michel Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code and a lot of the chapters in that talked about leaning on your IDE, on your refactoring tools to do automated refactoring. RubyMine has a few of those things but not all of them because it's just impossible so I'm really looking forward to having real refactoring tools that can let you do automated refactorings and things like that that are possible in other statically-typed languages but with Rust in an IDE. I haven't used an IDE in years because I haven't found them to be useful but once the language server is up and running, I'm thinking about going back to an IDE so it's definitely exciting. CHRIS: That's some pretty cool right now. There's one called Clippy which I love because of the name like it takes you back to my Microsoft Word days. There's a lot of very good stuff that they have added that I didn't expect from a 'systems language' but it has definitely benefited from a lot of things that people in the scripting world have learned. CAROL: One of the goals of 2017 for the core team is increasing people's productivity in Rust so getting people over the learning curve, providing them with tools like the language server and making it easier for people to build things in Rust without having to manage things around Rust. Just Cargo in itself has made systems programming so much better. I see people who develop in C and C++ who really try to minimize the amount of libraries they bring in because that makes your build system so much more complicated and you have to have libraries in the right place and so much more can go wrong. But with Cargo, it's just Cargo install and you have a Cargo.lock and cargo.toml that manages versions. It just work so it's been interesting watching people figure that out and change their opinions on bringing in dependencies with npm and JavaScript and Bower and Ruby Gems that we're all used to like, "Oh, there's a gem for that. Let's just pull that in and go." Systems people have been really reluctant to do that but Cargo is enabling that to be better and easier which is really exciting to watch. I want anyone listening to this who thinks, "I can't do system programming. It was too hard." No, you totally can. You can do Rust. Rust is going to let you do this and that's why Rust is really exciting because it's enabling a whole new group of people to get into the systems programming space where things need to be optimized and faster and letting people build these sorts of things without having the programs be vulnerable to crashes and security bugs and things like that. It's really, really exciting. CHRIS: Very cool. STEPHANIE: I'm curious in Rust, if there's an error, how would you know that there's an error? Is the whole thing going to stop? Is it going to break? Do you get a useful stack trace? What would I expect to see? CAROL: A lot of the errors in Rust are at compile time. It won't even let you try to run your code if you have certain kinds of problems and they tried to move as much as possible into that compile time space. There are always going to be things that you can't catch a compile time like the user enters a number that's too big for whatever you're trying to do. That's still going to be a runtime error because we can't possibly know what a user is going to put in when you're compiling. They've done a lot of work on the compiler errors as Chris was talking about, to make them friendlier and point here's where your error is, here's why it's happening, here's a hint as to how you might want to fix it. This has been really great. I was volunteering in a local code school with students just starting Ruby and I'm used to Ruby's error messages by now but they were just getting started and getting all sorts of errors and I was like, "Wow, these error messages are not helpful at all," and I forgot how bad that is and how confusing it can be for a beginner to just think you understand, think you have got it working and then you go and run the code and it's just like 'string is not a symbol' or whatever. The worst is when you forget to close the block and just expected to see [inaudible] end of file instead and it's not helpful at all. I was just like apologizing the whole time like, "I'm sorry. This is telling you that you need to write 'end' at the end of the file," but it's not telling you that in any way you could possibly know that. That made me appreciate much more all of the work that's going into Rust error messages that are really trying to help. Some people talk about, especially the borrow checker, fighting the borrow checker like they're not used to having a compiler tell them their code is wrong so often so people talk about fighting the borrow checker a lot but it's not trying to fight with you. It's not trying to make you feel bad about your code. It's trying to help you make your code better and prevent errors that might happen at runtime by catching them earlier. I actually have a little project called Rustlings that is full of little snippets of Rust that intentionally don't compile. You run them and you get an error message right away and your job is to read the error message and learn how to fix it. When I was starting out, I was really frustrated because I was trying to do something and I would get an error message and I would have to stop whatever is doing to deal with the error message. I was like, "If I could just get some practice just dealing with the error messages and learning how to fix them so that when I'm trying to do something else, I already have experience fixing that kind of error," so that's how that project came to be and people found that useful. I haven't had much time to work on it lately but it could definitely use more examples because I think people are used to error messages that are not helping. People used to back traces that are really long and don't say anything useful. Sometimes, you don't stop and read and think but the Rust error messages are really trying to help you and often times, they are telling you exactly what you need to do to change the code to work. I think getting practice seeing the compiler as more of a pair who is trying to help you and not someone who's trying to reject all your code is a different mindset that I don't think people are used to but I think it's really useful. STEPHANIE: That's excellent. I was going to ask you if there are any resources or any repos to check out for someone who is interested in getting into Rust. It's funny, last night I was poking around with Python and there's something similar to Rustlings. It's called Python Koans and it's basically like what you're already familiar if you do web development. You want to get your test to pass so it'll tell you, you need to think about this one or you need to meditate on this and then you try to get it to pass and then it says you have reached enlightenment or you have not yet reached enlightenment and you have to sit there and think about it and then run it again. It's very useful in trying to get started with language in a way that you are already sort of familiar with. CAROL: Yeah, I've definitely gotten inspiration from the Koans project that have existed in other languages. There's also an exercism track for Rust that people found really useful and of course, I'm working with Steve Klabnik on the Rust programming language book. We're rewriting the whole thing so there's an existing version that if you go to the Rust documentation and click on book, you'll get the existing version which is complete but the new version is going to be way better. Especially with the explanations of ownership and borrowing, people have said that the new version is way, way better than the old version. Someone even made the analogy of doing medical research and you see that trial case is doing so much better than the placebo case that is not ethical to continue the trial. It's more ethical to stop the trial and use the new thing because it's helping so many people. Someone was like, "You need to replace the old book with the new book right now because it's so much better," but the new book isn't complete yet. The new book is in a different repo which we can put in the show notes so I'd recommend starting with the new book and then working back and forth with the old book once you run out of content. But we're getting closer all the time so hopefully, that should be done and printed by No Starch sometime in 2017 -- CHRIS: Woah! It's being printed by No Starch? CAROL: Yeah. CHRIS: That's cool. I didn't know that. Congratulations. CAROL: I thought Steve mentioned that in the last one. CHRIS: He may have but he talked about it a long time ago and I thought he always meant the old one. How long have you been rewriting the Rust book for? CAROL: It's been a while. CHRIS: Longer than I knew about then, probably. CAROL: It's kind of like software. It's more work than you think it's going to be and estimating, it's going to be done when it's done. If you kept telling people, "It's going to be out on this time," and like Steve, "There's no way it's not getting done by then," so now he's not allowed to say it when it's going to be out. CHRIS: Nice. CAROL: I'm really grateful to see this opportunity because I don't think I would have written a book on my own and I'm learning a whole lot about the process of writing a book. It turns out there's a lot of editing, a lot of back and forth, a lot of trying to build a narrative through this long stretch of text so that you're building on top of what you've already covered and not introducing things that aren't mentioned. It's a lot of work and I'm learning a lot and I have no idea when it's going to be [inaudible] because I think there's more work that I still don't know about coming, as we get closer to going to print. It's definitely one of those things that you can't make agile because you've got to put it on paper that costs money and it's going to be around a long time at some point. It's definitely a different kind of working that I'm used to with software. CHRIS: Although, I have to say, I clicked around and I think this is the new version: Rustlings.Github.io/Book. Is that the new one? CAROL: Yes, that's the new version. CHRIS: There is a lot here and it's not quite what I would have expected to see here like it's not done yet. I've been clicking links and I have yet to find one that says 'to-do'. CAROL: I think 15 through 20 are like outlines right now. We're maybe three-quarters through with the content but then we have to go through revisions and editing and copyediting. CHRIS: I'm looking at the headings and I was a big fan of the first Rust book but I can already see it calling out things I wish had been hit on more specifically in the original book. There's a lot of good looking stuff here so I'm excited about this. I'm going to go and read this thing. CAROL: I'm excited for people to read it. CHRIS: Earlier, you were talking about one of the things that is really nice about the Rust tooling is that Cargo makes it really easy to bring in dependencies. I happen to know that you are recently, I believe the maintainer of Crates.io which is where all of Cargoes crates, which are the libraries are hosted. Is that correct? CAROL: That is correct. I have commitment Crates.io now which is very exciting. Crates.io is like Ruby Gems or npm. It's the site where people publish their libraries and you can go and search for a library for what you need. As part of the Rust 2017 goals, we want to make it easier for people to find high-quality libraries that do the things they needed to do. I've been doing some work on adding badges and categories. Rust makes major decisions on the language and on things through an RFC process, which I think Ember is doing now too. I forget which way we stole that. Do we steal it from Ember or did you steal from us? I can't remember. CHRIS: If I remember right, I think -- I could be wrong, Twitter -- Ember did it first. Rust borrowed it and then added the 'how do we teach this?' section. I think Ember took that back and added it to their RFCs. CAROL: Okay, I'm super excited about that section. Now, when you propose a change of language, you have to go through this RFC process where you write up what you want to change, why you want to change it, any downsides, any alternative designs. Then the community talks about it and makes comments when you revise it and things like that. Now, there's a new section that just got added. That's 'how do we teach this?' Before something can be stabilized in the language, you have to document it. This is still kind of starting to take effect but I'm super excited about it because people can't use something unless they know how to use it. Right now, Steve's the only person getting paid full time to work on the documentation and I need him to write the book so I'm excited that more people will be thinking about documentation and thinking about how to help people use their new features. Anyway, I have an RFC about how to rank Crates within a category that we're trying to work through. In some automated ways, we can recommend different Crates for different purposes. I'm working through that with the community to try and figure out how to best recommend Crates in different circumstances. Crates.io is written in Rust and it performs really well. It just got added to the Heroku things so you can deploy it too. Looking at the analytics and their response times for is just like the Ruby apps I work on would be thrilled to have these stats. The backend of it is Rust, the frontend is Ember and [inaudible] who was an Ember person is also interested in Rust and he thinks Rust on the backend and Ember on the frontend worked really well together. He's always trying to figure out ways that we can work together. Crates.io is an existing project that I'm still learning Ember. There's lots of words I don't really understand about like components and Bowers. I would love Ember help on Crates.io. I'm starting to pull out issues that would be good at first time issues or more Ember-focus or I have some idea of how to fix that I could help someone fix. I'm starting to tag those things with 'has mentor' in our labels so I love for people to come check out issues on Crates.io who know JavaScript and know Ember and might want to get into Rust because there are definitely some issues that need a little bit of frontend, a little bit of backend so it might be a good way for people to get into Rust. CHRIS: Very cool. I'm personally very interested in that and will likely hit you up. But I'm sure many of our listeners will as well because I think we have a lot of Ember-friendly listeners so look Carol up because it sounds like she could use some help. Actually, I'm curious, the backend, I know that pretty recently, Rust has kind of gone through this period of kind of explosion in terms of Rust as a web language. There have been a number of different things that have come out pretty recently for a web framework in Rust or there's that Tokio thing. I know Diesel is like the ORM for Rust in talking to databases. It looks like it's about to hit 1.0. There's a lot of stuff happening so I'm curious, what are you using to write the backend. I know you're using Rust but are you using one of these frameworks or have you rolled your own? How's that work right now? CAROL: Crates.io is one of the first web apps that has been written in Rust. Actually, if you look at the backend code, you'll see SQL being built by hand. It's going to the Rust postgres library so it has SQL injection protection. All the things are [inaudible] so don't worry about that but they're still like SQL with the Rust code so it's not using an ORM yet. I'm going to have to look up. There is a library that is using that I'm blanking on the name of it for but it's very low level. It just let you send HTTP requests and let you respond to HTTP. We're in kind of a Cambrian explosion period with Rust web frameworks. There's a lot of different ones. One that I'm excited about that I haven't gotten to tryout yet is Rocket. That was just released. The thing I love about Rocket is that everyone's really excited about it because it was announced and they have an awesome website with lots of awesome docs so that should be a lesson to any open source project that's launching is if you want to get excited about it, you've got to launch some docs. That will help so much. There's a lot of different frameworks happening. They're still little trilobites and little animals that can't walk on land on their own quite yet so there's still no Rails. There's the pieces of Rails. There's Diesel which would act like a record. There's Nickel and Pencil and Iron and Rocket. Tokio is the async framework that is getting more and more stable by the day. We got to try it out on a project recently and it's pretty fun. I still am working on wrapping my head around promises and futures and working in that way but I think as that stabilizes and people use that, that is going to cause like another explosion of libraries that enable really fast but safe web backend stuff, which I think is really exciting. If you're looking for the Rails experience of being able to plug things together and nicely, just declare a few things, it works but not quite there yet. But if it excites you to try out new things and figure out the best ways to do the things you want to do in Rust, this is a great time to jump in and help. CHRIS: I will say the Rocket website is beautiful and it even has this templating section, a testing library section. This is very exciting. It really looks like as the closest thing to a Rail-style web framework that I've seen in Rust so far. People should definitely check this stuff out. I'm curious, I know a lot is really interested in Rust and Ember, which doesn't surprise me because lots is really interested in Ember in general, which I think is awesome. But is there anything specific about working with the Rust and Ember together that seems, especially well suited or even like some gotchas that you guys have run into? One of the things I'm thinking of is like Ember is really big into JSON API spec and I don't know if Rust has a JSON API library for serializing things in that format. Is that something you guys have to tackle at all? CAROL: There might be. I'm not sure. Crates.io is using the Rust API adapter for Ember so we might not be keeping up with the latest of Ember. But I know there are people who want them to interface them better with each other. Actually, that's an interesting thing. Both Ember and Rust are on a six-week release trains sort of things so the way Rust people will say -- I don't know if Ember people do -- is stability without stagnation so they're both changing. Rust has backwards-compatibility guarantees so the code you wrote with Rust 1.0 is still going to compile today. You might have some warnings and there's probably new cooler stuff that you could switch to but it's still going to compile. I'm not sure about Ember's upgrade path things. Someone just sent in a pull request that we merged like three days ago to upgrade us from two Ember point versions. There were a couple of things that like [inaudible] and we weren't doing quite right and we had to fix. It's been interesting to kind of fit together, keep both of the sides, update it and upgrade it and continuing on using the best things. But I think they have similar philosophies around making things better all the time. CHRIS: Yeah, the whole stable upgrade path and backwards-compatibility guarantees is definitely mirrored on the Ember side of things. I can see that being a little kind of comforting place to be knowing that both your frontend and your backend are not going to suddenly just break on you one day because some new feature came out that breaks your router or something. That's very cool. One of the thing that I know you're involved in -- you're involved in a lot of things -- when it comes to Rust, it's very cool. But you also run or a co-run a conference, right? Rust Belt Rust? CAROL: Yeah, we had our first year in 2016 in Pittsburgh. I ran Steel City Ruby before then so I love running conferences and I love having them near me one, because it's convenient and I get to trick all of my friends into coming to visit me. But two, because there's a lot of tech stuff happening in the Rust Belt and places that aren't San Francisco or New York. People don't necessarily know about that and people who live here don't necessarily have the opportunities to travel as easy to conferences. I sort of start Rust Belt Rust, one because of the pun opportunity and one of our speakers drew a little bar graph. There were three conferences last year. There was Rust Fest in Europe which has [inaudible] amount of Rust. There's RustConf, the official Rust Conference in Portland that has a lot amount of Rust and then Rust Belt Rust has double the amount of Rust in its name so we're the Rust-serious Rust conference. We're going to do it again, in 2017 we're going to move it to a different Rust Belt city. I'm not going to say which one yet but we're closing in on a date and a venue in the Rust Belt city so watch out for an announcement on that. It was a lot of fun. We had a day of workshops and then a day of single-track talks and a lot of time for conversation. A bunch of the core team members came out and it was fun talking with a friend of mine who was trying out something with Tokio. This was in October so Tokio was still working towards their first big release and he was trying to do something with Tokio. I looked over and I saw Carl Lerche, Alex Crichton and Aaron Turon standing together and talking like 30 feet from us and I was like, "If only the three people working on Tokio were nearby to answer your question --" so he just walked over and talked about Tokio with them. I love getting people together to talk to other people working with things, talk to the people who are working on the things they're using and meeting the people behind the names on the internet so I love running conferences and having events like that. STEPHANIE: Carol, you have a Rust consultancy called Integer 32. How is that going? CAROL: It's going pretty well. We're learning a lot. One of the reasons I wanted to start it is because I felt like I wasn't learning more in my job. In my Rails job, I felt like I had kind of tapped out with that knowledge. In starting a business, I get to learn a lot of stuff like sales and marketing and taxes and invoices. Sometimes, I even get to program a little. We're still learning how to effectively find our target customers. We do have availability, if anyone listening is interested in hiring some Rust experts. Right now, I'm trying to figure out when can we bring more people on the team. I'm trying to decide if we can have an intern for the summer. It should be fun so yeah, it's going pretty well. It's been a slow build but we're lucky enough to have savings and be able to spend some time building our business but it's been really gratifying to feel like I'm in charge of my destiny somewhat, as opposed to the whims of a company. STEPHANIE: And if I were interested in some Rust consulting, what would be the best way to reach you? CAROL: We have a website at Integer32.com and a contact form on there. STEPHANIE: Thank you so much for speaking with us, Carol. It was a pleasure. I feel like I learned a lot about Rust. CAROL: Thank you for having me. STEPHANIE: All right, y'all. That's it from us. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time. Bye-bye.

