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In this touching episode, dive into the transformative world of nature therapy with Taylor Eagan and the Nature Connection team. Explore how they use nature to heal and boost mental health, igniting responsibility and trust with at-risk youth through therapeutic animal interactions. Discover moving tales of personal growth, like a young boy overcoming his fears with a bearded dragon. Uncover the value of small, everyday connections with nature- so important in our fast-paced world! Embrace the ripple effect of positivity the program instills in those battling disabilities and degenerative diseases. Navigate the hurdles in making such impactful programs accessible to all. Lastly, connect with Taylor and her colleagues as their own lives are profoundly changed by these life-affirming encounters. This episode beautifully encapsulates the transformative power of nature. Taylor Eagan is Program Director for The Nature Connection. She is a biologist, animal welfare advocate, educator, and gardener. Podcast Transcript Pat: Fill To Capacity, crazy good stories and timely topics. Podcasts for people too stubborn to quit and too creative not to make a difference. Inspiring, irreverent, and informative. Stay tuned. Hi, I'm Pat Benincasa, and welcome to Fill To Capacity! Pat: Today's episode: "Bringing the Outside, Inside: Nature's Path to Healing." My guest is Taylor Eagan. Taylor is a biologist, animal welfare advocate educator and gardener, and she is Program Director for the Nature Connection, where she designs and evaluates accessible and therapeutic programs utilizing plants and animals for people of all abilities and backgrounds. Well, welcome Taylor. I'm so happy to have you here. Taylor: I'm glad to be here. Pat: I'd like to start by giving our listeners a little bit of background. The Nature Connection was founded in 1983 and is located in Concord, Massachusetts. Now that's Middlesex County and the Greater Boston area? Okay. Their mission is to improve the wellbeing of individuals and communities through the therapeutic use of nature, by bringing the outside, inside through plants, animals, and natural materials to people with limited or no access to the outside world. Programs are delivered to at risk youth, people with disabilities, and older people with Alzheimer's and dementia. I love on your website the quote, "We bring, nature. Nature does the rest!" Pat: I'd like to start with the Nature Connection's mission of using nature therapeutically to improve the wellbeing of individuals and communities. Taylor, what does using nature therapeutically mean? How's it done and how's that different from other forms of therapy? Taylor: Yeah, it's a great place to start. It's very similar, I think, to maybe where art, music, dance therapies were about 20 years ago when they were kind of coming onto the scene and gaining popularity. And I think the pandemic has really helped shed light on how important nature is for our wellbeing. How important it is for us to be able to continue to get outside. And it's really come into the mainstream, the importance that it has in our mental health. And there's eco psychology and nature therapy and green therapy. It's got all these different names right now, but it's popping up in all of these different places and we know it's important. That's why there's therapy dog programs and forest bathing. And why, on a stressful, crazy, hectic day, you take a minute to go outside and breathe or take a walk, pet the dog. Taylor: So, it's something that we know is really important for us, for humans. And there's ... studies out there that are really starting to show it. Some, going all the way back again to 1983, actually with Ulrich's study of "View Through A Hospital Window," where patients who had had surgery, if they had a view outside of nature from their hospital bed, they recovered faster than patients who didn't. And we know it, historically, hospitals had garden centers and we knew it for a really long time, as humans, human society. And then we seem to have forgotten it with all of our technology, but it's coming back. That's the important part. It's coming back. Taylor: One of the things that I think nature is able to do is, it is so integral to our biology. We are a part of this planet, and we are a part of our ecosystems and where we are. So being able to have time with nature, feeling connected to nature. And Nature Connectedness is a real phrase, not just the name of our organization, but in being able to have that, it brings a sense of community and belonging along to those of us who are able to spend time in it. And that in itself, I think is healing. Pat: Yeah. I love how you bring in that macro eco connection, but yet you're a one-on-one organization. I love that duality. And so that segues into my next question. Can you highlight some specific examples of how your programs have positively impacted people with disabilities, Alzheimer's, or dementia? Taylor: It happens in a group setting, and we're very much talking on, we're designing our programs on an ecosystem level. So, bringing in the beach or the meadow or the forest. But then it does break down into these one-on-one interactions during the program hour. And that's when our, our staff and our volunteers are able to talk to participants. And we're talking about folks with disabilities. We're talking about folks with dementia and Alzheimer's, people with behavioral challenges and concerns. So, the person on your left is nowhere near the same as the person on your right. And you really need someone to be right there to talk with that participant about where they're at, what's connecting them to this experience. And we're able to really then, meet them where they're at. That very buzzword phrase these days, "meet them where they are" in terms of their interest and ability.  Taylor: And if it's an ocean program, it's summer right now we're doing a lot of ocean programs. We might have some hermit crabs with us. And for some participants, all that we're doing is really looking at how incredible that seashell is on the hermit crab's back and feeling the texture and just right there in the moment, exploring with our senses. And that's the moment. And it's amazing. Beautiful. Wonderful. But the next person might really wanna get into the science of this and like, well, how does the hermit crab fit in there? And we can talk about how the tail like curves in and holds onto that shell and how they need to change the shells as they grow. And that's within the same program. That's two different participants right next to each other. And so, we're able to really make meaningful connections with our program participants wherever it is that they're at, and whatever would be really meaningful and engaging for them at that time. Pat: So, your staff and volunteers really have to have a refined E.Q., Emotional Quotient in order to read what's going on with each individual and sense what will be helpful for that person. Taylor: Yeah. There's a reason why these programs are not everywhere. It is a huge resource and not just the time and the money, but for the people power to make it happen. To be able to sit there and converse, take the time, which sounds like should be a no brainer, but in today's fast-paced society, it so often gets missed to just sit and take the time and talk with someone and figure out where it is that they're at, and hear their stories and their experiences and hold that space for them, so that they can have that moment. Pat: Now ,I taught Art at an Arts high school and art programs in college. And so, I'm of course youth focused. I'm just gonna fess up right now. And I'd like to talk about your youth At Risk Youth Program. Now, during the pandemic, teen mental health issues, soared and, an American Psychological Association study found that during the pandemic depression and anxiety in youth doubled compared to pre pandemic levels. Now with that said, Taylor Youth at Risk are already in challenging situations. How has your program impacted these kids? So, two ways. The first way is our traditional, you know, we're traveling out, we're bringing, doing this sensory exploration therapeutic nature program that builds nature connectedness through repeated sensory exploration. It activates that parasympathetic nervous system to relax, renew that stress reduction of nature. There's that aspect to it. But something that we actually started just before Covid and we've been able to get back up and running, is we have a couple of critters, nothing crazy, some snails, a snake, some Madagascar Cockroaches that live with us at Nature Connection. Pat: Excuse me. Of course, everyone has Madagascar Cockroaches! Okay. I'm sorry, I just had to butt in and say that. Please continue. Taylor: They're really very cool. They can get up to like two, three inches long. So, they're, they're great insects when you're like trying to really look at an insect, especially for someone that has maybe some visual impairment or something like that. But yeah, you get that kinda like, ew factor as well around Halloween. But anyways, we have some critters that we have that live with us here at Nature Connection that need to be taken care of. And yeah, we have a huge collection of plants as well, to be taken care of. So, we've started a volunteer program, which to me is really just like a program in reverse that we're doing where we have specifically set aside blocks of time for kids in group homes or special education or therapeutic schools to come and volunteer with us to help take care of these animals. Taylor: You know...on our end, it's similar to a program 'cause we need to have a dedicated staff member there to kind of walk through and go with them. But it flips the script a little bit, right? We're not just showing up and we're like, hey, explore some nature. We're like, Nope, this is really meaningful. We need to take care of the animals. It has a real purpose and real meaning. Put it on an activity resume, put it on your resume for work experience. And our organization, our staff are coming with the understanding that these kids are coming to us from these particular backgrounds where it's challenging. And one day, they might not be able to show up. They might be having behavior challenges, whatever's going on. It doesn't mean that you're fired, it doesn't mean that you can't come back, we know that. So, it's really providing a stepping stone in their integration into the community that they're in. So that's been a really amazing program. Pat: So, they come in and their job is to take care of, let's say the Madagascar Cockroach or the snake or the snails. So, they come in, they do their part to take care of it. And what I'm struck by is that at the heart of that is learning to trust, that you guys are setting up a wonderful platform, much like teachers do. You have to earn the trust of your students to have any kind of learning happen. And ... they have to work, it's like something that they can feel proud of that, yeah, I'm taking care of the snails or I'm doing this. So that's really a phenomenal approach that they come in and participate. Taylor: Yeah, it's great. And they get to spend time with the animals and work with them. So, it's a win-win, win all way around. Pat: Well then, Taylor, can you describe a powerful, memorable experience where the Nature Connection program pushed beyond the boundaries of someone's life and brought them joy? Taylor: Oh, yeah. One story that's coming to mind was me personally out on a program a couple years back. There was a little boy, he's in a, in a group home. It was a, a residential therapeutic school. So, he lived there, went to school there with 12 other boys, and we would come in once a month. And this particular program, we had a bearded dragon with us. His name was Jim. He is the chillest bearded dragon I've ever met. Would just flop and sit there and really just let the kids ooh and awe over him. But this little boy was very afraid to pet him. So, we went through this whole process where I put my hand in the way, kind of blocking his head, and Jim was very accommodating and let us put a little wash rag over his face. Taylor: So, it was like, there's no way that he is gonna bite you. But even if he wanted to, no way this is gonna happen. And little boy reached out and he did pet Jim. He touched him very, very lightly, but like, just this huge explosion of joy in that moment. High fives all around. He reached out and he challenged himself and did this thing that was so scary, pushed his boundaries. And one of my favorite quotes is, "A mind stretched by a new experience can never return to old dimensions.” Right? He stretched, had a new experience, touched that bearded dragon. The best part for me is we came back the next month with a chicken and he comes running up and he is so excited. What did you bring? What did you bring? And I tell him, we've got a chicken. And he is like, all right, I'm gonna pet it. And I know that I can, because I did it with Jim, the bearded dragon. So, he took that like amazing explosion in the moment, but then carried it forward into that next month, into that next program. And, you know, that he took that into other things as well. I faced my fears, I did it, and it worked. Pat: What a beautiful life-changing moment. You mentioned a little bit earlier that how we've become disconnected from nature in our everyday life. And I was thinking about it getting ready for this podcast that people have to plan special trips, or they scroll through social media just to catch a glimpse of nature. And when you think of urban dwellers who can go for weeks without seeing a tree, it's as if we've put nature outside of ourselves as if we made it separate from our very existence. What can we do to bring nature back into our lives? Taylor: Yeah. It's such a real problem. I think that this is a fundamental issue, not only when we think of ourselves and our mental health and wellbeing, but when we think of things like climate change and some of the larger issues facing our planet. Because if, if you don't personally have a connection with nature, it is that much harder to get invested. And to care about some of these larger issues. So, this idea of nature connectedness, exactly what you described, you know, there is a scale of how connected do you see yourself with nature, how integral is it to who you are and your day-to-day life. And it's, it is something that we build over time through repeated sensory exploration with nature. So think little kids running around, outside playing, pulling up grass, looking for caterpillars, turning over rocks that builds this idea. But you need it over and over again. It's like going to the gym. You can't just do it once and expect to be good forever. It's something that every day would be the correct amount. Taylor: I don't think it has to be as big as, as sometimes we think that it does. You don't have to take a trip to the beach. You don't have to go climb a mountain. You could just go sit outside on your lunch break, take an extra minute on your trip to the car, to, to look up and see the clouds or the stars, depending on what time of day it is. when you, when you hear a bird song, you know, stop for a second and listen just for a second. And just like those teeny, little pieces start sneaking their way into your life. Yeah. Pat: You know, you, you touched on it earlier, that C O V I D caused many people to discover nature. One way I would phrase it is that many people discovered their backyards. And I have to say for myself, I'm an artist. My studio I built is 12 feet from the house. And I put a green room, I built a green room in there with shrubs and miniature trees and flowers. But during C O V I D I would go out there and all of a sudden, I'm seeing the number of squirrels, the number of chipmunks, the bunnies. We even had ducks waddling through our yard. And so all of a sudden, I thought, how did I miss this before I looked at flowers and shrubs? But it was the, the furry creatures, the winged creatures that all of a sudden came to life. And when I went online, people started talking about, and social media, oh, my backyard, I noticed, or this animal came back there, you know, whatever it is, it seemed like, and C O V I D was horrendous. I wouldn't wish that on anybody. But as we're getting away from it, there were some dark angel gifts that came from it. And I think one of them was the discovery of, of nature. Taylor: Yeah. And like you said, your own backyard, you don't need that much space to start noticing. And I love that phrase that you said, “I notice” because you don't need to know facts. Nature, documentaries have us so trained that like you need to know your facts about nature in order to appreciate it. But you, you don't, you so don't. You can really just go outside, and I promise you, if you look at the same little square foot of dirt every day, something about it is gonna be different. You're gonna be able to notice something. Pat: Now I'm urban. But one of the things I've done, and it started as a way to, to just relax and calm myself. I go outside in my little green room; I close my eyes and I count 10 different sounds that I hear. And I thought, well, there's not that many. What are you doing? And you know what, Taylor, there were more than 10. So, every day there were different sounds, birds, dogs barking, whatever it was, it was my way of going into the now, meditating into the now, the world around us, the audio world . Pat: It was phenomenal. So, as you say, “I notice,” and that to me is huge. Taylor: It's amazing how much there is. And, and now we're like slipping into this conversation, getting on the fringes of mindfulness and how wonderful that is. And nature is everywhere. Nature is everything. It's this big raw material that is just completely covering our planet and we can put all of these different lenses in front of it. So whatever way it works for us, nature just becomes this catalyst for us to, to get more in tuned and slow down. And whether that's counting the audio, counting the blades of grass, petting the dog, there are all these different ways that we can interact and get into even cooking. People that think that like, oh no, I don't have connection to nature. That's not for me. I would say even your food is nature. You know, get into some herbs and spices, and think about where your food's coming from. And that in itself can lead you right into those connections. Pat: That's huge. You know, on your website, you guys have on there that you have over 15,000 nature connections. So, as I was thinking about that, can you tell us what are some of the long-term benefits that participants have reported back to you from their interaction with your program? Taylor: Yeah. I tell you; I do know of one girl that went on to vet school because of The Nature Connection Program visiting her group home. That is like one of those big, huge kind of long-term moments there. But I will say a lot of the folks that we work with are in memory care, have dementia, have disabilities and degenerative diseases. So that in itself can make it tough. You know, we're not seeing folks really get better over time, but what we do see is the ripple effect of a positive moment in the day. And even when we're talking about folks with dementia and Alzheimer's, their emotional knowledge, and abilities, they're still largely intact in the deeper parts of the brain. And so the facts of the situation, the fact that we were there, that we brought a bunny rabbit and explored a forest meadow in the summer, that part might go, but the feeling of connection and being in this room with bubbly energy and conversation and someone stopped to listen to your story about that time where you had rabbits all over your, that piece stays and you know that you have those little positive moments in your day, and that can change everything. Taylor: That changes your own mood. It changes the caretaker's mood, your family members' mood when they come to see you. So just enough of those small positive moments and you really get a really large ripple effect coming out of just goodness, joy, wonder all around. Pat: So, I'd like to flip the discussion a little bit. Can you discuss some of the challenges the Nature Connection faces in its mission to make sure nature-based programming is accessible to everyone regardless of location, personal abilities, or socioeconomic status. What kind of challenges do you guys run into? Taylor: I mentioned before resources are the big one, but any nonprofit in any social justice kind of movement and money is always the big one that you can point a finger to. But I think time and people, you know, we talked a little bit earlier where we're trying to have these very personal connections, need to be able to have these very personal connections. So, we need to make sure that there's enough volunteers, interns, staff in the room that are able to engage with all of these folks that come in. Our groups can be anywhere from just a couple of people to upwards of 20, 25 people in the room. And when we get that big of a group, then we need more volunteers. We need more folks with us to come in and talk with people. Taylor: So folks aren't just sitting there too long waiting and sure there's a really cool display to look at, but, you know, having the time for someone there to talk to and being able to, I think, find people as well that are willing to sit in that intersection of nature, exploration, naturalist, environmental educator along with that really high emotional capacity to sit with someone and carve out that space and the time for them and be able to overcome those communication challenges. Some of our folks, they really are nonverbal. They use communication boards, find gross motor difficulties. So, it really is each person that we're talking to, a different style of communication and being able to go around and talk with all of these different folks on an individual level in a room. It's a skill. Pat: Okay. Taylor, we are talking macro what the program does, it's obvious the Nature Connection program is incredibly inspiring in the way it just touches so many lives. Now, I wanna know from when you started there to now, how has it affected you personally? Taylor: Oh, so many ways, and I think it's an understated piece of this organization because so much of our focus is on our participants as it should be. But I have personally seen so much growth happen with our volunteers, with our interns, with our staff, with myself, where this is an organization that is so committed to honoring the individual, the individual's experiences, the individual's knowledge, their abilities. And so I think all of those other folks that are working to make these programs happen for participants, they get that benefit as well. You know, it's just the environment that's been created here. And so, they too get to feel seen and heard and, and I mean, that can make all the difference in your life. Sometimes when things get challenging, to have a community of people that you can come to and feel seen and feel heard and know that your experiences are mattering here and being aware of that and in tune with that. So, I think it's helped plenty of us on the, the back end of things. Just through life's challenges as well, dealing with the things that come up over the years. Pat: The life things. Yes. I love the back-and-forthness, I know that's not a word, but I don't care, the back-and-forthness of your organization, that the goodness goes out to the community. It comes back to the people who are participating and it's so fluid that way. It's so fluid! And it makes me think at the core of The Nature Connection is empathy and compassion. It not only brings nature to people, but you really go the distance to understand their unique struggles and needs. This is a remarkable alchemy that fuses nature's profound ability to nourish our souls with the means to reach those most in need. And it has the capacity to transform lives. You know, I love your passion. I love your enthusiasm, your energy, and I suspect that the people in your organization suffer from the same thing, this passion and joy in the work that you do. I wanna wish continued success to you Taylor, and to all the dedicated people who make the Nature Connection such a powerful force for good. Thank you so much. Taylor: Thank you so much for having us on, being able to share the story. You know, that's half the battle is getting the word out, and let people know that we're here and that this is something that's going on in the world. Pat: So where can people learn more about the Nature Connection? And Hey folks, if you're in the Boston area and you wanna volunteer or anybody wants to donate, where can they get ahold of you? Taylor: Our website is, https://www.nature-connection.org/ It's got all of our information on there. We're also on social media. You find us on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Pat: Once again, thank you Taylor for joining us today. And thank you listeners for joining us on Fill To Capacity. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please let your friends know and pass the word along. Thank you. LINKS The Nature Connection    

