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更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: Hey, Yuri, I thought we would talk a little bit about immigration because you're from Italy, and I'm from the U.S. and both of our countries have issues with immigration. Can you talk a little bit about the immigration issues now in Italy?Yuri: Yes, immigration in Italy is a recent problem because until maybe the 80's the population was mostly Italian. Later we got a lot of people from Africa and from Eastern Europe, and people started getting a bit dodgy[不誠實的，不懷好意的] with that.Todd: Right, so people were't happy that non-Italians were coming into the country basically?Yuri: Right, some people think that it is bad for the economy, and some people think it's bad for Italy itself.Todd: For the culture?Yuri: For the culture itself.Todd: So basically you said people came in you said to the economy for jobs to do …? Were they coming in to do jobs that Italians didn't want to do?Yuri: Basically we have two different kinds of immigration. Lately, a lot of people, they are from country with the war problems, so they try to come into Italy with boats. They are illegal. So, and what people think is that they shouldn't even try to come in.Todd: Right.Yuri: Other people think that as Italian, we are a real population. We immigrate all over the planet. Everybody should be welcome and get the favor back.Todd: Right, so basically, the population in Italy is divided. Some people are for immigration and some are against.Yuri: Exactly, yes.Todd: What are your feeling about immigration?Yuri: Well, I myself have lived in different foreign countries. I always been welcomed. I never had problems with it, and I think that if people, they come to Italy, they're honest people, they want to work, please. No problem at all.Todd: Is the Italian government trying to do anything to stop immigration or slow immigration, or are they trying to encourage it?Yuri: It depends what government goes. Sometimes if it's a left government, they try to help. The right one, they try to stop.Todd: So if somebody is caught trying to come into Italy on say a boat, are they expelled from the country?Yuri: No, they get to refugees camps, and then since they are usually smart they come without papers, they are very difficult to track down, and they try to help them at the police. They don't beat them up or anything. No violence. The problem is the people that actually bring them in, they make a lot of money on them. That's the bigger problem. Also, they are connected with the mafia[黑手黨] as well.Todd: Yeah, the smuggling. The human traffickers. Yeah, the U.S. has the same problem. Anyway, thanks a lot. It sounds like it's very similar to the U.S.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: Hey, Yuri, I thought we would talk a little bit about immigration because you're from Italy, and I'm from the U.S. and both of our countries have issues with immigration. Can you talk a little bit about the immigration issues now in Italy?Yuri: Yes, immigration in Italy is a recent problem because until maybe the 80's the population was mostly Italian. Later we got a lot of people from Africa and from Eastern Europe, and people started getting a bit dodgy[不誠實的，不懷好意的] with that.Todd: Right, so people were't happy that non-Italians were coming into the country basically?Yuri: Right, some people think that it is bad for the economy, and some people think it's bad for Italy itself.Todd: For the culture?Yuri: For the culture itself.Todd: So basically you said people came in you said to the economy for jobs to do …? Were they coming in to do jobs that Italians didn't want to do?Yuri: Basically we have two different kinds of immigration. Lately, a lot of people, they are from country with the war problems, so they try to come into Italy with boats. They are illegal. So, and what people think is that they shouldn't even try to come in.Todd: Right.Yuri: Other people think that as Italian, we are a real population. We immigrate all over the planet. Everybody should be welcome and get the favor back.Todd: Right, so basically, the population in Italy is divided. Some people are for immigration and some are against.Yuri: Exactly, yes.Todd: What are your feeling about immigration?Yuri: Well, I myself have lived in different foreign countries. I always been welcomed. I never had problems with it, and I think that if people, they come to Italy, they're honest people, they want to work, please. No problem at all.Todd: Is the Italian government trying to do anything to stop immigration or slow immigration, or are they trying to encourage it?Yuri: It depends what government goes. Sometimes if it's a left government, they try to help. The right one, they try to stop.Todd: So if somebody is caught trying to come into Italy on say a boat, are they expelled from the country?Yuri: No, they get to refugees camps, and then since they are usually smart they come without papers, they are very difficult to track down, and they try to help them at the police. They don't beat them up or anything. No violence. The problem is the people that actually bring them in, they make a lot of money on them. That's the bigger problem. Also, they are connected with the mafia[黑手黨] as well.Todd: Yeah, the smuggling. The human traffickers. Yeah, the U.S. has the same problem. Anyway, thanks a lot. It sounds like it's very similar to the U.S.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:VOA英语每日一听Todd: So what exactly is Chinese New Year?Santi: We celebrate once a year and it's just like the same as a New Year in Western countries, but we celebrate in ... like special ... different dates every year.Todd: So it's a flexible calendar?Santi: Yes. My grandmother knows it but I don't. And especially for dinner we have a special arrangement in the table, like seven ... well, seven is a lucky number so seven types of dishes and then we got like money from our elders.Todd: You get money?Santi: Yes, we get money but we don't get presents. We get money.Todd: So when you get this money, what do you normally do with it? Like do they give you money and are you supposed to, like buy gifts, or are you supposed to put it away for savings?Santi: I think they want us to just save the money in case like for rainy days and then ... but most of my cousins just spend it for buying things like clothes, bags, shoes, but in my family, it's kind of different, so whenever I get the money I just give it to my mother.Todd: For your mom to keep for herself or for your mom to save for you?Santi: I don't know. I'm not very good at money so it's better for me to just give it to my mother and she will allocate it.Todd: Well, actually, I think that's also a Chinese traditional also in the United States where I think that Chinese families, isn't it custom for children actually to give their parents a portion of their money?Santi: YesTodd: Which is actually, I think makes a lot of sense.Santi: Well, because we trust our mother. We trust our parents beyond reason sometimes and I think it's good.Todd: So always give a little money up?Santi: Yes.Todd: I agree. I agree. Although I hope my mom's not listening. She's gonna expect some money from me.Santi: And I feel better whenever my mom just gives me money to spend it ... not my ... just my entire money and then I spend it. I feel awful.Todd: Oh, cause you feel like you've contributed some as well.Santi: Yes.Todd: Good point.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:VOA英语每日一听Todd: So what exactly is Chinese New Year?Santi: We celebrate once a year and it's just like the same as a New Year in Western countries, but we celebrate in ... like special ... different dates every year.Todd: So it's a flexible calendar?Santi: Yes. My grandmother knows it but I don't. And especially for dinner we have a special arrangement in the table, like seven ... well, seven is a lucky number so seven types of dishes and then we got like money from our elders.Todd: You get money?Santi: Yes, we get money but we don't get presents. We get money.Todd: So when you get this money, what do you normally do with it? Like do they give you money and are you supposed to, like buy gifts, or are you supposed to put it away for savings?Santi: I think they want us to just save the money in case like for rainy days and then ... but most of my cousins just spend it for buying things like clothes, bags, shoes, but in my family, it's kind of different, so whenever I get the money I just give it to my mother.Todd: For your mom to keep for herself or for your mom to save for you?Santi: I don't know. I'm not very good at money so it's better for me to just give it to my mother and she will allocate it.Todd: Well, actually, I think that's also a Chinese traditional also in the United States where I think that Chinese families, isn't it custom for children actually to give their parents a portion of their money?Santi: YesTodd: Which is actually, I think makes a lot of sense.Santi: Well, because we trust our mother. We trust our parents beyond reason sometimes and I think it's good.Todd: So always give a little money up?Santi: Yes.Todd: I agree. I agree. Although I hope my mom's not listening. She's gonna expect some money from me.Santi: And I feel better whenever my mom just gives me money to spend it ... not my ... just my entire money and then I spend it. I feel awful.Todd: Oh, cause you feel like you've contributed some as well.Santi: Yes.Todd: Good point.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: So, Rebecca, talking about shopping, is shopping something you enjoy doing?Rebecca: Yes, when I'm in the mood for it. Definitely.Todd: So I guess when you talk about shopping, we talk about clothes shopping, mainly right, so how often do you go clothes shopping?Rebecca: Not very often. Maybe once every three months. It depends on my money. If I have the money.Todd: Do you usually follow the fashions? Try to stay hip, and you know?Rebecca: No, because sometimes the fashions aren't comfortable. I prefer comfortable clothing.Todd: So are you a bargain shopper?Rebecca: I try to be but if there is something that I really, really like, I will save up and buy it.Todd: For example what is something you saved up to buy?Rebecca: I saved up to buy a really nice black jacket and I've had that now for two years so it was definitely a good purchase.Todd: And you bought this in Australia?Rebecca: Yeah, it wasn't during the sale, so.Todd: So how much did it cost?Rebecca: I think it was about two hundred dollars, three hundred dollars. Yeah, so it was quite expensive for me.Todd: Wow, that is a lot.Rebecca: Mm.Todd: Have you ever bought any clothes online?Rebecca: No, I haven't but my friends have and my friends have bought shoes and dresses and tops and, yeah, they really love shopping online.Todd: Now, they have no problems? Everything is OK?Rebecca: Everything is OK. They haven't had any problems at all.Todd: So how come you don't shop online?Rebecca: I think I prefer the contact with sales people and seeing dresses and clothes and trying them on. You never know if they're going to fit or not.Todd: Right. Right.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: So, Rebecca, talking about shopping, is shopping something you enjoy doing?Rebecca: Yes, when I'm in the mood for it. Definitely.Todd: So I guess when you talk about shopping, we talk about clothes shopping, mainly right, so how often do you go clothes shopping?Rebecca: Not very often. Maybe once every three months. It depends on my money. If I have the money.Todd: Do you usually follow the fashions? Try to stay hip, and you know?Rebecca: No, because sometimes the fashions aren't comfortable. I prefer comfortable clothing.Todd: So are you a bargain shopper?Rebecca: I try to be but if there is something that I really, really like, I will save up and buy it.Todd: For example what is something you saved up to buy?Rebecca: I saved up to buy a really nice black jacket and I've had that now for two years so it was definitely a good purchase.Todd: And you bought this in Australia?Rebecca: Yeah, it wasn't during the sale, so.Todd: So how much did it cost?Rebecca: I think it was about two hundred dollars, three hundred dollars. Yeah, so it was quite expensive for me.Todd: Wow, that is a lot.Rebecca: Mm.Todd: Have you ever bought any clothes online?Rebecca: No, I haven't but my friends have and my friends have bought shoes and dresses and tops and, yeah, they really love shopping online.Todd: Now, they have no problems? Everything is OK?Rebecca: Everything is OK. They haven't had any problems at all.Todd: So how come you don't shop online?Rebecca: I think I prefer the contact with sales people and seeing dresses and clothes and trying them on. You never know if they're going to fit or not.Todd: Right. Right.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: So, Deanne, you're very multi-lingual. What languages do you speak?Deanne: I speak Spanish, Italian, French, and English fluentlyTodd: Wow! All of them.Deanne: Yes.Todd: Is there any language that you prefer?Deanne: Yes. French and Spanish are my favorite languages.Todd: Oh, why is that?Deanne: French I like because it's very soft and romantic, and Spanish I think is very vivacious and dynamic and energetic and those two are my favorite languages. I also like the pronunciation of Spanish.Todd: OK, and how did you become so proficient -- like how did you learn to speak Spanish and French?Deanne: Well, my mother is Spanish and so I grew up listening to her speak usually when she didn't want my father to hear what she was saying. She spoke in Spanish just because she said. I'd never spoke it at that point but I understood and I grew up with the ear and French, I grew up in a French province in Canada, Quebec so we always had French. From when I was born, I had French. And English, my dad's anglophone and then Italian I learned in university.Todd: That's interesting. So now we're in Japan, maybe people will be able to hear the Japanese in the background, do you study Japanese now?Deanne: I'm starting because the last time I was in Japan and I didn't know anything and it's just difficult to get by. This time I said, OK, I have to so I'm going, I'm just beginning actually. Yeah.Todd: OK, and since, you are an expert at learning languages. What advice would you give to somebody to learn another language?Deanne: Not everybody has a knack for it, but if you do want to learn it, you need discipline and you need time and it's studying. You have to memorize a whole bunch of vocabulary and you have to dedicate about an hour and a half every day to doing homework and I would do that for the internet. Like try to find people on the internet. I did that with Netscape chatting. I used to find people who spoke other languages like for example Italian or Spanish and I would be chatting with them orally and written and I would learn a lot of new things by doing that because they would each have a different expression that I didn't know and find international friends and do international exchanges, like cultural exchanges with people so that you're forced to speak the language and then you don't speak you own. That's what I did.Todd: For the net stuff, don't you worry a little about security about kind of not the nicest people on the internet?Deanne: Yeah, there's a lot of weirdos, but you don't meet them. You don't -- I've never met them. I just stay on the internet with them and we chatted and usually, I chat with girls because you don't know what kind of people you'll meet and if they said, "Let's meet!", I just said, "NO" cause I don't really trust that. If I want to meet people, I join those intercultural exchanges where people are actually, you know, monitored, so yeah.Todd: OK, well