Lydia Guarino @lydiaguarino | data.world | GitHub Shannon Byrne @s_byrne | Blog | GitHub | shannon@emberitas.com Stephanie Riera @stefriera | The Frontside | GitHub Show Notes: 01:23 - Emberitas 02:50 - Developing Curriculum For Women By Women 10:16 - Pairing People Together 12:14 - The Volunteers and Support 18:42 - Getting Women to Attend Meetups 23:20 - Icebreaking Exercises 27:42 - Takeaways From the Event 33:35 - The Future of Emberitas 36:10 - Favorite Parts of the Event Resources: @iheartemberitas Ember ATX Women Who Code The Iron Yard Tilde Women Who Code Austin Slack Community We Speak Too ember-women Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast Episode 52. We're coming to you live from Frontside HQ where we can help you zero in on that precise experience that you want for your users. So, if that's something that you're interested in, go ahead and reach out to us at Frontside.io. Today, actually we got a pretty large panel today. It's a hardcore Austin posse - Lydia Guarino, Shannon Byrne, and Stephanie Riera. And we're going to be talking about kind of a passion project of theirs called Emberitas. We're going to be digging deep into it. But before we get into that, I want to introduce everybody. Lydia is a product engineer at Data.World which is a social network for your data. It's actually a really cool startup where you can go and you can upload your data and you can see other public data sets and slice and dice them. It's really cool. Shannon, who has been a developer since 2013, is kind of in the startup scene and been ubiquitous certainly in the circles that we've run in here in Austin. And so, her latest gig has been as a code school instructor teaching JavaScript and Ruby on the full stack. And of course, you've heard Stephanie on the podcast many times. She's a developer here at the Frontside. Without further ado, let's talk about Emberitas. What exactly is Emberitas and how did it get started? SHANNON: Emberitas is a 1-day 2-track workshop for teaching Ember to women. Last year, what was it? Like April maybe of last year, or maybe March, we were at an Ember ATX meetup. Brandon and Charles were talking about how to get more diversity into the Ember meetup. And then, of course, Lydia and Stephanie and I, as sort of the token ladies of Ember ATX, kind of huddled in a circle and we talked about how other communities in Austin were doing things. And of course, there's Rails Girls which is a 1-day workshop to teach girls programming through a little bit of Rails. We were like, "Why not do the same thing with Ember?" And so, after that, we just kind of picked up on everything, split up a lot of the work, decided we were going to do it, and made it happen. And we hosted our own 1-day workshop for teaching women who had no knowledge of coding some of the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript through Ember. And then taught other women in town who maybe were using Angular or had some experience with Rails or whatever, but didn't know what Ember was, the basics of Ember, so that they could then take that back to their companies and make more Ember jobs for all of us. CHARLES: For someone who's worked on trainings before and tried to develop them, how challenging was it to develop a curriculum for women -- literally, all spectra of experience with development. It sounds like a difficult task. And I'm curious what considerations did you take in when you were developing this curriculum and what did it encompass? LYDIA: One of the things that we did to make that a little easier on ourselves is we split the workshop into two tracks. We had a beginner track and then we also had an intermediate track. Shannon ran with the intermediate track and I ran with the beginner track with an understanding that for beginners, there's a lot more discussion about some of the basics of web development in general or how you think of a project and how you start with the basic building blocks of HTML and CSS, and then grow into building an application. For the beginner course, what I wanted to focus on was taking those basic building blocks and showing how they can be converted into an application. We actually started with making static web pages and then converted those gradually in pieces into an Ember application. Ember actually makes that pretty straightforward to do because there's such strong conventions that there's obvious places to put all of that information. So, we built everything in HTML and CSS, and then we came back and layered on Ember on top of that but the project was the same in both scenarios. And I'll let Shannon talk a little bit about how she approached the more advance course. SHANNON: For the intermediate course, one of the challenges was that it was very open as to what that would mean. It wasn't intermediate Ember; it was an introduction to Ember for anyone who considered themselves a developer. So we had some people who came in and they had a little bit of JavaScript experience and then we had some people who were already full stack JavaScript developers and then some people who had experience with like an NPC framework. People were kind of coming from all over the place, was my expectation. And so, it was kind of difficult to approach that, to be honest. I wasn't really sure what to do and I had a lot of false starts as, I'm sure, most people do who kind of create tutorials. Now that I'm working on curriculum for a code school, the same thing happens. There's definitely a lot of after the fact, being like 'duh'. Now I know I should have done it this way. But the way that I approached it was really just a result of conversations that Lydia and I had been having for years, which is how there's sort of some unique differences on what we've seen for how women kind of communicate and learn a little bit differently especially when they're in our classes and the experiences cater just to them. So, I just kind of went off of that and said, "Okay, how do I like to learn?" And then kind of applied that to how I developed the curriculum. It was a lot of, "Well, you might think we could do this, but actually that doesn't work. Let's try this." And so you go through it and it's kind of like a lot of false starts, a lot of learning together, a lot of like having these tiny little frustrations that you normally have when you're coding, and then achieving something together. And so the ultimate goal of both the beginner curriculum and the intermediate curriculum was not to teach everybody everything about Ember in one day, but to give them the confidence that they could go out and do whatever they wanted with Ember or just explore more about development in general, after that workshop. CHARLES: That makes me curious, Shannon, if you can unpack that a little bit more. You said that there were challenges and things that you took into account in developing this curriculum that was specifically for an all-woman studentship. Can you elaborate on that? What were some of the concrete things that you made that you custom-tailored? SHANNON: To be completely honest, there weren't a whole lot of things that I could really custom-tailor. It was more just thinking about the things that I had witnessed in terms of working with women specifically, and seriously as a result of the conversations that I've had with Lydia, trying to be much more conversational, trying to allow the questions that generally arose sort of drive what we did instead of being very rigid about how we did it, and the approach that I thought was going to work. And generally, just kind of being like quick on my feet and allowing the course to go at the pace that it should go and not trying to force anything, and really mostly trying to read the room and understand that we might not get to everything in one day. LYDIA: From the very beginning, from the very conception of this idea, we wanted to build something by women for women. And so, it was really important that we chose female instructors which is one of the reasons that Shannon and I volunteered to be the instructors ourselves when maybe we would have wanted to seek someone else to take that piece of it. But this is something that we were personally passionate about and we knew how we learned Ember and how we could translate that into something that would be accessible to the broader community of women in Austin. So, we did some targeting with specific groups in Austin that were women-driven. So, Women Who Code has a big following in Austin and we reached out to that community and we made sure that all of the sessions were, like Shannon mentioned, collaborative. For instance, in the beginner course, everyone worked as partners. You weren't just sitting there by yourself isolated with your own level of knowledge, you have somebody to bounce ideas off of you, you have somebody right next to you to ask your little secretive questions where you're a little embarrassed to raise your hand but you need someone to quick correct you. I also made sure that when I was teaching the course itself, it was less lecture and more tutorial which allowed me to walk around the room and actually speak to each individual pair about where they were in the process. So, instead of losing people throughout the course because they had slipped behind, I knew where everybody was for the entire day. While that slows down the overall speed for some of the faster people, it meant that we didn't have anybody take off at lunchtime which is a problem for a lot of workshops as somebody gets so far behind that they just give up. That was something that we wanted to try really hard to avoid with this particular workshop. SHANNON: Another thing that I want to say, if I can go back and fix my sort of bumbling before about what I specifically did. I thought about something I actually specifically did. In a lot of online tutorials, what I found is that it will tell you to do something but it doesn't quite tell you why. And answering that 'why' question is something that's always really important to me when I'm learning something new, so I added a lot of that into the tutorials that we did. Either out loud I would explain it or I would say, "For anyone who's interested, there's a link in the curriculum that will tell you exactly what that is," a much longer explanation of what a computed property is, why that works, and sort of even some of the internals in JavaScript if people were curious in learning that, to answer that why question for attendees. CHARLES: The 'why' is a question that unfortunately gets such short shrift in almost everything that we do. It's like shocking unless you see the absence of why. The other thing I wanted to ask too, Lydia, was you talked about making sure that everybody was paired up so that nobody got behind. Were you deliberate in kind of making sure? I know you had something like 40 students in the first one, so it can be difficult to kind of assess the skill level of each one. But were you able to be deliberate in those pairings and to kind of match people with a productive set of skills? LYDIA: I think that it's actually a little bit dangerous to have people label themselves before they get into a project. So instead of saying 'hey, if you've had some experience here, maybe work with somebody that's never seen this before', I tried to avoid that. So I actually let them choose their partners -- rather I just assigned them based on where they were sitting in the room. And for any kind of gaps we had there, if I had one pair where those people had way less experience than another group, we had an army of volunteers that were available to come and kind of sit down next to one of the pairs and help them work through the pieces. And I think that that's one of the major things that helped the day running smoothly because instead of having to have me come over and help them over and over again, we had somebody that could kind of more quietly come over and sit down and work through the tougher pieces or if someone got stuck on a bug, help them untangle it. CHARLES: I think that's fantastic because having participated in running trainings before, I know that's one of the biggest challenges of keeping everybody together and moving forward in unison is making sure that everyone can do things like do an npm-install. I had an entire training derailed because one person just could not figure out how do it. It was basically just Brandon and I and it was terrible. I guess the question is how many volunteers did it take to make that go smoothly? And I guess the follow on question is do you think that's indicative of kind of the Ember community at large when you guys proposed this event that you were able to really draw on this large pool of ready volunteers to show up? LYDIA: The volunteers were actually a strategic move that Shannon and I spoke about early on which was that part of what we wanted to do is show how welcoming and how supportive the Ember community in Austin is. And so, most of the volunteers that we had on hand were actually members of Ember ATX that were interested in increasing diversity as well. So these were people that they could meet in events and people that would encourage them to come back to a meetup next month or whatever. And you could see these are like really approachable, fantastic people and they're ready to help and they're excited about having you join our community. To keep it running smoothly, to answer that question, we were kind of split. Shannon's had a little bit more people in it than mine but I ended up having close to 20 people. So I had 10 pairs. I actually had almost as many volunteers as I had pairs. So we had some drifters floating between the two classes. But at any given time, I had at least five people running around the room in addition to myself. So, that's a lot of volunteers to coordinate, but we actually had a lot of support from Ember ATX and from people that really wanted to help out. SHANNON: That's a huge ask to ask 10/15 people to come out for the whole day on a Saturday. Even for attendees, that's a lot to ask people to do. And to have so many people from the Ember community in Austin come out and do that, I don't think -- maybe there was one volunteer, Lydia's husband, who didn't know any Ember. But everyone else was from the Ember community and either did Ember professionally or as a hobby, so it worked out really well like that. I was really glad to see that because the whole reason that I do Ember is because of the people that I met at the Ember meetup and I keep going back. And that warmth that I feel about the Ember community is kind of why I feel so great about doing Ember and why I choose to do Ember professionally is because that feeling that I have kind of follows me around while I code in Ember which is kind of silly. CHARLES: I don't think it's really silly at all. I think that's so much of the pervading narrative is that technology is about technology when in fact it's about people in the community. And I think it's great that kind of almost as just by virtue of holding the event and having those volunteers, what you're giving them is not just a set of tools but also you're kind of giving them a small part, that being the benefit of it is giving them this community. SHANNON: What was really excellent too and I think what made us be able to kind of coordinate with the volunteers really well is that Lydia and I were running the classes but Steph was really in charge of coordinating the day and making sure that things run smoothly and making sure the volunteers knew where they needed to be and where they could be most helpful because our challenge was that we actually were in two different spaces. We were able to get space donated to us by The Iron Yard but the Iron Yard campus in Austin is actually like there's kind of a field between their two locations where the classrooms are and where their main space was. And so, what kind of happened was that without Steph kind of like wrangling the volunteers into the right place, the volunteers were kind of forgetting that there was this kind of second intermediate location to come to. And so, I'm so thankful that she was able to be there and just be focused on coordinating the day of type stuff to make sure that everything ran smoothly. STEPHANIE: Thank you, Shannon. That's so sweet. I did want to make a quick mention about the volunteers. I feel like, especially in our industry, we hear a lot about the "brogrammer" and we give a lot of slack to men, particularly white men in the tech industry. I think it's very important to highlight most of the volunteers that we had were all men. And it's these men that are spending their Saturday there to coach and teach women. I think it's a very beautiful thing to see because a lot of these women, I think, they are intimated by going to meetups and going to hackathons because they feel like it's not an inclusive environment and they can't ask questions in a room full of guys. I think that's