To stay up to date checkout ⁠⁠⁠⁠thestartupproject.io⁠⁠⁠⁠ & follow Nataraj on twitter: ⁠⁠@natarajsindam⁠⁠ In this episode Nataraj spoke to Taylor Black who co-founded Fizzy Inc. Post Fizzy Taylor worked at Innovation Science Fund & currently works as a Principal Product Manager at the Office of the CTO Incubator at Microsoft. Transcript: [00:00:00] Nataraj: I looked at the portfolio there then it's completely deep tech, uh, and sort of like invention based, uh, ideas. [00:00:08] Nataraj: Uh, so what was the process of like capturing and invention and taking and productizing it and, you know, making a return out of it? Like what was the thinking process there? [00:00:20] Taylor: So the, uh, and you can read Malcolm Gladwell's take on this in a, in an article where he described our invention sessions. Um, a and the invention sessions are a bit of a riff on like an innovation session or an envisioning session or things along those lines where you, you come up with wild ideas within a particular problem space, um, in a very unfettered sort of, Um, and the whole goal of this session is to generate as many ideas as possible. [00:00:52] Taylor: That's the sole ROI you're looking for in those sessions. Um, but there's certain conditions you set for success in those [00:01:00] sessions. And so the way that we ran those sessions, and I, and I, I ran, uh, a number of them, um, is that we would prepare for months ahead of time in gathering all of the materials that related to the problem. [00:01:14] Taylor: and by materials I mean the scientific research in a particular problem space, the, uh, market, uh, and startup landscapes of that particular problem space. Um, uh, things that people had written about it. Books, articles, um, you know, YouTube videos, everything, uh, along those lines. And the goal was to, um, inform. [00:01:43] Taylor: Kind of the fermentation moment of when you're thinking about a problem, all of these things w wouldn't themselves, um, not be a solution necessarily, but there are all the things that someone who wanted to be completely informed or as, as, as informed and possible as possible about a set of [00:02:00] problems. Um, Had all of the raw material there. [00:02:03] Taylor: We'd also do customer discovery, we'd do customer interviews to understand those pain points. We'd bring people in, um, uh, and run sessions with them where they would, you know, get deep into their own, um, the problems they were encountering so that everybody who is, and everybody who's part of the sessions had to. [00:02:22] Taylor: Understand those materials, uh, deeply. We'd even quiz them on occasion. Um, it also helped that, uh, bill Gates, um, uh, whenever he came to those sessions, he would have all of those materials like completely groced. And so you, you know, you needed to have them groced too so that you didn't, you know, uh, lose face in front of Bill. [00:02:44] Taylor: But, um, Uh, but the key, so we'd, we'd get everybody, all of those materials and have them go through them, uh, a good month or so before the actual sessions happened. Um, that gave everybody an, an even playing [00:03:00] field in terms of, you know, I may be a physicist, I may be a biz dev person, I may be, um, an attorney. [00:03:06] Taylor: I may be, uh, you know, a program manager, but I have all of the same raw material. Uh, and my own perspective on it that I can bring to these sessions. The sessions themselves, them, um, were set around particular problem spaces and we'd start, we'd start each, um, session and then there's a variety of different kinds of sessions that we ram. [00:03:28] Taylor: Um, Uh, with a lot of provocations, a lot of conversation, a lot of like wild thinking and post-it notes and whiteboards of just dumping ideas out, uh, that had occurred to people or occurred in conversation or happened in the, in the hallway outside. Um, and we get all those ideas down, documenting everything. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/startupproject/message

About TaylorTaylor Barnett is a Staff Developer Advocate at PlanetScale. She is passionate about building great developer experiences emphasizing empathy within product, documentation, and other developer-facing projects. For the past decade, Taylor has worked at various data and API-focused startups in software development and developer relations. In her free time, as a firm believer in "touching grass," she's either gardening, taking long walks, climbing rocks with friends, trying to find the funkiest sour beers, or hanging out with her corgi, Yoda, and spouse in Austin, Texas.Links Referenced: PlanetScale: https://planetscale.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/taylor_atx Personal website: https://taylorbar.net TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: If you asked me to rank which cloud provider has the best developer experience, I'd be hard-pressed to choose a platform that isn't Google Cloud. Their developer experience is unparalleled and, in the early stages of building something great, that translates directly into velocity. Try it yourself with the Google for Startups Cloud Program over at cloud.google.com/startup. It'll give you up to $100k a year for each of the first two years in Google Cloud credits for companies that range from bootstrapped all the way on up to Series A. Go build something, and then tell me about it. My thanks to Google Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Logicworks. Getting to the cloud is challenging enough for many places, especially maintaining security, resiliency, cost control, agility, etc, etc, etc. Things break, configurations drift, technology advances, and organizations, frankly, need to evolve. How can you get to the cloud faster and ensure you have the right team in place to maintain success over time? Day 2 matters. Work with a partner who gets it - Logicworks combines the cloud expertise and platform automation to customize solutions to meet your unique requirements. Get started by chatting with a cloud specialist today at snark.cloud/logicworks. That's snark.cloud/logicworksCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Taylor Barnett, Staff Developer Advocate at PlanetScale. Taylor, you're one of those people that I'm ashamed I haven't had on the show before now. Thanks for joining me.Taylor: You're welcome. Yeah, I'm glad to be here.Corey: We've been traveling in similar circles for a while now. And I lost track of a lot of those areas when the pandemic hit, you know, the global plague o'er the land. And during that time, it seemed like there was a lot of question that folks had about what is developer advocacy. What does DevRel become now? And now that we're largely on the other side of it—at least business is pretending that we're behind it—do we have an answer yet?Taylor: I hope so. I mean, I have an answer. Not sure if other businesses have figured that out yet. But no, I mean, to me, advocacy is still just that glue between company and a community. But I think one of the things that the pandemic has really, like, pushed that, you know, when there were no in-person events, was that it questioned what activities that actually looks like.You know, I see advocacy as a ton of different levers and you can tweak those levers to different levels. Before, it was largely a lot of in-person stuff—I will say I was doing less in-person, actually before than most; I was doing a little bit more content—then it had to become so content-focused. And I think now we're in this awkward place where in-person events have come back and we're still, like, figuring out, like, how do we do those? What does that look like? And we've actually—I think part of it is we've over-indexed now on content.I think part of that is because it is visible and it is measurable, and that's always a big topic [laugh] in developer relations is metrics. But also, I think we've lost track of the actual advocacy part: how do we actually advocate for users internally? It's just disappeared a little bit because we were so content-focused during the pandemic.Corey: I would say that's been a recurring theme with every DevRel person that I've spoken to that metrics are the bane of their existence. And I want to be clear, I'm not just talking about developer advocates, I'm talking about people who manage and run developer advocacy teams, I'm talking about executives who are trying to bring the appropriate context to strategic-level discussions around these things. All of the metrics that I have been able to uncover are wrong. But it's like the, ‘all models are wrong, but some models are useful' type of approach, where—Taylor: Yeah.Corey: Every time you start putting a metric around it and measuring people based upon the outcome of that metric, it ends in disaster. My one and only interview for a DevRel job in my past was my question for them was how do you measure success? “Well, we want to see you have talks accepted at some of the big tier-one conferences.” And they list a few examples, and it's, yeah, “I've spoken at for the ones you just listed in the past year, so… do I get a raise?” It's one of those areas where there's no right answer, but a lot of wrong ones.Taylor: Yeah. And one of the other troubling patterns that I've started to see also more is that in these cloud startups, they have DevRel programs now that are fairly young, we're talking not even a year old. Some in the recent DevRel survey results, it was about, like, 29% of programs are less than a year old. Within those programs, 43% of those people have not even been in a DevRel role for more than a year. So, not only do we have folks that haven't done this before, the startup has not done this before.And so, the metrics conversation is basically a shit show. People with the right experiences aren't in these roles and so they're not able to craft strategies and actually look at good metrics. And so, then we then over-index on the things like, “Oh, you wrote a blog post.” Great, you know, that's, like, some kind of metric. “It got X number of page views.” Great, that's some kind of metric.And it often incentivizes some of the wrong things. And so, then it just incentivizes more and more of this content creation, to just get those pageviews up. And it's scary to me because then we're just going back to the more evangelist type of developer relations and less of the advocacy type stuff where we're actually advocating for users internally.Corey: I would agree. I'd say that there's a problem where we have a, almost across the board, lack of understanding about—let's even start at the very beginning of when DevRel is required or when it's not. I mean, take where you work now at PlanetScale. You're effectively managed Vitess-as-a-service. That's a little on the technical side and is not the sort of thing that's going to necessarily lend itself to a mass-market marketing approach.This is not something to put on billboards outside of most highways, for example, but it does require engaging with people on a technical level. I keep joking but also serious when I refer to DevRel as meaning you work in marketing, but they're scared to tell you.Taylor: Yeah. No, I mean, I actually sometimes say, “Well, like, I'm secretly probably a pretty good product marketer, but I don't want developers to know that because then I'll lose my street cred from my actual development and engineering background.” And I have a computer science degree and, like, I'm actually, like [laugh], very, very technical. But the reality is, like, you know, somebody's got to write the words, sometimes.Corey: The words are harder when they go into people then they are into computers. At least with computers—Taylor: Exactly.Corey: It's pretty—it's a bounded problem space to some extent. With people, oh no, no, there's no consistency at all.Taylor: Yeah. And like, words mean different things to different people, especially, like, my favorite one lately is, like, what does edge mean? Nobody actually has one [laugh] definition of that word.Corey: Oh, I think most of them do. Edge always means, “Oh, it's a way of describing the thing that we've been doing for 15 years, but now want to sell into a hype cycle.”Taylor: Yeah, yeah. I mean, CDNs have been around for a while. You know, and that's really—like, what PlanetScale, it is, in some ways, we're challenging what people expect from their database. We think you can actually expect more from your database platform, and so there are things you know, to teach people about some of these newer ways of working with a database. And that requires needing to think about how we present that to users, but also hearing back from users how do we work within their applications, their stacks.We're MySQL. That's, you know, a trusted standard. It's been around for a while, so it works with many, but also, we're in this whole new paradigm of how to use a database. These are all new ideas and they require both a two-way street of both putting things out there—so content, not bad; it's still needed—but also things coming in and taking that, making it actionable, and talking about it internally.Corey: When you take a look at the DevRel world, what do you think that most organizations are missing or getting wrong about it? And yes, I understand that I'm basically asking you to start beef with a whole bunch of companies out there, but that's all right. It's what we do here.Taylor: Yeah, one of the things I love, [Matty 00:07:44] Stratton had this thing where I tweeted out a few months ago that we've over-indexed on content, and matty's reply was that we've over-indexed on being able to do cool shit that isn't connected to revenue because that somehow is dirty for DevRel to somehow be connected to revenue. I think, you know, a lot of times, there are ways that we can look at how do users actually get value from our products. Like, are they actually getting value? One way they express that is by paying for it. So therefore, we are then somehow connected to revenue.I mean, I want to build things, I want to work on platforms that deliver value, that people actually want to pay for because they see this is makes my life easier, somehow. But to do that, and again, we've got to talk to our users. We've got to figure out where do they actually value. What are the things that are just fluff? There's a lot of fluff out there.Sometimes if we don't listen to them, then we don't have to find out that what we're building is fluff. So, that's probably the part that could start some beefs. But it's the reality of lots of VC money and tooling and being able to build things super easily, it's a bunch of different factors coming together in this time.Corey: One of the things that I don't pretend to understand, but I'm going to roll with it anyway, is there's been a lot of discourse on where DevRel does not belong in an org chart. I don't have a terrific answer at this, but I do know that most of the answers I get from practitioners in the space are deeply dissatisfying. It seems that—not to be unkind or cast aspersions where they don't belong, but whenever I ask the question, everyone has a whole laundry list of wrong answers and very few right ones.Taylor: I honestly will say I don't care [laugh]. I mean, that's the reality.Corey: Corporate IT. Got it.Taylor: Do I want to be on a team that makes me directly responsible for qualified leads? No. That does not necessarily say anything about the team itself. That is just a metric. That is—you know, and that team exists in a larger system that has put certain pressures on it.Like, you know, there's, like, things, like, it's more about how a team looks at just doing the DevRel stuff and doing marketing in general, or how they do sales. You know, I know lots of developers hate to hate on sales—marketing, too—and I don't necessarily think sales and marketing are a bad thing, I think is the way we incentivize those roles create bad behaviors, and so maybe we should look at how we incentivize them. And so, I don't care what team I'm honestly on most of the time. I've been on a few different ones. As long as I get to do the developer advocacy work that I actually think is impactful for developers and actually making developers' lives better, I'm cool.Corey: It's my belief, on some level, that it's very easy to internalize a bad expression of it. You can have phenomenally well-empowered DevRel teams working in marketing—Taylor: Yep.Corey: —at some companies, and in other places, it can be an absolute disaster because they start putting metrics like number of qualified leads around you. And I can't shake the feeling that people internalize, “Well, we've reported marketing once and it was terrible,” without realizing the context of yeah, but in a terrible way, and an org that didn't really understand what you do. That doesn't necessarily mean that you should throw that whole baby out with the bathwater.Taylor: Yeah, I mean, we've all had bad managers. So, we're not going to say we're just never going to have a manager.Corey: Some people try that.Taylor: Is that what you've done [laugh]?Corey: Indirectly. No, I was talking about more about the holacracy companies where oh yeah, no one reports to anyone. It's really? Because everyone makes different amounts of money, so one wonders about that.Taylor: Yeah. But by far, we just go find better managers is what we often do, you know? And there's the whole phrase that, like, people don't leave companies, they leave managers. It's very true in my experience. And we don't just say, “All marketing teams bad, so I'm never going to join a marketing team.” We should say, “Let's just go find one that fits better.”Corey: I was very frustrated in my last couple of real jobs because so much of what I was doing was DevRel-like, but this was before that was an established and accepted thing in the places that I worked, so there were questions like, “Well, what is the value of you going to give a keynote at this conference?” And the honest answer was, “Yeah, I have no idea how to quantify it, but I know that if I do it, good things come out of it.” And that was a difficult battle to fight, whereas now when I decided to go work for myself, it's, “Yeah, I'm going to go speak there. I don't know what the ROI is. I know good things and maybe some useful things will come out of it. Maybe I'll learn something, but this is how we experiment and learn.” And that looks an awful lot to most traditional management types. Like I'm trying to justify a trip somewhere.Taylor: Yeah. And I think, you know, what's been also interesting, as I noticed, some people are starting to notice a lot of more junior people wanting to get into developer relations. And we sometimes actually are wondering, some of us in developer relations, if we've not always shown like the negative parts of that. What happens when you go do that keynote? What does that mean for your week leading up to that keynote? What does travel look like? What is, like, running across an airport wearing a mask and carrying your luggage look like?I think we don't always get to see that and so it looks a little bit less glamorous when people see that. And maybe they would be slightly less interested in the role or just, like, how do you handle working with, like, five different teams across a company to try to be like that glue piece between all of them to get something done? Like, there's a lot less glamorous parts that I'm hoping more people talk about because, like you said, it just looks like you're trying to go get a trip somewhere. I think the other thing is, like, even if you are having a keynote, I think one of the things that some people—they think one keynote is going to just wreck a budget. The reality is for our business, it will not do that, so why can't we, like, have a better balance of extremes?Like, you're not going to be giving ten of those keynotes in a year, maybe experiment doing two and see what comes out of doing two of them. But the other thing is, it's a long-term game and so you're not going to see something maybe the week after. It could be six months later. I had this one experience where someone actually told me—it was probably, like, a whole year after I had given a talk—that him and his teammates—this was back when people you know, went into offices—sat in an office and watched one of my old talks together. And I was just like, what, like, y'all, like, got together and did that?Corey: Yeah, you could have invited me and I could have delivered it for you in person and answered questions, but all right.Taylor: Yeah. It was like, what I was just like, oh my gosh, that is literally never happened to me. This was a few years ago. And then, too, I was like, that just made it worth it. If you asked a CEO, would you like to have an advocate go give a talk for a whole team at a company, they'd be like, “Yes, I want you—” especially if that's a big company and the name is shiny and they would love to have that as a customer, they would be, like, a hundred percent, “Go give that talk.”And so, I think many times, leadership needs to actually kind of check in on, like, is this really that much of a cost if it's just, like, one keynote? I've seen battles over really feels like stupid things sometimes. But everything in moderation is kind of the way I approach it.