In this episode of Building Infinite Red, Jamon, Ken, and Todd answer a question from the podcast channel in the Infinite Red Slack Community about what they have learned and observed from businesses over the years who have succeeded or failed. Episode Transcript CHRIS MARTIN: We had someone reach out on the podcast channel with an idea for an episode. He said: "You three must have watched a lot of businesses starting up/establishing themselves and subsequently succeeding or failing. What have you learned or observed from those businesses? In your view, what made them successful or otherwise?" KEN MILLER: That is a great question. The first thing I would say is no one, literally no one can predict which company is going to succeed, especially like in a big way. The startups that we have been part of in our careers or, have worked for as clients, the ones that are trying to hit it big, there's no one who can predict that. That said, we do see mistakes, we do see things that will hinder success or prevent it. One of the big ones I would say is having the wrong amount of money. That doesn't necessarily mean having to little although, that's by far the most common version, but sometimes having too much. I've seen startups that had so much money that they just wasted it and never had any discipline, and they crashed and burned. So, having too much money surprisingly, can be a problem. Having too little is much more common, you don't hear about it as much, because they tend to fizzle in a very quiet way. There's a fairly frequent thing that we will encounter which is the self-funded entrepreneur who comes to us and says, "Hey, can you do this for $50,000?" The answer is almost always no. Any interesting app is likely to be more than $50,000. But more than that, if your only source of funding is your own life savings, or yours and your parents' life savings, that's a big red flag. Because it means that you have no room to move or develop or anything. If all you have is $50,000 to spend, and it's your life savings, and you want to build the business. I'm not saying don't do it. But what I am saying is you need to use that $50,000 to validate your idea more than you need to build an app or a website or whatever it is that you're looking for. That can take a lot of forms, right? But take that $50,000, quit your job if you have a job, go interview customers, go do things that don't cost money that let you validate your idea. And then you can go find people who can help you. We are famously bootstrapped here, and the reason that we're able to do that is because consulting is a very easy thing to do the first one. Because it's just you, and you go out and get a contract and you grow from there. A lot of businesses, that's not true. And if you need investors, because your idea has enough going on that you have to build something, then use the money you have to start that process rather than blow it all on an app that then can't grow because you've run out of money, Todd. TODD WERTH: If the kind of business you want to build is $10,000 to actually build it, and then $50,000 is a great amount of money because then you can build it and iterate on it and have extra funds. The problem is something like an app that typically costs $100,000 or more is not only do you need the initial cost of it, you need all the capital to run that business and modifying and really adapt it to what you find the market actually wants. That being said, there's nothing wrong with starting out bootstrapping. However, it is a little bit of a red flag if you haven't convinced anyone other than your mother to give you money for your idea, because if you can't convince one person, it's going to be hard to convince all the users to give you money to use for said business. JAMON HOLMGREN: To play off of what Ken said earlier, I think that a lot of it is you want enough money that you're not making decisions based on fear, basing it on desperation. But you also don't want to be in a position where you just don't care. Where who cares if you blow this money because it's not your money and whatever. You need to have some level of skin in the game, so to speak. KEN: Yeah, I would say that the ideal that we look for is whatever budget we think we need to build the most focused version of your app, we would love to see that you have two, three times that total somewhere. Not because we want to spend it for you, but because you're going to need it for something. And it's a measure of your health as a startup. Even more ideal than that is, you have that much in hand, and you know what you're going to do to get more when you need it. JAMON: Moving beyond the financial side of it. Another thing that I've observed in my 13 years of doing consulting work is when the stakeholder, generally speaking, the founder CEO, but not always, feels that they have all of the answers already. And they just need to build this thing. Just get someone to build it, get someone to design it, build it, put it out there and the money will flow. That's extremely rare. Very, very rare. TODD: I bet it doesn't exist at all. JAMON: I would tend to agree. One of the things that we say, as we're going through the sales process with a particular new client is, if your app does not change during the process, if what you conceive of as being this app at the very beginning does not change, then that's probably a failure. You're probably not listening to your clients, you're probably not ... Or your customers, or your users. You're probably not listening to the experts you're surrounding yourself with, which would hopefully include us. We've been through this quite a few times, and if you're not willing to say, "Hey, I don't know everything. I need to learn some of these things. Then that's a problem. Of course, conversely, we do expect people to bring some level of expertise in the domain that we're talking about. So, you should have some ... I'm not going to go and just start a business making farming equipment or something. I've never run a farm, I don't have any clue what it would take. So, having no experience whatsoever in the domain can be an issue as well, and you're not going to be able to just rely on other people to fill in all of those gaps. But, I think that there has to be a happy medium where you do have some domain expertise, you have some things in mind, you have a framework to make these decisions. We also understand that you don't know everything, and that you're going to need to gather information and evolve your view of what the app is going to be during the process. TODD: Another one that's very common, you see it right up front with people. Either they're telling you their story about their business, or I've worked with them, or whatever, is they don't really care that much. They act like they do, but they don't really. Meaning, they put a few hours in a week or a month or something, and they show up every once in a while. You get this a lot with people who are extremely wealthy maybe. It's a side thing for them, they're playing around and they just don't really care. It's pretty true that the person who cares about your business the most is you. There will be no one who cares about it more than you. So, if that's not true, there's a big problem. That being said, a lot of successful people don't have a lot of funding, maybe they bootstrap it at the beginning. They don't take for granted they know everything. They asked for help. They try to learn. They accept the fact that they're going to have to be salespeople and finance people, and operations people and everything. Even if something applies to a particular person that we've already mentioned or are going to mention more, they may have other features that totally overwhelm that meaning. If you're particularly a good salesperson, you can be pretty bad at business and still be successful. That's just a fact. If your idea's so compelling that even though you're a horrible salesperson, when people hear it, they're like, "I want to give you money for this, because it sounds amazing." Then that person knows enough to hire someone who can execute well like us, Infinite Red. I'm not good like Jamon is with the plugs ... those people can be very successful as well. KEN: To flip this around to a more positive script. To some degree, we approach the clients that we take like an investor would to some degree. An investor is going to do more due diligence than we would obviously, but we're looking for: Do they have adequate access to capital? Do they have a high degree of commitment? Do the founders get along? Are people in agreement about what the vision is if there's more than one person involved? By the way, we have plenty of projects projects with established companies and it's totally different. Because then, a budget is a budget, et cetera, et cetera. This is talking startups. These are all things basically like, if you have all of those pieces, and a deep understanding of, and relationship with their target customer. If you have all of those, then it's between you and the market. That's ... you have all of the tools that you need at that point to succeed or fail on the merits of the idea. It is very hard to predict what's going to happen with the market. And that's the part that no matter how good you are, you might still fail. The commitment helps. You hear the word pivot applied to startups because what happens is, they have all the other pieces; they have access to capital, they have a committed founding team, they are working very hard. What the market tells them is that their idea is wrong basically. The thing that they thought that they wanted to build, turns out, they misunderstood the market, the market changed, something happened, and then they're like, "But as we were deep in the muck of figuring that out, we saw this other thing and we're going to run at that now." TODD: You'll find your subconscious as very creative and very strong and very secretive. What I mean by that is, if subconsciously, a person knows that their business model and their revenue model doesn't actually work or they fear it doesn't work. They haven't actually looked into it, they'll come up with super creative ways to get away from or not do those plans. When you ask them for it, they can either avoid it, sometimes become hostile. Whatever secret fears you have, sometimes just sabotage yourself by avoiding those particular things. If you find that you're just very anxious about doing a business plan, you don't know why. It may be because your subconscious thinks that if you did it, you're going to realize that even best case scenario, this business does not make money. JAMON: That's why one of the questions we ask during the sales process is, what are your biggest fears with this process? Because it tends to let them come up with the answers to that without us being hostile about it, or anything like that. We're on their side, we're trying to solve those problems as much as we can. I had a client back in the ClearSight days. We did a bunch of work for him, and he was this incredible engineer. Came up with just some amazing stuff. But he loved to invent. He wasn't super big on running the business. He didn't really enjoy a lot of the parts of running a business. He brought onboard a series of CEOs to run the business over a period of many years. At one point, it just became obvious to me that that this was really hurting his business. Because all he wanted to do was work on the product, and he didn't want to necessarily work on the business itself. The stuff he was building was amazing. It was awesome. I really loved it. And he was a very good person. He always paid his bills to us, always appreciated us, but that blind spot, I think it really hurt him. TODD: Yeah, that gentlemen, I don't know who you're referring to, but that gentleman needs to accept the fact that a business person is super important, and they need to find theirs to be a co-founder with them. JAMON: I think a big part of that is just seeing it as a business and not just the product itself, which actually is a big failing of a lot of people that think of building apps, they think of the app. They think of the product, they don't think about the business itself. It's hard because business, there's a lot to it. We're doing a whole podcast series on it right now. There's a lot to talk about, and there's a lot to learn, and there's stuff we're still learning. It's definitely having a characteristic of thinking more holistically about the whole business and being willing to just dive in and learn things that you haven't done before. All of those types of things, but that's a positive characteristic. There are a few other negative characteristics that I've seen over the years. One actually is, over-confidence and over-optimism. Now, I tend to be a very optimistic person. I'm very confident. TODD: Are you talking about me Jamon? JAMON: Sometimes. TODD: I'm very optimistic that you're insulting me right now. JAMON: But then again, sometimes it's me, and Todd has to ground me. Now, Ken's always grounding both of us at the same time like an anchor in some ways. TODD: That was mean. That was very mean. JAMON: We're dragging this thing ... No, I'm joking. There's one gentleman that we worked for a long time ago, and he was very optimistic that the funding was going to come through. So, he had us do a whole lot of work. The funding didn't come through, and that put us in a tough position. That was a lesson that we had to learn, but it certainly put him in an even worse position, because now he owes his vendors money, and it's not ready to go yet. So, the Elon Musk sort of thing. Although he seems to have access to bottomless levels of cash. KEN: Elon Musk has easily inherited the reality distortion field from Steve Jobs. JAMON: Yes, exactly. KEN: And put it to shame to be honest. JAMON: Right. That sort of thing can kill you if you're not Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. KEN: Yeah, and actually, anybody who comes in acting like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, which usually means being an asshole and playing fast and loose with the facts, which is not what I'm saying that Jobs and Musk are doing. I'm saying that that's what the people who think that they're right tend to do. That is a massive red flag. TODD: They're pale clones of the original, and probably only cloning the worst parts. A couple of quick hits here. One is, if you don't like your customers, or worse, you hate your customers, huge problem. Your business provides value to customers. If you hate your customers, or loathe them or don't want to interact with them, and you'd be like well, "Todd, that's ridiculous, who would do that?" You would be surprised how many businesses hate their customers. That's a problem, you really should look for customers that you enjoy servicing, you enjoy providing value to, it gives you a lot of personal, and the company and a lot of gratification for sure. The second one is, when you describe your product or your business to someone, if they think it's awesome, and it's really good, and when can they get their hands on it, that's, that's a good sign. Anything below that from mild praise to praise means they really think your product sucks. Especially, if you know those people. So, take mild praise as this is horrible. So, really find something that where, when you're leaving the discussion, they're very interested in how they can get their hands on this thing and when. KEN: Related to that. I would say, if you're a startup ... Well, okay two things. Back up. One, what kind of business are you? Are you a startup? By startup, that means you think there's a large opportunity, and you've got to get to it fast before somebody else does. Maybe it's winner take all. You're aiming to be a big thing. It doesn't necessarily have to be like unicorn big, but it's big. In which case, you need to optimize for hitting that and failing relatively quickly if you're not going to. Versus a lifestyle company, where you want to make a long term sustainable thing, you probably want to bootstrap. TODD: Like us. KEN: If your ultimate idea is not subject to bootstrapping. It's not something that you have to get to in the next year or two, or you're going to miss it. Then find the idea you can bootstrap that's more practical. Do that first, and then work on the big thing. But those two strategies are different. They require very different mindsets. They require different ways of capitalizing. The worst thing that can happen to a startup by the way, is not failure. Outright failure in a startup is not the outcome anybody wants, but once it's gone, you're free, and you can do the next one or something else. The worst outcome is kind of success. Where it makes just enough to keep going, and you never know whether to pull the plug. I've seen a couple of those. That is the worst outcome for a startup in my opinion. JAMON: I worked with a startup many years ago that it was actually a success. I'd like to talk about that one a little bit. The founder, I think he had a lot of the characteristics that an ideal founder would have. He was a very nice guy, but also very driven. He was really great to work with. Everybody that worked on this project really loved it, which was good because you'd get their best work and they would really go out of their way to try to make his product a success. It was very much a niche market. It had to do with transportation, and he was really, really great at identifying the problem that people had, these transportation companies, and solving one very specific but very painful problem that was hard to solve. You couldn't just do it in house. If you did it in house, you would inevitably fail, and you would have a real problem on your hands. Almost everybody has this issue. He had us build a web application that mimicked a spreadsheet that he'd been solving this problem with. He'd already gone through the manual labor of figuring out a lot of the issues and doing this almost on a notepad in a way, as a consultant for these transportation companies. He had figured out his business model, and then he had us build a web app. He wasn't afraid to spend money if we said, "Hey, we need to beef up this section of the web app." He would he would totally be cool with it. He wouldn't spend money willy nilly, but if we said it was important, then he would budget the money for it and he would do it. He was also very good at networking and getting out there and talking to his customers. He would come back and say, "Hey, I've got this customer, it's a big, huge company you've heard of, and they're having a problem with this part of the application, and this is how I think we should fix it." He actually spent the time to figure out how we worked and the language that we needed from him to solve these problems. He would also very much listen to that feedback that we would give him. He now works for a big company. They hired him specifically for this expertise. They have a lot of trucks on the road, and a lot of different jurisdictions that they're rolling through, and they need to have their ducks in a row. The application itself is, I believe, he's either sold it, or is in process of selling it, exiting. That was a very good experience. It was something that I learned a lot from. One thing that's for sure, is that founder put in a ton of work, learning from his customers, learning all of the domain expertise that he needed in order to be the expert in this particular field. That was very instructive. He was not lazy, he was very much a go getter, but also willing to listen to us. TODD: Yeah, I think developing partnerships with either your partners, your team your vendors is hugely important. And what I mean by partnership, it sounds like corporate speak or whatever, but what it means is not adversarial. Meaning, one of the things was working with lawyers, bless their heart, as clients, in my experience is they're trained to always start everything adversarial. That can work to a point. But really, if you work as a partner, meaning, you're looking out for your partner's best interest, and they're looking out for your best interest, and then you're looking out for your own best interest, and vice versa. Then you tend to get the best results. If you're trying to compete with them, or one-up them or nickel and dime or whatever, it's not going to do that. KEN: If you want to start a business, don't be discouraged by anything what we're saying. Because you can go into it the wrong way, and end up someplace fine, if