indicative of 'that's not always the case'. Yes, there might be a problem in the tech industry but there are also people that care and you can see that through the volunteers. SHANNON: It's no lie that the three of us were really the only girls at Ember ATX until we put Emberitas on. We didn't have a large pool of experienced -- not even experienced Ember developers, but even people who had just sat down to try out Ember in Austin who were female to pull from. And so that was always the go-to was to make this so that we could have this be able to diversify Ember ATX in one way by bringing more women in, but also just to make the community stronger overall. I'll say again the Ember community is far and above the best programming community in Austin and I wanted to make sure that every other girl at least had the opportunity to know why I rave about Ember meetups and the Ember community and everything about Ember. And that doesn't just go for Austin, obviously. To shout out as well to Leah, who already does so much with Women Helping Women in Austin, Tilde actually donated a bunch of extra swag to us from the Ember Conf from last year, Ember Conf 2016. So, that saved us a ton of money that we got to use towards other stuff. And then saving money on that, then we got to do a happy hour after that we also invited sponsors and the rest of the community, too. We had a bunch of Ember community members who weren't able to spend the day with us volunteering but they still came out and had a couple of free drinks and got to chat with all the attendees as well. So overall, the whole day was really fun and full of Ember community members. CHARLES: Personally, I'm so sad that I missed it. I was out of the country although it was on my birthday. So, it was like a good birthday present to know that that was like going on in my community back home. Having not been to so many Ember meetups since, have you all noticed and I guess this is really just kind of a question for the four, have you noticed real traction like an uptick in the number of women in attendance and kind of an increase in that level of interest from women in the community at large? LYDIA: The meetup right afterwards had a pretty major uptick because a lot of the people that had come in through Women Who Code and are already kind of avid meetup goers took a chance and came to the meetup. And I've seen several of them come to a couple of the other ones throughout the year. There's at least two people that I've seen repeat show up a bunch of times. When you've got a meetup of about 40 people and even if you just increase it by two more, that's like actually moving the needle pretty significantly. The trick about increasing diversity, that's a little bit above chicken and the egg problem, is that the best way to get women to attend is to have women attend. And so, you want to have some women in the room when other women come for the first time because then it becomes a welcoming environment and you can start kind of the snowball effect of, "Okay, I'm welcome here. I see that this person is comfortable in this setting. That means that I'm going to have an easy time integrating here as well." SHANNON: The timing in terms of -- if we were to do this again actually, one thing I'd improve is to make sure that all three of us could be at the upcoming Ember meetup and that we plan to do it the week before the Ember meetup, so that energy is high and all that kind of stuff. But I think there was something that prevented each of the three of us from maybe even being at that next Ember meetup which really was not a good idea. Maybe one of the three of us was there. So, that's something that I'd like to improve upon is being more strategic about fulfilling on that goal. And then another thing that I'd like to do as well like we have Women Who Code slack channel here in Austin and we have an Emberitas room now and we do actually chat on there. And I'd like to incorporate that into what we do as well, is having a community for the women who met there to continue speaking online, so that we can develop that community and I can post in there and say, "Ooh, there's an Ember meetup tonight. Let's all go." But I know a lot of them. I think a lot of them went to an event together that I didn't know about. When Yehuda was in town, I think a handful of people talked about going to that and they met up through the Women Who Code Ember room. So, that's cool. CHARLES: That's fantastic. I actually think this is a good opportunity to plug something that I learned about through [Emily], who is Alex's girlfriend, is the WeSpeakToo which I think is another good way. You talked about that Catch 22, the chicken and the egg of the best way to have women to attend is to have women attend. I also think the best way to have women attend is to have women speak. And to see that in terms of leadership, there's representation there. And so, there's a tool that I just found out about that I think is really cool that helps kind of solve that Catch 22 or lower the friction if you were a meetup organizer. You can go and you can find there's a list of women in Austin, it's only in DC and Austin, but it's coupled with an analysis of the ratios of female, male, and non-binary speakers in Austin. There's a signup sheet where you can go if you're a woman or you're non-binary and you can sign up and you can enlist your levels of expertise. And if you're a meetup organizer -- you hear a lot of people say, "Where do I find someone who can speak at my meetup?" And so, that tool exists now. Everything's for Austin. If you go to wespeaktoo.org/austin, there it is. I certainly hope the three of you guys are on that list if you're not already because I've seen each one of you speak and there's a lot to share there with the community. And so, if you're listening too, I think it's also a good resource if you're in the DC area or in Austin area or if you want to bring it to your own city. Anyway, I just wanted to share that as what I thought is a cool tool. SHANNON: And to plug another list too. I have to get the URL, I don't know it off the top of my head. But Leah for Women Helping Women put together a list of female Ember speakers to make that available to all the Ember meetups. But even if you're a non-Ember person, these are a list of really great speakers. Some of them spoke at Ember Conf last year, other people who put in their proposals and then other people who were just like interested in speaking locally. She has that list somewhere and I'll try and find the link to it. CHARLES: I will definitely look for that. The other thing that I wanted to talk about before we moved on was we've talked about how you paired people up, you talked about kind of a tight-knit community you created and they were going not just Ember meetups kind of user group but also the bonds that were formed were maintained as they went to other meetups. When we were talking about this part of the podcast, you mentioned some of the icebreaking exercises that you did but you didn't give any specifics. You didn't give any details. I want to hear about this and I want to hear what the best ones were because I'm so curious. Again, I'll just throw this question up. What was it that you did to kind of break that ice and what were the best results that you saw? SHANNON: The icebreaker was actually a little bit of a happy accident. We had budgeted time for an icebreaker at the beginning and it was something that kept slipping down the priority list until the morning off. And on the morning off, we had discussed different brainstorming ideas beforehand but we hadn't settled on anything. And in the morning off, we were like, "You know what we should do is we should have them as a group act out programming terms or programming concepts." As a group, they had to decide on a way to explain some programming concepts like a wow loop or http or something like that. They had to describe that physically. STEPHANIE: Also, we use HTML too which is a hard one. CHARLES: Did you just write them on cards and hand them out to people? LYDIA: Yes. I literally was scribbling a list as people were walking in of terms that we thought would probably possibly work. And then we've split them up into groups and passed them out. I have to say people came up with the most creative things. It went so much better than I would have ever dreamed. CHARLES: Is any of this on video? What was the best one? SHANNON: I have the wow loop dance. I think it's posted on the Emberitas instagram page that you can all go check out. It was so funny. They all went up there and while one of them was clapping, all the rest of them had a dance. And then when she stopped clapping, they'd stopped dancing. And so, it's really straightforward but it was just hilarious and sort of the big personalities of some of the extroverts in the room were given their chance to shine there in the morning and I was laughing so hard. It went a lot better than I think we expected it to since we had done zero preparation. LYDIA: That said, Shannon put together a fantastic survey at the end so that we can kind of gather feedback on how to make this better in the future. And we had several comments about the icebreakers themselves. And one of the things that we might want to tweak in the future is exactly how we let different people participate in that activity because some people that were a little bit more reserved, a little bit shier like starting out the day with basically public speaking or a performance was a little bit rough. Now, I'm going to argue that when you push somebody out of the comfort zone as soon as they show up for the day, everything else is going to be great because they've already stepped outside of their comfort zone and they've already done the thing that's going to pull them out of their shell and be able to talk to other people in the room. CHARLES: Right. The point of those things is vulnerability and to make it safe to be vulnerable. And so, someone who is definitely in, someone who walks around into these groups as a shell, I definitely see the value in that. SHANNON: The other thing too is one of the positive things about an icebreaker like this is you could kind of take a backseat or kind of [inaudible] off to the side, so we didn't require everyone to say something out loud either. So, there are positives and negatives. I think that was like an overall learning thing about doing this is for me, I definitely am a perfectionist and I want everything to go perfectly and I want everything to be exactly my way. It was learning that no matter how well something goes, you can't please everyone 100%. And getting the feedback on the surveys and just seeing how, for some people, the icebreaker was their favorite part of the day. For other people, it was their least favorite part. Some people wanted more workshop time, other people wanted way less workshop time and to focus more on community building and this and that. And so, we can't please everyone but we've really pulled off something really cool that I think made a lot of the stakeholders very happy. CHARLES: Yeah, definitely, which kind of goes right into my next question which I'm going to ask to all of you is what do you feel are kind of like the key things that you learned from this based on the survey, based on your experience, based on conversations with the participants and observations later on? What was it that you feel like was kind of your biggest takeaway? Why don't we start with you, Lydia? LYDIA: For me, the biggest takeaway was that it really makes such an enormous impact for women to see other women speaking and women putting these types of workshops and things on for other women. That was the one thing that stood out to me the most in the feedback was that people were just so excited to see someone relatable up in front of them giving these presentations. And that having the opportunity to see a room full of women that were interested in the same things that they were interested in was incredibly inspiring and encouraged them to kind of go out on a limb and try something that they hadn't tried before and follow up in the future with more meetups and things like that, which was precisely the goal. I feel like our primary goal was to get women to feel like this was an accessible community and I feel like that was where we excelled the most. CHARLES: How about you, Stephanie? STEPHANIE: I wanted to piggy back off of what she just talked about because I, myself, we just touched on something earlier and it was about the feeling of being uncomfortable. It's no secret that and I said it there, I hate public speaking. Absolutely hate it, it terrifies me. I hate doing podcasts, I hate doing all kinds of speaking. But I realized how important it is. And then as Shannon was saying like you can plan and you want to try as hard as you can to make everything go as smoothly and perfect as possible, but sometimes things will happen. And I remember at one point of the day, she came up to me and asked me a favor and was like, "Hey…" She had been emceeing all day and asked, "Do you mind doing the middle part?" And I think it was talking about Ember ATX and why it was important to do this workshop and all of that. So I was caught completely unprepared and I was very hesitant. But in that moment, I thought to myself, "Well, we are choosing to be leaders in the community. We are choosing to put ourselves out there and do something for the greater good. I'm just going to do it. I'm just going to force myself to do it." I think it went well. The first bit of it, I was very nervous and I just admitted it to everyone. But someone else came up to me afterwards and told me, "I think it meant a lot to people to see someone just take something on and speak from their heart, and you can see that they're so nervous but they're still doing it." And so, that's the point I wanted to make was yes, I'm uncomfortable with it but it's the only way you can grow as an individual. I also want to send a message through that which is yes, we're all women, we're all bad ass, we all have this purpose that we want to achieve and we're doing it. So, that was my biggest takeaway. So, thank you, Shannon, for that unexpected request. SHANNON: Yeah. That kind of came as a result of like I was trying to emcee and teach and I went up to Steph and she was like, "I'm nervous!" And I was like, "Look, I need to lay down. I've been talking all day. My brain is mushed." And she did such a great job and I was so happy that you did that. For me, I would say Lydia definitely covered all of the philanthropic reasons that this is important and why it went so well and everything that was great. For me, I think that I had been going through some stuff. Like sometimes I question - am I really good at what I'm doing? Am I doing the right thing? Can I accomplish this? The sort of questions that everybody has. Taking this on and sort of planning it from start to finish on our own, doing all the marketing, getting all the sponsorships, getting all the attendees, communicating with all the attendees, trying to pretend that we were kind of more official than we were. I was individually texting people to their numbers and it would be like, "Reply with STOP if you no longer want these texts." Just to make it look like we were something official when really like I'm copying and pasting from one person to the next. And we're trying to get literally everything done, just the handful of us that were working on this. It made me start thinking about what do I really want to do. I had never truly considered teaching other people to code until this. And now, I'm trying that out. Since then, through Emberitas, we've done another lecture series for high schoolers. We did a weekend workshop for high school girls and honestly, it opened up something in me and I was like, "We need to be teaching high school-aged kids to code." I know that's something that a lot of organizations are trying to do but I now have a very specific idea of how I want to approach that. It really gave me a lot of confidence that I really needed at the time. I think that I threw myself so hard into doing Emberitas was because I needed something to really be passionate about it at the time. And then it gave back to me everything that we put into it and I was so fortunate for that. Just to watch everyone having such a good time and everyone learning something and just the look on someone's face when they get something and then the look of someone's face when they make something is so cool. And that's just what I loved about this whole experience. CHARLES: Yeah. It sounds wonderful. Here we are in 2017, what's next? Are there any further events that we can look forward to? Are there any grand plans? I mean, you kind of alluded to some of that, doing more education for targeting a younger age group? What can we look forward to? Why don't we start with, Shannon? What can we look forward to in 2017?