[midroll 00:15:17]Corey: One problem that I tended to see and I don't know how closely your experience mirrors my own, but it seemed, especially in the before times, right before the pandemic hit, that we were almost trapped in a downward spiral at a lot of the conferences because it felt like it was mostly becoming DevRels speaking to DevRel. And that wasn't the most inclusive thing for folks who used to wind up going to a lot of local conferences to learn from their local community and see how other people were solving the problems that they were solving. Instead, it felt like a bunch of DevRel types getting up there, in most cases giving a talk that was heavily alluding to why you should buy their product, if not an outright sales pitch for it. And it just felt like we're losing something. Do you think that's something that we've avoided, that we've pressed pause on, with the pandemic and now the recession, or do you think there's something else afoot?Taylor: I think that's still happening today, especially with, like, engineers wanting sometimes to travel less, you know, some people still have personal and family reasons for not traveling, so even less of them are wanting to speak. I don't think I saw, like, a huge swath of engineers, like, really excited to speak once conferences started in person again. They thought, “Oh, my gosh, I have to go talk to people in person again?” And so, it's still happening. I've seen it from an organizer's perspective.I used to organize the API specifications conference. There's tons of DevRel submissions in there, so you know, we really tried to spend time reaching out to companies that were member companies of the OpenAPI Initiative and get them to actually have member engineers from their teams come speak. I think DevRel has a role to internally advocate for engineers who are doing the day-to-day work, go speak at conferences. You know, I think many times engineers feel like, “Oh, what I have to talk about is not very interesting.” And I have to tell them, it is very interesting, and I would love to have you speak, and I'm here to help you, and you know, need help writing a CFP? I'm there. You need help putting together slides, practicing talks? I'm there.And I think DevRel can be kind of like these coaches for folks to go speak at conferences because the reality is attendees want to hear from them. They want to hear engineers from especially major companies or companies just doing really interesting engineering challenges speaking. And I think DevRel has a part in helping that happen. I've personally backed away from speaking the last six months, partially because I'm kind of not seeing as much value for myself doing it before I was doing a lot more, so I'm using that effort to try to advocate internally to help people CFPs. Last week, I helped a bunch of people KubeCon submissions, and then next week, I have other conferences I would love to—I have engineers that I've kind of picked out that I would love to have speak. And yeah, I'm glad to play a part in trying to improve that. And I think other advocates should, too.Corey: Where do you think that we're going as an industry? Because it became pretty clear for a couple of years that so much of what we were doing and how we were discussing it, it felt like there was a brief moment in time that we could really transform what we were doing and start to have a broader awareness that DevRel was more than giving talks on stage at conferences. And it feels like we squandered that opportunity and it mostly turned into, oh, now we're going to give the same talks, we're just going to do it to webcams, either pre-recorded—which was the better approach—or we're going to do it live, even though there's no interactive component to it, just introduce a whole bunch of different failure modes. I was disappointed. I liked some of the early stuff I saw coming out, like Desert Island DevOps, where they did it inside of Animal Crossing. Like I wanted to see more stuff like that, but it just seems like we didn't.Taylor: Yeah, I mean, the reality is, I think a lot of the online events have disappeared a lot in the last three or four months. And we're also seeing events trying to be hybrid. To me, a hybrid event is, like, throwing two events. Do you have an organizing team that can actually handle two concurrent events? It's hard.And API Specifications Conference, we did two years in person. Pretty niche conference. It's like the API nerds of the API nerds. And so, we still had pretty engaged attendees because there weren't any other sources of this, but then when everyone was starting to do the same content, attendees started checking out. They got tired of sitting in front of their monitors and watching talks.You know, we're seeing things coming back in person. I think it's going to be very interesting for the Spring because the Fall for me, it was probably one of my busiest conference seasons in terms of us just also sponsoring things. And I'm unsure of the return on investment today. We will see over time how that return on investment comes out, but I think it's going to change the way we look at the Spring, it's going to change the way we look at next Fall, and I think other companies are having the same conversations, too. And so, it's going to be like, okay, what do we do instead if we don't focus on conferences? I don't know. For me, that's focusing on the actual advocacy part, the user feedback, talking to users, building a product that people find value in. But for other teams, their team might not be in the place to do that. They might be expected to still produce this content in different ways, in-person, written, online.Corey: So, one of the burning questions that I think is not asked or addressed particularly well in the space has been, how do you get users to trust you? And to be clear, I am not saying you personally. It's like, “Well, given your history of flagrant lying and misleading people and scam after scam after scam, that is honestly impressive—” No, no, no, none of that. It's how do you—the indefinite you—build user trust?Taylor: Yeah, I think this is something we've seen, lots of companies of all sizes really struggle with. You know, the obvious thing I think many times companies think of is like, oh, if I'm open and transparent and have great docs, users will trust me. You know, I think that's part of it. I think the other thing that many often forget is that you need to listen to them, you need to take their feedback that they give you when you ask questions—and there's a whole, like, asking questions; I'm learning myself, like, how to ask better questions—how do you then make that actionable internally?You know, you have to understand who makes product decisions. Who do I need to talk to about this feature versus this other feature, and there's all these internal dynamics that you're then wading into. So, you have to get good at that. And then when you finally actually get some kind of change, whether that be some small paper cut of a thing related to a feature, or a big feature that you release, you actually go back to the user and you tell them, “Hey, look, we did this.” And what blows my mind is I do this, I take notes on who told me what feedback, and when that issue gets closed out, I go back to them and they're just shocked that I replied. They are shocked that I actually followed up. And to me, it's like such a basic thing, just following up. Doesn't seem, like, that hard.But it actually is hard but also useful. And you know, I think we've seen this so many times. We see—this is one example that I think about a lot, and I think you're familiar with this one too, Corey, the Aurora Serverless Data API in V1, people loved that. Then they came out with V2. There was no data API.And if you search that people are upset everywhere. And AWS keeps on telling them, “Nope, it's not going to happen.” And it's like, it's such an easy win if they actually listened to the user base. But there's countless examples of this, you know? There's things that we do at PlanetScale that we could improve on, you know, that users are telling us.There's only so much time in the day, but I think part of an advocate's job to wade through this feedback and figure out where can we bring the biggest value and the most impact. And, you know, I think all companies could benefit just from listening more and doing something about it.Corey: I wish that were a message that would get in front of the right people to make them a little bit more receptive. It feels like that's a message that is bandied around—to be direct—in DevRel circles an awful lot, but it doesn't seem to gain traction outside of that.Taylor: This kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier with what team you're on. Sometimes that makes a huge difference, especially in larger companies. If you were siloed away in a marketing org—nothing bad about marketing, to be clear, but internally, you're seen as marketing—engineers, developers, see you as marketing. When you come with product feedback, they're kind of, “That's not your box. Go back to your box. Go back to your silo.”And you know, I think the reality is, we can't look at advocacy like that. I have users tell me things that they would never tell salesperson, they would never tell someone on our leadership team, they might tell someone in support. They tell me things. They send me emails that are multiple paragraphs long, giving positive and negative feedback. Many times it's positive, but I'm just shocked they'll even write that much, you know, positive. Like, they actually took out the time to do it.And they trusted that it was worth their time. I've done something right there if they're willing to do that at that point. And I, you know, I make sure I respond to every single one of those emails. I had someone ask me like, “Oh, do you want us to forward you all of them?” And I'm like, “Yes. Every single one. No matter what it says, I'm going to reply to this email.”Because then if I lose that trust, it's everything for me as an advocate. It's how I can help them, you know, see the value in the product, and help them with adoption, and bring them along to eventually paying, potentially—dirty word, revenue—but otherwise, I wouldn't have a job. So, you know, I think it's really something that startups, they think they see DevRel advocacy as content farms and not enough of the part that actually helps them make money.Corey: I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Taylor: So, for now, I'm on Twitter as @taylor_atx. But if anything happens with that, as we know right now, you can also find me at taylorbar.net is my website. I'll always try to keep links of where I am on there. Trying to write more. We'll see if I accomplish that over the holidays. But yeah, that's the two places you can find me.Corey: And we will, of course, include links to that in the [show notes 00:26:27]. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Taylor: Yeah, thanks, Corey, for letting me rant, ramble, kind of have all these thoughts about advocacy. I'm hoping we can have a good 2023 in the world of DevRel and advocacy and make progress on some of these things.Corey: I sure hope you're right.Taylor: [laugh]. I hope I'm right, too, for the happiness of my job [laugh].Corey: Taylor Barnett, Staff Developer Advocate at PlanetScale. 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 channeling a late Christmas spirit to tell us what the true meaning of DevRel was all along. Which will be wrong. Because it includes metrics.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.

As 2020 continues to throw curveballs left and right, the only thing we know for sure is that we have no idea what is coming next. That’s a tough pill to swallow, especially if you are a business owner trying to plan for the next quarter, or even the next week. Consumer behavior continues to shift in varying directions, and every industry in the world seems to be in a constant state of flux.  With so much volatility, what is an entrepreneur to do? Taylor Holiday has some ideas. Taylor is the Managing Partner of Common Thread Collective, an agency that helps eCommerce companies grow from zero to millions. Recently, the companies he works with have been forced to change the way they operate. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Taylor takes us through what it means to build an antifragile business, and how that mentality can lead to a thriving business despite what the market or current environment has in store. Because, as Taylor says, there’s no point in trying to predict what the future holds, and instead, founders should be creating many different models so you can prevail even during volatile times. So what does that mean for your Q4 strategy? How should you be preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? And what data should you really be looking at when developing a Facebook ad strategy? Find out all of that and more in this interview.   Main Takeaways: Never-Ending Qs for Q4: 2020 has been the year of uncertainty, and Q4 will be no different. Traditional planning for end of year events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday have to be approached with a new mindset, one that can adapt and pivot quickly. Companies need to put systems and plans in place so that they are prepared to take on any and all scenarios that might arise. Building Something That Works in Spite of You: Modeling and forecasting are tools that every business uses to help guide strategy, but neither are ever 100% accurate. Because humans are wrong more often than they are right, it is critical to set up systems that can survive not only when you’re right, but also when you’re wrong. That is the fundamental practice of being antifragile.  How The Past Predicts The Future: Drawing insights from historical ad campaigns is a double-edged sword.  When it comes to analyzing data, you can’t look too far back or too far forward. Yesterday’s ad data can help inform your decision for what to do tomorrow, but it can’t help you make a month or year-long ad strategy. What can be beneficial, however, is poking through the creative assets of campaigns from companies decades ago, pre-internet. Those are timeless sources of inspiration that can help you stand out from the uniform ad campaigns of today.    For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today, we have Taylor Holiday join the show, the Managing Partner of Common Thread Collective. Taylor, welcome. Taylor: Thank you so much for having me. I am excited to be here. Stephanie: Yeah, I'm really excited to have you here as well. I have followed your Twitter threads and I think we're going to have a lot to talk about today. Taylor: Okay. That's good. Now I feel accountable to everything I've ever said. So here we go. Let's see what I can dig up. Stephanie: Yep. I've looked at everything back to 2008, so we're going to cover all of it. Stephanie: I wanted to start with your background a little bit. I saw that you were in the world of sports. Taylor: Yeah, I did many [crosstalk 00:00:50]. Stephanie: And I wanted to hear how you evolved. Taylor: Another lifetime ago, I was a professional athlete. I played baseball in the Yankees organization for a couple of years, and that was my life for the first 25 years of my life, was committed to that pursuit. Then one day I got a call and they told me that they were no longer interested in my services and I had to figure out what on earth I was going to do from there. That sort of set me off onto the second phase of life. I'd like to think I'm breaking my life in this sort of 25 year chunks. I'm about halfway through the second quarter. Stephanie: That's awesome. What did you decide to do after that? Taylor: Well, I didn't really decide much. I was finishing up, so I got drafted when I was a junior in college, so I had some school to finish. I was sort of in the off season. I would go back to school and take them at a semester at a time. When I got released, I started trying to figure out, okay, well, what was I going to do? And I was a political science major with a minor in psychology, and I loved to argue, and so I figured, well, I'll try and be a lawyer. That was sort of what I was prepping to do. I was prepping to take the LSAT and head off to be a lawyer. Then I had a good friend that had been a childhood friend, and is still now my business partner named Josh, who was starting a company. In between class, he would let me come to their office, which was him and his brother in a garage, and print the orders off the website and take them to the post office, and that was my job part-time. Stephanie: Sweet. Taylor: One day, day one, there was one order, and then within a year and a half we had done 60 million in revenue and that became my business school, and how I got into entrepreneurship. Stephanie: Wow. That is crazy. That's really good growth, and I'm sure you learned a ton while working there. Taylor: It was wild. But it sort of met everything in me that being an athlete did. There was a team of people that I love, working towards a common goal, every day you showed up and had something to do intentionally to be better. I was single, I was young, I had nothing else to do. We just lived at the office, and it was everything. As the business was sort of growing, we got asked this question of like, "Well, this is a real company. What's your job going to be?" And they went, "Well, you're the young person. Why don't we figure out Ecommerce, social media, and you know some famous people, so how about influencer marketing?" And I was like, "Okay." Then I started Googling, how do you set up a Facebook page. And just had no idea what I was doing, but learned, got to play in a sandbox, where suddenly I developed a skill that mattered in the world. I got really lucky in that sense that they entrusted me with that responsibility. Stephanie: That's great. What kind of famous people do you know? Now I'm intrigued? Taylor: Oh, so many famous people. No, not really. I had played professional sports, so I had a lot of relationships with athletes and agents and people like that. Our product was built for that community, and so it was just literally Facebook messaging friends and being like, "Hey, can I send you this product? Would you wear it?" That snowballed really quickly. We ended up building an incredible athlete team with ... at one point, we had all four MVPs of the major sports. We were brokering deals with Kobe Bryant and China, Shaquille O'Neal was a business partner. It was wild. We got involved in so many things in that first business that we had no business doing as 26, 27 year old kids, and made every mistake you could possibly make, but just learned so much that has sort of been the foundation for what we get the chance to do today. Stephanie: That's great. Yeah, that's a really good story. So fast forward to today. Tell me a bit about Common Thread Collective. What is it and what is your role there? What's your day to day look like? Taylor: Yeah. Common Thread Collective is an Ecommerce growth agency. We help consumer product Ecom businesses grow from zero to $30 million. That's sort of the range that we focus on, and we do that through a combination of paid acquisition services, email, SMS retention and landing page development, and then creative for that whole customer journey. So, we really see our role as the guide for our clients along that growth trajectory that we've lived ourselves and are currently living alongside them with the brands that we own and operate. So, we sort of approach growth from an operator's mindset, which we think really sets us apart from a lot of marketing agencies. My job is to be the CEO of that organization. It is certainly a very different job than when I started where I was doing the work. I spend much more of my time now thinking about organizational structure and culture and hiring than I do about marketing. That has just sort of been my own personal evolution, which I'm learning to love. But yeah, that's what it does. Stephanie: That's cool. So how do you go about picking who you want to partner with, which companies you want to? Taylor: In terms of the clients? Stephanie: Yeah, clients. Taylor: Yeah, so our mission for Common Thread Collective and really for our whole ecosystem, and I think Andrew talked a little bit about this on your podcast, is to help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. That is our heartbeat. It's what drives us because we ourselves have experienced the transformation that comes from being a successful entrepreneur, what it offers you in life. So, we love to partner specifically with founders and entrepreneurs who are in that range of business. Usually, when clients come to us, they're somewhere between two to 10 million in revenue, and we're helping them sort of reach that next phase of growth along the way. That connection to the person who is passionately committed to the product or idea that they have is what motivates us. It's what keeps us engaged, because the reality is, when you work at an agency, you're not going to love every product that you're working on. Taylor: You're not going to care as deeply as the founder about hair care and sports wear and fitness equipment and beauty products and vitamins. There's just no way, but what we learn is that, what really works is when we care about the people. That's when our people internally are the most inspired, that's when they wake up in the middle of the night and think about ideas for the product, is that when they fall in love with the humans on the other side of it. Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. I want to jump right into something I've been following. You were discussing a little bit about how brands should be approaching holiday season, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and how they should be thinking about their marketing and advertising efforts. I think it was on Twitter, maybe as an email thread, but I was hoping we could dive right into that, because we hadn't actually talked about that on the podcast so far, and I think it's a perfect time to kind of discuss how you think brands should be prepping for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and how it's different than in the past. Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. This is a crazy time, right? It's never been a more volatile moment in the history of Ecommerce, which is not necessarily the longest history in the world. I would put it right up there with every business season in our country's history, certainly in terms of the volatility of the moment. When you think about trying to forecast into an environment that is this volatile, there's huge error bars on any prediction that you're going to make as a business owner. If you think about some of the things that we're looking at, as we think about Q4, is retail going to be open? Are people going to be able to shop in stores? We have no idea? Is the USPS going to be able to handle the influx of demand on the infrastructure? We have no idea. Taylor: What is the social position of our country going to be after this election? We have no idea. As you think about that, what you have to sort of agree or accept is the idea that whatever you think is going to happen is likely going to be wrong. What that means is that, unlike years before, where we were in a more stable environment, you need to have plans that account for different possibilities. As you think about something like your Black Friday promotion, which in years past, maybe a very simple exercise of just going well, we're going to try and bundle some products and do a discount, you need to consider the possibility, well, what happens, what would our discount be if USPS doubled their rates? Would we still be able to offer and afford free shipping? Taylor: I would start to have multiple plans. The same is true for the tone of your messaging. If we come out of an incredibly hostile election on November 4th, and three weeks later we're in holiday season, and the country's significant unrest, what is the right message for your brand to have to sell products into that environment? Rather than trying to guess which one is going to be accurate, I would begin to have a multitude of plans for this moment in ways that we've never really had to consider that level of volatility before. That's one of the big things we're talking with our clients about, is this idea of how do you deal with the idea that you are most likely going to be wrong about whatever you think is going to happen in the future? Stephanie: Yeah, that's really good. I like the idea of making scenarios so you don't have to predict the future. How are you thinking about advertising? I think you were mentioning that you can actually prep in a way that you know it's going to be expensive to advertise during those times, and so how brands can actually start prepping early so maybe they're not being met with these really high costs. Taylor: Yeah. I would just contend that I don't actually know that it's going to be expensive. I think that's a theory that people have, is this idea that big retailers are going to be allocating a bunch of money into the platform and CPMs are going to be through the roof. But we have seen really dramatic things happen where like, last time when the pandemic got peaked in April, all of a sudden cell phone usage goes through the roof, the inventory allotment for ads goes really high, CPMs plummet. The idea that we know for sure, this is, again, sort of that idea of the contingency planning, I think is really hard. What that means, and I think what you're driving me towards is this idea that, how do I build revenue in a more predictable fashion when the ad environment could be incredibly volatile? Taylor: What I would say is that, when I think about forecasting, we described Ecommerce forecasting like a layer cake. The base layer, the foundation with the least variability is your existing customer set. You know that when you acquire a customer, they're going to produce future revenue for you as well as present revenue, and they do that really predictably. It's not subject to CPMs, it's not subject to the levels of volatility based on any sort of thing. So you can always start by my existing customer side is going to produce future revenue, and you can look at cohort specific LTV data and figure out exactly how much future revenue. That's the foundation of your forecast. Then the next layer is owned audiences. If I think about like organic SEO, my keyword rank of position two on keyword, CrossFit sports bra is going to produce for me a certain volume of traffic that will lead to revenue. Taylor: That's more predictable, even than advertising CPMs. The same thing with my remarketing traffic is going to be more predictable than my prospecting traffic. My email database that