you're committed. When Todd and I started, we were going to build an app. I had a little money in the bank so I could quit my job. It didn't work. Let's be perfectly honest. We built a really nice app that 300 people in the world really, really loved. They still occasionally email us. TODD: We did get a number six in the Apple Health and Fitness category above Nike by the way. KEN: Yeah, that was- TODD: For whatever that's worth. KEN: That was a little bit of a fluke. TODD: Which is nothing. KEN: But in any case, it didn't work. We started to take on clients, but we were out of money, and we were looking at, what's going to happen next. I realized that I was like, I will break IRAs. I'll break my 401Ks, I will sell my stock in order to keep this going. That was the point where I knew I was committed for real. It's like until you have a moment like that, you and everyone around you can have some doubts legitimately about whether you're actually committed. But once you're like, I will put everything on the line if I have to. Not that I wanted to, unfortunately, I didn't have to. But when you make that transition in your head, that you're willing to do whatever it takes to make it succeed, then your odds go way up. Because if you are smart enough to be able to manage things so that you can keep trying, and you have the drive to keep trying even after a failure, then you're doing pretty well at that point. JAMON: I'm kind of scanning through a list of old clients and I think that of the ones that failed ... I had a lot of existing businesses. They already had business models that were working and things like that. I did a lot of work for existing businesses. But the startups that failed, I think the commonality from what I'm seeing in this list that I'm scrolling through, is that they didn't really have a business model that worked. They didn't really have something that they could point to and say, "Yeah, this is what people need, and this is what they're willing to pay for it, and yes, that will sustain not only paying for this app, but also, my salary and salary of the staff, everything." That was actually I think one of the biggest issues. The ones that did succeed had a fairly compelling and simple and straightforward business model. There are a few that they would have 14 different ways that they would make money on this, shave a little percentage off of this, and a little bit off of that, and we're going to make a little bit here, or they'd have astronomical user numbers that we're going to be impossible to hit in order to make these numbers work. That was a fairly common thing. And that's something that I think that if you're moving into a business, you need to be able to sit down and look up, and do a realistic projection of how am I going to appeal to these people? How am I going to get sale number one for one thing? Then, what kind of dollars are we looking at? Is this going to sustain us? TODD: I have a positive story. None of this is a secret. I wasn't under NDA or anything. I actually, this is circa 2008. I don't know 2007, 2008 something like that. I interviewed at Airbnb. At that time, they were in their apartment in San Francisco. There was the two founders, and a couple other people working there. They had one engineer working on their system, but he was going to school, and he wasn't full-time. They were interviewing me for basically one of the first full-time engineering positions. I did not take that job. I actually took a job with Ken instead. So, thank you for that Ken. But what was cool about it is a couple things, I knew they were going to be extremely successful for multiple reasons. One, the two young gentlemen in there, they were like 24 at the time, I was quite a bit older then. Were very impressive people. They were trained industrial designers. They had actually started their business by actually doing it. They did the Airbnb model with their own apartment, and they had some success. But more than that, when they showed me their pitch deck, it was good and compelling. But they had a great customer acquisition plan. Their plan was very specific. The DNC, the Democratic National Convention was happening in Denver that year. It's very common to know that if you have to get housing early, and they completely run out of housing, because the size of the event, and the size of Denver ... I believe it was Denver. Their whole thing was okay, we know that this periodic thing happens. We know for a fact that they run out of tons of housing, and we know for a fact that there's a lot of young people who go to the political conventions because they're more idealistic in the parties. They were going to do their huge push, and they're planning on putting all their wood behind that arrow to get Airbnb set up and operating and making money at that venue. As we all know, because we've probably all used Airbnb, or least know about it, they were very successful in their company. Now, they did some more nefarious marketing things later, but just sitting down ... And by the way, when you interview at a very small startup like that as an engineer in the Bay Area, they tend to pitch to you because it's hard to get engineers, and they want to convince you that their startup's going to make it. I did walk away feeling like yeah, although I didn't particularly want to join their company because at the time, I didn't want to be on a tiny team. I wanted to be on a bigger team, and it would have just been a team of me and this one gentleman who was working part-time from the East Coast. But I did walk away knowing for sure that these people were going to make it because they had all their ducks in a row. JAMON: Existing businesses tend to have maybe a little better success with startups. They may not blow the lid off of things, but they're going to have a little better sense for some of the pitfalls that can come along. I worked for a company, I was doing their website. This is way early when I was first started. They were selling, I think they were auto parts or something. Something along those lines, it has been a long time. But they decided they were going to get into re-manufactured parts, and they wanted to sell those online, not just new parts. They did a lot of things really well. That was one of our more successful projects. I think it's still running to this day. What we had to do was make sure that mechanics who were, and still are fairly non-technical, not super computer savvy clientele, that they can jump on to this website, find what they needed, order it very quickly, and be done with it. We also optimized for SEO and things like that. But this company was owned by an older couple. They worked together, husband and wife. They were really great to work with, they really had a keen eye for business, how they were going to make money with this, how they're going to reach their customers. They just didn't know the online part of it. And that's where they brought us in, and they were very good about listening to what we had to offer. We also built a back office system for them so that they could monitor all of the orders coming in, provide customized quotes where they needed to, and fill the orders. When we started this project, they said, we see the writing on the wall for our current business, which was aging as far as how they were ... Like anything retail, or online orders is going to get sucked up by Amazon and these other big companies, right? So, they needed to provide something that Amazon wasn't going to be able to do as easily. After the project, and after it had been going for a while, the owner called me up and he said, "Hey, I think this saved our business. I think this really helped." It was bringing in tens of thousands of dollars per month in revenue, and probably approaching hundreds of thousands. They just had this idea they were willing to explore a little bit into a territory that they weren't very used to. But they also were very much thinking in terms of dollars and cents, business model, marketing, all those other aspects of the business. That was good for me to see, because I could see that yeah, you can create something out of nothing, essentially. As long as you're willing to put the work in, and have a complete business from start to finish, you don't skip any other steps. TODD: I would like to ask Ken. Ken worked for a photo which later was bought by Kodak. And then Kodak destroyed it through pure stupidity, but I would love to hear least from your perspective if you feel that's a good story Ken about your experiences at Ofoto? KEN: I wasn't around at Ofoto when it started by the way. It had already been bought when I joined them. Anything I know about the early stages is lore, it's second hand. But they were always a very sensible company, and I liked that. That was one of the things that I liked when I joined them, which is that you know at the end of the day, they sold photos. TODD: Could you tell our younger audience who Ofoto was? KEN: Ofoto was one of the first generation of online photo sharing sites. JAMON: That's O-F-O-T-O. KEN: O-F-O-T-O. It was a great name, by the way. It was an amazing name that Kodak just threw away. TODD: What did Kodak call it by the way once they bought it? KEN: Kodak Easy Share Gallery. TODD: That rolls off the tongue. Ofoto was so hard to remember. KEN: Yeah. TODD: Kodak Easy Share Gallery. It's just amazing. KEN: I heard a lot of stories about that. There was a lot of amazing people there. But boy, were they a case study in how to throw away a century of legacy. Anyway, but they were very sensible, right? So, A, they could offer all the photo sharing stuff for free because they sold prints, and that was when people still cared about prints. Eventually, people stopped caring very much about prints, but their primary competitor who for a long time was never bought by anybody was Shutterfly, and they're still around. I think they bought the assets of Kodak Easy Share Gallery when Kodak quit. That's what I liked about it at the time when I joined them was like, their business model was extremely straightforward. They sold prints at a healthy markup, they had a great operation, there was two teams. There was the site team, which was the user facing, the sharing and all that, and there was the lab team. Which is this elaborate system that controlled the printers and the workflow for the people who operated them. It was great. I loved Ofoto. TODD: Ken, you also worked for the company Yammer, who later got bought by Microsoft? Can you tell us a little bit more about that? KEN: Yeah. Yammer is actually a great example of a pivot. It was a spinoff of an internal project at, I think it was called Geni.com. So David Sacks, one of the PayPal mafia, along with Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, and all those kind of people. He was the primary founder and CEO. It was a spinoff of Geni that made this internal Twitter-like tool just for internal communication. And we're like, "Hey, this is actually a pretty good idea. It's got some legs." So, it turned into Yammer. They cared a lot about culture and productivity and how to make a team work and they thought about it constantly, which I always admired. But one of the interesting things that I would say is that, the things that you as a programmer, all the good habits you have as a programmer, if you become an entrepreneur and you're building something new, I'm not saying throw them out. But I am saying your first problem isn't having a scaling problem. Your first problem is to find your market fit, and clean codes, scalability. All that stuff doesn't matter if it doesn't work. It doesn't matter if you don't get there. The code base when I got to it, and I'm sure all the people here will agree to this, was challenging, shall we say, right? But at that point, it didn't matter as much, because they had the further investment, then they got bought by Microsoft. They had the resources to fix that problem, now that they had a product market fit. Until they had that product market fit, they just worked like hell. They just blasted that thing out. Honestly, I think for that kind of startup, for a big a startup, that's probably the right way to do it. Blast the thing out, go as fast as you can, and then when you've got success and money, then you bring people on who can come in, be code grownups and figure it out. The lesson from that one is focus. It's very tempting when programmers become entrepreneurs to be like, now that I get to like make this Greenfield app, I'm going to make sure that it's just really beautiful and wonderful. You know what, that doesn't matter. If you're being so aggressive that you're constantly fixing your own mistakes, and that kind of thing. Then you need to slow down a little bit. But the lesson is, be laser focused on the one thing that is the most important to you right now. That was a hard lesson for me to learn, but I think it was a good one to learn. Anyway, go ahead. JAMON: I was just going to say, we've had to apply that to our own business for sure. It's easy to get distracted by all the other things that are possible out there. But making sure that we're laser focused and have all of our ducks in a row, and have a business model, and marketing, and are talking to our clients. One of the things that we did when we actually hired a consultant to go out and talk to a bunch of our clients and ask a bunch of questions, was why haven't we done this before? We tell our clients to do this, but we hadn't done it up to that point. It was a no brainer, face palm moment. Like, oh man, we really should have been doing this. TODD: Yeah, that highlights a point, you can make mistakes, you can do exactly opposite what we said you can. If you just keep on keeping on, it'll be okay. It is hard to keep on keeping on. The less mistakes you make, the easier it is to keep on keeping on, but that is really the only secret. KEN: The takeaway from some of these negative stories, by the way, is that you'll see statistics like, nine out of 10 businesses fail, or 19 out of 20 are ... I don't know about the statistics are. But it's something like. Some large number of businesses will fail within the first couple of years. If you have the things that we talked about—commitment, knowledge of your market, access to capital—your odds are way, way better. Because all of those statistics include all these weird cases that we've seen in our careers. Don't be discouraged. If you're the type who really, really believes that you need to be an entrepreneur, keep at it. Because these are all solvable issues. JAMON: I think one of the things that I've seen from a lot of companies that don't have much of a chance of making it, is they're just looking for a formula that works. Rather than doing the difficult work of identifying what it is that you have a unique perspective and advantage on and then building a business around that.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Todd: OK, so now we are going to talk about other people, so you can talk about somebody else, a friend, a family, a celebrity. Who would you like to talk about?Roe: Anybody?Todd: Anybody.Roe: Who rips.Todd: Who rips? What does "rips" mean?Roe: Ripping means if you are like a surfer, if you say he rips, he is really good.Todd: Oh, OK. He rips! Wow, so just for surfing?Roe: And windsurfing, too.Todd: He rips. Skateboarding?Roe: Yeah. Skateboarding too.Todd: Skateboarding, he ripsRoe: Yeah, it means he can make some great moves.Todd: Great turns, great flips. OK, who rips?Roe: Just go to the beach, and you see it. Like, you don't even have to talk, you just have to see it, and if you rip then you get respect, and if you talk, if you have a chance to talk to the guy, it's almost always that he is a nice guy.Todd: Really.Roe: Well, 99 percent.Todd: So guys who rip are nice guys.Roe: Nice guys. Like nice, meaning, it's nothing like talking to a salaryman.Todd: Wow, so very easy-going, very friendly, not serious.Roe: Yes. Like open, no attitude, no attitude, it's like a way to elaborate.Todd: OK, so do you rip?Roe: No. I'm in progress. I'm trying. It's hard. It's hard to rip through.Todd: But you said earlier that you are very good at windsurfing so you are closest to ripping at windsurfing.Roe: Man, In my dreams, but in reality, I'm, no, I'm trying.Todd: Maybe you're being modest. So a modest person doesn't say he rips or he is goodRoe: You got the point, no I was just kidding, I can't rip.Todd: OK, who is the best surfer in the world?Roe: Robbie Naish.Todd: Robbie Naish. What country does he come from?Roe: Hawaii. Todd: Oh, so he's Hawaiian. He's American.Roe: Yeah, from Oahu!Todd: From Oahu, so he surfs on waves. -- How big are the waves that Robbie Naish surfs on?Roe: OK like Jaws, there is a specific point in Maui, Hawaii Maui, and it's called Jaws, cause people say that there are a lot of sharks at the point, but anyway, at Jaws 25 meters or 30 meters in winter.Todd: Man, that's high. 25 to 30 meters. That's what? Three stories? Maybe!Roe: That's like from here to the basement.Todd: Wow! And were on the second floor so that's three stories.Roe: Oh, right, right, right, right.Todd: Man, that's high. That's really high. What's the highest wave you've ever surfed on? So you're standing up here. The ceiling!Roe: Yeah! Probably the ceiling.Todd: So that's what, maybe 10 feet.Roe: I don't know the feet stuff.Todd: So that would be, 3, 4 meters.Roe: Yeah, 3, 4 meters probably.Todd: Wow, that's still pretty high.Roe: Yeah, if you are in the ocean you are like lying down right, so it's quite high actually, yeah, if you're standing up it doesn't seem that high but.Todd: But, when you're on the ground, you're right, when you're lying flat on your stomach, you're right it would seem very high. So Robbie Naish, does he make a lot of money surfing?Roe: Yep.Todd: He's a rich man.Roe: He's a billionaire.Todd: Wow, has he ever come to Japan?Roe: Many times.Todd: Really!Roe: Yep.Todd: Wow.Roe: For promotion.Todd: For promotion.Roe: He owns a boarding, sailing, and what have you. He owns a lot of companies. Yeah, he's smart too. Nice guy.Todd: Nice guy and he's a nice guy because he rips.