SHANNON: What you can look forward to in 2017 is me updating the website a little bit. It's still the typo-ed place it was at the very last day before the workshop. So, I need to update that so that people can get more information and contact us if they're interested because I have had a lot of people reach out to me over Twitter, through our Facebook page, all that kind of stuff, asking when we're going to do this again, and if we're going to do it in other cities than Austin. What was really cool was all of our curriculum is open source, so we put that out there and we told on our Twitter that people could check out our curriculum. And one morning, we just started getting ding…ding….ding…ding…ding…all of these GitHub pull requests from people in Seattle. And it turned out that a code school in Seattle was using it as part of their curriculum. And so, a couple of those girls reached out and we're like, "Oh, we might be interested in posting one of these in Seattle." And so, hopefully doing something like that would be really fun. Additionally, just kind of improving the curriculum. We need to sit down and kind of click out the best things about how we approach doing the beginner curriculum, the best things about how we approach doing the intermediate curriculum, and sort of entwine those together. So, a lot of kind of behind the scenes work to get things in place and then a lot of planning to put on the next one. And so, the biggest thing that limits us from putting on more is money. We need sponsors and we kind of already hit up everybody who does Ember here in Austin. So, we're going to have to expand our reach if we want to put on another one of these at the same quality that we did before. CHARLES: So, you heard it here. If you're interested in seeing this happen, by all means, reach out and send money. SHANNON: Yeah. CHARLES: Lots of money. SHANNON: You can email me: Shannon@emberitas.com, if you want to talk about any of those things. Or hit up our Twitter or our Instagram. Yeah, there's place to contact us if you're interested in helping us out in any way. STEPHANIE: And it's also important to point out that a lot of those sponsors gave lightning talks. SHANNON: Yup. STEPHANIE: So, you can have your plugs in there. SHANNON: Yeah. You can show up and have a captive audience for five minutes. CHARLES: Alrighty. In closing, again, I want to kind of go around and ask what was the number one -- we talked about kind of mistakes that were made, things that were learned. In terms of the number one impactful thing that you feel like this event had and this kind of process had either for the external world or even for the internal world, like affecting the way that you work day to day. What has that been? What has that been for you, Lydia? LYDIA: My favorite part of the entire thing was that some of my best friends and I decided to build a thing that we cared about. And then we watched it grow into something amazing, and then we got to see the people that got to enjoy the beautiful thing that we built. It was just one of those moments where you feel really proud about deciding to take a risk and deciding to kind of put yourself out there and do something that is outside of your comfort zone that makes it totally worthwhile and makes it so that you want to do it again, and again, and again. And I'm just really grateful that Shannon and Steph thought this was a cool idea and just had to make it a real thing. SHANNON: I was just thinking, as usual Lydia says it best. That's exactly what was so great about it was we did it together, it was great, we want to do it again, we want other people to do it. There's something so inherently rewarding about this experience and it was just so much fun. And I'm so glad that I got to do it with the two of these guys. CHARLES: Yeah. I think just kind of watching from the sidelines, just the energy that it generated. I think it touched everybody who participated, who volunteered, and even people like me who just kind of watched it from the sidelines as part of the general community. And so, I am really looking forward to what you guys are going to bring in the future. And I really hope that you don't allow it to just fall by the wayside and that there is some continuance of it. And I promise I will participate this time. But thank you, thank you, thank you so much for doing that. It really was wonderful. Thank you all for coming by and sharing the story of Emberitas. You can find them on Emberitas.com or if you want to reach out directly over Twitter, it's @iheartemberitas. Hopefully, we get to hear from you and we'll continue the discussion. And thank again. Thanks everybody for listening and thanks to you guys for coming. SHANNON: Thanks for having us.

Dr. Sheila Gephart. Photo courtesy of Dr. Sheila Gephart. Episode 8 features Dr. Sheila Gephart, neonatal nurse scientist and assistant professor at the University of Arizona College of Nursing. During this episode, Dr. Gephart provides a comprehensive overview of GutCheckNEC, a first-of-its-kind, 10-item risk assessment that she developed for the early detection of NEC in premature infants. She discusses: * Her transition from bedside nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit to her development of GutCheckNEC—what she calls a “real-time, early warning score for NEC,”* The 10 risk factors that make up GutCheckNEC, their associated symptoms, and how risk is communicated,* The development of NEC Zero, an intervention that has evolved out of the Unit NEC rate component of GutCheckNEC,* The strength of evidence for the use of probiotics in the prevention of NEC, and* The importance of shared decision making in the NICU. Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. This episode was produced in part by the TeacherCast Educational Broadcasting Network. [powerpress] STEPHANIE VAUGHAN, HOST: Welcome to Episode 8 of Speaking of NEC—a free, audio podcast series about Necrotizing Enterocolitis. Produced by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, and funded by The Petit Family Foundation, Speaking of NEC is a series of one-on-one conversations with relevant NEC experts—neonatologists, clinicians and researchers—that highlights current prevention, diagnosis, and treatment strategies for NEC, and the search for a cure. For more information about this podcast series or The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, visit our website at morgansfund.org. Hello, my name is Stephanie Vaughan. Welcome to the show. I’m the Co-founder and President of The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund. Today, my guest will be Dr. Sheila Gephart, neonatal nurse scientist and assistant professor at the University of Arizona College of Nursing, who developed a first-of-its-kind, 10-item risk assessment for the early detection of NEC in premature infants called GutCheckNEC. During our conversation, she will discuss in varying degrees: Her transition from bedside nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit to her development of GutCheckNEC—what she calls a “real-time, early warning score for NEC,” The 10 risk factors that make up the acronym GutCheck and their associated symptoms How risk is communicated, The significance of the Unit NEC rate component in GutCheckNEC, and how that led her to develop the NEC Zero Intervention, The strength of evidence for the use of probiotics in the prevention of NEC, and The importance of shared decision making in the NICU. With that in mind, let me introduce my guest today. Hi, welcome to the show. This is my guest, Dr. Sheila Gephart. She is a neonatal nurse scientist from the University of Arizona College of Nursing. Hi, Sheila, how are you? DR. SHEILA GEPHART, GUEST: Good, thank you, Stephanie! STEPHANIE: Thank you! So, we have had more than one person mention you on our show in previous episodes, so I’m thrilled to have you join me today and would love to let you talk a little bit about your background and how you got involved with Necrotizing Enterocolitis. DR. GEPHART: Well, I am very thankful to be asked to be on the broadcast today, and I will tell you that I started my interest in Necrotizing Enterocolitis risk understanding when I was a bedside nurse. I have been a nurse since 1997, and I worked in the neonatal intensive care unit as a bedside nurse taking care of babies, and many of them were really convalescing. They were doing well, but then we had a subset of babies, or a clump of babies, that all developed this horrible disease within about three weeks. And now I know the clustering of NEC is very common, or not common, but it does happen. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: But then I didn’t really understand a whole lot about the disease, but I was very concerned because I realized that we had been concerned about these babies, as nurses, for hours to days before the actual diagnosis of NEC was made. So what happened at that point was I had the role of getting into the data for our NICU. I collected the data and reported the data for a large registry called the Vermont Oxford Network. And so I was focused on looking at the baby’s case and looking at the research and looking at the data, and I realized that there was a constellation of risk factors that kind of coalesced for these kids, that all of these things seemed to snowball with these babies who developed NEC, and we really had no context for talking to physicians to communicate why we were concerned. We were using terms like something’s not right with this baby, and from there, it really launched me into the next five years of understanding more about NEC risk. STEPHANIE: Okay. And can you talk to me a little bit about the protocol – I think it’s a protocol -- that you’ve developed called GutCheckNEC and how you got from starting to look at the data to compiling and understanding this set of risk factors? DR. GEPHART: Sure, I’m happy to talk about GutCheckNEC. So, being a bedside nurse, sometimes I would work in the middle of the night, and I needed a strategy for putting things together so I could remember them. And when I thought about NEC, I thought about well, we just need to check the gut. So GutCheck was kind of how it organized these risk factors, and I wrote GutCheck in a line straight down, and I remember one day I was at a delivery, and it was about three in the morning and it was taking a while for the baby to be born. And I was trying to understand all of the research that I had been reading about NEC risk and so what I did was I write GutCheck straight down on a napkin and horizontally for each letter I wrote the risk factor that was associated with that letter, and so that helped me organize what I was reading in the literature. But really it started out as just wanting to develop a risk assessment so nurses could really know what the risk factors were, physicians could know what the risk factors were, but then also put the symptoms in the context of what was going on with the baby. So that’s where I started, but then I went into a Ph.D. program, and in science you have to be very systematic. And so my literature review was the systematic beginning. But then what I did was I asked neonatal NEC experts how relevant they thought the different risk factors were to actually developing NEC. So I asked them to rate the relevance, and we went through three rounds of surveys to determine if we had the right list of risk factors, so that was very useful. We got rid of some, we kept most of them and added a few. And then, the next step was I got a very large dataset from a group of neonatal practices here in the US called The Pediatrics Medical Group, and I built, this is research speak, but I will tell you that I threw all of the risk factors into a statistical model to see what fell out as the most important, and the way statistical models work is that they keep the most important things that account for most of the explanation for what you’re looking at, and they get rid of everything that’s not quite so important. STEPHANIE: Okay. DR. GEPHART: So we went from like 33 risk factors down to essentially ten risk factors for GutCheckNEC. And then we tested it to see if it actually discriminated or told the difference between the kids that got NEC and the ones who didn’t, and it showed pretty good discrimination, or separation of groups, for the kids who had the most severe NEC compared to those who didn’t get NEC at all. STEPHANIE: Okay. DR. GEPHART: So that was the work we did, and now we’re taking this ten item tool and we’re trying to combine it with clinical science so that we can really have a real time early warning score for NEC. STEPHANIE: Great. Can you sort of go down the list just for parents that might be listening or family members if they’re seeing any of these risk factors? DR. GEPHART: Sure, I’d be happy to do that. The items that we kept in GutCheckNEC, like I said, there are two versions. There’s the one before the statistical modeling and then there is the one after, and the one that’s before is actually more comprehensive. And if you think about just writing GutCheck down linearly, you think for G, you’ve got growth restricted, so they’re born really small for gestational age, you’ve got gestational age. Those are the main ones that I always thought of with the G. And then with U, the one item that the experts recommended adding was the unit NEC rate, because infants who are in units with high NEC rates are more likely to get NEC, and so I didn’t understand that finding. I’ll talk about that in a minute, about the unit NEC rate. T, if you talk about T, transfusion. There is an association that we see in lots of studies with transfusion and NEC. We don’t see any evidence of causation, but the studies aren’t designed to show us that, so there is a temporal relationship or a time based relationship between transfusion and the most severe NEC. That said, there is a lot of babies who get transfusions and don’t get NEC. So that’s what makes it hard. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: What else goes with T? I’m going to stick to the final version, okay, as we think through the acronym. And then for C, signs of infection, so chorioamnionitis is when mom has a really bad uterine infection prior to the baby being born. Some preterm moms have this because—we don’t know exactly why they have this, but chorioamnionitis, particularly if it’s invasive, if it’s really severe, that is a risk factor. Also cardiac kids are going to be more at risk, so if you think of the C, kids who have had heart disease or heart malformations, particularly those that are low oxygenation kinds of defects… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..and there are some more for C but I don’t recall exactly what those were right now, but I’m just going to stick—oh, culture proven infection. That also goes with C. So if babies have had sepsis, particularly more than once, which sometimes these really early babies do get multiple bouts of infection, that is a risk factor. So that stayed in my model long term. Enteral feeding is definitely a risk factor that all babies are hopefully exposed to because we want them to be fed. That I understand a lot more now about the details of enteral feeding, and that particularly if the enteral feeding is formula, that is very important. We know formula is a high risk factor. There is a whole slew of argument about cow’s milk based fortifiers that go with that as well, so there is some argument about how extensive of a risk factor that is, but formula and enteral feedings certainly. And then the H, I skipped the H. That would be hypotension treated with medicines to bring that blood pressure up. So hypotension is low blood pressure. A lot of preemies have episodes of low blood pressure, but we know that the most sick are going to be hemodynamically unstable which means that their ability to regulate their blood pressure and keep their heart rate within a good level is not quite as solid as a kid who doesn’t have those light fluctuations, so that was a risk factor that did stay. Also race. Race stayed. The experts did not think that race was a risk factor, and they were pretty, if you remember the stages that we used to develop GutCheckNEC, we asked experts about how relevant they thought these risk factors were and they really didn’t think race was relevant. But it was so strong in the model, I couldn’t get rid of it. So if a baby is either black or Hispanic, that puts them at higher risk. Now, the reason for that we think, we don’t really know exactly why that stayed in the model, however, we know that black babies are very much less likely to get human milk… STEPHANIE: Okay. DR. GEPHART: ..than white babies, and that is something we can fix. So that’s really important. As I went through these risk factors that are in GutCheckNEC, I started to separate in my mind what’s modifiable, which is what of these can we do something about and what is non-modifiable? And what I saw really was quite a few of these things were modifiable that stayed in GutCheckNEC. You can do a query online for GutCheckNEC and it will pop up the actual, you’ll be able to find GutCheckNEC in the literature. It’s published so anybody can find it. But the thing that was so interesting to me, and I’m probably going to go off a little bit here, is that the NICU NEC rate consumed a huge amount of the variants in this tool which means that if we were to say that these items explained an infant’s risk for NEC. The NICU NEC rate explains three times as much as gestational age, three times as much as transfusion. So it was so important, and what we saw in the sample, we had 284 NICUs in the sample that we used to build GutCheckNEC and to verify it, of those 284 NICUs, we saw huge variance in NEC rates. So that was pretty concerning, and it wasn’t something that I went into the research expecting or looking for really even because I had read 70 papers about NEC risk, and invariably, they would start with Necrotizing Enterocolitis is a disease that we have very few answers for. We don’t really know why it occurs, but we know that premature babies are at risk and that is the most consistent risk factor across studies. So prematurity. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: Everybody blamed it on prematurity and low birth rate, and very few said anything about—oh, and we know, actually we have about six large studies from 20 years ago that show that unit NEC rate is consistently an issue. So that is something that I didn’t expect to find, but I found, and then I was able to go back into the literature and find other studies that verified it. STEPHANIE: Excellent. That’s a phenomenal amount of information, and I think that’s really great for parents going into the NICU to have in their minds. DR. GEPHART: And I think, I apologize to the parents for throwing out all these terms, but I know that you’re smart, and you can handle it. Okay, I’m just going to give you credit, because if you’re NICU parents, you’re super savvy, and you know how to find information. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: But one of the things we were really concerned about with NEC is how we communicate risk to parents and how parents are really the eyes and ears of understanding what’s going on with that baby just like the nurses are. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: And they are really better situated, honestly, to be able to identify the trends in their own kid, because that’s all they’re worried about. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: They’re not worried about the delivery down the hallway or all these other things, they are the expert. So one thing I’ve been working on trying to frame this message for parents as partners on the team looking for signs of any kind of complication and I think if they know to speak up. To keep track and to speak up if things don’t seem right, and I’ve heard many physicians actually say that it’s the parents indication of concern that will make them stop, and think slower, about what’s going on with that baby. So either the nurses concern or the parents concern, because often the physician, as excellent as they are, may not be right at that bedside… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..at that moment when something is changing. STEPHANIE: Right. Right And we did have an experience between Morgan’s surgeries where there was a concern in the NICU, and I can’t even remember who had mentioned it at rounds of attempting to give him—I don’t know if it was formula or breast milk—but giving him something that the surgeon had previously not agreed to—and it was a whole day of me trying to get in contact with the surgeon and making sure that nobody did anything until the surgeon had said yes or no. And he called me back from outside of the surgical room and said if anything like this happens, call me, I will call you back. So we definitely found that the doctors are very receptive, and especially when you raise an alarm, and to give people concrete things to look at for their babies I think is a wonderful tool. So thank you for sharing this. DR. GEPHART: Absolutely! And I can say that within the next few weeks, probably by the time this podcast is released, our website will be active, and on that website are parent materials that we’ve created that are designed to help them. Anyone can download these parent materials, they can use them in their NICU, and they are basically pamphlets to talk about things to watch for, what you can do to prevent NEC, and what the signs are, and a little bit about what happens afterwards. Because you know the first-hand experience of how different your life is… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..coordinating care for a child who’s had NEC. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So the long term impacts of dealing with life after NEC, I know Laura Martin was on the broadcast… STEPHANIE: Yes. DR. GEPHART: ..recently… STEPHANIE: Yes. DR. GEPHART: ..and her story has been such an important part of my development as a nurse scientist. Think beyond just the NICU stay, to think about how NEC impacts these kids forever. STEPHANIE: Right, right, and we’ve been very lucky that Morgan has had (knock on wood) minimal residual effects. We see a little bit, but I mean, I looked at Laura’s story and they are doing a phenomenal job with him. He is a miracle. DR. GEPHART: Yeah, Joseph is pretty awesome. I haven’t had the chance to meet him in person yet, but Laura and I collaborated to write up his story, and that paper is going to be coming out in the next couple weeks in Journal of Perinatal and Neonatal Nursing, and it is a testament to his resilience. STEPHANIE: Right. Hers too and her husband’s and the family’s. DR. GEPHART: It’s pretty awesome. STEPHANIE: Definitely send me those links and we can certainly share that with everyone—direct links in the show episode notes. So I’ll ask you, now that GutCheckNEC is I’ll say standardized if that’s a correct term, is there anything that you’re looking towards in your research moving forward from GutCheckNEC? DR. GEPHART: Well, that’s a great question, and GutCheckNEC is a risk assessment, it’s a tool. It fits on one page. We’ve just gone through a process where we’ve added to it a structured communication protocol, so if a NICU wanted to use GutCheckNEC, we would have them complete a request form, and on one side is GutCheckNEC, and on the other side is the structured communication form, which also clues the nurses, the parents for which signs and symptoms to look for and how to communicate it. So that’s easy. So that’s where GutCheckNEC is going. We’re also trying to combine it with clinical science right now, so that’s the analysis I’m working on right now, and I’ve worked with a great collaborator, Sherry Fleiner from the Inner Health to do that work. But beyond that, one of the things with research, you do a project and then you have these findings and then there is something that just kind of nabs at you and it doesn’t fit like you expected it to. And for us, that was the unit NEC rate component of GutCheckNEC that carried so much weight in the score, and it demonstrated across the 284 NICUs how variable NEC rates can be. So what we did next is we asked the question, well, why are they different? Why are the NEC rates different? And what if we did something to try to standardize prevention care? So there are a couple of main things that prevent NEC. One is human milk—very, very important starting with colostrum for oral care. The other thing is standardized feeding protocols, stewarding antibiotics, and I can kind of get into more detail there, and then there is a lot of controversy about transfusions. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So those components, those four things plus a strategy for early recognition, we’ve put those components into an intervention we call NEC Zero, and the name of it is designed to convey that we’re hoping to get NEC to zero rate. Now, this is an audacious goal. But why set goals if they’re not crazy? This is an audacious goal, but it was not my idea. There was an editor for Journal of Perinatology, his name is Jonathan Swanson, and he wrote a paper the year that I finished my dissertation, so I think that was in 2012, it might have been 2013, and the title of that paper was “Can We Get NEC to Zero”? And if you ask scientists this and clinicians this, you will hear a lot of concern that this is an audacious goal. Like of course, we’re not going to get NEC to zero, we don’t even know what causes it. However, we do know some things that consistently reduce the risk for NEC. So human milk is, like I said, those five components, but human milk is so primary. So now we’re trying to put those interventions together, make them implementable so that people in the NICU in Delaware could implement them with the same consistency and clarity that people in Texas could do. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So that bundle of practices is NEC Zero. So the process for NEC Zero right now where we’re at in the project is that we’ve gone through kind of an expert process of refining the recommendations. So we’ve gone through that, we need to publish that, but we’ve got them. We had a really great expert group of almost 20 people, and four of those people were parents. Laura Martin was on that group. So we’ve got the recommendations, now we’re trying to break those recommendations into implementable steps, and we’re creating tool kit products to go with the NEC Zero intervention. So pieces of that are— GutCheckNEC is definitely a primary component of that. Frankly, GutCheckNEC has the least strong evidence of any of the components in the tool kit. But it’s something that is actionable, it’s something that we can use to monitor, and we know that monitoring and evaluation is a key component of implementation success for anything. So that’s where we’re at right now is we’re working on NEC Zero. STEPHANIE: Great, that sounds excellent. Do you have a projection of when people might see this? You said you’re looking to get it published, or the first stages of it getting published? DR. GEPHART: Right. We’re working on refining the recommendations really in terms of publishing any sort of a recommendation list or a guideline. They carry much more weight if you have the authority of a professional organization behind them. So our strategy right now is to try to link up with some professional organizations and see if we can get some endorsements for them. So if any of your listeners are prominent members of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Association of Neonatal Nursing, The Academy for Breastfeeding Medicine—any of those groups would be excellent proponents. So we have the recommendations, we have some parent products that will be available, like I said, within a few weeks once our website gets done, and the other pieces of it being available, I will say that we’re testing it right now. So with the testing, there are two things we’re doing. We have the recommendations, we’re asking experts to kind of assign relative importance to the different parts of the intervention, and that score, we’re creating a ten point score for the NEC Zero adherence score, and that’s almost done. And then we’re going to look at relationships between adoption of NEC Zero practices and NEC rates, because we really don’t have a great evidence body for understanding why NEC rates differ so much NICU to NICU. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So this is kind of an effort to add to that body of evidence of understanding why are they different. We don’t know what we’ll find, that’s the beauty of research is you start with a hypothesis, you get your data, you test your hypothesis, and you see how it turns out. STEPHANIE: Excellent. This is great work, Sheila. I mean, it sounds like it’s really sort of simple, but I’m sure it’s not. DR. GEPHART: That’s right! It does kind of sound simple, doesn’t it? STEPHANIE: Or that it maybe should be simple. Hopefully it will be simple, but it sounds like parents in the NICU could really take this information and be able to be confident in their monitoring of their children and really confident in voicing any concerns that they see. DR. GEPHART: Right. STEPHANIE: So I think it’s great. DR. GEPHART: The challenge is that really statistically you’re not going to have a lot of kids get NEC. Even in a high rate NICU, you’re going to have a lot of babies who don’t get it, and a few babies who do. But the outcomes can be so devastating for those few babies. So the simple part is really important, and the other question is do the interventions of NEC Zero affect other outcomes? And really, the answer is yes, because interventions are things like human milk standardized feeding protocols, antibiotic stewardship—those things are good for any baby— STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: Any baby! So the good thing is that any NICU clinician can implement those things with relative confidence. Now, the big wildcard here that people don’t agree to consistently is holding feeding during transfusion. So that piece is a little bit controversial, actually it’s a lot controversial right now, but that component—the health system I’m working with has already adopted a practice to do that, so that is part of our bundle, and we’re going to keep it that way, but as we get into the literature about transfusions and NEC, it is somewhat controversial, and the evidence is not really conclusive. STEPHANIE: Right. We actually had an episode with a Dr. Hussain from Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, and in his conversation about transfusion associated NEC, he had mentioned GutCheckNEC. So it does seem to sort of all circle around. DR. GEPHART: It does, and the thing with GutCheckNEC is that transfusions is a risk factor. So in our structured communications protocol, which is coupled with GutCheckNEC, understanding the context of if a baby has been transfused in the last 48 hours, that’s a trigger. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So those two pieces put together do heighten our awareness of what a baby could be at risk for. STEPHANIE: This was a really great conversation, Sheila. I really appreciate you sharing all of this. A lot of this, even though I have done a lot of research myself is pretty new in this context to me. So I think it really sort of simplifies some really complicated information. So I appreciate you sharing this with us. DR. GEPHART: Well, it’s been my pleasure and honor to try to simplify things. I have to do that for my own brain. I will say that this is an audacious goal. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: People look at me cross eyed when I say NEC Zero. They think what are you talking about? Is that possible? But I will tell you that there are a handful of NICUs across the country who are getting to zero with their NEC rates, and they are models. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: The things they consistently do are they prioritize human milk feeding, it is critical, they use standardized feeding protocols, they start feedings early with trophic feedings, which is just small feedings, and they generally have a fairly specific approach to handling transfusions and feeding. So those things are very important. But the human milk is essential. STEPHANIE: Right. Right. So before we wrap up, is there anything else with regard to NEC or your research moving forward that you would like to share? DR. GEPHART: I appreciate that offer. I would like to just emphasize how we do have evidence. We have pretty good evidence about things that prevent NEC. Now, does that mean that we’re going to prevent every single case of NEC? I don’t know that yet. STEPHANIE: Right DR. GEPHART: But we have pretty good evidence, and one of the things that’s pretty controversial in our country right now is the use of probiotics. I don’t know if any of your experts have gotten into that realm yet, but- STEPHANIE: We’ve touched on it and they’ve sort of said the same thing you did that it is sort of a controversial topic because if I’m saying this correctly, the FDA regulations and the procedures around that, but I know in other countries that they have seen reduced rates of NEC with probiotics. DR. GEPHART: Right, right, and that is one thing that I would say is certainly controversial. There is one of the NICUs that I’m aware of that uses probiotics. They’ve been at zero for like six years. One of the issues we have, I’ve spent a lot of time lately understanding the strength of evidence for all of these components that prevent NEC, we don’t have randomized control trial evidence for most of them. But we have 24 randomized control trials that show a decreased risk for NEC with probiotics—thousands of babies—thousands, and even some people will say the preparations are different in these different studies, there is a recent study that actually pulled the results from just a certain type of probiotic and they still showed benefit. So the issue here we have in the United States is that probiotics are marketed as a food product. And so as a food product, their regulation is different with the FDA than as a medicine. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: However, I think parents should know this, frankly. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: I think this is one of those opportunities for shared decision making in the NICU where a physician, a nurse practitioner could bring up this issue with parents to say hey, look, we have this opportunity to give your baby probiotics and this is what is available, this is the evidence, this is the risk. See, this is shared decision making. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: You go and you have a test, your physician or nurse practitioner would say this is how you have to decide what’s important, but I think NICU parents are very, very smart people, and I think we’re at the point in the United States where it is time to open up the conversation about probiotics to make it a joint decision versus an “oh, we’re just not going to do it”. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: Because we have such strong evidence, it’s just that most of those studies were not done in the US. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: However, there are many things that have been developed in other countries that we can adopt. The other issue is a standard formulation, a safe, standard formulation. There was a case of sepsis a few years ago that was very concerning—that’s severe widespread infection in a premature baby. That is the risk. So that’s what the clinician would say to the parent. But it’s very, very small risk if you look at all of the benefits. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So I’m not going to pretend we should be using probiotics, but I do think that parents need to start asking for them. They need to start asking why are we not using them… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..because we have such strong evidence. So we have actually stronger evidence for probiotics than we do for antenatal steroids or Surfactant. Those are common, important, consistently delivered interventions for NICU babies. But you have risks, and that’s the issue. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So we’re at a place for decision making. STEPHANIE: Right. And actually ironically, or maybe not ironically, I know that my boys did get probiotics, and that was five years ago that they were born. DR. GEPHART: That is ironic. STEPHANIE: We had an anomaly with Morgan. Nobody can sort of figure out why he got NEC when he did, but we did do all of the sort of standard care practices, probably even advanced practices for five years ago, and we had one that got it and one that didn’t. So…but knowing now what I have learned is they were doing the very best practices at the hospital where my sons were born. So I think we were at the right place at the right time and had the best outcomes that we could hope for. DR. GEPHART: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Did you feel like with Morgan that they were able to recognize it pretty fast and act? STEPHANIE: I really think they did. I think that is probably the key that saved his life because he developed NEC at four days old and had really only had two trophic feeds, and it was colostrum. DR. GEPHART: Okay. STEPHANIE: Actually after the conversation that I had with Dr. Hussein, I went back and looked and he did not have a blood transfusion within that timeframe, so he sort of, it’s my understanding he’s just sort of an anomaly, but that’s why we’re looking to the researchers to piece together all of these things. That’s sort of what drives me is he doesn’t easily fit into something that could have, should have, would have, maybe been different and that seems to be the riddle that’s NEC. DR. GEPHART: Sure. There’s an analogy for this it’s called, a wicked problem, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that term, but you were at my talk when we were in Connecticut,… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..and I talked about the wicked problem and how it’s like a forest fire, it’s not easily solved. There’s a lot of pieces to it,… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: …and I think NEC is really the neonatal wicked problem. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So I’m so glad that Morgan got care so quickly and got such excellent care. And that’s the thing is that clinicians, physicians, dieticians, lactation consultants, nurses, nurse practitioners, they want to do the absolute best for your baby. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: Nobody has ill will. This is a team effort, but they’re human, and that’s the thing with wicked problems… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..is that you have humans operating in these complex systems, and trying to deal with things and what we know with solving wicked problems, like forest fires, it’s a combination of boots on the ground, and standard protocol. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So it’s the strength and protection of both approaches that really is effective, maybe not taking away completely the wicked problem, but at least confronting it. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So I’m so glad that Morgan got such great care. STEPHANIE: Thank you. We are too. We are too. And like I said, I think it goes to show that I’ve heard multifactorial used and all kinds of big words with regard to NEC, and just knowing that there are researchers out there like yourself who are trying to distill this information and simplify it for parents and practitioners as well that this is one of the ways that I think we will get to zero NEC. That’s our goal as well. So I really appreciate you talking to me today, and would love to talk to you again, and any of these links when the website is up, would love to share. So thank you! DR. GEPHART: Absolutely. It would be my honor to share those. It’s been fun to be with you. STEPHANIE: Thank you. You too. Direct links to more information about the GutCheckNEC can be found in this episode’s show notes. In closing, I’d like to share a few thoughts about today’s conversation with Dr. Gephart. Simply put, information is power. I believe that a risk assessment like GutCheckNEC can empower parents in the NICU by distilling complex medical information, and presenting it in a simplified, and actionable way. Morgan was diagnosed with NEC at four days old. My husband and I were still in shock, and hadn’t even begun to come to terms with our twin sons’ unexpected and traumatic birth, when Morgan was transferred to another hospital and underwent emergency surgery. In the days and weeks that followed, I diligently called two NICUs every morning after rounds for updates on our two babies. I took copious notes to share with my husband on weight gains, Oxygen levels, and whatever else each nurse made mention of during the phone calls. And during our daily visits, we spoke with each baby’s nurse personally about all of the day’s happenings. Since then, I’ve learned a lot more about prematurity and NEC. And if we were in the same situation today, I would have a lot more questions to ask about all areas of our babies care. In retrospect, I realize we didn’t know what questions to ask. We took our lead from the nurses, and we looked to them to tell us what we needed to know. GutCheckNEC presents parents the opportunity to learn what questions to ask about NEC. Objectively. And, proactively. And, it can help open up the dialogue between parents and caregivers in advance of potential crisis. Show your support for our smallest and most fragile babies, those who have the greatest risk for developing NEC. Show your support for continued research in NEC. And join our effort to raise awareness about, and funds for research in NEC by making a donation to Morgan’s Fund at morgansfund.org/donate. If you’ve had a personal experience with NEC and would like to share your story, or have a question or topic that you’d like to hear addressed on our show, e-mail us at feedback@morgansfund.org. We’d love to hear from you! Additional Information You can make a donation directly to Dr. Gephart’s research in NEC at the University of Arizona College of Nursing by visiting https://www2.uafoundation.org/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx?pid=341 You can become a donor to the College of Nursing by visiting http://www.nursing.arizona.edu/giving/leave-your-legacy Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. The opinions expressed in Speaking of NEC: Necrotizing Enterocolitis (the Podcast series) and by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund are published for educational and informational purposes only, and are not intended as a diagnosis, treatment or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis and treatment. Please consult a local physician or other health care professional for your specific health care and/or medical needs or concerns. The Podcast series does not endorse or recommend any commercial products, medical treatments, pharmaceuticals, brand names, processes, or services, or the use of any trade, firm, or corporation name is for the information and education of the viewing public, and the mention of any of the above on the Site does not constitute an endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund.

  Episode 2 features Dr. Adam Matson, attending neonatologist at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center-Newborn Intensive Care Unit (Hartford, CT) and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Immunology at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine (Farmington, CT). During this episode, Dr. Matson provides a comprehensive overview of NEC as it relates primarily to very low birth weight babies, those weighing less than 1500 grams (3 pounds 4.91 ounces) and who have the greatest risk for developing the disease. He discusses: * The early warning signs of NEC, what steps are taken when NEC is suspected, and how X-rays are used to diagnose NEC * How a premature baby’s immune response to the microbiome (bacterial communities) of the intestine appears to play a role in the development of NEC * Known risk factors of NEC, and how they may affect the intestinal microbiome * His current research focused on innate immune signaling in the developing intestine as it pertains to the development of NEC * Current prevention strategies for NEC * Additional research trends in NEC, and the importance of efforts to prevent prematurity Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. This episode was produced in part by the TeacherCast Educational Broadcasting Network. [powerpress] STEPHANIE VAUGHAN, HOST: Welcome to Episode 2 of Speaking of NEC—a free, audio podcast series about Necrotizing Enterocolitis. Produced by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, and funded by The Petit Family Foundation, Speaking of NEC is a series of one-on-one conversations with relevant NEC experts—neonatologists, clinicians and researchers—that highlights current prevention, diagnosis, and treatment strategies for NEC, and the search for a cure. For more information about this podcast series or The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, visit our website at morgansfund.org. Hello, my name is Stephanie Vaughan. Welcome to the show. I’m the Co-founder and President of The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund. Today, my guest will be Dr. Adam Matson, attending neonatologist at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center-Newborn Intensive Care Unit in Hartford, CT, and the Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Immunology at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington, CT. Dr. Matson will share with me today a comprehensive overview of NEC as it relates primarily to very low birth weight babies, those weighing less than 1500 grams or 3 pounds 4.91 ounces, who have the greatest risk for developing the disease. During our conversation, he will discuss in varying degrees: Early warning signs, Steps that are taken when NEC is suspected, Diagnosis, Risk factors, Prevention, Current areas of research, and The importance of efforts to prevent prematurity He will also discuss how a premature baby’s immune response to the microbiome or bacterial communities of the intestine appears to play a role in the development of NEC, and his current research focused on innate immune signaling in the developing intestine as it pertains to the development of NEC. With that in mind, let me introduce my guest today. Welcome, Dr. Matson, thank you for joining us today. I’m very excited to talk to you. DR. ADAM MATSON, GUEST: Thanks for having me here. STEPHANIE: As you know, we’re talking about Necrotizing Enterocolitis, but I’d love for you to tell me about your experience in the NICU and then in the NICU in relation to your experience with NEC. DR. MATSON: Okay, well, I am an attending neonatologist at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, which is located in Hartford, Connecticut, and there I’m involved with taking care of premature babies and infants with other types of medical problems. And unfortunately, Necrotizing Enterocolitis is one of the disease processes that does affect premature babies in our unit as like many other NICUs around the world. In our NICU, we average probably about 14 cases of Necrotizing Enterocolitis, or I’ll refer to it as NEC, per year, so it’s a major medical problem for these infants. As I mentioned before, it’s unfortunate that I do have experience in managing these infants. STEPHANIE: So what can you tell me as a parent about I guess signs and symptoms and what you guys as the doctors and clinicians and nurses are looking for that’s, I guess raises a red flag for you that this baby might have NEC? DR. MATSON: Sure, so NEC is most common in the very small premature babies, particularly those that are with birth weights less than 1500 grams (3 pounds 4.91 ounces). So these are infants that are typically being fed by a feeding tube that’s introduced into the nose and goes down to the stomach, or into the mouth and goes down to the stomach. Usually these babies are too small or weak to eat on their own. And it’s a gradual process. We start with small volumes of feeds and increase them gradually. And the types of symptoms that babies can start to develop when this