I've collected ahead of the moment that aren't yet customers, but they're people that I can speak to for free is subject to less volatility than those environments. The more that ahead of this Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you can develop owned audiences of communication that allow you to forecast more accurately your future revenue, the better position you're going to be in, and the less subject to that crazy volatility you're going to be. The end tactic there, out of that sort of ideology, is that right now you should be accumulating as many emails and YouTube subscribers and Instagram followers and website visitors that you possibly can to help you build a foundation for that future revenue in a way that's less volatile. Stephanie: Oh, I love that. Are there any specific examples of creative campaigns that you're working on with your brands right now, or that you know of? Taylor: Yeah. So, one of the big things that we love as a vehicle for this is quiz funnels. A lot of our brands are running these quiz funnels, and what I mean by that is you come to the website and there's like, hey, let me ask you some questions to help make a perfect product recommendation to you. And it's email gated. So, you're saying, hey, give us your email, and at the end of this, we'll send you a specific product recommendation. So, what that does, what we've been able to see is that, with many of these quiz funnels, you're able to prospect at virtually the same return as your general campaigns, but you're collecting emails at four to five to six X the rate. In those examples, what you're doing is you're almost able to match your present value, but you're banking a lot more future revenue off of all of those owned audience emails that you're capturing. Taylor: That's one example of the way that we think about this, of like, not just like the singularity of how much revenue I'm making now, but what additional assets are being accumulated to drive future value. Another example I would use, and this is something we talked a lot about last year, is that website traffic. So, when you go to do remarketing, which most of your revenue in the holiday period, specifically Black Friday Cyber Monday, is going to be driven out of your remarketing audiences. What that means is that website traffic today has a high future value. The more website traffic you can generate now, the better. Let's say you have two Facebook ad campaigns, and one has a 50 cent CPC, and one has a dollar CPC, but the ROAS is the same, I'm going to give preferential treatment in scale to the campaign with the lower CPC, even if the ROAS is the same or slightly less, because that traffic is going to yield future revenue in a way that's really important. Those kinds of thoughts around, what is the incremental value of the audience creation, is a really important consideration. Stephanie: Oh, I like that. How often are you checking in with those ... when you're starting to do that prospecting, in a way, early, how often are you checking back with them so you stay top of mind? Taylor: The window that I think about, so we have our general campaign set up, which is that we look at our time lag report, which in Google is basically the average window that a customer will make a purchase in. You can look at and see, like, what percentage of your customers make a purchase within 24 hours, within 48 hours? Usually, almost 80% of your are making a purchase within seven days. For the initial consideration, our primary remarketing funnels usually attempt to encapsulate the primary consideration phase, which is usually somewhere around seven to 10 days. But in terms of this strategy, what we're doing is we're building an audience that, ultimately, when it comes to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the widest Facebook audience you can look at is 180 days. Taylor: The second you get within six months, which just happened for us a couple of weeks ago, we got within that six month window of this. Now, you've got an audience that you're going to speak to again at Black Friday. I don't know that we have an intentional strategy to speak to them again at a 45 day window or a 90 day window. We don't. But I think that one, that's a good idea. I think that it might be worthwhile to just sort of warm them up again, but as long as they're within that 180 day window, I have the capacity to speak to them at Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Stephanie: Got it. That makes sense. So, what kind of mistakes do you see companies making when it comes to these growth strategies? Taylor: Oh man, that's a broad question. One of the primary ones is what we call the single account ROAS problem, which is this idea that most people are running their ad accounts on the idea that every purchase is the same just based on the cost to acquire the customer. Let's say I have a target of a two to one ROAS, which basically means that I'm paying 50% of the purchase price in acquisition. Well, the reality is that not all customers are equal to you, and not all product sales net you the same amount of dollars in your pocket. One of the things that we work really hard to get really clear with our clients on is the value of customers by different cohorts, so by first product purchases an example. If you think about every skew that you have in your store, every skew has a different margin and has a different return rate and has a different shipping cost. Taylor: Each of these three variables mean that, even at a fixed ROAS, so if you applied a two to one ROAS across every skew that you have, the net dollars in your pocket is different for every skew. Really understanding which products net you the most dollars as a business owner is a critical data element that I do not see enough people consider, and they don't design their ad accounts to reflect the variable value of the product. Stephanie: That's a good one. I haven't heard anyone talk about that as a mistake yet, so that must mean a lot of companies are making it. Taylor: Yeah. It's because it's hard. The information is hard to access, and it's hard to get granular visibility too. It's a much simpler decision-making mechanism to go, "Well, my blended cogs are 30%, and so if I get a two to one I'm making 20% generally across my business." That's a much easier consideration to make than to try and actually break it down by individual skew and get really specific on the decisions. Stephanie: Yep. Are there any best practices when it comes to developing spreadsheets or dashboards or something that can give you easy access to that information that you've seen your brands or yourself develop? Taylor: Yeah. We've built a tool to do this, to calculate cohort specific LTV data, to ultimately give us a view that we care a lot about, which is your 60 day LTV by specific cohorts. The reason we look at that time window is because most early stage Ecommerce businesses can't really wait much longer than 60 days to really realize the value. They just don't have the cash position to be able to wait longer than that, nor do I think it's really wise to wait longer than that. We've built something internally to do it, so I wish I could say like, hey, just go copy this spreadsheet and set it up, but it is difficult information to access, but you can do it. You can build cohort models for your business, but beyond just the LTV, the easiest thing to do is to really deeply understand that you did economics by every skew that you have. Taylor: What I would do to start is I would export every product that you have, I would mark the MSRP, so the retail sales price. Then next to that, I would put the cost to you as a business. Then I would put the return rate of the product, and then I would put the shipping cost of the product, and then I would calculate the net value of every skew. Just being aware of that for your merchandise set, like for the entirety of your product catalog will give you the kind of information that you need to then think more specifically about your ad account. Stephanie: That's great. To shift a bit into, we were just talking about how to grow a company, then track metrics and all that. I know you also have just been recently talking about an anti-fragile Ecommerce playbook. I was hoping you could kind of detail what that means, how are you setting up the anti-fragile Ecommerce companies, and what does that playbook look like? Taylor: Yeah. This goes back to this idea that we are bad at predicting the future. When I think about how I want to build a business, I want to build a business that thrives when I'm wrong. I actually want to accept the fact that I am not going to be able to determine the future, and I want to set up the business to be able to survive in almost any environment. That's sort of the idea of anti-fragile, is not just that I'm resistant to negative, but actually the negatives can be in an environment in which I succeed. The way in which I think that you're afforded the opportunity to do that is by having a specific set of attributes related to your business that allow you to sort of thrive in variability. Some of those are ... now you're going to make me try and quote my exact tweet to see if I can remember all of them, but one of them is high margin, right? Taylor: This is seemingly obvious, but this idea, the more room for error that you have to still be profitable, the more that the variability on your CAC, as an example, still does it affect you, and it allows you to potentially win when others can't. So, high margin is one. Another is, and this is a really underrated one, is great payment terms with your manufacturing supplier. One of the biggest things that destroys cashflow for Ecommerce businesses is obligation to front the cash for inventory. One of the best skills I think an entrepreneur can have is relational development and negotiation skills with their supplier to develop trust, to get to net 30 terms on delivery, where you're actually realizing the revenue of your product before you have to pay for it. That allows your cash conversion cycle to speed up tremendously in a way that's super, super helpful. Another one [crosstalk 00:21:19]. Stephanie: When I saw that, I'm like, that's huge. We have the same thing in media. People will start coming and be like, "Oh, we have net 60 or net 90 payment terms." You just can't take no for an answer sometimes, and just keep trying to build up the relationship and be like, "We really can't do that." Oftentimes, you'll be able to get down to net 30, just like you're mentioning here. So I thought that one was a really good point. Sorry, keep going. Taylor: Yeah, that's exactly right. You just got to think about your cash conversion cycle and how you're going to not be in a position where you have to sort or seek outside capitalization to fund when you're winning. That happens in Ecom because of the cost of inventory upfront, which makes it a complex cash management business. Another one, and again, these seem obvious, but I think we don't consider them enough is low OPEX as a percentage of your revenue. We have this principle, we call the four quarter accounting principle, which gives you sort of a directional guide to where you want your revenue to go. So, if you think about your top line revenues of business, we break it into four quarters. The idea is, if you want 25% profit, then your costs need to exist in these quadrants. Taylor: You need to have 25% CAC, so a four to one, what we would call marketing efficiency rating, so total revenue divided by total sales is 25%. 25% cost of delivery, which is basically the cost of the product from wherever you're manufacturing it all the way to the customer. Then 25% of OPEX, and that's your payroll, your rent and all of those things. If you look at your P&L and you look at it relative to each of those four quarters, you can figure out where your profit gets eaten up and where you need to go make improvements. So, the lower your OPEX is, so you can do this by not having a really expensive office by controlling your overhead in an employee count in smart ways. Really, just looking at how do I run this business as clean as necessary or as possible in order to give myself opportunity again, because there's going to be variability in my other places. Taylor: The shipping thing is a good example, where it's like, maybe my cost of delivery is normally 23%, but because of the shipping thing, maybe it's going to go to 27% of my revenue. If that destroys your profit, because your OPEX is too high, then it gives you a lack of options. That's a really important one to consider. Gosh, what else did I say in there? Stephanie: You also said diverse traffic mix, which I like. Taylor: Okay. Yeah, so this goes back to the point that we're talking about. Just like an investment portfolio, if you're over-indexed on any single channel, if that channel deteriorates in value, your business is in real trouble, but if you have a diverse traffic sourcing, and I think, so the question is, what's a diverse traffic sourcing? A good baseline metric is 50% paid, 50% organic. You're going to be able to survive volatility in any one of those channels, because you have a good amount of traffic from other sources. All of these things, make it so that when the inevitable problem strikes, your business is set up for it. Taylor: I think that we under consider how important it is to get into these positions of strong foundations of anti-fragility before we pursue further growth. Especially in this crazy environment where we're in now, where basically every forecast that I see every business make is wrong. The question is, what do you do? A lot of people want to try and think about like, well, how do I forecast better? I just go like, I think that's a fool's errand. I think attempting to predict the future, there are just too many inputs to do it well. So, instead, how do you build a business that when you're wrong, you still win? Stephanie: Yep. Yeah, I love that. I think it's such a bad mindset to think that like, you have to be perfect. I think that that's how companies do it. Even when I worked at other finance groups within companies, we were usually not right, which is why we did scenarios because you usually are wrong. Taylor: Well, that's exactly it. The quote that I always come back to is that, all models are wrong, some are useful. They're useful in their ability to understand where you're importantly wrong. When you have a detailed model, let's say I have a prediction that shows me what I'm expecting my traffic to be by every channel next month. Okay, so for direct organic search paid, search paid social, I have a prediction. Well, the reason that model is so important is not because it's going to be right, but because it allows me, as I'm actualizing the data, to understand where I am importantly wrong. As the data's coming in, I can start to see, Ooh, I'm missing my prediction in email by a lot, and it allows you to then think about strategies to go and solve that problem, where if you don't have that model, if you don't have that prediction, it's really hard to determine where the problem comes from. Stephanie: Yep, exactly. It's like the pandemic too, who would have predicted that? It's straight out of Missing, Taleb's book. That's a black swan event, you never would have predicted it, so why try? Just different scenarios, and a worst case scenario like now. Taylor: It seems a lot like I'm reading Antifragile as I'm thinking about the application of Ecommerce. It's like, well, how do you think about a business like that? What I see is I see frustration from our entrepreneur partners about their forecast being wrong, and they get really upset about it. I get it. It's really hard. You have to make decisions about this. So, it is an important exercise and you want to reduce the margin of error as much as possible going forward, but you have to begin to expect that. That's one of the things I think about being a more seasoned entrepreneur who have seen thousands and thousands of forecasts be wrong is I'm no longer surprised when they are. So, it just gives me a different frame of the problem. Stephanie: Yup. When people are trying to think of those black swan events or scenarios, how can someone go about building a scenario if they don't even really know how to anticipate it? They don't even know what to prepare for. Taylor: I like the idea of, rather than trying to predict the future, you should extrapolate the present. That's the Nassim Taleb idea, which is that, where are you now, and where do you believe you will be in the next month based on the present? If you extrapolate the present versus predict the future, then what it allows you to do is to think about, okay, my organic search is currently at 20,000 visits a month, and it has grown by 5% a month. If that continues, I'll be at 21,000 visitors next month. You put that into place, and then as you actualize it in real time, then you can understand what's happening. What you need to understand is that, the further out you go, the wider the margin of error becomes. Predicting tomorrow is a lot easier than predicting a week from now, which is a lot easier than predicting a year from now, because the number of inputs and variables just increase as you move out. Taylor: That idea of constantly re-forecasting and constantly actualizing your prediction and making adjustments, that's the skill, that's the exercise to continually get in the habit of doing and understanding where you were wrong. Then, doing your best to understand why, I think sorting out causality can often be sort of this thing that we chase and we make assumptions around. I think it's sometimes useful, but more importantly, it allows you to make adjustments in your next forecast, and then do it again and then do it again and then do it again. But again, no matter how many times you do it, you're always going to be wrong, and that wrongness is the thing that I think is really informative, and it allows you to ask the question, how do I make sure I'm okay when I'm wrong? That becomes the important thing to then go build. Stephanie: Yup. I love that. Yeah, it reminds me back in my Fannie Mae days, I used to do with a housing forecast, and we would literally be forecasting for like the next month, and we would have data almost halfway through that month and we would still be wrong. I think it boggled my mind how we'd be wrong, but even thinking of that, I'm like, there's just no way, once you get past a certain point, you just have to keep re forecasting, even if you're halfway through the month sometimes again. Taylor: This is such an important understanding about how we as humans process information. My favorite example is something I call the roulette run problem, where if you've ever been to Vegas, there is a reason that at the roulette table, they display all of the recent numbers for you. The reason is, is because what your brain does, when you see a bunch of reds in a row is you go, uh, well, the next one has to be black. And you build this relationship between past data and future data that is not real. We do this all the time with information as humans. We're just really bad at computating things in a statistically rigorous way about the future. This is also why humans are actually really bad media buyers, and why we try and train all of our internal media buyers to make as few of decisions as possible inside of the ad account. Taylor: Because if you think about what most people are doing inside of a Facebook ad account, is they're loading up a dashboard. They're looking at past data. So, they're looking at historical data and making inferences about the future without using a computer, without using a calculator, without so much as writing down chicken scratch. They're trying to make predictive decisions about how things like CTR and CPC and ROAS are going to relate to the future, and they're almost always wrong in those decisions. This is just like, it's really important to understand what the biases are that affect us as humans in our decision-making. Stephanie: That's great. Talk a little bit more about humans being bad media buyers, how are you all going about buying media? What are some best practices? Other than just saying like, "Okay, just rely on the platform, let it do its job." What kind of things are you guys trying out and doing and seeing success with right now? Taylor: What I'm going to push back on is that language that you use, I think diminishes the right idea, which is people love to say like, "Oh, well, yeah, just let the algorithm do it." They say that in a way that reflects that that's the simplistic decision. What I'll tell you is it's not. It actually takes incredible discipline to be thoughtful about allowing the computer to do what the computer does best and focus on what you do best. With our media buyers, their job, if you think about any machine learning tool, the key to a great machine learning tool is the inputs. Machine learning tool is just taking a set of inputs and understanding them to generate future outputs. Well, the key to being a great media buyer is you set a good structure of inputs. I'll give you an example. Taylor: Let's go back to this idea of different product values and different average order values by purchase types. If you were to export your last 30 days of orders and you were to build a scatter plot, where across every day, every dot was an order by AOV, you would have a variation of different order values. If you think about one of the most common mistakes I see in an ad account is you have a campaign that's bidding for lowest cost, which is the conversion objective, where you're basically saying to Facebook, give me the lowest CPA that you can inside of this ad set. Then in that ad set, what they will do is they will sell a bunch of different products with different prices. Let's imagine I have five different skews. I'm a jewelry brand, and they range in price from $50 to $500. Well, what product is Facebook going to favor if the structural setup is lowest cost and you give it those options? Stephanie: Yeah, the cheapest one. Taylor: So, you're building a structure where the computer output is going to be focused on the skew that likely doesn't generate you the best net outcome. That is a tactical media buying error that has to do with poor structural setup and understanding of the tool, that has nothing to do with the decision making of which ad you should allocate the budget to. That's the kind of thing we teach our people to think about over and over and over again is, am I setting up the right structure for the output that I want? Stephanie: That makes sense. You would instead maybe have like similar price products so they can all actually see the performance, instead of teaching the algorithm to, of course, always showcase the cheapest one because you don't have a budget? Taylor: That's right. Or I'm going to bid for highest value instead of lowest cost. Facebook has different conversion objectives I can set up relative to the thing that I want. The question is, and we play this game at our company every Friday morning called [inaudible 00:33:36], where I pull up an ad account and we go through campaigns and I make the media buyers tell me, what are you intending to accomplish with this campaign? What were you trying to do? Then let's discuss of whether the structural setup and inputs were right for that outcome. Did you design the system accurately to generate the thing that you want? Because Facebook's tool is incredibly good at getting you what you want, but over and over and over again, I see people design systems that will never, ever generate the outcome they want. So they're setting up games where the rules mean they will never win. Stephanie: Yup. That's really good lessons. Any other things that you've seen, like similar themes of ad buying, where you were like, I've seen quite a few people do it this way and it's wrong. Anything else that has come on your radar? Taylor: Yeah. The big other thing is just the relationship of budget to number of variables. One of the things, again, this all comes back to some basic statistical ideas, where if you think about ... have you ever seen a graph of how long it takes to normalize the data for flipping a coin? Like how many coin flips it takes before you basically get to 50% outcomes? Have you ever seen a graph that looks like that? What it is, is that like, when it's a two sided coin, the amount of flips that it takes to normalize the data, so in other words, the time at which it will reach the predicted outcome of 50%, it's somewhere, usually in the range, by the time you get to 100 flips, it's almost always going to be at 50%. Now, if you take a six sided die, okay, do you think it takes more or less rolls to get there? Taylor: It takes substantially more, because there's more possible outcomes, so the amount of time that it takes for the data to normalize is a lot more rolls than if there's only two possible outcomes. Taylor: So the same is true of the way that you build a campaign. The more end nodes in your structure, so think of an end node as an ad set or a campaign to an ad set to an ad. The number of variables in your campaign is going to determine the amount of budget that is required to get to statistical significance, to get to accurate outcomes. The other big mistake I see people make is they build these campaigns with all these end nodes, all of these ad sets, all of these ads and a very tiny budget. You might as well check back in three years and then you'll actually get a definitive result. What they do is they build campaigns like that, and then they make decisions on insufficient data. What that is, is it's basically looking at four flips of a coin and then saying, "Oh, it's 70, 30 heads. The truth here must be this coin yield 70% heads." Taylor: Instead, you have to build structures that allow you to get to accurate information quickly by having an appropriate amount of budget against the number of nodes in your test, if that makes. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes complete sense. Is there any ratio where you're like, for every 10 ads, you need $1,000, or is there any ranges like that? Taylor: Facebook gives you this information. They tell you that they want 50 conversions per ad set per week. That's what they need to get you out of the learning phase. There's a lot of people that are these Facebook truthers, that think like Facebook has all these ulterior motives to attempt to get you to spend money. I get it. They are rationally self-interested, but your success is actually in their interest. So, they will give you directional understanding of how to use their tool best. So, part of what they tell you is that they designed this thing called the learning phase, which is basically their way of declaring that the data that you're seeing is not trustworthy yet. When you are still learning, you should not act on this data because it's not actually predictive of the future. Taylor: But then when you get out of learning phase, now you're in an actual set of outcomes that are more predictive, they're more accurate, they're more deep, they're more true about the set of inputs that are there. So, the way to get out of that is this idea of ensuring that, based on your budget and based on your target CPA, you can get to 50 conversions per week per ad set. Because campaigns use a daily budget, if you take 50 and you divide it by seven, the formula that we give people is 7.14, which is just 50 divided by seven, so for your daily budget. 7.14 times your target CPA. Again, that's the payment that you want for the objective times the number of ad sets in the campaign, that needs to be your daily budget in order to get through optimization as fast as possible. Stephanie: Ooh, that's good. I'm writing down the formula now, so we can put it in our show notes. Taylor: Yup. Stephanie: Okay, cool. Awesome. That's really good tips around Facebook ads. I agree about the, like when you were mentioning the learning phase, we have our own ad network, and it's just the same thing. Our growth team's always like, "Hey, we need about $1,000 just to learn and then we'll let you know what the cost per click is." It's not just Facebook, it's other platforms as well. Taylor: That's right. People get frustrated by that because it's a media buyer, especially if you're a company that's charging on a percentage of ad spend, it's really hard for that to feel like anything, but a self serving piece of information. But the reality is, it just goes back to an understanding of how data happens. It's like, again, if you wanted me to tell you the results of flipping a coin, give me a hundred flips, not five, and it's the same thing. That's the understanding that we need to get to about how you get to statistical significance. Stephanie: Yep. So, are there any surprising campaigns that your team has initiated or certain kinds of ads that you were like, "That's not going to work", and they actually performed well? Taylor: Oh man, all the time. I'm so horrible at predicting what will work well, creatively in particular. Man, anything that I think is like a really interesting format right now. Stephanie: I feel like the formats right now are ... they have to be kind of different. There's a lot happening with the ad platforms because of brands pulling back and other brands dipping in on those ad platforms, but also just with the styles of ads that are going out. With the whole world, it just seems like things are different. So, I'm wondering how you guys are approaching that. Taylor: Yeah. Different is a good thing. The hardest thing is actually to avoid ruts. Because there's this horrible habit that we have in the media buying world. I'll lump us into this. We fall guilty to it too, which is the way that you generate ad creative is you go to Facebook ad library, you look up your favorite brand and you copy the styling of their ads, because you're making an assumption that they're working. But I'm a big believer in sort of the purple cow principle from Seth Godin, which is this idea that, the value of an ad deteriorates in repetition of its use. Every time that an ad goes out into the world and every time it's replicated, it becomes less valuable. That same thing happens with ad formats. We've seen it with influencer ads and UGC and the Mashable style, and these formats that have become really popular, eventually their impact is reduced as people encounter them. Taylor: I think that the key thing, and this is the biggest challenge inside of an organization like ours, is how do you produce a system that constantly generates novel ideas? That's what I would think a lot about. Again, I know this isn't the simple answer, where I can say to you, just use an ID story squared, whatever format, but I would be lying to you if I said that. Instead, I would really take space to challenge yourself to think like, one think a lot about the beginning of the ad. I know this is cliche, but it's just so true, is that video average watch times on Facebook are like four seconds for great ads. You just don't have as much time to say the thing that you're intending to say. It's sort of the David Ogilvy quote, "If you're selling a fire extinguisher, lead with the fire." That is just fundamentally true. Taylor: I would think about that as a core principle, but beyond that, you've got to break the feed. You've got to be novel, and you've got to figure out a way to differentiate yourself. People are scrolling a mile a day on their phone. If you plan to stop them and break them, then you've got to figure out a way to be compelling right off the bat, and a great metric for tracking this, so we have this principle that we sort of developed off of AIDA, which is a sort of legendary advertising hierarchy of effects model, and we've sort of applied modern metrics to it. So, if you think about the first one, the most important one before ... so with the hierarchy of effects model, they happen in sequence. The second one can't happen until the first one happens. I think this is really true of Facebook ads, which is you don't get a chance to communicate your message until you stop them and capture their attention. Taylor: A metric we focus on a ton is three second views divided by impressions. In other words, what percentage of your served ad impressions result in a three-second consumption? You want to see that number get close to a north of 40%. Otherwise, you are paying for a lot of people to scroll past your ad. Stephanie: Yep. I like that. I like having specific metrics set up for the AIDA format, which for anyone who's like, "What's AIDA?" Attention, interest, desire, action retailers. Taylor: That's right. That's exactly right. We assign a metric to each of those variables, so attention is this three-second views divided by impressions. Interest is video average watch time. Desire is outbound CTR. Then action is ultimately CPA or ROAS or whatever you use there. But the important thing again, with these models, is to think about them happening, they have to happen in sequence. What that does, what I love about using that as a feedback loop for our creatives is that the worst feedback that you can give to a designer or a creative is your ad's not working. That is so not helpful, because what do you do with feedback that says it's not working? What you can do is if, instead of thinking about the ad as a single unit, I think about it as component parts. If I say to them, "Hey, your three-second view to impression ratio is really low." Taylor: Well, now I can think about what's happening at the beginning of the ad. Or if I say, "Hey, everybody's dropping off at four seconds." Now, I can think about what's happening at that point in the ad. So, you can start to now deconstruct the actual ad into pieces that allows a creative to actually take it and iterate in ways that are productive. Stephanie: Yeah, I love that. It seems it could get a bit overwhelming if you have tons of ads running, like starting to just try and dissect, what's happening at the four second mark, or what's happening when it should be the D in AIDA? How are you thinking about, if the company has like a large amount of ads that they're testing? Taylor: This is a great question, because this is the number one marketer's dilemma, is that, what do I do next? There's a thousand million gazillion things to do. The answer is you sequence by volume of opportunities. I'm going to just start with the ads that are running in my campaign with the highest spend, and I'm going to iterate on those first because that's my area of highest potential impact. Then I'm going to sequence the rate at which I engage with my ad creative relative to their potential impact. That's a really important thing to think about is that, the sequence by which you decide to do things has opportunity cost to it. So, you have to make sure that you are going after the areas of highest impact relentlessly first. Stephanie: I love that. Yeah, really a good way to think about it. How are you thinking about maybe ... oftentimes, history repeats itself, how are you thinking about looking at historical ad styles or going back to direct mail, which a lot of people are doing right now since everyone's at home? How are you thinking about viewing history to maybe impact present day advertising methods or growth strategies for your brands? Taylor: Yeah. We have this course that we teach to all of our designers called advertising philosophy. The idea is to do that exact thing, which is to understand the fundamentals of advertising that are always true. So, we start with things like behavioral psychology. We read The Choice Factory by Richard Shotton, which talks about different human biases, to help them understand things that are just true of people, period. Then from there, we sort of begin to allocate that against the medium. We read a little bit on advertising and the history of advertising the change, the history of advertising, which are all just chockfull of amazing adding examples that are primarily prints from a legacy of magazine print ads, but they're so much in those print ads. If you think about how hard it was to actually create impact with a print ad, like someone had to open a magazine, they had to see the ad, then they'd to physically go somewhere to take action. It was way harder to be an advertiser there. Taylor: So, the copy had to be so strong and the visuals had to be compelling. There's so much to be learned from a lot of those principles that I think we underestimate the value of the art and history of advertising before we worry about applying it to the modern medium. So, we teach that to all of our people, because one, we want them to fall in love with advertising, because we think it's an incredible art form. A lot of times, for creatives, advertising is sort of seen as the thing that you do when you fail at being a real creative. We just don't believe that. We believe that it is like a true, true art form that reaches millions and millions of people, and if you can learn to really love it and to love the way in which you can impact human behavior with your communication, it can unlock like inspiration for you. That's a long winded way of answering, and it's not just as simple as direct mail, but you've probably realized by now my answers are rarely simple. Stephanie: No, I love them all. Every time I'm Like, ooh, that's a good quote. We should pull that one, because yeah, that's a really good point. Even thinking about when we're generating ads for Mission, it takes so much brain power to think about like, what's good copy, what kind of images should we use? What is someone going to remark about? It's a process. It's harder than even building out a podcast sometimes. So, I can [crosstalk 00:47:18]. Taylor: Yeah, as a simple hack, because I think these things are cyclical. If you are really creatively stalled and you're looking for inspiration, I would really encourage you not to use Facebook ad library as a mechanism for copying. Go look at one of these books, they're full of ads, and literally copy an ad from 1960, and think about the language, the imagery, and literally replicate it in the modern day. It will be more impactful than copying somebody's ad from Facebook ad library. That is a much better source of really potentially impactful ad creative than is the stuff that you're going to see from basically every brand on the internet. Stephanie: Yeah. That's really great. Are there any brands that you're watching that are actually always head of someone, where you're like, these brands all have the same ads, but this particular one is always kind of ahead of the game? Taylor: Yeah. I put out the other day, like one of the things I've gotten shamelessly relentless about is when I see something amazing, I go try and figure out who did it and try and hire them. So, TRUFF, the hot sauce company, their ad creative is as good as anybody's I've seen in the last few months. I put out on Twitter the other day, like I was citing that as an example. I just said, whoever did this, if you reach out to me, I'll double your salary to come work for me right now. Taylor: I think what they've done is really, really fascinating, clever ways of taking a sort of historically boring product in hot sauce and making it super compelling. One of the things, a lot of creatives feel constrained by the product attributes, like our initial entry point in ad creative all the time is like the product features. We just have this phrase that we tell our creatives all the time, which is you live in an infinite creative universe. You can say and do anything and make it relevant to this product. One of my favorite examples of this is there's this legendary ad from Gillette razors. It's a picture of an egg in a frying pan, and the headline is, this is an ad about razorblades. Taylor: The copy just talks about how the nonstick material in the pan is the same thing that they use to build the razors so it doesn't grab your face when it goes by. It's just brilliant. But the idea is like, it's a picture of an egg in a frying pan. It didn't come with the asset library from the client when they sent it over. But if you open yourself up to the possibility of telling stories broader than just the library of photos you receive from the client, and you really embrace this idea of an infinite creative universe, you can do anything. I think that's when you get to the really interesting stuff. Stephanie: Oh, that's great. I love that. Yeah, one of the ads that a friend's company is running, it's for socks, but it's literally a piece of corn growing out of two different. Something like very random, not relevant and it's their best performing ad. Taylor: That is the thing. It's like random. Again, you've got to think about somebody who is scrolling endlessly on their phone, and what is going to stop them Taylor: It's just about understanding, and this is the thing. You've got to be an internet user. In the same way, like everyone thinks about platforms like Reddit is this really specific sub-culture where you'd have this specific language. I saw a hilarious ad for a Reddit out the other day that understood this really well. It was Fresh Box, or one of the meal delivery services. The ad was basically like, "Hey, Reddit, my boss asked me to run an ad on Reddit, so I went ahead and took care of it for you." It's basically this meme app that Reddit users use, which is a robot blowing up the brand. It was basically the satirical way of understanding the medium so clearly, that they mock themselves in a way that made them endeared and loved by the Reddit users. That sort of ability to understand the place and the environment in which people are receiving your content is a real skill. Stephanie: Yeah. No, that's a really good example. I know we only have a couple minutes left, so I did want to ask a higher level Ecommerce question because from the interview, I just know you're so excited about predicting the future and you just feel very confident about it. Taylor: Do it. Stephanie: I wanted to hear, what kind of trends or patterns or disruptions are you most excited about right now in Ecommerce, or do you see coming down the pike? Taylor: Let's see. One of the things that I like, I'm sort of betting on for the future, is the global Ecommerce market. I think about the ... when anytime I see a marketplace where there is this pent up demand, that the infrastructure doesn't yet support, but it's finding a way to happen even before the infrastructure exists, what that means is that, by the time the infrastructure catches up, you're going to have a massive moment of arbitrage. Think of it like a wave that builds up that suddenly then released by some sort of technological innovation, and that's where there's periods of arbitrage before everybody else shows up and the competition's there. I think about a market like India, where you have this massive, massive market that is coming online really, really fast, and you have this problem, which is a payments infrastructure. Taylor: Nobody there has credit cards. Almost everything is cash on delivery, and none of the systems yet support the infrastructure for that delivery and payments processing. But yet, there's massive engagement from the user base. The second that gets solved, it's going to be a huge opportunity. This is true in a ton of other countries, where you have ad inventory costs that are extremely low, you have demand that's really high and you just don't have the systems that need it yet. That's a thing I'm watching and following really closely, as we already have clients that are seeing 30, 40, in some cases, 50% of their spend in international markets, where there's tons of friction in fulfilling the product. The second that, that all goes away, we are on the precipice of a truly global marketplace in a way that we haven't even begun to process. It's going to be really, really cool. Stephanie: Ooh, that is a very good answer. What other parts, or what other places in the globe are you looking at right now? India of course, is a big one next million users, everyone's focused there, but what other smaller markets are you looking at right now that you see a big opportunity, or your brands [crosstalk 00:56:20]? Taylor: Places where like, so the United Arab Emirates is anytime you ... especially, if you have any sort of luxury product, there's massive opportunity there. There's highly efficient opportunity. It's pretty volume constrained. It's a small country. Super interesting. I think Southeast Asia is super, super interesting to me. Nigeria, even from a talent standpoint in the Ecommerce world, that's a giant country. I think sometimes, because we have these geographically warped maps because of our Western centric view, we don't realize how big some of these countries are. Those are a few, Nigeria, Southeast Asia and India from a hiring standpoint, from a potential market opportunity standpoint are places that we're following really closely. Stephanie: And is good spots to watch. All right, so we have a few minutes left. I want to hop into a quick lightning round brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Taylor? Taylor: Ready, fire. Stephanie: All right. What's next on your reading list? Taylor: What is next? I'm going to pull up audible right now. Do I have a countdown on my clock? Shoot. Where's my reading app? Audible. Someone just sent me a book. Oh, I know what it ... Here, let me take it. I'm failing at the time challenge, but [crosstalk 00:57:36]. Stephanie: That's okay. Thankfully, we can edit this podcast and make it [crosstalk 00:57:39]. Taylor: Yeah, a book called Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson. It's all about sort of racial history in the United States and some of the things that have led to our own version of a caste system. This is a big sort of initiative for me personally, in my own learning and development right now, is sort of redesigning my own sense of history, as well as we've got a bunch of big diversity inclusion initiatives inside of CTC right now. So, I'm trying to do the work of my own education, and that's a book that was just recommended to me. Stephanie: That sounds good. I will have to check that out as well. What's up next on your Netflix queue? Taylor: Man, Netflix is so dead right now. It's one of the biggest drawbacks of COVID era. We just finished Money Heist, which is awesome, or Heist, maybe it's just called, which is dub from a Spanish show. So good. But I'm watching a show on Amazon right now called Upload, which is about this idea that like in the future, they've invented a way that when you die, they upload your consciousness into this digital world and you can interact with the present world. It's sort of a comedy, but it's ... I like those sort of futurist dystopian content. Stephanie: That's interesting. If you were to create a podcast, what would it be about? It can't be Ecommerce, and who would your first guest be? Taylor: Right now it'd be about trading cards. I've become obsessed with baseball cards in the last few months. My guest would be God to the name of Evan Vandenberg, who's launching this company that I might potentially be an investor in called [CollectX 00:59:07], which is basically, think of it as Robinhood meets DraftKings, but it's basically the digitization and tokenization of physical cards into a market dynamic that I'm sort of obsessed with. That's a weird nerdy answer. I'm sorry. Stephanie: I know nothing about trading cards, but that sounds very intriguing. All right, and the last one, what favorite piece of tech or an Ecommerce tool are you trying out right now that is either making you more efficient or you're having a lot of success with? Taylor: It's one that we're building, which is our growth data tool, which is just all around cohort specific LTV data. I have this super fun position of being able to hire a rad developer and a rad product manager and just build something that I want.that is just so fun. To have ideas in your head and then for them to be able to manifest themselves into the world, it's magic. That's my real answer, but I'm an obsessive Evernote user. I believe a lot in creating an external hard-drive for your brain as a really, really powerful tool. I think we were already sort of bionic people more than we realize, and expanding your mental capacity by taking great notes, I think is a serious life hack. Stephanie: Yeah. I completely agree there. All right. Well, this has been an awesome interview, so many good insights and tips and things that people can actually implement, which I love interviews like that. Where can people find out more about Common Thread Collective and yourself? Taylor: So, commonthreadco.com is our website. Then, I would say follow me, Taylor Holiday on Twitter. Stephanie: You are a good Twitter follow. Yes. All right, thanks Taylor. Taylor: Awesome.