In this episode we are talking about our remote work tools that enable our distributed team across the world to collaborate, design, and build software. Throughout the episode, Todd, Ken, and Jamon touch on their favorite tools—from Slack, Zoom, and Google Sheets—why they chose them, and the ways they have added custom features to really make the remote experience special. Show Links & Resources Slack Zoom G Suite BlueJeans Screenhero RealtimeBoard InVision Trello Airtable Shush Dropbox Bigscreen VR Taking the Pain Out of Video Conferences by Ken Miller Episode Transcript CHRIS MARTIN: The topic at hand today is remote tools, and all of the different ways that you have built a remote company. Where do you even start when you're thinking about what tools to pick when you're going remote? KEN MILLER: This is Ken Miller, by the way. It happened very organically for us. To be honest, I don't know that we could've done this company this way before Slack. Because the tools that came before, Hipchat and IRC and Yammer, even though I worked there. Sorry, Yam-fam. They just didn't quite do it. Right? They didn't quite create the online atmosphere that we need to work the way that we do. Does that sound accurate to you, Todd? I feel like once we found Slack, we were like, "Holy crap, this is epic!" TODD WERTH: I think there's a few alternatives. Hipchat, at the time, wasn't good enough. There were a few alternatives we investigated. I would like to mention at the beginning of this ... This is Todd Werth, by the way. I would like to mention at the beginning, I imagine that a lot of companies in this podcast will need to be paying us an advertising fee. Like Slack. JAMON HOLMGREN: We actually adopted Slack before we were remote. We had ... I think we were using Google Hangouts or something. Or whatever of the myriad Google chats there are out there. They have like 12 apps. We were using something else in person, and then we started using Slack organically right when it first came out. TODD: Sorry about that noise you all heard. That was me throwing up a little bit in my mouth when you said "Google Hangouts". (laughter) KEN: We'll talk about video-chat in a minute. JAMON: By the way, this is Jamon Holmgren. It was ... Initially, we jumped onboard. They did a really good job marketing themselves. We had used Hipchat a little bit, but it just wasn't what we expected. We started using Slack. That was in early 2014, I think it was? I don't think it's a coincidence that within a year and a half we ended up going remote. I think that was one of the enabling tools. We got used to it in the office, but it enabled remote work. TODD: To talk about chat apps or chat services is important, but on a more general standpoint, I would say how you approach it is actually try 'em and do it. A lot of companies seem to just use whatever is available and not look for optimum solutions. If trying three or four different chat systems is too onerous for you, that's probably the wrong attitude, in my opinion. KEN: You think, "don't settle". Don't assume that the first thing that you try is the only thing, and then conclude that remote isn't gonna work because the tool that you tried sucks. JAMON: We tried a lot of tools at ClearSight, before the merger. We tried ... I can't even name them all, to be honest. Part of it is because I like ... I'm a gadget guy, I like to try new things and see how it goes. There was actually a lot of skepticism around Slack because they're just yet another tool that they had to log into and pay attention to. "We already had the email, so do we really need this." It was kinda funny, when I went back and looked at our inner-company email, just tracked ... I think I used the "everyone@clearsightstudio.com" or something email address to track how often we were using it for company communications. It just dropped off a cliff after Slack. The amount of email, the volume of email that was flying around went way, way, way down. In fact, I remember we used to send GIFs in the email threads, and stuff. There were elements of the culture that we have today in Slack going on in email threads. Slack was just so much more well-suited to that. That actually came about very organically. We had tried a bunch of different things. We tried Slack, and it just picked up steam, picked up steam, picked up steam. TODD: I don't ... I'm not even exaggerating, I don't believe I've ever sent an email to anyone at Infinite Red internally. I don't think so. KEN: Unless it's a forward from someone external. TODD: Correct. I think there's people on our team who probably don't check their email very often because they don't have a lot of -- KEN: Yeah, if you don't do sales or any kind of external outreach -- TODD: Yeah. That was a sticking point a few times, when people were sending out the emails, and we had to ... They were wondering why people weren't responding, it's because the variety of people never check their email. JAMON: It is funny, because email does still, it is still a tool that we use for remote communication with outside clients, especially people first coming to us. But as soon as we can, we get them onto Slack because we've found that that level of communication is the least friction, it's very seamless. Slack is definitely featuring very centrally in our remote-tool story, for sure. TODD: Rather than just ... I'm sure a lot of people out there use Slack. If you don't, give it a try. But rather than just gushing on Slack, I do wanna say that the important part here is we did go through a lot of different chat services. You have to give 'em some time. At first, for example ... We do love Slack, but at first it didn't seem that different. There wasn't a bullet list that's like, "Oh, this has feature X", it was a bunch of little, subtle things that made it work especially well for us. KEN: Part of the meta-point there, is you have to treat your tools really seriously. Right? Google and Amazon and all these big companies, any well-funded start-up, whatever, they're gonna lavish a lot of attention on making an office that works for them. Right? TODD: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: They're gonna create an office environment very thoughtfully. I've been to a lot of these offices. A lot of them are very thoughtfully considered. Right? They're designed to create a certain atmosphere. For example, I was at the Square offices once. Huge, cavernous room designed to create a sense of energy. That's the open-office mantra, that sense of energy. They had these little cubicle ... nicely designed cubicle things where you could go if you wanted quiet. Clearly, noise was the default. That architecture creates a culture. At least it reinforces a culture. As a remote company, your tools are your architecture. You either need to buy them from people who design them in a way that works for you, and Slack seems to work for a lot of people, or you build things that work for you, or you create norms about how they're used that do the same thing. We've done some things on Slack, we've done some things on Zoom, to create that sense of being together. Todd? TODD: I would like to add emphasis to what Ken just said. Imagine a time that someone puts into an office: architecture, the layout, the furniture. Rearranging it multiple times, placing stuff. Now think about the time that companies you've worked for put into remote tools. Anyone out there with their hands up saying they spent about 30 minutes on their remote tools -- KEN: Ever! TODD: Yeah. It's not surprising that one is superior to other in those organizations. I would pile on, like Ken said, and take the same amount of effort and consideration of your tools as a remote company as you did with everything else in the physical space if you're a commuter company. CHRIS: I'm interested, too, because as you're talking, you're talking about the difference between physical architecture and the architecture of your tools that allow you to do remote work, and if everyone's using Slack, and it looks and functions the same way, what brings the sense of uniqueness to a company that's using the same tools? TODD: Me. Just me being around makes everything unique, wonderful, and amazing. To answer the real question, you have to take Slack ... One of the great things about Slack, 'cause it's highly customizable, you can add plug-ins, you can add all sorts of integrations. We're gonna talk about other tools than Slack. They literally just pay us a crapload of money just to talk about this. JAMON: I wish. KEN: I wish. TODD: You don't take the vanilla. The point of a tool like that is you take it and you make it your own. JAMON: I did see someone tweeting about switching remote companies. They quit one company and they got hired by another. They did mention, actually, how similar it was. You go into the same place; you sit down at the same chair; you have the same computer in front of you; you log in to a different Slack, and you start working. Right? There is some level of consistency there. In a way, that's a very good thing. You can be comfortable very, very, very soon. There are plenty of things to learn about a new company without having to also learn new office layout, new office norms, policies about who can put their lunch in the fridge and who can't. I don't know what else. It's been so long since I've been in an office, I don't even know. I think there is some level of normalcy there because people do use similar tools. Like Todd said, you can customize Slack to work the way that your company needs to, and you can customize other tools as well. Since we're programmers, since our team has a lot of programming capability on it, we do actually build a lot of glue code in the scripts and things that will help tie all the tools together. KEN: In most organizations that have adopted chat tools, whether it's Slack or something else, they are usually billed as an internal supplement replacement for email. It is great at that, don't get me wrong, but I think something that gets lost in the way people talk about in the way we communicate now is that ... Let me tell a little story. I used to be a big fan of Roger Ebert. Rest in peace. Brilliant writer, right? Super enthusiastic. He was very critical of the way people write online. Very critical of things like emojis and emoticons. I think, while I respect him a lot, I think he completely missed the point on that. The point of that is, although, yes, we type to communicate online, it's not really writing. Not in the way our English teachers taught us. Right? It's typed speech, really. Right? It's a register of communication that's closer to the way that we talk than it is to the way that we would write if we're writing an essay or a blog post. One of the things that I really like about, Slack for example, is the rich way that you can communicate without it looking junky. It doesn't look like something awful or 4chan or some of the other really junky-looking message boards that have that level of expressiveness. It gives you the level of expressiveness so that you can substitute for the lack of facial expressions and body-language, but it's not writing. You don't write ... you don't type into Slack the same way you do. It's much closer to the way that you talk. For a remote organization, where we're not on Zoom all the time, although we are a lot, it's super important that you have that level of human expressiveness in your medium, in the medium that you're using to replace spoken word. TODD: Three comments. One: Zoom is the video conferencing tool we use, and we'll talk about that in a second. Two: I don't spend much time on 4chan, Ken, so I'll take your word on that one. (laughter) Three: just to give an example, talking about customization and you might be asking yourself, "Okay, Todd, I've used Slack. I've used chat. What're you talking about?" Just give you a few flavors. The simplest is creating your own channels that have some sort of cultural significance to your organization. One of ours is called "Rollcall", where we ... It's the digital equivalency of walking in and out of the office. "I'm here this morning." "I'm gonna go get my car worked on." "I'm back." It's not just status, it's also ... not just whether you're working or not, but it's a way to communicate basic, little life things in a short way. We have another one called "Kudos", where we give kudos to people. Which, at first, I thought, probably, wouldn't take off, but it actually did. It's where you give kudos to people for things that they did well, and I'm really shocked how many people give kudos and how many people respond. That's obviously just using the base tool and choosing what content to put on there, and how to organize. There's other things, too. Obviously there's things like code-repository integration, a code bug-reporting integration. We integrate with other companies' Slacks. They have a Slack channel, we have a Slack channel, and they connect so that we can do that with our clients. All the way to we have a custom Bot we wrote for Slack. Her name is Ava. She does a variety of internal processes for us. She's kind of ... In the old days, you'd have a database and you'd have a Windows app written to connect your database for your company, you'd do things in there. We have a lot of internet SaaS-tools. And then we have Ava that integrates a lot of them together. JAMON: Todd, can you give an example of something that Ava does for us? TODD: Yes. There's some basic things that a chatbot might do. For instance, you might wanna ask her where Jamon is, and she'll tell you the information she knows about Jamon. It's a lot of operational stuff. For instance, our Project Manager, Jed, has to produce weekly reports for clients. Ava produces those for him. Stuff like that. Stuff that you would normally do, like I said, in the old days, in a desktop app personally. JAMON: Todd came up with Ava quite a while ago, actually. It was sort of a toy to start with, just playing around with it. He had some ideas where it might go, but over time we've actually invested more and more resources into this internal chatbot and it's proven to be quite valuable. It's saved a lot of time, reduced the amount of overhead that we have to have tracking things because it's able to do a lot of process things. KEN: So far, she has not escaped and murdered us. (laughter) TODD: Not so far. I'm working on that. JAMON: That's a win. TODD: There's some tiny things. She's just a way for us, if we need to program something that we have a sticking point like, here's a very simple thing that took me five minutes to ruin. We do a lot of things on Mondays, and constantly wanna know what last Monday was, or Monday three weeks ago. You can literally just say, "Ava, what was Monday two weeks ago," and she'll tell you. That's a very tiny thing. Generating project PDFs or generating project reports is a bigger thing, obviously. JAMON: Another tool we use to communicate, non-verbally in Slack, is "Reactions". Someone'll post something and we react to it. I think this is pretty common in Slack teams and this is something that Slack did a good job of coming up with a cool idea. Usually you think of up-voting and down-voting, but when you have the whole range of emojis, including custom ones and animated ones and things like that, it can be a very cool thing. One interesting example of this: we have an integration with ... Ken, what's the service we use for Chain React tickets? KEN: Zapier. JAMON: Zavier. Zapier, yeah, and it connects with Eventbrite, and that basically will post any time someone buys a ticket to Chain React, which is our React Native conference, of course, happening in Portland in July. You should buy a ticket. (laughter) We get a notification, and it pops in there, says who's coming. When we're getting down there ... We were getting down to the last few advanced workshops that were available, someone started putting a number emoji underneath it. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, like that. You can see then, at a glance, how many were left. It was very cool how we were all collaborating on that. When someone would buy the advanced workshop, Kevin VanGelder, who's our resident Windows guy, he would put a little Windows emoji on there because that's part of the advanced workshop. It was just a cool way to communicate and collaborate without even using words. TODD: I think the important part of using reactions or emojis or Slack Responses ... Reactions, if you're not familiar, Slack is ... It's simply, someone posts a message, and instead of responding to it, you can post a little image on it, like heart, or a thumbs up, or a vote-up, or whatever. Slack Response is an automatic system that, when you say X, it outputs Y into it. One Slack Response that Jamon hates is that when you say "I'm not a big fan", it posts this picture of this really, really small fan. It's hilarious. I love it. (laughter) JAMON: Really hilarious. TODD: Every time someone put ... We had some that we had to remove, 'cause they just came up too much. Every time you'd say "founders" it would show the Three Stooges, which is "Accurate", but... KEN: It was "founders' meeting". TODD: Oh, whatever. KEN: But still, yeah. TODD: It was accurate but a little too much noise. The point is, it's very important. We've probably added a huge number of Slack Responses, a huge number of our own emojis, and the emojis you can use for Responses. A lot of them have become very cultural. Just to give you a few examples: my cat, Calle, that's short for Calle Berry, I took a picture of her paw. And, of course, cats, if you just do the front part of their paw, it looks like they have four fingers instead of five because their fifth one's back further. We came with this emoji and this thing where, if someone does a really great job, they get a "high-four", instead of high-five, and that's Calle's Response. JAMON: I didn't actually know that was Calle's paw. TODD: Oh, yeah, that's Calle's paw. JAMON: That's cool. TODD: So that's a cultural thing that I created one day, and it just kinda stuck. It became a "high-four"; it is an Infinite Red thing, you get a "high-four". We have other things like that, too, that are very specific to our culture, where you have to explain to people who come in what that means. I would definitely customize it, make it fun. We don't worry too much if clients see it. We're not doing anything inappropriate. At first, there was discussion, "Is it professional if they accidentally trigger one of the Slack Responses?" "No, but does that really matter?" "No," in my opinion. KEN: It depends on the Response. (laughter) TODD: Of course. KEN: There were some that were a little over the line and that, without context, could be a little startling. We removed those. TODD: Yeah, that's true. KEN: But for the most part, yeah, just something that's quirky. Hopefully, we all have clients that, at least the people who are in the Slack room are able to appreciate that. TODD: Another one that's totally part of our culture is, there was this early picture of me looking into the camera with a stern face. That became the "shame" emoji. That's been used ever since. Every time someone wants to throw shame upon someone, my face is there. I don't know if that's good or bad. JAMON: There's another one that's quite disturbing, of you, Todd. TODD: Oh! When you say yes "yis", Y, I, S, yes that is disturbing. JAMON: "Yis dream." TODD: You have to work here to ... KEN: You had to be there. KEN: Some of the things that came from my experience at Yammer, where a lot of the company was run internally on Yammer, there's a couple of really big advantages to that. Especially, at an all-remote company, where the vast majority of conversations happen there. One is that there's very much less pressure to include people in meetings just because, just in case they might have something to say about it. Because if you've having a conversation in Slack, you just pull 'em in. Right? After the fact, and they can catch up. But the other was, there was an ethos at Yammer that was, there was this pat question which was, "Why is this private?" "Why did you make this group private?" "Why is this in a private chat?" Making closed conversations justify themselves, rather than being the default. Particularly when we invite other people into Slack, I notice there's a little period of training, where people will instinctively start DMing, 'cause it's like "Well, I need to ask Ken this question." Say we brought our bookkeeper in, right? They would ask me 'cause I was the contact. I'm like, "Ask this question in Finance." Right? "Ask this question in the Finance channel." Which happens to be one of the private ones, for a variety of fairly obvious reasons. By asking in the channel, then the other people who might be interested can just observe. That's one of the ways that you compensate for the lack of that serendipitous, overheard conversation that people are so fond of in a office. CHRIS: In Episode Two, we talked about the philosophy of remote work. Todd, you actually made a comment that was really interesting to me. You said, "When the leadership uses the remote tools, they immediately get better." Why do you think that's the case? TODD: Human nature. I'll answer your question with a little story. I worked for company ... This is circa 1999. I don't know. I didn't work for 'em; they were a client of ours. For many, many years they were very much a Microsoft shop. They had no interest in testing anything on other platforms like Mac or whatever. We worked for them for nine years, something like that. So this is all through the 2000s. It was frustrating for people who wanted to produce websites that were universal. If someone opened 'em on a Mac, it would actually look good and not look horrible. One day, one of the VPs who was above the software group bought an iPad. I think, about a year later, he bought a MacBook. Once he had that iPad, all of a sudden, it'd become very important that things look good on his iPad, which is funny and horrible at the same time. It is just human nature. If you use something, it's much more front of mind than if you don't. Even the best of people suffer this. If you have a mixed company, meaning you're part remote, part commuter, one of those groups is gonna be a second-class citizen. Period. If 10 people are in a meeting, and eight are remote and two are in the office, the two in the office are gonna be the second-class citizens. More often, it's the vice versa, right? Getting everyone on the same page gets rid of second-class citizens. If you wanna make the best remote environment, either getting the majority or getting the people who have more power in the remote situation will increase your tools' quality big time. JAMON: That's for sure. We've seen that internally at Infinite Red, as well. When we use the tools, which we do, leadership team is probably the heaviest user of the remote tools in a lot of ways. There are situations where they're just not good enough, and we make sure that they get changed, for sure. Zoom is a good ... Zoom, the video chat, video call system, is really an interesting one because it has worked the best for us in terms of video calls. We've used a whole bunch of them. We've used everything from Google Hangouts, Skype, Appear.in, which is pretty decent. Pretty frictionless, actually. I like Appear.in for how fast it is to jump into it, but the quality is still a little bit sub-optimal. A few others as well. The nice thing about Zoom is that it allows you to put everybody into a grid pattern. It has a gallery view, which is really cool because then you feel like you're having a meeting and not doing a presentation. That's something that came out of us doing sales calls and internal meetings where we kinda felt like, "I don't wanna be the person on the big screen," right? Feel like your giving a presentation. "I wanna feel like this is a meeting with everybody in an equal place." It makes people feel more comfortable. That was a situation where we were using the tools for various things and found the one that, I think, has worked the best 'cause, as a leadership team, we needed it. TODD: Yes, as far as video chat or video calls ... We actually need a name for that. What do you say if ... It's not really video chatting. JAMON: Video conferencing? TODD: I don't like ... KEN: It's not exactly "conferencing". TODD: I don't like the term. JAMON: Video meeting? KEN: Video meeting. TODD: Yeah, there needs to be a term for that. We need to coin a term for that, at least internally. CHRIS: Zooming. TODD: Zooming. Well that's ... That's not tool-specific. KEN: Slack as a tool is much stickier, in the long term, probably, than Zoom is. At the moment, Zoom is, by far, in our experience, the best quality. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: But that could change. Slack ... there's a lot we've invested in customizing and it would be harder, but ... Although, we have invested some in Zoom, which we can talk about a bit. TODD: I would say Zoom is our favorite for our situation. One of our clients is BlueJeans.net, which is not really a competitor, but they do video conferencing. BlueJeans is really great for many things. One thing is they do every platform well. KEN: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yep. TODD: Which, Zoom, and a lot of the other ones don't necessarily do. Now, we're all mostly on Macs, and it works really well on that, so that works out well. Also, BlueJeans.net has a lot of additional features. Where we basically just need video conferencing; Zoom is so superior. Google Hangouts is horrible. Please, please stop using Google Hangouts. KEN: Don't use Skype. Don't use Google Hangouts. TODD: Well, Skype -- KEN: Skype has gotten better, but -- TODD: Skype's quality is great, but it does a max of six people. We have 26 people. KEN: I disagree that they're quality is great. TODD: I was being ni -- KEN: Even domestically, I've had problems with it. (laughter) JAMON: We have Microsoft people listening. TODD: I was being nice, Ken. JAMON: It crashes a lot on Mac. KEN: The point is, here, you should demand rock-solid video 99% of the time. TODD: Yeah. KEN: If that's not what you're getting, look at another tool. JAMON: This extends to the internet bandwidth that you have available at your place of work, too. Some people that were really scraping by on 20Mb or something connections, and it was impacting video quality, and -- TODD: On what tool? KEN: No, their connection. JAMON: Their internet connection, yeah. That was something that we, overtime, got everybody to upgrade to faster and faster internet. I think that was a success for, pretty much, everybody. They have pretty acceptable internet, now, at this point. TODD: Some aren't as much. We have a person who's a nomad and travels around. We have someone who's in extremely rural Canada, up above Toronto, Tor-on-toe, I'm told is the proper way to say that. Zoom does very well in bandwidth, so the people that do have limited bandwidth, that works very well. We actually have meetings, 26 people in Zoom, which before would have been crazy. Skype limits you to six, which I'm not sure how useful that is for most meetings, but good for you, Skype. KEN: The only thing it's not so great on is battery-life, if you're using a mobile device. JAMON: It sort of trades CPU time for bandwidth. KEN: It does, yeah. JAMON: One of the things that Zoom doesn't do, that we've sort of built a system on top of, is permanent conference rooms. We've found this to be very useful to say, "Hey, let's jump into this 'conference room A', or 'conference room B'." We have better names for it. We name them after rooms in the boardgame Clue. TODD: Trademark Milton Bradley. (laughter) JAMON: There's a billiard room, there's a conservatory, there's a study, kitchen, et cetera. We have different uses for those different rooms. Some are for sales calls; some are for ... One is called Kitchen, which we use for the kitchen table, it's basically where people just jump in there, and work together in relative quiet. It's a cool little concept. We actually built an online, like a website, as well as a desktop app that shows a Clue board with the different rooms that light up when people are in them, and then it puts avatars of who's in that room, including guests, which is very cool because I can go in there and say, "Hey, look! Chris and Todd are having a meeting over there. I'm gonna jump in and see what's going on." I can just click in there, and it opens a Zoom window, and I'm in their meeting. TODD: For example, currently, Chris, Jamon, Ken and I are in Study. We have Kevin and Ryan in Library, and we have Jed in the Billiard Room by himself. I'm not sure what that's about. Maybe playing a little pool. KEN: This goes back to the notion of tools as architecture. Consider the experience of being in an office, and you want a meeting. You say, "Hey, let's meet in Fisherman's Wharf." I was in an office where they named things after San Francisco neighborhoods. "Let's meet in Fisherman's Wharf." Everybody, after they've been oriented into the office, knows where that is and they just go. That's it, right? That's the experience, right? Furthermore, if you wanna know where somebody is, you walk around the building, look into the rooms, and see that so-and-so is in Fisherman's Wharf, so they're in a meeting, they're busy. Now let's look at what it's like to be remote, without a tool like this. "Where's the meeting? Okay, I gotta ask somebody. Oh, okay. Oh, did someone start the meeting? Oh, no, no, okay, somebody needs to start the meeting. Alright, gimme a second, I'm gonna start the meeting. Here's the Zoom URL." TODD: Oh, God! KEN: "Okay, you gotta invite somebody." "Do you remember the Zoom URL?" "I don't remember the Zoom URL." "Okay, hang on. Okay, I got it. Here you go." That's the UX, right now. JAMON: Yes. KEN: Of the base ... TODD: Oh, jeez. KEN: ... video conferencing tool, and it's no wonder people hate that! JAMON: Yep. KEN: Right? TODD: Can you imagine? KEN: Yeah. It turns out ... We've had to increase the number of rooms over the years, right? But how many do we have now? Eight? TODD: Eight. KEN: So we have eight rooms now? TODD: Eight current rooms. KEN: That's pretty much fine. TODD: Mm-hmm (affirmative). For a team our size, that works well. JAMON: We usually don't fill all of ... I think, yesterday, I looked in there and there were six in use, which was kind of a anomaly, but ... KEN: In an office, we can keep adding those as long as we need to. JAMON: That's right. KEN: This is a case where I think we've created something that is actually better than what people who have an office have. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: Right? Because you can, just at a glance, see where people are. Nobody has to even tell you what room they're in. They just say, "Hey, we're meeting." You go look at the Clue board, and you see where the people that you're meeting with are, and you join the room. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: It's just one more little piece of constant friction that we've eliminated. I love it. I think it's a fantastic tool. TODD: Yeah, I keep the Clue desktop app open all day long while I'm at work. It's also cool to see the little avatars and stuff. Makes me feel like I'm at work. When we first started, you did have to push ... This is a very common interaction. "Hey, Todd, I need your help with X." And I'm like, "Let's have a meeting" or "Let's jump in Zoom" or whatever. "Which one?" "I'm already there. I joined a room as soon as you said it." "Which one?" "Open Clue. (laughter) Look for my name. Click on it." JAMON: Yeah. TODD: That only took a few weeks, to be honest, of constantly just needling that to the point where, when someone says, "Hey, I wanna jump in a room," they look and they see where you jumped in. KEN: That brings back the importance of having the leadership on the tool. TODD: Yes. JAMON: That's right. This tool actually came out of a side-project. I think Gant and AJ, two of our engineers, came up with the idea and built a prototype, and put it out there. It was ... I remember being, initially, a little bit skeptical that it'd be useful and it's turned out to be a really key part of our remote experience. TODD: That's actually an important point. No one asked anyone to make that tool. No one asked for permission to make that tool. They made it. They turned it on. Now, we've had tools that people've made. For instance, my tool Ava, which, now, is very useful, originally was Dolores, which is from HBO's great TV show, "Westworld". Dolores never caught on. She didn't do enough important stuff, and so she just kinda died. Later I resurrected her as Ava, which is from the movie "Ex Machina". Excellent movie, by the way. KEN: It's still kind of a disturbing allusion, though. TODD: It is, but it's ... It's a great movie. And then the next movie he did, which was "Annihilation", was fantastic as well. Anyways, not important, obviously. The point is, no one needs to ask for permission. They can make tools. They do. They put 'em out there, and they live or die based on whether or not they're actually used. We do sunset things that just never really took off. CHRIS: You're mentioning a lot of tools that enable remote work, that enable productive work. What are some tools that you're thinking about or are in place that help with focus and eliminating distractions? 