process begins can sometimes be nonspecific. They can have decreased activity, they may have increased apnea spells (moments when the baby stops breathing) is something that we’ll see. Their abdomens can become more distended. One of the things that we’ll frequently check for are something that is referred to as aspirates. This is when a nurse is going to give a feed with feeds being given every three hours. They will check the stomach to see how much of the prior feed has actually gone out of the stomach and into the intestines. So often times if the intestine is starting to not feel too happy, that feed can sort of back up and that’s called an aspirate. If the volume becomes excessive, one of the measurements that we’ll use in our unit is more than 50% of the prior feed, that’s a red flag for us. STEPHANIE: Okay, actually that was the first symptom that Morgan had was his aspirate they said was tinge green which was an immediate red flag and x-rays were taken bedside and that’s—rapidly they discovered that he had NEC and that’s when he had his surgery. So that was definitely a red flag with him. DR. MATSON: Sure, those signs occur particularly when the aspirate turns green, as you had mentioned for your son that indicates that bile that’s being emptied into the intestine is not emptying down into the more distal portions of the intestines. So for his bile to start backing up, that’s absolutely a warning sign. STEPHANIE: Okay, thank you. So is there anything else that would be a good warning for parents or questions that they should ask if something’s maybe not looking right? DR. MATSON: Well, as I had mentioned, many of the signs can be nonspecific and they can actually often occur very fast as well. You know, we do monitor as I had mentioned for those things, bloody stools as well. And if those sort of warning signs come up, typically we’ll end up holding some feeds for a while to not overwhelm the stomach or the intestine with additional food, and as you had mentioned, we’ll end up doing x-rays and that’s the primary way that Necrotizing Enterocolitis is diagnosed. Really what we’re looking for with those x-rays is a finding referred to as pneumatosis intestinalis. And what that is is part of the pathophysiology of NEC is as bacteria are starting to invade through the intestinal wall, they can start to produce gas and make gas bubbles, and when we do x-rays looking for NEC, if we visualize those gas bubbles in the walls of the intestine, that’s diagnostic that the process is indeed happening. STEPHANIE: Okay, so can you tell me a little bit on the flip side of your experience with NEC on the research side? DR. MATSON: Sure, you know, perhaps I should talk a little bit about in that regard on what we think actually causes NEC. And I think that the answer to that right now is that we don’t know exactly. But it appears to be a rather complex interaction between bacteria that are inside the intestine, and exaggerated or overactive immune response that’s happening inside the intestine. The whole hypoxia or decrease in oxygen within the intestine also probably plays a role in some cases. But studies have indicated at least in many cases of NEC it’s not—it doesn’t appear to be attributable to a single bacterial species like E. coli or Salmonella. But it appears to be more related to bacterial communities or what we would say is the microbiome of the intestine which can be influenced by certain things that we know to be risk factors for Necrotizing Enterocolitis as well such as formula feeding, where breast milk—human milk is protective, excessive use of antibiotics, antacids, those sorts of things are thought to disrupt the microbiome and result in overgrowth of different species, particularly gram negative bacteria. And when there’s an overgrowth of those types of bacteria in the intestine, those appear to activate certain receptors that are inside the intestine— this is getting into a little bit of the research that I’m involved with, because these receptors primarily in premature infancy appear to be very sensitive to a large number of these gram negative bacteria, and as they start to become activated, they start to break down the intestinal epithelial lining and this results in trans-location of bacteria through the intestinal mucosa—the protective barrier, and then activation of immune cells in the deeper layers. Another feature of the premature infant is that they’re really not able to control that immune response in their intestine very well, so they end up with a very profound inflammatory response in their intestine. That’s really what Necrotizing Enterocolitis is. It’s the most common gastrointestinal emergency in premature babies. It occurs primarily in premature infants. It’s characterized by diffuse inflammation and necrosis, or tissue death inside the intestine. And it’s also associated with very significant morbidity and mortality. About 15 to 30 percent of infants who develop NEC may ultimately die. So it’s a major problem for this population. STEPHANIE: And can you tell me, I guess a little bit more about what the hospital’s doing in their research? And more specifically, what other areas you’re researching? DR. MATSON: Sure, so our hospital, we have a number of different projects that we’re involved in. We have a very active lactation program where we’re looking at different aspects of human milk. I had mentioned before that one of the main risk factors for Necrotizing Enterocolitis is diet and formula feeding, and we do know that providing human milk reduces the risk of NEC by about 50 to 90 percent providing a diet of exclusive human milk. So we are currently looking at factors inside of breast milk, macronutrients and how they affect the bacterial populations inside of the intestine and how that may ultimately contribute to infants developing this process. More specifically in terms of laboratory work, we’re now working with some collaborators at UConn Storrs as well and we’re doing a preemie poop project where we’re collecting a lot of fecal samples from babies inside our NICU. And we’re doing a real detailed analysis, molecular analysis where we sequence out basically all the different microbial species or bacterial species inside the intestine. And one of our hopes with this study is that we’re able to identify how diet and exposure to medications affect the bacterial populations inside the intestine, which we know has a very strong role in Necrotizing Enterocolitis. I also have a laboratory at UConn Health Center in the department of pediatrics and we’re looking a little bit deeper at some of the receptors inside the intestine. There’s a group of receptors that I refer to as toll-like receptors, and these recognize molecules that we refer to as pathogen associated molecular patterns or PAMPs. So these are the receptors that are on the surface layer of the cells that line the intestine and respond to these different bacteria. And I think this is the type of research that tying in aspects of clinical care with breast milk to knowing what’s actually growing inside the intestines in terms of bacterial populations, and then looking at more detailed molecular aspects of immune signaling inside the intestine and what’s ultimately controlling the inflammatory process. STEPHANIE: That’s very interesting. Is there anything else that you would like to add about research specifically? I know one of our major goals is to help the doctors and researchers advance research through funding. So can you talk to me a little bit about funding for research within the NEC community? DR. MATSON: Sure, well I think that one of the areas that would likely help the most is more funding to look at causes of premature birth. This continues to be a major problem in the United States and elsewhere. Up to ten to eleven percent of infants are born premature. And a significant number of those babies are the very premature infants that are at the highest risk for developing NEC. So I think that I need to mention that as really one of the primary areas because there’s a lot of different challenges that these babies face, and the more that we can prevent preterm birth, I think that would be advantageous for them. The other aspect I think would be important to look at is in terms of diagnosis or earlier diagnosis. Being able to identify which babies are starting to develop some changes in their intestine earlier. I have a colleague that I work with who often says that it’s when we’re diagnosing by x-ray, it’s almost like arriving at the crime scene after the crime has already been committed. STEPHANIE: Mm-hmm. DR. MATSON: The care that we implement at that stage is really is very supportive in terms of holding feeds, antibiotics, bringing the suction tube into the stomach, getting frequent x-rays, getting the surgeons involved to help follow the infants, and in many ways, the time that we’re diagnosing these infants at this point is the process is already much too far ahead. STEPHANIE: It’s definitely a complex disease, and I know that with Morgan, I think within a span of five hours or so he was diagnosed and in and out of surgery and in recovery, so I know that it’s a rapid time frame. But I appreciate all of the information that you shared with us today—I think you’ve given a really good perspective on causes and signs and symptoms, and if there is anything else that you’d like to add in any area for parents that might be listening to this from your perspective as a doctor talking to parents, please feel free. DR. MATSON: Sure, so I could mention just a little bit more about prevention of Necrotizing Enterocolitis. In some diseases, an ounce of prevention’s worth a pound of cure. When we’re looking at certain populations in the NICU, we often classify premature infants according to their weight. Those at highest risk of developing Necrotizing Enterocolitis are what we would refer to as very low birth weight infants, and those are less than 1500 grams at birth. STEPHANIE: And that’s about three pounds? DR. MATSON: Yes, pretty close to that. And I had mentioned efforts to prevent prematurity is a major goal, also diet. The American Academy of Pediatrics came out with a statement in 2012 really encouraging the provision of human milk to all of these babies. We do know that human milk does help protect against Necrotizing Enterocolitis. And if mom’s milk is not available for these infants, many units including ours are now using pasteurized donor human milk. It’s a very safe product, and that has been shown to help as well. Other potential preventative measures is—one would be using a standardized feeding protocol. There is very good data on that. That means really sort of having a very strict protocol for each size baby and how much milk you start with with the feeds, how rapidly you advance them, and what sort of warning signs that the healthcare team should be observing for. So that has been shown to be very important. Limited use of antibiotics appears to be very important. It’s a difficult task for us while we’re inside the Newborn Intensive Care Unit because these babies are at such high risk for infection. But one of the things that data has shown is that the more antibiotics, the more unnecessary antibiotics, that these babies receive increases their chances of getting Necrotizing Enterocolitis, so that probably relates to overgrowth of gram negative and other bacteria inside the intestine that activate the inflammatory cascade. There’s a few interesting other preventative measures that are topics of conversation within our field and one is using probiotics. There is good data out of other countries. So, I should say that probiotics are live bacteria. They’ve been using older children and adults for some time for various reasons. Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus are the most common probiotics. Those are bacteria that are typically found in the stool of breastfed infants. And many units outside of the United States are now giving these probiotics, which they’re giving them to extremely premature infants in an effort to prevent NEC from happening. And the thought is that these help to prevent some of the pathogenic bacteria from growing, they also help to mature the intestinal barrier inside the intestine. At this point in time in the United States, however, there has not been a—at least to my knowledge—there has not been a properly randomized, controlled trial to study these here. And also another major issue using probiotics in the United States is how are they regulated by the FDA as they’re considered a food. So really you can go to GNC or CVS to buy probiotics over the counter. So with that type of designation by the FDA, they don’t have the same oversight as a drug would, and one of the concerns with many of the NICUs in using a product like that is it doesn’t have the same consistent quality oversight, meaning that we don’t know how pure it is or how consistent the actual dose would be that we’re giving to premature infants, so hopefully some research down the line will help answer those questions. STEPHANIE: Well, I think you’ve given us a lot of information, a lot of really good information I think, and a lot of really relevant information for parents that will be listening. So I really appreciate you sharing your time with us, and joining us today. And so with that, I will let you go. And… DR. MATSON: Okay, well thank you very much. STEPHANIE: we will talk again. DR. MATSON: Sounds great. STEPHANIE: Thank you. DR. MATSON: Okay, take care Steph. STEPHANIE: Thank you. STEPHANIE: For more information about Dr. Matson and his research in NEC, visit: connecticutchildrens.org. A direct link can also be found in this episode’s show notes: http://www.connecticutchildrensfoundation.org/document.doc?id=402 In closing, I’d like to share a few thoughts about today’s conversation with Dr. Matson. One of Morgan’s former doctors described NEC to me as “an inflammatory response gone haywire.” That simple, but vividly descriptive, phrase gave me pretty quick understanding of the disease that nearly took my son’s life. The inability of a very premature baby to regulate their immune response, and in turn their inflammatory response, appears to be a crucial factor in the development of NEC. And as Dr. Matson mentioned, understanding not only how diet and exposure to medications affect the bacterial populations inside the intestine, but also understanding the immune signaling inside the intestine and what’s ultimately controlling the inflammatory process are critical to fully understanding, and preventing, NEC. Show your support for our smallest and most fragile babies, those who have the greatest risk for developing NEC. Show your support for continued research in NEC. And join our effort to raise awareness about, and funds for research in NEC by making a donation to Morgan’s Fund at morgansfund.org/donate. If you’ve had a personal experience with NEC and would like to share your story, or have a question or topic that you’d like to hear addressed on our show, e-mail us at feedback@morgansfund.org. We’d love to hear from you! Additional Information You can make a donation directly to Dr. Matson’s research in NEC at Connectiut Children’s Medical Center by visiting https://www.connecticutchildrensfoundation.org/giving/nec Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. The opinions expressed in Speaking of NEC: Necrotizing Enterocolitis (the Podcast series) and by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund are published for educational and informational purposes only, and are not intended as a diagnosis, treatment or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis and treatment. Please consult a local physician or other health care professional for your specific health care and/or medical needs or concerns. The Podcast series does not endorse or recommend any commercial products, medical treatments, pharmaceuticals, brand names, processes, or services, or the use of any trade, firm, or corporation name is for the information and education of the viewing public, and the mention of any of the above on the Site does not constitute an endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund.