You may not know exactly what Soft-Tex is, but chances are you’ve seen or even own a Soft-Tex product. That’s because Soft-Tex is a B2B2C company that provides products to retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Bed Bath & Beyond, Macy’s, and many more. The company specializes in sleep products, like pillows, mattress toppers, mattresses, mattress pads, or anything else you might need in your bedroom to help you get a good night’s sleep. But Soft-Tex doesn’t only ship to their retail partners. In recent years the company has upped its Ecommerce and drop-shipping capabilities in an effort to get even more in the lives of consumers. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Taylor Jones, the Vice President of Marketing for Soft-Tex explains how the company is creating a collaborative partnership with retailers while also exploring and consulting in the world of Ecommerce. He explains the ways in which Soft-Tex goes about ensuring successful product launches — including the exact number of reviews he thinks is the sweet spot — why SEO and product-usage videos are the ultimate keys to success, and the need for an Amazon strategy and what that looks like.   3 Takeaways: There is a delicate balance you have to strike when working with retail partners and also selling products D2C. You have to work collaboratively and across multiple channels to ensure that you have the products selling where you want them and not competing against themselves  Amazon is a price-leader, and in order to get any market share, you need to have an Amazon strategy that allows you to live there, while also ensuring that other partners have exclusive access to other products Product reviews and product-usage videos are absolutely essential to achieving a high conversion rate. Generating about 15 reviews and placing a usage video front and center are two strategies to implement to help grow conversions 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 your number one show on all things eCommerce, I'm your host, Stephanie Postles. And today we have Taylor Jones on the show, the VP of marketing and eCommerce at Soft-Tex International. Taylor. Welcome. Taylor: Hey Stephanie, thanks so much for having me. Stephanie: I'm excited to have you here. I'm feeling a little bit sleepy now, thinking about all the nice products you guys have, that are centered around sleep. I'd love for you to dive a bit into what is Soft-Tex International and how did you come to the company? Taylor: We'd love to hook you up first off. Stephanie: Yes, please. Taylor: So at Soft-Tex, we're really serious about sleep and home comfort products. I think for a long time, the company has been a leader in memory foam and cooling technologies and just everything to help you get a better night's sleep and live a comfortable and better life. I came to the company about three years ago. I have deep digital experience, worked for a company called Red Ventures here in Charlotte. Maybe you've heard of them. Then for another company in the call center space, Arise Virtual Solutions, and from some mutual connections found this role at Soft-Tex and started, really owning the eCommerce business for them. And it's blossomed into a larger marketing role, including e-commerce still. Stephanie: That's great. So how do I think about Soft-Tex? Because maybe a normal consumer, maybe hasn't heard of them. So how do I think about, how big the company is, who their partners are, how you guys sell? Tell me a bit about that. Taylor: Soft-Tex is really a B2B, to C company, and Soft-Tex is the entity that would be known to our retail partners. So think about Macy's, Bed Bath & Beyond, J.C. Penney, Walmart, Amazon, the whole gamut of retail, we supply with bedding, pillows, toppers, mattresses, mattress pads, protection, anything that is in the bedroom that you'd sleep on, it would probably make it. Taylor: We have a direct to consumer presence that we work with, bedpillows.com. We also have a robust, drop ship capability. So it's not just, we sell in bulk to a retailer. We do that absolutely, but we do, as a core capability, have drop ship to over 50 partners. Stephanie: Wow. So it seems like there's an interesting mix where, you're trying to market for yourself, you're doing direct to consumer, you have your retail partners. How do you think about managing these relationships and also not cannibalizing yourself at the same time? Taylor: Right. So I would say, our partnership with bedpillows.com, is emerging. It's a delicate balance for folks in our position, because we supply, our retail partners, we absolutely don't want to compete with them. Ultimately those relationships are very important to us and we build custom products. It's a very collaborative process with our brick and mortar retail partners and the branding that that goes into all of our different channels. Soft-Tex we have about five or six national or licensed brands that we supply product under or, or we'll develop product under a private label, to mitigate some of the brand conflicts or sales channel conflicts that may arise with selling our products. Stephanie: Very cool. And are you helping your partners when it comes to digitally marketing, the mattresses, pillows, are you helping improve their eCommerce strategy? Because I could see you having a lot of insights into different brands and their strategies and what they're doing to maybe share that knowledge and help each other out. Taylor: Absolutely. So the role we play on with the eCommerce team is a consultative role in that aspect, in that, we're able to see over the wall, we supply our products to the 50 different partners that I mentioned. So we can see some really interesting things that, maybe somebody over here is doing, in merchandising, assortment, with features, attributes, something cool on the product description page. And we can make that suggestion to someone else who maybe has not done that yet. Stephanie: That's great. So what are some learnings or key things that you see happening on these eCommerce sites where your like, here's some good best practices that anyone could implement or I see this working really well right now, or maybe it wasn't working six months ago. What lessons are you seeing through all these brands that you work with? Taylor: I think the concept of reviews syndication and review seeding is very important. Obviously, authenticity is critical and you don't want to see fake reviews, but when you have a new product, accelerating the process through which consumers can experience the product and write a review and leave a review, such that it exists is social proof, for other customers who see that product, is so important to getting a product off on the good foot. We've seen, in the home comfort space, 10 to 15 reviews, seems to be a sweet spot for a new product introduction to really help accelerate its growth. Stephanie: Completely agree on there. How do you encourage reviews? Taylor: There are review seeding partners out there, those companies that you can do seeding programs with, Bazaarvoice is a big one in our space. They have a really interesting service where you can collect reviews if you have a direct to consumer presence and syndicate those reviews. And they also have a network of folks that exists to, you can nominate your products and folks order it to sample your product. And those reviews can get syndicated out to retailers that, on the flip side are members of the Bazaarvoice syndication network. So we've seen retailers who participate in that, really scale up quickly on our products. Stephanie: Very cool. So they're not really having to do as much of the heavy lifting because essentially a consumer would review a product and that review can be used multiple times. Is that how to think about it? Taylor: Through a seeded review, say we did 10 reviews, those same 10 reviews would appear on Macy's, on J.C. Penney, on Kohl's, all at the same time, versus, if someone visited Macy's and bought the product and reviewed it, obviously that review would be owned by Macy's, and it will show there. So, as much as we can do to help reviews go as many places as possible, that's been very helpful. Stephanie: That makes sense. So when it comes to, I'm thinking about mattresses and buying mattresses, for a while, everyone wanted to lay on them and sit on them and see how they feel. And now with the market evolving, especially with the pandemic and everyone being a little bit more comfortable with ordering online, what shifts have you seen? Do you see consumer expectations increasing, consumer demands increasing on the sellers? What are you seeing happening behind the scenes right now? Taylor: For our products, from basic bedding, so everything non-mattress and the mattress, it's been through the roof. I think, folks want a fresh and clean sleeping environment, especially cleanliness is top of mind. With COVID in fact, Soft-Tex, my company announced a deeper partnership with Thomson Research Associates. They make an anti-microbial technology called Ultra-Fresh, the market is hot right now for all bedding products. And I think, from the customer experience point that you're hitting at, do you need to touch and feel the product in order to feel confident in purchasing it? Certainly bedding is a very tactile and personal experience and the same pillow or mattress that's great for me may not, may not work for you. Right. Taylor: I think we've seen folks through warranties and trial periods that the industry has, particularly on the mattresses, pretty much a hundred nights sleep trial guarantee, in some form or the other is a standard now. But from a pillow or top or other product standpoint, maybe there's not that trial period, but being as descriptive as possible, the images, the copy, using enhanced content and the importance of video is so important. Batched attributes, iconography, to really recreate that story and experience, doing everything you can without the consumer touching the product, and that way, I joke with folks at my company that I have the hardest job, right. I have to convince people to buy something that's highly personal and tactile, that they have never touched prior to receiving it. Stephanie: That's pretty tough. What best practices have you seen around creating videos? Because that's something that a lot of companies are leaning into right now, but especially for, a mattress or something, what are you seeing work when it comes to videos for the products? Taylor: I think the concept of video can take a number of forms. YouTube is the second largest search engine. So, you can do a ton of explainer videos or keyword optimized videos, to try and drum up search traffic to your products. But you can also leverage video, in particular the 30-second to a minute product video, to help drive conversion. And I think, that's been a huge thing that we've seen. The addition of video to product pages has scaled our conversion rate by an incremental 10 or 20%. It's hard to fathom, because typically most retailers merchandise video is the last piece in an image carousel, right? People don't like to read, they want to be told, and be surprised and delighted. Taylor: And so, leveraging that video format in a short, condensing it to 30 seconds, has been really big for us. And I think, stylistically, it's very on brand for us, the videos that we've done. As I mentioned at the top of the podcast, Soft-Tex is a very innovative company with emphasizing technology, cooling, I mentioned antimicrobial. So our videos come off as very techie, with graphics, lower thirds that pop up. So I think, making sure your videos are on brand and authentic to your brand voice, clearly and concisely conveying the product value proposition. In our space, it's really, how are we different than everybody else selling a mattress or a pillow? There's thousands of options. Stephanie: Yep. Are you making the videos for your brand partners, or are they all are using the same one, or are you customizing them where you're like Bed Bath & Beyond, this video works better versus Macy's they have a different clientele and we're going to make a different video for them or are they making their own? Taylor: Absolutely great question, Stephanie. For private label products, or we have some national brands that we offer exclusively to certain retailers, obviously those are customized, and we work with retail partners like Bed Bath & Beyond, and Macy's, on art direction, model considerations, we work with them on developing a storyboard and get it approved by them before we film it. Stephanie: Got it. That makes sense. So the one thing I was thinking about when we were mentioning direct to consumer, how you guys were going about that route right now. I was thinking about a very large mattress brand who I think recently IPOed and a lot of people are talking about their negative unit costs. And I was wondering, how are you guys thinking about that with your direct to consumer strategy? Are you willing to have negative margins to add a new customer, or how do you think about the digital growth around them? Taylor: I think the way we've thought about it in a lot of ways, is in the concept of, getting reviews on Amazon is so critical to helping ramp up. If you're giving a discount or something, that you may be selling your product at a loss initially to help gain those reviews, gain some initial sales traction initially. I think it has to be for a finite period of time, right? That you turn the corner and have a clear path to profitability. You can't just do it indefinitely. Right. But I think that there are definitely values to doing it, in that, you get your brand out there, you get some exposure, user generated content is so powerful right now. I think if the world is telling us anything, the power of social media and viral media, the same can be true for user generated content and reviews. If you get a really good review or a really bad one, people can upload them, they're always going to be there. Right. It's so important. Stephanie: That makes sense. Is there any model that you developed around we're going to, we're okay with going in the negative for this amount of time with this campaign, or is there any models that you build to influences these decisions, around adding new customers? Taylor: In terms of the review thing, it's still an algorithm that we're working out, what's the right quantity of review that moves the needle towards a product being successful. That's mostly in our space, right? When you're syndicating in a retail environment, so products sold across many retailers, because really the review is a key way to optimize, each retailer has its own search engine, right? Now, if you're your own brand, right? Selling direct to the consumer. I think it's a different calculus, you have your own tolerance with whoever's providing your investment. Taylor: If you're going to go negative for a time. What is the strategy? How do you become cashflow positive? In the industry, a lot of these, just e-commerce mattress in a box guys, is really, they're marketing companies if you think about it. There's a lot of articles, a lot of them are made by the same folks in terms of manufacturers and who pours the foam, et cetera. So it's interesting. Stephanie: That's really interesting to think about. I think I have three different brands of mattresses in our house, but I'm pretty sure they're probably all the same or made from the same people. Taylor: Or from the same cloth. Stephanie: I think so. They all feel pretty similar. How do you think about returns, for something as large as a mattress or, I'm thinking about furniture companies and stuff, how have you seen some brands lower their return rates? What are some best practices around them? Taylor: I think for the industry, for the mattress in a box, we've seen return rates average out between 10 and 15%. I would include basically everything in that, including the comfort trials and everything. Right. So, when you're a direct to consumer mattress in a box guy, that has to be factored into your pricing. Some other things that we've seen creative ways to save the sale, a lot of, one of the big complaints with sleep products is, maybe the bed is too firm. Maybe you'd send a topper or something to make the mattress more plush, as a method to save recouping, returning the mattress. Because ultimately, right, wrong or indifferent, in the mattress industry once somebody slept on a bed, you can't resell it. It's just one of those things. People don't don't buy used mattress. Stephanie: Good. All the things I'd never really thought about. So you were just mentioning how... I'm glad that you have to deal with that and not me. So we were talking about how a lot of the brands that maybe we think are unique, maybe are utilizing the same types of underlying materials and things like that. So they're kind similar. I saw that you guys sell on Amazon. Are you ever worried that Amazon could just knock you off and just make a mattress that's so similar, that it's maybe not beneficial to be on there, or what's your reason for selling products on there? Taylor: Well, I think, so many things nowadays, if you're searching for a product, folks don't just begin on Google anymore. There's a large contingent of the population that are Prime subscribers and really begin the product search phase on Amazon. I think you pretty much have to be there to have the share of voice, whether you like it or not. I think, for us, Amazon's a growing partner. Certainly it's hard, we have a lot of rebates and allowances with them, from a margin standpoint and I'm sure you've heard this from many folks. It's hard to find products that, you can be profitable. But, I think brands have to make a decision to have an Amazon strategy. Taylor: It is delicate. Obviously, retailers are very sensitive to being comped on Amazon. So it's a very nuanced delicate road that we walk. We have an assortment that we have on Amazon, but we also offer exclusive products to other channels, that we don't offer to Amazon. Stephanie: Got it. Is there any other advice that you would give when it comes to selling on Amazon, but making sure that it's beneficial, like you said, one idea is keeping exclusive content to where not everything you offer is all on Amazon, but is there anything else that you all do, where you're like, this works well? Taylor: I think, really it's ensuring that you're being thoughtful about your assortment, if you're selling on multiple outlets. We've learned in our experience that Amazon is a price follower. Well, we're a first party vendor. Obviously many of your listeners, maybe third party sellers were there. They set the retail price, but as a first party vendor, we have a wholesale price that we give to Amazon and there are, like I mentioned, rebates and allowances. But ultimately, they then retail it to make a profit or not, in some cases. Taylor: They're pretty aggressive in price scraping and seeing what others are doing and commanding the market share to come to them, if they see a lower price out in the market, they will likely try and beat it. So I think, you just have to be prepared, before you open that flood gate, if that's your strategy, making sure that you're ready to enforce, map or, D inventory Amazon as needed. I think, certainly if you're a third party seller on Amazon, you're in much more control of your destiny in that respect, as you can, you set the retail yourself. Stephanie: That completely make sense. In terms of SEO, I'm thinking it's pretty tricky for you guys to, you want your brands to be seen as leaders, but then you also want yourself to be seen as leaders. What SEO tactics do you all use for yourself and your brands? Taylor: Great question. I totally think, in our space in particular, features and attributes are more important than the brand overall, in terms of the search volume. Obviously, if you build a brand, which obviously we all are in the business of doing, you can build search volume that way, but, most of our SEO strategy exists around, trying to optimize and rank for generic keywords, based on the features and benefits of each product. For us, the brand story and value proposition is more of a conversion factor rather than a volume driver, if you will. We as a company have invested more in building a robust e-commerce interface, to target that non-branded search term versus building, paying money for our brands to be the most searched today. Taylor: That's not to say that, our brands don't have an impressive story and value proposition, but I think, part of that comes into cost, right. A brand that spends a lot in marketing, a direct to consumer mattress that may retail for $1000, queen size, roughly, you have a very similar product that we offer under one of our brands, through