'Cause sometimes, people new to these environments can look at these tools going, "Man there's so many distractions. How do I work?" JAMON: I actually think that's one of the biggest benefits of working remotely, which is kind of counter-intuitive. You think, "Oh, there's so many distractions when you're working remotely." Actually, you can turn off Slack. You can turn your screen to "do not disturb". You can shut off Zoom. You can turn off you're email. You can close all of those applications and just have the app that you're doing the work in, you're writing a blog post, you're writing code, you can just have that open. You can turn on a "do not disturb" mode in Slack that'll actually tell people that you're currently away. If you use the tools that are available, remote work can actually be much better, because what happens in an office? Someone can't get a hold of you on email or Slack, so what do they do? They hop up and they walk over to your office, and they're like, "Hey, did you get my email?" (laughter) "Okay, I will check my email, eventually, here. Is this really important?" One of the things that we do is ... This is kind of funny, but we'll actually say "I'm going offline for three hours, 'cause I'm gonna focus on this thing. If it's really important, text me." Our phone numbers are there, right? Nobody's gonna text you, 'cause that just feels like a complete intrusion. Right? KEN: It does happen. Like, if it's a genuine emergency. JAMON: It does happen if it's like an emergency. But that is so rare. That is awesome, because you're adding a ton of friction, but you're still giving them some way to get to you. I think that's a good property of remote work, that you can actually focus more in those situations than you can in an office. TODD: Yeah, try to turn off all the noise in an open-concept office. Good luck! KEN: Yeah, an office is distracting by default. You have to use technology to get some focus. I can't think of any tool that we use just for focus. Right? It's about human habits around how they use the tools that are already there. TODD: I think there are some, Ken. I don't personally use them. KEN: Yeah, yeah. I mean there are things, but there's nothing we use as a company. TODD: No, but there are people here that use, for one thing, they'll use the various timer apps that tell them to stand up, or if they set a timer for focus -- KEN: I've used the Pomodoro timer. TODD: Yeah, there are things. What's cool about remote work as opposed to depressing cubicle work (laughter), is you can set up the environment -- KEN: Soul-crushing commute work. (laughter) TODD: Soul-crushing commute work, SCCW, I like it. In those situations, you have to go to the lowest common denominator. If 50% of the people are very productive and get focused with music, and 50 can't at all, you're gonna have no music. When you're sitting in your own environment, whatever that environment is, whether it's your home, or a café, or co-working space, or whatever it is that you've chosen to be most efficient in, when you're sitting in that environment, you can control and make it perfect for you to be able to focus. Personally, if I'm doing design work or visual work, I play music. It gets me in the groove. If I'm programming, I cannot have any music. Or if I do have music, it can't have any lyrics in it. That's a focus thing. I tend to like to work more in the dark, strangely. I love light and I live in a very sunny place, and a very sunny house, but I have noticed that I tend to get more in the zone in dark and often late at night, for me personally. CHRIS: I'm the same way, Todd. I have to fake my brain into thinking it's late at night by closing all the blinds and turning the lights off. And it actually helps productivity. TODD: Yeah, that's interesting. I used to have this problem at every company I worked at. Even, say, I shared a room with four other people. One office, and four. I would wanna have all the lights off and have a desk lamp so I could see. No one liked this. Having the fluorescent lights on ... I didn't take cyanide, but I do believe I shopped online for cyanide, just saying. (laughter) KEN: So this is in your browser history, now, forever, man. (laughter) There's a FBI file on you. TODD: Oh, there's been a FBI file. Come on. If you don't have a FBI file on you, what are you doing with your life? (laughter) JAMON: At the old ClearSight office, we had some fluorescent lights, and one by one they would burn out. Nobody would tell the maintenance guy because they just liked that they were burning out. (laughter) Eventually it got quite dark in there and everybody, they just wouldn't even turn on the light. TODD: I would like to make a confession. I have purposely broke some lights in offices. KEN: "True Confessions with Todd Werth." (laughter) TODD: You don't want true ones. No, that actually -- CHRIS: That's Season Two of the podcast. (laughter) TODD: That actually is very true. Sometimes you just have to ... KEN: Civil disobedience? TODD: Yes, I like the way you phrased that. Makes things more noble and less selfish. (laughter) KEN: Yeah, right. Guerilla productivity. JAMON: We have some other tools to talk about, too, right? TODD: Oh, yeah, we have other tools to talk about. JAMON: Should we talk about some of them, or ... TODD: Yes. KEN: But enough about Todd. (laughter) TODD: I'll be here all week. Do not eat the veal. JAMON: One of the tools that has been really helpful for us is Google Sheets. Obviously, that's the spreadsheet program in Google Apps. We ... We're having trouble ... Again, this is pre-merger. We're having trouble figuring out how to schedule people. It was just a real pain. Eventually, my Project Manager at the time, came up with a system that involved sticky notes on a board that were, across the top were weeks, and down the left side were the names of people. We could just put sticky notes. My wife went out and bought a whole bunch of different colored sticky notes. We'd put the same project as the same color across the board. You could, at a glance, see who was working on the same project. You could see how long it was going to be, as far as number of weeks, and every week we'd move 'em over to the left and add another column. That eventually migrated onto Google Sheets, 'cause, of course, that doesn't work so well when you're remote. The collaboration tools on Google Sheets are extremely good. It's very, very responsive to having multiple people on it. When we do our Friday scheduling meeting for the next week, and beyond, we'll all pull open the sheet, and we look at it, and we can all update it ... If we see something that's wrong, we can update it. We can change colors of the backgrounds. It's worked really well for, now, two and a half years. I think that's a remote tool that has actually been quite useful for us for quite some time. Not only does it give us forward-looking data, but it also gives us backward-looking. We can look at previous years and see what projects were we working on at the time, who was working on what, all the way throughout. It's been a very cool tool. We're just repurposing Google Sheets to use as a scheduling tool. TODD: Another tool we used to use ... Jeez, I can't remember what it's called. What was the [inaudible 00:43:17] tool we used to use? JAMON: Screenhero. KEN: Screenhero? TODD: Screenhero, yes, of course. I remember when Screenhero was ... It was eventually bought by Slack and is being integrated into Slack. We used to use that a lot, but truthfully, the tools in Zoom for screensharing stuff became superior and so I think almost everyone pairs with each other Zooming. TODD: Another tool we use is RealtimeBoard, which is a sticky board analogist tool; the designers -- KEN: Designers love it. TODD: The designers used it a lot, but we also use it in leadership and the developers, I think, are starting to look into it. It's great for brainstorming. It's a real-time tool, kinda like Google Docs or Google Sheets, where everyone can use it at the same time, and you see everyone using it. That's been really great. The designers use the heck out of InVision, which is a wonderful tool for showing designs, getting notes, and collaborating with clients, collaborating with the rest of the team, and that kind of stuff. Another tool we use for project management a lot is Trello. If you're not familiar, with it, it's a great project management tool. It's a Kanban board, if you're familiar with those. Not only do we use Trello, we also integrated ... Ava connects to Trello, produces reports from ... Ava connects to Airtable, which is another interesting mix between a database and a spreadsheet. We use Airtable and Trello. Those are some other tools we use. KEN: Something to mention, also, is that between Slack and Zoom we have some redundancy, because Zoom has rudimentary chat and Slack has video conferencing. It's not as good as Zoom's, but it's there, and we already have it. For example, when Slack is down, we have Zoom channels that we can all do basic communication in. That provides a certain amount of resiliency for the work environment, and that's very helpful. TODD: Yeah, it does go down every so often. It's funny because our company comes to a screeching halt when Slack goes down. KEN: Yeah, and that's a valid criticism, I think, of remote working. We do have the redundancy so that people can at least, basically, keep going. TODD: We all know now, if Slack's down ... It was, actually yesterday, coincidentally. JAMON: Yeah. TODD: If Slack is down, we go into Zoom chat. That took a while to get people ... It's funny 'cause we don't use email and stuff, and we use that so much. We could jump into a meeting. We've done that in the past, before we had this redundancy we would just jump into a meeting room and kinda like, "Hey, what do we do?" It was like the lights went out and everyone was confused at what to do. It's actually kind of amusing if you think about that. A bunch of virtual people wandering around in the dark wondering what to do. JAMON: We have a lot of redundancy of internet connection. Someone might be having internet issues, but not everybody is having internet issues. That's a pretty big deal. I remember the office internet would stop working and, even though we were all in the same place, yes we could collaborate, no we couldn't work 'cause we couldn't access -- KEN: Couldn't get to GitHub, can't get to... JAMON: ... Dropbox, whatever. Which, we do use GitHub, we use Dropbox. There's a little tool that I use that, I would say, about a third of the company also uses. We're on video calls a lot. When you're on a video call, sometimes it's nice to have a cough button: you hit a button and it mutes you for just a second, so you can cough or whatever. This one's called Shush. It's a Mac app. You can buy it for three bucks or something. It turns your function key into a mute button, so you just hit that button and it will mute you for a short amount of time. Or you can double-tap it and it turns into a push to talk button, which is nice when you're in a big group. TODD: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I don't use Shush, because I use a hardware version of that. I have quite a lot of audio equipment and video stuff. Pretty sure, in the remote podcast, we talked about the importance of having good equipment and spending a little money on good equipment. You cheap managers out there, stop doing that; you're horrible people. (laughter) JAMON: Also the background of your video call is really important. That was actually something Todd really emphasized when we first started. I will point out that he has the messiest background of all of us, right now. TODD: Well, to be clear, I have two cameras. One is a wide angle which I use for the team so I can move around and stuff; and I have a tighter angle I use for clients, in which case, what's behind me is very specifically chosen to be a background, and I keep that incredibly clean. JAMON: I just say that to tweak Todd, because he's the biggest champion of having a good background. TODD: Yes. Jamon's horizon, right now, is extremely tilted, and it's been driving me crazy the whole time, but I'll get over it. (laughter) KEN: I know. I can't unsee that. TODD: In my 46 years on this planet, I've learned not to mention that, even though I really, really want him to straighten his camera. KEN: It doesn't help, Jamon, you've still got a vertical line that is -- TODD: I'll tell you a funny story about backgrounds. Poor Ken. Ken had this very nice ... I don't know what it was. What was it, Ken? KEN: It's a bookcase, right, (laughter) but it's IKEA furniture, so it looks -- TODD: It's IKEA? KEN: It looks like a dresser. Yeah. TODD: This whole time it was IKEA? We thought it was important. We felt bad for making fun of it. 'Cause it looks like a dresser. It was right behind him, and it looked like Ken was sitting in bed (laughter) with his dresser behind him. KEN: Yes, reinforcing every stereotype about remote workers. (laughter) TODD: Right. We kept on bugging him, and he said, "It's a really nice bookcase." I didn't realize it was IKEA. KEN: I didn't say it was a really nice bookcase. I said it was a bookcase. (laughter) TODD: It looked like a dresser. JAMON: It really did, in fact. KEN: That's because it's IKEA furniture, so it's looks like that. TODD: I guess the point is, how things appear is more important than what they actually are. This is something a lot of people aren't familiar with. We have different people with different levels of quality of what they produce as far as visually or audio. I think the general takeaway is take some time. You are almost doing a mini-television broadcast, and you wanna be ... I wouldn't say the word "professional", because it's not stuffy, it's fine if you're wearing your tie-dye and your shorts, but you should make it a pleasant experience for the viewers. KEN: Yeah. You should look inviting, and it should look intentional. TODD: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KEN: And kept. JAMON: We have some other tips for remote video meetings that, I think, are on a blog post that we created. Was that you, Ken, that wrote that post? KEN: Yeah. We could do a whole podcast, frankly, on how to have a good video meeting. JAMON: We can link to that in the show notes. KEN: We can link to that for now. TODD: That is a podcast I wanna do. I do wanna point out to the audience who can't see us now, we're recording this for your listening pleasure, and I put pleasure in quotation marks 'cause I don't wanna oversell it. But, we are actually on Zoom, so we can see each other. Jamon, thankfully moved his camera so we can't see the horizon any more, which is crooked, but right over his left shoulder is a door-line that's incredibly crooked. I appreciate the effort, Jamon, but come on. Have some dignity. JAMON: I will point out that I'm moving out of this rental in a week because I had a house fire, Todd. (laughter) TODD: Oh, jeez. You can't pull a house fire out every time there's a criticism. KEN: The only thing in my background is my Harvard diploma (laughter) because it's all that anyone cares about. JAMON: Yes, exactly. Over my shoulder, I'm thinking about putting my not-Harvard diploma. KEN: "Narvard". JAMON: It'll just say, "Not Harvard." TODD: Sometimes we just invite Ken's Harvard diploma, instead of Ken, to meetings. (laughter) KEN: Yeah, I just put it in frame and then I walk out. (laughter) I'm like, "I'm just the janitor." CHRIS: I do have one final question, as we bring this episode to a close: Is there any tool that you use outside of remote work or in your daily life that you wish existed as a remote tool. KEN: Blow torch. (laughter) CHRIS: Elon's got that for ya. TODD: Not a tool, completely, but here's something ... I have ideas for tools that'd be cool in the future. We have the concept of "kitchen table". This is a real quick story; please, bear with me. The three of us ... I don't know if Ken was, but there was multiple of us of the company who were speaking at a conference in Paris. We rented a large Airbnb apartment in Paris, and a bunch of us were staying there. It had a very large kitchen table. When we weren't doing stuff individually, we'd all sit around the kitchen table, and we'd work together. We would just sit there, like you would at a library in a university or something like that, and work. We wanted to recreate that in ... virtually. The simple solution is we dedicated one of our Zoom rooms, the "Kitchen", to the "kitchen table" and you can't use that for anything else. If you just wanna be around people, but you're working, you're not really saying anything, as if you're in a library ... I guess we should do the library, but whatever ... you'd go in the kitchen table and just be around people. Sometimes people say things and have little conversations, like you would in an office, but typically you're just sitting there working together. That's cool. It's missing a few features which I'd love to see. For one is, if you're not ... Say there was a group of people working in an open office, and they're in the center and you're on the perimeter of the office. You see them working together there, the "kitchen table", now we have that, with our tool, we can see who's in the "kitchen table" and they're there. Great. But you can also, even if you're far away and they're dim enough ... not dim, but the volume's low enough that it's not disturbing, you can still hear them, and sometimes you'll pick up on little words that may interest you. They'll mention a project you're on, or they'll mention a personal interest that you're interested in or whatever, and you can choose then to go walk over and join them, because of that kind of low-noise but informational thing you're getting by being in the perimeter. I would love to somehow integrate that into our tool, where you could have a low-murmur of people in the background of the meetings that you're not in, and listen for things that might be interesting, something like that. KEN: I don't really know how to think about that question. TODD: I find it very interesting that none of us can really come up with a tool that we wish we had. That's a fantastic answer. KEN: I mean ... JAMON: I think there's probably tools that, eventually, we'll get that will be like, "How did we live without this?" But I don't ... I can't think of one. KEN: I can imagine in the future, basically a VR setup. JAMON: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes. KEN: If VR gets to the point where it feels natural; it's comfortable to wear the equipment, it's not a burden just to have the stuff on your head, and the resolution is to the point where you could have a virtual monitor in space, and you can have that feeling of actually being next to people. Then you could, in theory, have the best of both worlds, where you can drop out and leave the space if you want to. You can also be in the space and be available for that. JAMON: Yeah. KEN: I think that would be pretty nice, but ... JAMON: There is a tool out there that's ... I think they're, maybe, in beta right now. It's called Bigscreen VR, it's by a guy that I know, Darshan Shankar, who's on Twitter. I met him on Twitter. He's doing this Bigscreen VR system. It's very much what you described, Ken. Right now, it's only on Windows, and of course the VR headsets are still evolving. But apparently the new Oculus Go or Oculus Now, or something, is apparently quite good -- KEN: Yeah, they're getting better. JAMON: It's also likely, they said that within the next year, that it'll come to Mac 'cause they're working on it. KEN: I think another threshold, though, is the quote-unquote "retina" threshold, to where the resolution of the headsets is such that you can't, in terms of resolution, anyway, you can't tell the difference between that and something that you're looking at. JAMON: Yep. KEN: You could actually make a projected display without any compromise. JAMON: Yes. TODD: I agree, in the future that's gonna be wonderful. I do have some current ideas on how to add spacial stuff to our tools to give us proximity information of each other, virtually. Kind of what you would get if you were in a VR situation, but without having VR. Anyways, there's some interesting things there. KEN: Yeah, we've talked about making an ambient audio device, something like that, that can just sit there and ... Kind of like "kitchen table", but without the video. There's a bunch of things we've talked about, but not of them are things that exist today. They're just things that we've thought about creating or ... yeah.