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Stephanie Boyle Founder, Rogue Paper, Inc. Date: August 29, 2011 [music] Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of NCWIT, the National Center for Women in Information Technology. We're working hard to make sure that more girls and women are introduced to the exciting potential of computing education and career paths. Part of what we're doing is this exciting interview series with women who have started IT companies. They're fabulous entrepreneurs. They all have such interesting stories to tell. today we're going to interview another one, Stephanie Boyle. With me is Larry Nelson from W3W3.com. Hi, Larry. Larry Nelson: Oh, it's really a pleasure to be here. We like to focus, of course, on business and high technology with a special emphasis on young girls and women in technology. NCWIT has been doing a marvelous job. We're happy to be a part of it. Lucy: Well, and thank you very much for all the support that you give us with this excellent interview series. Now let me say a few words about Stephanie Boyle, the person we're talking to today. She's nothing less than a pioneer in the mobile Internet space as far as I'm concerned, having first helped shape the area as a founding member of Ericsson's Digital Media Innovation Center. Big brain thinking going on in this center, and it really helped to shape the whole mobile area. Now she is the founder of Rogue Paper, and she and her team deliver integrated mobile experiences to users. Now in the old days we used to call this convergence, but there's really a whole lot more exciting language and capability around the space today. I'm sure that Stephanie will be talking about that. But some of the things you can do now with the things that they're working on with Rogue Paper around co‑viewing a TV show and interacting with social media at the same time and integrating all of that. You're thinking, "That's really cool real‑time experience." But wait. There's more. You can actually do it with a rerun, where you can experience the whole power of what people said about the show or whatever movie and do it even when you are replaying or rerunning it. Just really interesting types of interactions going on right now and certainly leading to more engaging experience for viewers. Stephanie, wow! You've got a great company. Tell us a little bit about what's going on here. Stephanie Boyle: Thank you. Rogue Paper, we really started the business a year and a half ago with the mission of using mobile applications and technology to help enhance and drive traditional medium broadcast. Basically we are self‑proclaimed "TV‑holics"... Lucy: [laughs] Stephanie: ...and recognized [laughs] that we really wanted to not only watch television but really interact with the social sphere while we're watching these shows, that the content goes beyond just the primary screen. Really there is a second screen opportunity that can be interactive and augment the primary screen. There's a lot of really bad television being watched, but then [laughs] along with a lot of our guilty pleasures, which makes our jobs definitely a little bit more fun. But we really focused on how can we make the primary screen of television an interactive experience for users on the second screen, whether the second screen is a mobile device, a tablet, a desktop experience, or other things? We're trying to provide the users with second screen interactive content but then also provide media companies a way to reach these people already multitasking, who are already texting with their friends or IM‑ing or posting to Facebook or tweeting about what they're watching. It's really trying to bring the experience together as one single destination for a viewer and for the media companies to really have a holistic double‑screen experience. Lucy: That's really phenomenal. OK, I have a lot of guilty pleasures with TV, too. [laughs] One of them is American Idol, right? Stephanie: Right. [laughs] Lucy: When people are performing, and then people are tweeting or they've got things to say later in the blogs, and it's just not as much fun as if you could see it right then. Stephanie: Yeah. Well, and if you think about it, television has always been a social experience. It started in the 1950s. Maybe one or two people on a block had a television. It was really event driven. The people would come and sit together, and watch whatever was on the television and really talk about it together. Then as the technology innovations and as even socio‑economic things happened, we had VCRs and all of these second screens in the home, second televisions in the home, if you go into the seventies and eighties. Then the conversations started moving around the water cooler, so it was where people aggregated. It could be eight hours, 10 hours, 24 hours after the show aired. In the last two decades this has really moved into a digital landscape. I would say in the last five years or so it's really become back to real time because people aren't sitting together anymore. They're actually on their sofas or tweeting or talking, texting, or instant messaging. All these different mediums, but it's all really because, as a medium, it is social. Lucy: Yes, it certainly is. I remember the first time I saw a color TV in my neighborhood. It was Halloween. Larry: Oh! Lucy: I know. Stephanie: [laughs] Lucy: I was trick or treating. Anyway, back to you, Stephanie. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about how you first got into technology? Stephanie: Yeah. I was always interested in systems and the way things interconnect. I was of a generation that there was one computer in our elementary school to having them in high school and later. But wasn't necessarily as intrigued with the computers themselves as I was with the Ataris, the ColecoVisions, [laughs] the computer systems that we had at home that really could help me build games or play games. But always interested in how the systems worked and how people interacted with them. Actually, my mother was the first person to show me a computer in a way where she took it apart and had me put it back together. Lucy: Oh, that is awesome. Stephanie: Yeah. [laughs] While I'm not a digital native, I was exposed to technology as something that could be deconstructed to learn about and then put it back together. It definitely eliminated fear for me. It's always something that I felt was accessible, interesting, and intriguing. As time went on, I'm self‑taught in a lot of ways because of that because if I don't know how to program in HTML5, I'll have somebody [laughs] do it for me. Then I'll take it apart and try and change it and put it back together. But definitely I look to my mother as the person who eliminated that "technology is this strange and new" thing and made it instead something that was tangible and interesting. Larry: I wish I had known you a number of years ago when we needed something put back together. [laughter] Stephanie: Right. I remember being intrigued by this whole concept of my mother showing me the mother board in the computer. [laughter] Lucy: That's great. Stephanie: [laughs] I didn't really believe her that that was what it was called. Larry: Being the father of five I thought it should have been called a father board. But anyhow... Stephanie: [laughs] Larry: You've been through a great deal. You're really building an interesting company. What is it about entrepreneurship that makes you tick, and why did you become an entrepreneur? Stephanie: Well, it's really interesting. I think the most exciting part of being an entrepreneur is the infinite blank canvas. Even when you have a product, an idea, a customer, anything, the next steps are never really clearly defined. Persistent problem‑solving and adjusting can be exhausting, but overall for me it's invigorating. It's how do we get to the next step? How do we keep moving forward? What ways do we need to be nimble and still meet our business objectives, our product objectives, our client objectives, the user objectives? It almost feels like the future is so undefined, and in that way I feel like it's really exciting. I often liken it to building a bridge while you're walking over it, which, of course, scares our business people to death. You should build a bridge on a [laughs] stable foundation. But what I mean by that is being an entrepreneur often allows you to be nimble enough to defy gratify and space as necessary. You're moving forward, but the future is undefined and you are still defining it. Lucy: Well, you're inventing it. I mean entrepreneurs are great inventors, right? Stephanie: Yeah, definitely. It's so exciting. Right now we share an office with actually four other startups. The collective energy is so interesting, just watching teams work together and just the steam coming off [laughs] the teams. It's exciting, and some of the things they talk about doing I think are impossible. I'm amazed at how those can be executed. Lucy: Well, now Stephanie, you mentioned your mother as having influenced you, really built your confidence, took the fear out of approaching technology and understanding it. Who else has influenced or supported you on your entrepreneurial career path? Stephanie: There are so many. I wish I had time to name them all. I can tell you the very first person who helped me grow as an employee or an executive or as a contributor to a team was by boss at Ericsson. Her name was Donna Campbell. She's a founder of Ericsson Cyberlab that was Ericsson's Digital Innovation Center. Donna had a very good and healthy way of looking at growth. We have a job that we have to do to make the trains run on time every day, but beyond that take time to learn more about this exciting new area that was mobile Internet or this new thing that has been so undefined because Telco previous to that the only content that existed was voice conversation, that people were talking to each other. It was just a voice channel. Then we were really looking at this next generation, which included data applications, content, anything. While we had all of our jobs to, what we would say, make the trains run on time, whatever that job was, she really challenged us to always think about learning about this new space and helping to define it. I sometimes even just with our team or our employees, I think I hear her voice in my head encouraging them to be as creative and also forward‑thinking and less constrained, that all ideas are really good ideas. Larry: I'm curious. With all the things you've done so far, not only with Ericsson but now with this newer type startup, what's the toughest thing that you've had to do in your career? Stephanie: [laughs] To be perfectly honest, it's probably less about my career itself and more about my personality. But I really believe that the toughest thing was really to learn to listen. That is in a big organization. That's with your own staff, employees, and partners, with your customers, with anything. I mean it's very easy to believe that you know what is the right way and to feel confident in your decisions and to try and push those things forward if you have a little bit of a bulldog personality, which I have. Still, I think the hardest thing for me to do is to really take a step back and realize that not only are all opinions really interesting and can spark new ideas for a collective group, but that you have to pay attention to what people are saying, and really listen. While that shouldn't be a tough thing in a career path, I think it adds growth as a human being, and applying that to my career. It's something I also believe that Donna really taught me, was that while maybe in the end your way is the right way, there are five, ten other people who can contribute and make it a better thing. Larry: Stephanie, we love your candor. Lucy: I have to say that this is such an important point. I can remember when I worked at Bell Labs that we took some amount of our imagination from "Rolling Stone Magazine." Who would figure? Stephanie: Right. Very cool. Lucy: Yeah. Around what we were doing with multimedia communication interfaces, and it came through this person who was sitting on the beach one day reading "Rolling Stone" on vacation. He brought the idea back to us at the Labs, and we at first didn't listen to him. Then we read the article. [laughter] Stephanie: It's interesting when you're really thinking about working through multimedia and technology, it's very easy as technologists to come from, "Well, this is the way it should work." It's really hard to think about, these are the other people on the value team, the people who create music. When you're thinking about all pieces of the value chain, it's really easy to focus on the technology. It's hard sometimes to remember that not only are, maybe, music companies involved, or people who listen, or all the other pieces along the way, to really bring them together. It's sometimes hard to get out of the tasks that we're doing today and think about the holistic view of the ecosystem. Lucy: I'll tell one other quick little story. At Bell Labs, in my organization, we finally realized that the Internet was real when a woman appeared on "The Donahue Show." Remember "The Donahue Show?" Stephanie: Yes. Lucy: OK. The sensation, of course, much more plain than it is today on some of those shows, but the sensation was that she was getting divorced because she had been talking with some other man on the Internet. They did a whole show. [laughter] Lucy: Stephanie, if you were sitting here with a young person and giving them advice about entrepreneurship, what advice would you give them? Stephanie: I actually think that the best advice I could give to anybody would be to take time to learn, to go and do internships, to find the salty dog in the organization who isn't always the oldest person in the organization, or the person who might be a little contrarian. Find those people and really learn about how you can work with them and how you can support them in all of their issues. I think internship is so important. I think coming to an organization with ideas is amazing. I think learning to collaborate and gain consensus amongst a huge number of people who are key influencers within the organizations are really, really good ways to learn how to contribute. I think becoming an intern in a larger organization, or even a smaller organization, and then making sure you touch all points of that organization, gives you a view of how an entrepreneur has to live. Some days I write business cases. Some days I do contracts. Some days I deal with end users. Some days I deal with angry clients on our side. Some days I'm troubleshooting why the applications have bugs in them. Really taking time to learn all of the aspects, all of the people in an organization, helps later to learn what it's like to be this utility person, which is all entrepreneurs. Some days you're accounting and some days you're dev, and all places in between. I think the best exposure is either (A) working in a big company where you intern, or working side by side with other entrepreneurs who pick up the six different hats a day, or even in an hour. Larry: I know a coming out of Ericsson and all, and that was great experience, but what is it about you personally that gives you the advantage of being an entrepreneur? Stephanie: I think I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I am a little bit of a bulldog. I think when people say that people are like their dogs, I have a very, very, very adorable and stubborn French bulldog named Weesie. I think we share some characteristics, in that when we I want to do something, or think that it's something that is good for the company, or for end users, or for the organization, I can't let it go until we get there. Whether we have to take five different routes to get to the same place, I really think that having a vision and sticking to it, but not sticking to how you get there, is really important in being an entrepreneur. To be flexible and learn how you can do it differently, or any of those things is really important, but just owning what you want to do and, hopefully, the outcome is really important. I think as a characteristic, and while I don't necessarily want to be considered a puppy with a sock. I am sometimes gnawing on that sock until we really can get to the vision. We're flexible enough to think that the vision can change over time and evolve. Definitely, especially within Rogue Paper, because this is a business we wanted to build, to make TV exciting for viewers, but then also just to help media companies to engage with their users and also to drive their core business, which is broadcast advertising. Really thinking about how to keep bringing eyeballs back for them. We'd done a few things to get it to change as time goes on. But I think definitely we always stick to this vision that we really think mobile can help drive traditional media. Lucy: I think it's great advice to think about sticking to your vision and being flexible with the way you get there. That's a powerful piece of advice. Changing gears just a bit, you're very busy, obviously. You're working hard on your company. I'm sure you have a wonderful set of friends and family around you as well. Larry: And a bulldog. Lucy: And a bulldog. [laughter] Lucy: How do you bring balance into your personal and professional life? Stephanie: It is very difficult. It's one of the bigger challenges, I would say, that most entrepreneurs have. I think the most successful are those to whom work is play, to some degree. If you love what you do and it bleeds into your personal life, it's not necessarily a hassle to do that. It's still that you're so excited about what you're doing and you're consistently thinking about it. In that way, there is not a huge difference in work life in terms of happiness. It's exciting to work at work, it's exciting to think about it afterwards. But it's interesting. Every company has growth phases. There's an innovation phase. You go through these big bursts of time when the focus gets really hard. I have an agreement with people in my personal life that in those two or three months, or in this growth phase, that I might be checked out a little bit. Then after that period goes, or after we solve a big problem, then I'm back at the dinner table and being an active participant in life. I would say it's not a burden on me, but it can be lonely for the other people in your life. Fortunately, the bulldog doesn't really notice as long as you throw the ball. [laughter] Stephanie: But it is a challenge. It's something that I watch people do around me. My business partner and co‑founder, she works nine hours a day full time, really hard during those times. Then she's able to really turn it off afterwards. It's something that impresses me and I admire, but at the same time, my brain is going at all times. I don't necessarily turn it off as well, or go as intensely during the day, but it is definitely one of the bigger challenges. But I would say in partnership, we just have to have agreements that this is a head sound period and I'll be back in two weeks, and a better participant. Lucy: I think that's an important point, that you can in fact give the people who are around you a heads up that this is going on and that you will be back. Stephanie: Right. I think it's definitely something that I learned through relationships and friendships, that what was scary was just going away, even though I knew I'd be back. Lucy: Right. Exactly. Just that simple communication seems like a pretty good tool for one's tool chest. Stephanie: It's not acceptable to miss birthdays and big events, but for the daily check‑ins, or the high‑intensity communication, I just kind of wave my hand and say, "OK, I'll get back to you in a couple of weeks. We're really powering through something." Larry: Stephanie, you might want to check with your mother before you answer this next question. [laughter] Larry: That is, you've already been through and done a great deal. What's next for you? Stephanie: Rogue Paper is actually my third business. The first one is really focused on technology. I actually taught Pilates and had Pilates studios. My life has changed in these big ways. Going back to what we were talking about earlier, that was a system. Pilates is a system, the human body is a system. I was always intrigued by that. This technology, co‑viewing and television, it's applying the same framework to a different type of thing. I would say I'm so excited about Rogue Paper. We're still just about a year and a half old. I feel like we're just really at the precipice of some really interesting things that we can do for media companies and for users. I think mobile penetration is really getting bigger. It's hard for me to think about too much of the future. Maybe I'm a little too comfortable with ambiguity, but I feel like there's so much I want to do now that is at the intersection of mobile media and entertainment. We're really excited about growing. I'm sure my mother would say, "children." Larry: [laughs] Very good. [laughter] Stephanie: "Grandchildren." Lucy: [laughs] Thank you so much for talking to us. You have such a great company, very interesting work. We wish you the very best for the future. We'll be watching, both from a business perspective, and probably we'll be using your technology as well. Stephanie: That is so exciting. Lucy: Yeah. Really. Thanks very much, Stephanie. I want to remind listeners that they can hear this interview at w3w3.com, and ncwit.org, as well as all the other interviews that we've done. Larry: You betcha. Thank you very much, Stephanie. Stephanie: Thank you. Have a great day. Lucy: Thank you, Stephanie. [music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Stephanie BoyleInterview Summary: As a self-proclaimed “TV-holic,” Stephanie Boyle founded Rogue Paper, Inc. to use mobile applications and technology to help enhance traditional media broadcasts and create an engaging double screen experience for viewers. Release Date: August 29, 2011Interview Subject: Stephanie BoyleInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 22:06