Macy's or J.C. Penney, or Walmart, Amazon, that retails for 350 to $400. Is there much difference in the product? I would say they're very similar in terms of features and attributes, but it comes down to advertising and price point, right? Stephanie: So what have you seen works? How do you win? Taylor: I think, again, each retailer is its own search engine and each retailer's algorithm for the sort that they show, when somebody types in a pillow, I'm searching for memory foam pillows or pillows or mattresses, is a little different. They take into effect or into account different factors, all of them leverage the trailing sales history, review quality. So, is your product good? Four stars or better? Are you getting reviews recently? So review count and frequency and recency. And then how does it relate to the query that was searched? Taylor: So, for example, there's a lot of backend keywords that we look to put with our products and we've really gone through and looked to optimize those to make sure that we're calling out things like, if a product is antimicrobial, it is tagged appropriately, or if it's got some certifications or whatever it is, such that, when you're searching on a retailer, if you're typing in the keyword or leveraging a checkbox menu, faceted navigation, that we're optimized to show as much as we can. Stephanie: Got it. So how are you finding new brands who would be willing to work with you on selling your product? Are you marketing to them? Are you approaching them directly, cold email? How do you find new partners in your space? Taylor: It's a great question. A lot of our business is, if you put it into two buckets, hunting and farming, it is farming. You bring new ideas and new product and new concepts to the same folks you've been dealing with. But we absolutely have hunting strategies as well. Honestly, I think Soft-Tex has taken a position as an industry leader of research. We've undertaken bedding industry research initiative, both of bedding buyer trends. We work with, many, many retail partners, and especially during COVID times, we've been able to survey our partners on what they're seeing and aggregate the results and provide that as a free service, that I think has been really valuable to folks in the industry. And then also not just industry or retailer, B2C information, but what the consumer is looking for in bedding today. We've actually just completed a large scale research initiative for bedding consumer tastes and preferences in 2020. Stephanie: Very cool. And are you plugging in some of your products, because consumers are very interested in cleanliness going forward and what do you know? We have an antimicrobial, I'm saying that wrong, but you know what I mean, product? Taylor: It's absolutely the type of a feedback loop that fuels our product development cycle. So in our bedding buyer survey, we just got the results back on that. As you might imagine, anything with fresh and clean attributes has been on a positive sales trend and we've for a long time had anti-microbial infusions and treatments in our products, but obviously we're ramping that up now, given the favorable sales trend that it's seeing. We're looking forward to, seeing the full landscape of what consumers are shopping for, how they shop, as that's in constant flux, especially with COVID and beyond. I think, consumers are more comfortable shopping online, increasingly daily, more and more orders, for all of eCommerce, not just bedding are taking place digitally. Stephanie: Do you think this is a longer term trend? And if so, how have you guys shifted your strategy? What things are you planning on doing differently or changing going forward? Taylor: I think, like I mentioned, we've done a great job at Soft-Tex in optimizing our product pages and the end retailer optimization. We are making the investment now, in that top of funnel or off of retailers sites discoverability. So we want people to have our brands, enter the consideration phase earlier in the process versus, just see them on a retailer site and click on them. So we're definitely investing there, because we do see the shift towards e-commerce, increasingly as a longterm trend, just rough numbers that I had looked at before this podcast. When I started at Soft-Tex, e-commerce was, just under 10% of the total business. Stephanie: That's four years ago, right? Taylor: That was in 2017. And I think, ultimately even then we were under-indexed as a company. This year, I think, just given how the trends are going and how we're pacing, it's looking, 35 to 40%. And that's not to say that the brick and mortar piece or other channels of business have shrunk terribly either. It's just grown that much, just organically as well. Stephanie: The pie has increased. Taylor: Exactly. Stephanie: With that much growth, I'm thinking about your tech stack now. And I saw a quote on some article, where you said, our approach is working, and we believe that the tech stack we've built is well positioned for continued growth. So what does your tech stack look like? What are you guys investing in? What platform are you using? What does it look behind the scenes? Taylor: I think, product information management and taxonomy, and really taking control of your data as the expert of whatever product you make, is so critical. Before I started, all of our product data was in, 50 million Excel sheets, right. Now it's much more systematized. And also, not to mention, different retail partners require different fields and everybody's set up processes a little different, whereas, before that, was institutional knowledge and it lived with a person, now that lives with platform. So that's a huge process improvement that we've made. Taylor: Digital asset management is so critical, particularly from being able to rapidly get new images out to different syndication platforms, but also tests. We've done a lot in push the envelope on image standards. We talked about how we can play a consultative role with retail partners. We'd seen some really nice boosts when we added some batches to images, as trust symbols, like if something was featured on, Better Homes & Gardens, sticking that, in the bottom right hand corner. Sometimes that's been a little tough, because certainly main images get picked up in Google shopping and there's some rules against how much text can be in the image. Taylor: That worked well for a time, when we were able to get it approved. From a text tech standpoint, email marketing, that's super important, leveraging, and also of course social, being able to leverage all of our digital assets and brand voice and value, getting it out there consistently to the customer as well, has been really important. Stephanie: What metrics do you look at for success around, whether it's your B2B type of backend or your eCommerce platform, what metrics are you reviewing to see if things are going well? Taylor: An early indication, skew count. So how many skews do we have in our assortment and how many places are they set up? Obviously if we have a thousand skews, they should all be 50 places, ideally, right? For full skew syndication. Certainly not every retailer is going to take every skew that we have. A lot of retailers still have more of a curated assortment versus an endless aisle. Certainly I think, we see a value in an endless aisle, because of how we differentiate our products. Literally we try to create every product to be a little different, to have a little bit of unique feature and value proposition. So that concept that, there's something for everyone, right. Taylor: So skew count, a very important metric, ultimately total sales obviously, unit sales and how are retailers trending, particularly ramping up impression volume, how many people are getting to a product page and certainly for folks listening, they're probably like, well, how do you get that? Not every retailer provides that information. But you certainly can leverage tools out there, on Amazon, there's intelligence tools to look at, how many views your products are getting and other things of that nature. I think that, being able to just check that and see the demand for your product over time is very important. Taylor: Other metrics that we really look at, sale, when we give discounts, how things perform, because ultimately a lot of things come back to the law of supply and demand, right. We might have a price in our mind where we think something should be, but that's not the price that the consumer wants to pay for a product. Finding that right price that moves the volume, through discounts, just finding that equilibrium is interesting. And then obviously we talked about reviews a lot, review count and quality. The quality is a big feedback loop that we take very seriously, in terms of work with our quality assurance and customer service teams, to make sure that, we don't have an issue. And we're very proud, that our products have about a 4.7, 4.8 aggregate rating. Stephanie: That's great. Taylor: It's huge. I said at the top of the call, what works for one person doesn't for another. So you might think that a pillow, if left long enough to its own devices might net out around a three. So the fact that, we're at a 4.8 overall, is really encouraging. Stephanie: That's awesome. Do any of your partners right now, not having an eCommerce platform? I'm thinking there must be some people who don't, how do you work differently with them if they only have a retail location versus your eCommerce partners? Taylor: There are, sometimes e-commerce is challenging to jump into. It can seem daunting for folks that aren't doing it, because you're talking about things at the each level versus, big old fat POS, the way you retail used to run, right. You order a bunch to a warehouse and it gets distributed. There's a lot of implications to that, especially when you're talking about commitments for product, with e-commerce and drop ship the risk is inherently on the supplier or the vendor. There's no risk for the retailer, right. The retailers is like, Oh, sure, I'll put it up on my website, but you're inventorying it. Right. You're going to ship it for me, just when I sell it. Taylor: A lot of companies, that's their biggest objection, I think, is, without a hard commitment or a retailer to commit to bulk units upfront, if they don't have that, they won't offer it for e-commerce. They won't bring it in, because they don't have that driver to pull them into it. Because it's very easy, if a retailer's ordering 10,000 units of something, pepper and a few thousand more free commerce while we're at it. But if e-commerce is the first channel you're thinking about, it can be a riskier equation. Stephanie: Do you see that changing going forward? Do you see a lot of these brands thinking about now going online? Taylor: Yeah. I mean, even within Soft-Tex it's changing, right. We have now for, within the past couple of years, now digital first product, whereas, not saying that my e-commerce department was a recycling bin before, but pulling off of the success of things in brick and mortar initially, was really what drove eCommerce previously, which is not necessarily a bad strategy. But I think today, for innovation and new product, more and more stuff, if you're confident in it, you have to commit and leverage on e-commerce. Stephanie: I completely agree. So I saw you guys had some showrooms, I think, for your product. How are you all thinking about that? Taylor: We have permanent showrooms in New York and Las Vegas, and participate in market events where we host, the buyers from many different retail partners, so much of that. The importance of an in person event, has been blown up now through COVID. We went through a virtual market in March, which, obviously is hard to convey everything through a video, but, we had fun doing it and a lot of people really enjoyed it. That whole concept has been a challenge. Right? Being able to find that dedicated time to get in front of your customers and have them, if anything, particularly for stores, it's all about creating an experience to surprise and delight. Taylor: Those buyers really want to feel the product and experience it, to ensure that it's worth, that it will monetize that floor space, that it will take up. With the first touch point being a virtual video, that can be a challenge sometimes, but, we're adapting through virtual markets, mailing samples for, Zoom calls to review them. But it certainly has been different, it looks like, the Las Vegas market furniture show was pushed back.It's likely that, at least for us, it's virtual still, just given everything that's going on. And many of our customers are, you've seen probably the announcements, a lot of travel moratoriums. Some through the end of the year, they've already come out and said so. It's been interesting from that standpoint. I guess from that point- Stephanie: I can imagine. Taylor: I think home products, more folks will spend money, through e-commerce on home and other products, that they're not spending on travel. So, positives for us and for many others. Stephanie: That could be a good opportunity. I'm thinking of, these virtual events right now to sell to buyers. I think, I would just run and jump on the mattress and then just go to sleep and then people would just be interested to see if I'd wake up, that might pull people in. That's how I would sell it. Taylor: That's a very attention grabbing headline, for sure. Stephanie: It'd be like, is she asleep or is she dead, what happened or is she frozen? I don't know. Taylor: That's all right. Maybe we'll use that in our next market video. Stephanie: Great. I can be the star of it, I'm pretty good at sleeping and internet freezing, all of the above I'm good at. Are you thinking about incorporating these virtual strategies going forward? Is it something even when the pandemics over, that you're like, this is working well, we might try this out in the future and use it for, our initial targeting effort to then retarget them to an in person event afterwards. Or how are you thinking about that marketing strategy going forward? Taylor: I think it's something that, we're definitely going to do. It's something that we had been doing, I guess, even before. We would do video walk throughs of our showroom and our virtual experience with an industry publication called, Home Textiles Today. But for the most recent market, we produced the virtual market video ourselves. So, leveraging, either internal or partner capabilities, we still think it's very important to address that. There's always going to be people that can't come to an event, even forget COVID times. So it's always good to have that digital touch point to be able to send to them. And also, to your point, it absolutely can sit on our website and exist as a lead generation tool as well, for people to sign up, to see our latest innovation and then fill out a lead form and then go watch the video. Stephanie: There is definitely a lot of opportunity there, for content that is being created now that maybe wouldn't have been thought of before everything that was going on. Taylor: Right. It's a delicate situation, because a lot of what we produce for a trade show like that, and our competitors, is very future looking and conceptual. There is a level of security. Most of what we sell at a trade show is not yet fully commercialized. Sometimes it is, but in many cases it's like, this is new brand new technology and we're introducing it here. So, there's also a dimension of, yes, we want people to see it, but no, we don't want everyone to see it. Stephanie: That's got to be a little bit, get a little FOMO there and make it a secret. Taylor: That's right. Stephanie: So you have an interesting intersection between B2B and B2C. Is there anything that you wish existed right now in the eCommerce space or technology wise, or you're like, we're struggling with this right now, that you could see getting better in the future or that you hope to get better? Taylor: We have some partners now that help us provide really high quality CGI imagery. Obviously that's been around, but, making that process easier, it takes a lot of work to stage a live photo and video shoot, especially for our product class. That's something that we're looking to get better at, such that we can, as we commercialize new products, we don't have to have crazy processes to stage a photo and video shoot. Certainly there's value to that, and we will continue to use it. We have to use live folks for a lot of things, and models and videos, but for the static, just e-commerce imagery, getting those images up front can really increase our speed to market. Taylor: I would think the other thing, that perhaps we're missing today, is really seeing an aggregation of reviews across platforms. So obviously we see reviews that are syndicated. But we don't always see every review out there. So getting notified when there's a negative review in particular, such that we can see, is it just a one off? Somebody just didn't like it, or, is it the start of a trend of some sort. That happens very seldom with us fortunately, but it's always good to be on the forefront. Taylor: If you think about it, I'm sure we're not alone. A company like Kraft, they have millions of skews probably, having that feedback loop automated is so important. You can't have a person, tracking every review manually, right? So the more automation that's out there, the better. And we've done a really good job, I think, building out partners with the scraping capability to monitor our product pages and also, with advertising as well. Stephanie: Very cool. That's two very useful things. I'm sure a lot of people will be looking for, going forward as well. So we have a couple of minutes left and I do not want to let you get out of the lightning round. So let me know if you're ready and we can start that, Taylor. Taylor: Let's do it. Stephanie: All right. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It's where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready? Taylor: Yes. Stephanie: All right. First one. What's the next sleep product that you're excited about buying or what are you most excited about right now? Taylor: CBD pillows. Stephanie: Tell me more about that. Taylor: Our CBD, we're really proud of the chemistry. It's microencapsulated into the cover. So with body pressure and as you toss and turn, as you sleep, the capsules break open and release the CBD up through the fabric and it's absorbed in the CBD receptors in the skin. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. That sounds very interesting. I have to check that out. Taylor: Coming, next quarter. Stephanie: Cool. I'll be on the lookout for that. What's up next on your reading list or audible? Taylor: That's a really great question. I don't read as much as I should. Mostly, I'm reader of the news. I would love a good mystery. I don't read enough fiction, sometimes it's good for diversion, especially during COVID times, right? Stephanie: Yep. We'll have to find one for you then. I'll source one and let you know. Taylor: Yes, please. Stephanie: What's up next on your Netflix queue? Taylor: Ozark. We just started, it's been really intense. So my wife as a mental health counselor, and I have some stressful days at work, so we both agreed, it's pretty much a weekend thing, because it's so intense, we can't watch it. Stephanie: Yes. I agree. You got to balance that out, put on a Disney movie or something. Taylor: Exactly. Stephanie: And the last one, what one thing, will have the biggest impact on e-commerce in the next year? Taylor: I am going to say, voice search, I think more and more people will leverage, Siri or Alexa or the Google voice piece, for searching on stuff. I think, particularly, so much of our population is aging. For whatever reason, when I see somebody have a question, I see them using the voice search the most, like my grandparents, that demographic. As it gets better, we'll see it used more and more. Stephanie: I completely agree [inaudible 00:57:15]. To take anymore, too much work. Taylor: I know. That's all right. Stephanie: I like that. Well, Taylor, it's been a blast having you on. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Where can people find out more about you and Soft-Tex International? Taylor: You can check us out on the web at, soft-tex.com. We're also on Facebook and Instagram. You can also check out any of our brands, like SensorPedic, SensorGel or BioPEDIC. For me personally, I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter, Taylor Jones. There's a lot of Taylor Jones's, but I'm out there. Stephanie: We'll link you up. We will find you, don't worry. All right. Thanks so much, Taylor. And we will talk to you soon. Taylor: Okay. Thanks so much, Stephanie. This is great.  