So, this is my turn at soloing for a brief episode of Battles with Bits of Rubber. And, depending on responses to my musings, perhaps Stuart and I can extend this into a longer broadcast with tips from you all on how to get rid of unwanted and no longer needed stuff. Hi. My name is Todd. And I’m a pack rat. (Hi, Todd!) Let’s face it, most of us have too much stuff. Stuff we don’t use, stuff we don’t need, and stuff we don’t even remember getting. So how do you get rid of it?! I can look around my office, shop and studio and wonder when the crew from Hoarders is arriving. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, because at least I’m not navigating through canyons of stacked magazines and newspapers, but… it’s easy to lose sight of my office from certain vantage points because of props, molds and masks… I can be looking for something - and it can even be in plain view - but it will take me a bit to see it amidst everything else. I either need more space, or less stuff. The answer is less stuff. But how do you part with something you may need later? There’s a psychology to it… maybe even a pathology… I’ve been collecting and adding to bins of doodads and thingamabobs (I swear they even multiply by themselves!) for what seems like eons that I know I’ll find a cool use for someday. I need help. I’m never going to use that shit. Who do I think I’m kidding? 2018 may be the Year of the Dog for China, but for me it is The Year of the Purge. I started reading a book by Japanese author Marie Kondo called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up - The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. I haven’t finished it yet, but the gist of it is this: Figure out which items ‘spark joy’ and which don’t. The items that don’t, heave ho! I’m still trying to wrap my head around that, but I confess I am making headway. Perhaps I need to put in a call to American Pickers. It’s just that I’m in a business that requires stuff, and lots of it. There has to be a way to make do and do well with a leaner inventory and library of stuff. This is my start. Take a listen and let us know what you think. Cheers, Todd ---- For the blog post on this, check out http://www.learnmakeupeffects.com/packrat/

Todd Tresidder’s background includes: B.A. in Economics from University of California at Davis Member of Economics Honors Society and Deans List A serial entrepreneur since childhood building many businesses and retiring at age 35 from his position as a Hedge Fund Investment Manager responsible for a 20+ million dollar portfolio. Todd’s portfolio management for the Hedge Fund produced 100% winning years except one which was less than a 5% loss. Raised net worth from less than zero at age 23 to self-made millionaire 12 years later by “walking the talk” using the same personal finance and investment strategies taught on this web site. An early pioneer and expert in statistical and mathematical risk management systems for investing. Financially independent from age 35 through investing – not marketing – unlike many other financial gurus who made their money through marketing courses and books. Still an active investor who earns consistent investment returns in both up and down markets. The point of these factoids is to demonstrate that I teach personal finance and investing based on real experience. I walk the talk and have the results to prove it. I do not teach ivory tower theories or inaccurate conventional wisdom: instead, I show you what works, what doesn’t, and why – all based on actual, provable, experience. With that said, there is a serious limitation to the financial and professional data cited above. It tells you about my financial and investment expertise, but it doesn’t tell you anything about me as a person. In other words, there are many self-proclaimed financial experts with impressive resumes so what is different about Todd?   The most obvious difference is I made my money investing in publicly traded markets just like you can do; whereas, many financial experts made their money through becoming best-selling authors and marketing financial advice to you. Unless you plan on writing a best-selling book and building a marketing empire you may find difficulty duplicating their success. More at https://financialmentor.com   Here's the Transcript Hugh: Hey, this is Hugh Ballou. Welcome to this episode of Orchestrating Success. I got a guy today that I’m going to interview that knows how to convert passion to profit. Todd, tell us a little bit about you. How do you say your last name? Todd: Tresidder. Hugh: I have a Southern focus on pronunciation, so I want to make sure I got it right. Todd, I’ve read a little bit about you and I’m really impressed. We’re talking about how to get more clients than you really need today. Talk about your background and what brought you to being able to do this for yourself and for others. Todd: My background is in hedge fund investing. That’s where I learned the investment skills that ultimately I market through my coaching services and books and courses and things like that. That’s where I learned it: practical school hard knocks. I spent about 12 years doing research in computerized trading algorithms and risk management systems, things like that. I ran the fund for all those years. We had only one losing year for the investors. The portfolio actually won money, even in that losing year, but it was such a small win that with the net of expenses and fees, investors lost a little bit. We now have 100% winning years. I went on to build this financial education company. I sold the hedge fund back when I was 35, which anybody looking at this feed can see that was a long time ago. I’ve been building out a financial education business, trying to give back the knowledge I created. It’s different; my viewpoints are sometimes unorthodox, but they are always supported by math and research and proof. They violate a lot of commonly held ideas in the financial planning area. Hugh: Love it. I like to violate all the standard leadership rules because they don’t work. Todd: Make hamburger out of sacred cows. Hugh: That’s right. One of the people I interviewed was Gary Gunderson, who wrote the book Killing Sacred Cows. For your business, who’s your ideal client? Todd: Depends on what part of the business you’re talking about. There is various parts of the business: online advertising, the books, the courses, and the coaching services. I think what you’re referring to is the coaching services. When you look at the ideal target client, there is several. The reason for that is there is several problems that the coaching service solves. One of the keys in getting more clients than you can handle is you have to be clear on what problem you solve. People pay for solutions to problems. You have to look at what the high value solution you have that other people will gladly pay for. That’s your starting point. It’s not so much like, women over 35 with a net worth of blah blah blah. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a psychographic, not a demographic. Hugh: Say a little more about that. That’s fascinating. What problem do you solve? Let’s go after it that way. Todd: One of the problems that I solve is people who achieve very-near financial independence. A lot of people don’t understand this, but as you approach financial independence, it’s a very unleveling experience, if you will. It typically takes people by surprise. The reason for that is as you approach financial independence, what happens is your life up to that point was very well prescribed. It’s standard stuff. You go to work five days a week. You have your job. Your focus is making more money. Your focus is spending less, saving money, trying to achieve some modicum of financial security. Everything is pretty well set. Once you achieve financial independence, all that grounding is removed because you no longer have to report to the man, you no longer have a daily routine that is required of you. Everything is up to you. You can choose. You no longer have any excuses for your unhappiness. Before when you were unhappy, you could always blame it on your crappy boss or your lousy job or the fact that you work all day when you really want to be doing X or Y. Once you’re financially independent, you have no excuses. Your happiness is entirely up to you. Your day is entirely up to you. That is what I call a burden of responsibility. Most people sitting on the other side of this will be like, “Yeah, Todd, gee, big burden. I’ll take it any day.” It’s true. For most people, it’s a privilege to get to that position in life. But don’t kid yourself. It’s very disconcerting. When people experience it, they’re thrown off. They seek out guidance, and I’m one of the only people who has been through it and is willing to mentor others through it. I have been through it a lot, both with myself and clients. That’s one target profile client. They have a lot of money, they are very concerned, they are right at the edge of financial independence but don’t know if they are financially independent or not. They’re not sure. The numbers are marginal. Right when you hit that point, your whole life changes. Before that, everything was pre-prescribed. After that, you’re going according to what your values are. All kinds of stuff that you could tolerate before, like going to work and putting up with people’s crap and all kinds of things like that, you won’t tolerate it anymore. It’s very unsettling. It’s a huge change in a person’s life. That’s one target client. Another target client is somebody who wants to build wealth. For example, an entrepreneur who has success, but he is not converting it into wealth. He is building a successful business. It’s not translating over into wealth into his personal balance sheet. He’s not sure what he’s doing wrong. He needs help. That’s another target client where I help them solve a problem. There is a variety of target clients. Hugh: Those are the people listening to this podcast. That’s how we position ourselves. There are people- 31 years working with solopreneurs and early-stage businesses. People are stuck. They are on a treadmill, and they are too busy. They don’t have a life. They haven’t done this kind of planning or reframing. Let’s go back to the expertise. Todd: Most people I see are too busy making a living to develop wealth. Hugh: Absolutely. Sometimes they’re too busy making a living to make a living. Todd: To live. Hugh: Amen. To the bottom line. We’re talking about how to have more clients than you can handle. I’m at a place in my career where, like you are, I screen clients and I don’t want to work with everybody. I only take a certain number. I try to automate the others or put them into groups. What are the problems? I’m in a service business. A lot of people I work with are in a service business. We are selling what might be called invisible at some point. Leadership is invisible until you’re bad at it. Financial planning is invisible until you’re bad at it. Service businesses - Todd: I call it selling pink fog. Hugh: Pink fog. I love that. What are some of the problems in approaching marketing for this kind of business? Todd: First of all, as I said, you have to be clear on what problem you solve that people will pay for. A lot of people have a lot of problems. For example, early on in the business, I used to help people get out of debt. I don’t do that anymore. That’s a problem people won’t pay for a solution for; they don’t have the money. They may really need help. They have a huge problem. But they don’t have money and they can’t really pay for a solution. You have to find problems that you are the single best solution to that people will gladly pay for that solution. Then you have to position yourself in their buying process. You have to understand where they look and what they’re looking for in order to solve that problem. It’s got to be a burning enough problem that they wake up in the morning and it bothers them. They care about it enough to research it. Those I call money key words. You’re looking for those money key words, or finding a buying process. The buying process might exist somewhere else other than the Internet, but you have to identify their buying process. Then you have to map yourself right into that buying process. You have to show up at the point they’re looking for that solution. As an example, on my site, if you look up terms like “money coach,” “financial coach,” “investment coach,” all those terms with coaching and finance, I will rank pretty highly. The way a buying process works for a coaching service is people will look for those money terms like “money coach” or “financial coach” or “financial coaching.” It’s a trust relationship. The buying process is you don’t have to be number one. It’s like a retirement calculator where somebody comes in, they will use the top result, they have their answer, and they’re out. With coaching, it’s a personal service, it’s a trusted relationship. People will go through the first couple pages of results, at least the first page. They will try to find somebody that they resonate with. They are trying to find somebody they can trust and connect with, somebody whose message they resonate with. They will go through the first couple pages of coaches in search of a coach. If you are looking for a financial coach, you have a financial problem you are trying to solve. You don’t want a traditional financial advisor; otherwise you would search for those terms. The site then has to position itself as a trusted authority in that field to where they feel compelled to connect with you. You also want to write your message in a way that it’s unique and stands for what you provide and only you can provide. For example, my message connects a lot of personal growth issues with wealth-building. In other words, the way I like to say it is that building wealth is the ultimate path to personal growth because of everything you have to go through in order to get there. The real gold is in who you become on the journey, not in the destination itself. That’s a very different positioning statement, but it’s true. It’s been true in my life and in my clients’ lives. It’s not some cutesy thing; it’s what I truly believe. But that’s unique in my message. Everybody else is about the money. They will all position themselves next to a Lamborghini or a fancy mansion. I’m sitting by a stream and talking about how life is about experiences, not stuff. Nobody wants more money; they want what they think money will get them. For the most part, people don’t want more stuff; they want a more fulfilling life. People connect with that. My target client does. That’s the point. Your message won’t relate to everybody, but it will relate to your target client, who you will want to attract. It will stand out from the crowd. If you go through the first couple pages of search results for things like “money coach” or “financial coaching” and look at those, I’m clearly a trusted authority in the field. That’s where I rank. People then contact you because that’s the buying process for a coach. Nearly every coach gives away a free strategy session. That’s where you get to know the client. You talk over stuff with them. All you have to do, the whole purpose of that content marketing is to get you to the strategy session. The strategy session is where the close takes place. Again, it’s just positioning yourself in the buying process. You have to have enough flow in clients in that buying process to have a full practice or a full business. In my case, back when I did it, I have grown since then. I don’t know what the numbers are now, but there was something like 25,000 searches for “money coach” if I am recalling right. You apply the 1% rule to it on the Internet. Of 25,000 searches, 1% of those click through, that is 250. 