We hear all the time that we should love ourselves more, but what does that actually look like in real life? Can self-love be more than buying ourselves flowers? Jennie Taylor shares the tools in her self-love playbook and speaks honestly about loving herself through a deeply personal surrender. Music by Terry Hughes Inspired to create something for yourself? Visit https://ever-changing.net/ Links: https://thriveglobal.com/stories/the-self-love-playbook https://expand-coaching.com/ ---- Full Transcript Taylor: We all have that one thing. We all have that thing we think we're supposed to be, that we think will bring us happiness or will make us worthy of love and joy. What I've learned is that one of the deepest ways you can love yourself is just letting go of that thing. What does it mean to love ourselves? To have our own back and be on our own team as we make the tough decisions? Is self-love really just narcissism? Is it just a new age thing? We'll speak today with Jennie Taylor, who has been on a wide and deep journey to understand what self love means for her, and who will share with us how we can learn to actually do it. This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. As you know, in this first season on Shame Piñata we are focusing on weddings & commitment ceremonies, a type of ceremony we are all familiar with. And we've also touched just a bit on the idea of self-commitment ceremonies, where a person commits to being their own best partner. Today we're going to look at little more deeply into the idea of self love. I came across a wonderful article by Jennie Taylor which helped me understand that self love can be an action instead of a feeling and also that it's really a practice from moment to moment, ever-evolving as we learn to know and trust ourselves more. This idea of self love as an action reminds me of one of my favorite Mr. Rogers quotes, “Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like 'struggle'. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now – and to go on caring even through times that may bring us pain." So, self love can look like us accepting ourselves, no matter how we're feeling in the moment. And when you think about it, isn't that really the way you'd want someone to love you, to just accept you the way you are in this moment? I also learned from Jennie's article (and this shouldn't be a surprise) that our ability to be in our body and feel our feelings has a huge impact on our ability to accept ourselves and show up for ourselves in the moment. Because if I'm not in touch with my body, I won't be as able to identify my feelings and listen to what they're telling me. I'll be disconnected from the cues that help me make decisions like should I stay or do I want to leave? Is this job a good fit for me? Is this relationship meeting my needs? Jennie and I had a wonderful conversation a few months ago. We spoke about self love within the context of the first few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. Thomas: So what does self love mean to you? Taylor: So for me, self love has really been a journey of discovering that it's really a practice. When I first started out, I was looking for this feeling of self love. And what I've learned in going through so many layers of it is that it's a ritual, it's a habit, it's a practice. It's a way I show up for myself. Specifically, I'd say the most important thing is allowing myself to feel my feelings, setting boundaries with people. That practice, you know, includes being mindful of how I spend my time, how I talk to myself, how I care for my body, it's those... practicing compassion and acceptance. So all of those things are more doing rather than a feeling. Thomas: So I know that you've been on a journey to find self love and to concretize and weave it into your life. Can you tell us a little bit about what that journey looked like? Taylor: Yes. I feel like the word that comes up is resistance. It's just this big journey of resistance. And me like fighting it and then giving in and fighting and giving in... And so yeah, I mean, I think, for me, it's always peeling back new layers. It started with things like, you know, trying to really like myself in my 20s, buying myself flowers, allowing myself alone time, cooking myself a nice dinner. So there were these things that I was like, yes, this is a part of self care. And I'm just going to have a special time with myself. But then what I realized when I peel back that layer is like, I still had really harsh self talk and I still was really hard on myself if I would make a mistake, sort of beat myself up. And so that led me to this other layer of like doing the work on that part of me. What was driving the the negative self talk? How could I shift that, you know? So becoming conscious of that. And then once that shifted, it was like I stopped being overly critical of myself, I stopped doing things that were bad for me like, you know, drinking a decent amount or you know, eating badly, hanging out with people that were just blatantly not good for me. But then I really still was disconnected from my body. And so when I would be stressed, I wouldn't leave a situation, or when I would be feeling really not good physically, you know, sometimes you can get yourself in a situation and you're, you physically just feel like your energy is capped or it's being drained. And I realized I wasn't criticizing myself but I was also still putting myself in these situations where I didn't feel good about myself. So that was this whole 'nother you know, layer and I would say, where I am now is sort of... it’s feeling all of my feelings, the light, the dark, the things I'm nervous make me a bad person or make me unlovable. It's feeling all of that with a really deep level of acceptance and then checking in with my body on like, how well I'm doing. You know what I mean? So if I still feel anxiety, I know I'm not there. Because when I'm in my truth and when I'm in my aligned place of self love, my body feels free, it feels clear, it feels good. Did you get that? Jennie lets her body tell her how well she's taking care of herself. She makes the best decision she can from moment to moment and then checks in with how her body is feeling to see if her decision was a supportive one. Thomas: I love that idea, that metric, of listening to the body checking in with the body. How does my body feel? Because the body doesn't lie. Taylor: Absolutely. And your intuition speaks through your body. And it's funny because I actually run a triggers... like a workshop on triggers. So how to help people process these stuck beliefs and through the body. And one of the things coolest things is when you do the work, you can actually have a feeling that really triggers your body and it dissolves the more you work with it and dance with it and love it and play with it. So it's a check-in and you can sort of feel the progress within your body to over time. Thomas: Yeah, I was always taught that it was mind, body, heart, spirit, but I've only recently realized that the emotions in the body are and so much in the gut as well. Thomas: Yeah. When my father passed away, that was probably one of the biggest grieving times I had and, and a lot of times when I was crying, there was no content. I wasn't thinking about him. I wasn't missing him even I was just... my body needed to cry. And yes, and it was it was almost like, you know, throwing up or something. It was just like, I had to just stepped back and let the body do it. And it helped if somebody was there to hold space, so I didn't feel like I had to stop. And then I just would go and go and go and go and go and go and go and go, go, go, go go... just just let it go. And just until it was done, and like, okay, that had to happen. Taylor: Yes. What you're talking about is so helpful when we when we start talking about using the body to process emotion. When we're in our heads and we're creating story and we're crying and we're making it worse and making ourselves sad, that's a different type. What you're talking about is absolutely hands down the body just processing and moving on emotion when there's not a lot of thought, there's not a narrative. You're just getting it out. I felt like that with this virus as well going around. Have you? Thomas: No, I think I'm still in my head. Taylor: You're still in your head? Thomas: I'm still... I'm still making plans, making plays. Yeah, you know, worrying and calling people in the you know, I'm still in that place. Taylor: Right, right, right. Yeah, I have there been a couple of days where I am not sure what I'm crying it out, but I just have to release. It's like there's this collective angsty typing that is just heavy. We've got to get it out, you know? I think a big part of my practice has been is this useful for me to feel this or is this creating more of this negative energy? You know, so checking in on what the intention behind feeling the negative emotion is. Is it ego? Is it my body processing? Thomas: Nice. Yeah. And how do you how do you tell? Taylor: Usually it's a head versus - and a lot of thought - versus that body feeling that you're talking about. And for me, when I'm processing emotion, in my body, it feels like it sort of wells up and then I have to get it out, usually through tears, a lot of times breath or sound. Like if it's energy in my throat, that's usually not ego. But when it's my head sort of making me inferior making a victim, making me... you know, where there's like a strong narrative around it... Thomas: Yeah. Yep, I hear ya. Taylor: Yeah. So. And, and fear also, I think lives in our head when we're down that rabbit hole of like all the things that could happen. Yeah, we're in fear and fear is ego. So when we're scared and we have scary thoughts in our heads, maybe ones that keep us awake at night or steal our attention while we're at a stoplight, those moments can take us out of our body, into our head. And the weird thing is that we can't really release that tension or resolve the feelings when we're in our head, because the emotions are in the body. I asked Jennie what she discovered about herself over the years. Taylor: I mean, there's so many things what immediately came to mind was that I am lovable. I feel like that sounds very trite. I've also discovered just how hard on myself I was. But I think overall, which includes both of those things is that I'm human. You know, this is all part of it. And the ups and the downs and the dark and the light that's it's all safe. You know, and the truth is, it's between me and me. I don't need to expose it and to put it out there and make sure other people love my dark. I'm the only one that has to love that and accept that and explore it and so from that place, it's a lot safer and easier to explore. Because it's between me and you know, what I believe is my Creator source energy like the divine that's within me and in the universe. Thomas: Wow, that's the lesson right there. I love that. Thank you. Taylor: Yeah. Thomas: So you and I had spoken a little bit before that one of the things that you went through in your life was coming to terms with the reality of not having children. making peace with that, with that reality. And I'm curious how self love was part of that process what that process was like for you and how self love was part of it. Taylor: Yeah. So this was a big one in 2019 for me. I have always identified with being a mom, always. Like from the time I was six years old, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" "A mom." That was me, you know? And so I had cultivated self love and I'll be honest with you, part of it was in preparing myself to be a better mom, a better wife a better you know, the head of the family. And so when you're when I was doing all these things, and I still wasn't feeling like I was any closer to becoming a mother, I started having a lot of suffering. And it was self inflicted. It wasn't because society was telling me I should have a baby because I'm a woman, you know. It just it wasn't that. I was genuinely... it was like a real internal identity and a pull of like, what am I, if I don't do this with my life? It feels like this is my purpose. I feel so called to do this and I can't... I felt like I can't create it. So that awareness of the suffering, and how much I was creating that for myself, I think, opened up this bigger discussion for me with myself around surrender. And it was this sort of come-to-Jesus moment of like, I cannot create this much suffering for myself and this much self judgment and love myself at the same time. And so what needs to happen is a place of total like radical acceptance and surrender, that my life has value and meaning even if I don't even know Know what it is yet? And that's profound. To sort of like yes, you love yourself for what you know of yourself but to then peel back this layer and have to love this part of yourself that you trust has value because, you know, if you have a spiritual practice you you believe that. But you don't even know what it looks like yet you don't know what your contribution is yet. And I feel like it really was a twofold practice of like A: noticing the shame and the suffering and the thoughts, and finally just getting a place of saying, "No, I will not treat myself like this anymore. I won't". And even though I want it so badly, and I feel so called, there's something else and I trust with I trust that divine within me that knows there's some purpose here, why this hasn't happened. Thomas: Right Taylor: And yeah, I mean, again, that's a practice, that's showing up every day for myself. And of course there are some bad days, you know, but in those moments, it's... it really is just a call back to trust and surrender. And knowing that that's the kindest, most loving thing I can do for myself. And I'm still obviously open to it. You know what I mean? Like, I'm... it's not too late. I certainly could still have children, but it's... there's no attachment to it anymore. There's no... there's not like that need to, to have me be worthy. That's sort of how I know that I've healed that part of me, is because I don't have a narrative anymore around how it's gonna go or like why it hasn't happened. You know, sometimes I think when we're insecure about things or we are resisting things, we have a narrative around why it hasn't happened to sort of cover up our shame. And for me right now, it's just, I don't know. I really have no story anymore. I have no... I have no ending one way or the other. It feels so good to be in this place of such tension and such pain and suffering right in my body to then move through it and claim this other part of my power. Thomas: Right. Taylor: And yeah, just feel sort of lighter and still open but not attached. Thomas: Right. Right. You've like moved beyond the story in the detachment. Taylor: Yes, yes. It's just... I'm very much in trust. And I think I think one common misconception or mistake is that people will surrender in order to get there. And there's still that attachment to... "Okay, but I have to let go of it all and then I'll get it!" You know, that's all I think it's common right now where there's a lot of talk around manifestation. And the purpose with the context of self love is: Do it because it's kind to yourself. Don't do it to get it. You know what I mean? Thomas: Well, thank you so much. It's been so awesome just getting to know you and absolutely continuing to have a conversation. Taylor: Back at you and I hope you know our conversations continue on and on. So yes, yes. I'm so grateful to Jennie for sharing her wisdom with us, not only on her ever-deepening explorations of self love, but also for her reminders on the wisdom our bodies offer us right now, in this moment. I hope you can take a minute today to take one or maybe even two deep breaths and notice how your body feels. You might even see if you can sense your body's response as you make decisions like working another few hours or taking a break, reading a book or taking a walk. Just noticing. You might notice if you can even feel your body today. And if you can't, it's okay. Your body is there, just waiting to connect. Waiting to accept you in this moment, no matter how you are. Jennie Taylor is a certified leadership coach and founder of Expand Coaching, an organization aimed at helping clients deepen connection and authenticity in the workplace and with oneself. Her Expand Within program focuses on the components of Self-Love and gives practical ways to cultivate it to impact all areas of life: career, relationships, purpose. Before coaching full-time, Jennie spent 16 years in the healthcare and technology industries as a sales leader. You can learn more about her and book a free session at www.expand-coaching.com Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please take a minute to review it on Apple Podcasts. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

Nearly 25 percent of all heart attacks might be silent myocardial infarctions, or silent MI. These heart attacks can cause serious, long-term damage without any noticeable symptoms. Dr. Allen Taylor discusses who is at risk for this condition and how to prevent it.   TRANSCRIPT Intro: MedStar Washington Hospital Center presents Medical Intel where our healthcare team shares health and wellness insights and gives you the inside story on advances in medicine. Host: Thank you for joining us today. We’re talking with Dr. Allen J. Taylor, Chief of Cardiology at MedStar Heart and Vascular Institute at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. Today we’re talking about silent myocardial infarction, or silent MI, which is a heart attack that goes unnoticed by the person who has it. Silent MI might have no symptoms, or the symptoms might be so mild that they’re mistaken for muscle pain or heartburn. But the lack of symptoms is deceiving. Research has found that Silent MI, without a history of traditional heart attack, increases a patient’s risk of heart failure, heart attack, and death in general. Dr. Taylor, how can a condition that feels and seems harmless be so dangerous? Dr. Taylor: Silent MI is an unrecognized problem. It’s the same as a recognized heart attack, in terms of its risk. Seems surprising, how can something silent be so dangerous. And it’s not just the recognition that’s the problem, in terms of risk, but it’s the fact that when not recognized, we don’t have an opportunity to apply the right treatments that improve outcomes. So, silent MIs are risky and they’re just as risky as MIs that patients recognize. So, it’s important that we find them and get patients on the right treatment. Host: Are silent MIs common? Dr. Taylor: So, about a quarter of heart attacks are thought to be silent. And I think that when we use the word silent, we have to explain a little bit. Cause some MIs are truly silent - the patient never even has a symptom. Some MIs are unrecognized and so, silent to the patient, although there was a symptom that the patient didn’t recognize as being typical for a heart attack. Patients may mistake their symptoms - for instance, they may say “Oh, that’s just heartburn”, or they may experience heart pain as back pain. Or, in older patients in particular, they may simply have no symptoms at all or simply be feeling down or fatigued or just “off” a particular day. We hear all these stories and, whether it’s truly silent or unrecognized, it’s about 1 in 4 heart attacks that occur in the community. Host: How are silent MIs detected if they cause no symptoms? Dr. Taylor: Detection of unrecognized or silent MI can be a problem because it takes a test to detect it since the patient didn’t experience warning symptoms. Some ways we’ll identify them are using a simple test such as an electrocardiogram, that if it shows the changes of a heart attack, that we would then do further investigations to confirm if the electrocardiogram was true or not. Electrocardiograms can be very useful tests in detecting heart attacks that have been unrecognized, although it’s important to note that there’s both false positive test as well as negative tests. So, the electrocardiogram is not perfect, but it’s our primary tool to detect them. Another test that is very common in use is a heart function test called an echocardiogram. It’s a test using sound waves that looks at the heart function and if an area of the heart was shown to be not functioning properly, we might suspect that it had been impaired by an unrecognized heart attack. And that might lead to further investigations to determine if that was true or not. But the detection is difficult. And so, it takes going to your doctor and having one or two of these tests to see if your heart’s in really good shape. Host: What happens after you discover that a patient has experienced a silent MI? Dr. Taylor: Well, the first thing I say is “Don’t panic.” Let’s dive a little deeper into this. But, what happens then is we’ll just basically use the same evaluation as someone that had a known heart attack and run them through generally simple tests to see. For example, if the EKG or ECG electrocardiogram was abnormal, we’d perhaps get an echocardiogram to see if the heart function was ok. And then maybe a stress test - having somebody walk and then lightly jog on a treadmill while placed on an electrocardiogram to see if that shows any signs of heart stress when being active. And, if that’s not enough, we have very sophisticated tests that we can really dive very deep into heart function and to make sure the arteries are in good shape or, if not, what the depth of the problem is. So, it’s really the same evaluation as someone who has a known heart attack. And if we find there’s truly an abnormality, what then begins, after it’s assessed, is pick the right treatments. Does someone need an artery treatment right up front, and clearly then we’ll move them on to the right preventative treatments to prevent anything further from happening. Host: Who’s at risk for silent MI and should patients worry? Dr. Taylor: It really can be anyone because if it’s truly silent or unrecognized, any of us could mistake, say back pain, for back pain when it was really truly a heart attack. But there’s a few patient populations we’ve really focused on. One would be patients with diabetes. The patients with diabetes often don’t feel pain in the same way. And, they truly can be silent, or they may even experience a heart attack in a day when they simply don’t feel well and maybe their blood sugar control gets worse all of a sudden and they can’t figure out why. In an older patient, particularly in older females, the heart attacks can also be truly silent or unrecognized because they present in odd ways like back pain or a day in which they feel tired or just simply off. But it’s important to know that if anyone is feeling any symptoms that are unexplained - heartburn that’s just a little different than the usual heartburn they’ve experienced and longer lasting - they shouldn’t assume it’s heartburn, but get seen promptly to make sure that, nothing’s going wrong with their heart. Host: What can patients do to reduce their risk of silent MI? Dr. Taylor:  In terms of reducing the risk for it, well it comes down to the core risk factors for heart disease. That is, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, tobacco use, and then leading an optimal lifestyle, regular exercise 30 to 60 minutes most days of the week, avoiding tobacco, eating a diet that’s low in fat and low in sugars. So, it’s a lifestyle approach. Really, knowing your numbers and leading a healthy lifestyle to prevent it. But then not taking symptoms that you think are a little funny for granted. Host: Why is MedStar Washington Hospital Center the best place to seek heart care? Dr. Taylor: Well, I’m very proud of what we do at MedStar Washington Hospital Center and MedStar Heart and Vascular Institute because we simply can take care of anything from the most simple to the most incredibly complex. And we have every possible diagnostic tool to help uncover heart disease and every possible tool then to treat it. No matter the severity, we have a team that can help and that’s another unique aspect of MedStar Heart and Vascular Institute is that when you see one person, you’re really seeing an entire team. An entire team of experts that work together for making your care optimal. Host: Could you share some success stories from your patient population? Dr. Taylor: I have an interesting case - a young man, he’s very overweight but he had come in the hospital in terrible shape and things weren’t quite right. And in fact, in looking at his electrocardiogram, we noticed that there were signs of an old heart attack. And, in fact, what we indeed found in investigating it, was in fact he had an artery that was totally blocked, and it really had helped contribute to this whole illness that started with just a little breathing difficulty and retaining fluid. And by diagnosing the artery blockage, now we’re on a completely different course of care and now we’re seeking some really novel ways to restore blood flow past the total artery blockage. And while it’s unusual for a 30-year-old to have a blocked artery, it was the EKG that tipped us off and it’s really changed the way we’re caring for him. And, while I don’t want to alarm every 30-year-old person out there to say, “Oh my goodness, I could have a totally, artery totally blocked”, it raises the point of leading an optimal lifestyle. Good diet, exercise, maintaining good body weight, avoiding tobacco are the real ways to preserve your artery health. Host: Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Taylor. Conclusion: Thanks for listening to Medical Intel with MedStar Washington Hospital Center. Find more podcasts from our healthcare team by visiting medstarwashington.org/podcast or subscribing in iTunes or iHeartRadio.

How do you show up online and in social media when you are insecure about your appearance? Haters are real and they are gonna hate, right, Taylor? So, what do you do about it? How do you get yourself to show up as you are, unapologetically and with confidence? It isn't easy but here's where you start. Have a question for the show? Heather@choosetohaveitall.com