1% of that is 2.5 clients that will actually contact you and possibly convert. That’s 2.5 clients. That is only one term, right? There are a whole bunch of these terms I would rank for. If you take 2.5 clients for the one term and you say, “Okay, my average retention on a client is two years,” that would mean you could carry a constant practice of roughly 50 people, which is way more than I could ever fulfill. Just that one strategy alone right there more than filled my practice. One other thing we want to go through is one more step that I want to make sure we get in before we move. That is the actual conversion process. It’s traffic times conversion equals profit. That’s the formula. Hugh: Traffic x conversion = profit. Really good formula. Thank you. Todd: Very straightforward. That’s the way business works. So far, I have been showing the traffic, and I have been showing the first step to conversion. The actual conversion to a coaching relationship is a trust relationship. It’s going to be different for your business. You have to relate what I am saying to your business. The key is understanding the buying process of a client. I am relating the buying process of a coaching client to illustrate the point. You’re going to have to figure out the buying process for your clients. In my case, they all get a free strategy session. You have two conversions that have to take place. You have to convert them from cold traffic to somebody who wants a strategy session. You then have to convert the strategy session to a paying client. In the strategy session, I had a system set up where the person would have to first prequalify themselves. A prequalification is genuine, yet it also creates the bit of exclusivity. What I found in doing coaching was that it’s really a selection process. It’s not a marketing or sales process. For the right client, coaching was a no-brainer thing. It would definitely put more money in their pocket than it costs them. The key was finding the right client. So I gave away an article that everybody had to pre-read to qualify themselves. They had to say where they fit into the process when they applied for a strategy session. They would have to read the article to tell me where they fit in as a target client who is going to get more value than they paid for. In that essay, if you will, or article, it would go through and explain everybody that shouldn’t do coaching; they should instead learn the stuff over here and over here because it has a higher value relative to their need. It’s a more efficient way to get the information. The coaching is properly used in a very specific way for a very specific client, and either they qualify or they don’t. I just laid it out right up front, right? Those are the clients that are going to be great clients for me. Then they would write in and say, “I qualified under blah blah blah,” and they would pre-qualify themselves. That sorts out the strategy session. Very high percentages of the strategy sessions would close. It would be like 70-80% of the strategy sessions would actually result in a paying client. What it is is a prequalification system that keeps me from wasting my time on my phone. It sorts people. The key to that is the top of the funnel. We are explaining a funnel here. The top of the funnel has to be large enough that you can afford to be picky like that. You have to get that traffic coming in, and then you have to have the conversion process. By the time they come to me, they are definitely pre-sold. They have read my material. Most of my coaching clients would come to me and say, “Todd, I listened to all your podcasts.” One guy told me that he and his wife listened to each one of my podcasts three times before they called me. Three times. He and his wife. This guy made $600,000 a year. His time is very valuable. That is how much time he put into researching me: he researched my name, my business. He read a bunch of my articles, and then he contacted me. By the time he contacted me, he was pre-sold. That is the beauty. Once you go into a strategy session with this much pre-qual, the only thing you have to do is help him. Hugh: You have given us a whole lot of data here. It is a brilliant process. There is a couple of places I want to go back and clarify. I sound like I cut you off. This guy made $600,000 because he has the due diligence to do research before he jumps into something, like before he talked to you. Todd: Very high-quality clients. You are not dealing with college kids kicking the tires or people who can’t pay your bills or wannabes. You are only paying for people who are serious. Hugh: Your website is financialmentor.com. You got at least five books. How Much Money Do I Need to Retire? Those can be found on financialmentor.com? Todd: Yeah, and also on Amazon. Look up my name, or look up Financial Mentor on Amazon or Todd Tresidder. Go to my website, and you will see the books in the sidebar. Hugh: How long have you been doing this particular program? Todd: I got the website back in 1998 after I sold the hedge fund. I really didn’t do anything with it. I made tons of mistakes. It was a brochureware website. It was good enough back then because there wasn’t much competition on the Internet. It was good enough back then to bring clients into the coaching practice. But it was basically brochureware. It had tons of mistakes in it. We went into the top of the real estate market, so around 2006 or 2007, I got really uncomfortable. I was mostly focused on my real estate business back then. By real estate business, I mean personal ownership of a bunch of apartment buildings. I got uncomfortable with the financial leverage in real estate as the credit bubble bloomed. I sold everything, and I finished selling by 2007. At that point, all I had left was the house I live in. Once the downturn had really developed in full force and I saw how the government was going with it, I really wasn’t comfortable bringing financial leverage back in, and I am still not comfortable with it. I think things are too unstable. I decided to pursue time leverage, knowledge leverage, and technology leverage to build out this business finally. Also, along that time, I was introduced to Wordpress around 2008/2009. To make a short story long, I got the URL back in 1998, developed a junkie site that sat there for about ten years, got ahold of Wordpress, and the site has been through about three evolutions since then to the form you see now. I have only really taken it seriously since about 2009 or so. Hugh: You spoke early on in this interview about you not looking at a demographic, but a psychographic. There may be people listening to this that aren’t really familiar with that term. How do you sort out your psychographic? What does that mean? Todd: Let’s use my course as an example. What I’m doing in the business right now, we’ll get to it or not, is I am moving from coaching services. as you directly alluded to, those more than sold out. Couldn’t take new clients. I have been sold out for years. If you go on my website now, you will see I am not accepting new clients. I am moving the whole business to putting Todd in a box through courses. I coached for fifteen years. More than that now because I am still coaching, just the old clients that are still with me. I guess it’s 20 years I have been coaching now. I am dating myself here. I have been coaching 20 years. What I learned is what people go through to achieve financial freedom. The big solution I provide is financial freedom, like serious education for financial freedom, not get-rich-quick garbage, like serious education. How do you engineer your life to develop financial freedom with reliability and security? That is the solution I provide on the website. The moniker is Financial Freedom for Smart People. I am moving everything to courses because what I learned through coaching over those years is my clients slowly showed me it’s a step-by-step math they follow. Everybody comes to me at a different step in the process, but they all follow the same seven steps. I am formulating Seven Steps to Seven Figures. All the courses are already formulated. They are in drawers; I am just making them manifest if you will by formally putting them in courses. The first one available now is Step 3. That is how to design your life to result in wealth. It’s a wealth-planning course, but it is totally different from traditional financial planning or investment planning. We can go into that if you want. The point being, there is a psychographic for that course. It took me a while to figure that out. I was very confused. At first, I was like, It’s going to be people over 50, and thy are trying to retire. This, that, and the other thing. I was wrong. People who were college kids who were just getting out of school and getting started with a career. I had stay-at-home moms. I had men at 70 who were multi-millionaires. I couldn’t figure it out. It took me forever. I was interviewing my clients in the course trying to find out a commonality. It was obvious, but I didn’t get it at first. It was anybody who was serious enough about their financial freedom to study the subject and do something about it. That was the common psychographic. It was people who were serious about it. They weren’t just wannabes. They weren’t thinking it would be nice to have it. They were actively doing something about it. That’s why they were willing to pay some money for a course that gave them a complete soup-to-nuts solution. My target client is hanging out on other financial independence blogs. They are reading this stuff. Most of what you find on the subject is somewhat limited; it’s mostly about extreme frugality and how you achieve financial independence at an early age. My target client is studying it, and they say, “I want more.” They run across my course and buy it. Does that make sense to you, Hugh? Hugh: It makes a huge amount of sense. Todd, it’s probably 3% of the population that has been able to figure that out for their own benefit. Todd: I am just following standard business practices. When a course is new and the size of the people coming in is small enough that you can have personal interaction, I am having it. I am calling them up. I am getting on the phone with them. I am talking about the course. I am asking them how it’s working for them. What are their interests? What are their dreams? Where do they come from? How did they find me? How did they buy the course? How often do you get to talk to the course creator? Who cares enough to do that? You go in there and start seeing it. They will hand it to you if you ask the right questions. Hugh: Thank you for that. That is so helpful. It is so helpful. You did a lot of trial and error. I don’t call those mistakes; I call them learning opportunities. Todd: The way I approach it is everything is figure-out-able. You have to apply good business practices and step forward and apply risk management every step of the way. Eventually you will get there. I never knew courses when I started, and the course came out great. I didn’t know Internet marketing when I started. I was the first financial coach on the Internet when I started. Didn’t even exist as a business model. I had this harebrained crazy idea that I wanted to separate financial advice and financial education from investment product sales. Back in the 1990s, where did you get your financial information? It was from a broker, which is inherent conflict of interest. Now it doesn’t sound so revolutionary, but it is 20 years later. Hugh: I had a broker once. I kept getting broker and broker. We won’t go there. You figured out who needs you. You talk about getting the funnel. Here is the funnel. You need enough people in the funnel to be able to sort out those numbers you were talking about. How do you get people into that funnel? Todd: That’s what I was explaining earlier. I gave that content marketing example. I’m sorry, I didn’t explain in detail though. If you go on my site, you will see an entire area under Financial Coaching. There is a library of articles in there that are all connected into a silo of content. Hugh: Back up from that. How do you get them to come there? How do you drive traffic there? Todd: I am not driving traffic. They are searching for a solution, and I am becoming the authority in it. The key is you have to find out their buying process. It goes back to the beginning of the conversation. It’s about their buying process; it’s not about me. This is the thing that almost everybody misses in marketing. Nobody gives a damn about you. All they care about is themselves and their problems and what solution you can provide. The only thing they want from you is the solution. That may sound harsh, but isn’t it real? You’re laughing because it’s real. Hugh: I’m laughing because so few people have been able to figure that out. Here I am. Just being on social media, people hit me all the time, “Here I am, I’m great, buy my stuff.” Wait a minute. We haven’t had a conversation. I don’t know you. How do you know what I need? Todd: People think it’s about building up- You need to be authoritative, but you need to be authoritative in the way you give. When you’re giving to your customer, you have to come from the customer’s viewpoint. What are they looking for? What will convert them? They will convert when you give them so much value for free. The beauty of the Internet and content marketing is you can give unbelievable amounts of value for free, and it still makes good business sense because you can deliver videos and e-books and audio downloads and podcasts. You can deliver unbelievable solutions at almost no cost to yourself, just the cost of time of producing the media. When you do an authoritative body of work, Google will figure it out. If you structure it properly, Google will see that you’re an authority. But you have to build that authoritative body of work. I built an authoritative body of work in financial coaching quite a few years ago. It’s been top-ranked in Google ever since. Hugh: That’s the secret there. When I work with clients that are solopreneurs, we work on creating their position of influence. That is precisely what you are describing. Why do people need you? Who do you want to influence first? How do you want to influence them? What do you want them to do about it? There is figuring that dynamic out. You have given us a whole lot of data. I am just trying to go back and capture some of the significant sound bites here and some of the steps in the process because you figured out a very good process. People can go to your website and learn some things or buy some of your books. In the front end, creating that position of influence, you’re an expert at things. That is so key. You created the body of information. Go back to that part again. How did you start creating this expert position? Todd: For the terms “financial coaching,” all that, I did curated research around those terms. I saw all the searches people were using. How do you become a money coach? What is a money coach? How is financial coaching different from financial advice? Then what I did was I turned it into- I am very much about the consumer. I am a consumer advocate. That is how I got into this business. I got tired of all the- Where there is money, there is power. If you are in the money business, there are a lot of corrupt people who are trying to exploit people. If you read my book Don’t Hire a Financial Coach… Until After You Read This Book, that book was directly targeted at all the clients who were coming to me from the back-end coaching programs off of New York Times best-selling authors. What they were doing was they were getting a book that establishes them as an authority. Most people don’t know this, but there are floors of coaches off in Utah in high-rise buildings with headsets on in cubicles. They market these back-end coaching services to New York Times bestsellers. They create this curriculum. But it’s not real coaching. It’s not how coaching is best applied. It is very expensive content delivery, and it’s overpriced. But because it’s labeled as coaching, people can upsell it as a back-end sell off of their NYT bestselling books. So I’m not going to name names, but you can probably guess the people in my business who did this. I wrote a book as a consumer protection device so that consumers could recognize a genuine financial coach who is genuinely providing coaching in the way that it works and adds value versus somebody who is using it as a renaming metaphor for content delivery done in a very expensive, lazy way. That is an example of a consumer advocate book. The books are another thing, though. What they do is establish authority. They are another source of what you call high-relationship conversions. After people read my books or listen to my podcasts, they have an experience of me. There is trust involved. When they come over to the site, they are a different class of client than somebody who just did a Google search. I should say prospect, not client, a whole different class of prospect because you have to convert people from prospect to client. There is a consistent conversion process. Hugh: Absolutely. A lot of people that I know and that I talk to and that I see some dialogue on social media have a lot of traffic. A lot of people come to their website. They are not really converting. Is part of it that they haven’t really established the value and relationship with the client? Or is there some other secret for conversion? Todd: Let me put it this way. Hugh, do you like to be converted? Hugh: No. Todd: No, of course not. None of us do. That is why “Subscribe to my newsletter” is a losing proposition. Nobody wants another newsletter. Nobody needs more information. As I said before, they need solutions. They need value. You have to figure out how you can deliver value as part of the conversion. What is it that you can give that people will want enough to convert? I.e. become a subscriber on your list. It’s always about giving. That is the beauty of content marketing. That is what makes it fun. It’s a giving business. I don’t like to pitch, but I am more than happy to give and in the process have a smart business model behind it. Then my profits become a measure of how many people I’ve helped as opposed to how much I extracted from people or something. As long as you are always giving more value than you take, it’s a fun business. It’s hard work, but it’s fun. Hugh: Well, I do detect a bit of passion in your voice. You have excitement when you talk about what you do and a passion for it. That is underlying. You really have to want to do what you’re doing. What did you say about this is a giving business? Would you go back to that? You slipped that one in there. Todd: Think about it. If you go on my website, what do you get when you subscribe? You can get a free e-book and a free course called 52 Weeks to Financial Freedom. I am changing that up by the way, but the course as it exists right now as we record this is 52 Weeks to Financial Freedom. It maps up the entire financial freedom process step by step. You can see all the steps. It gives you the overview framework. If that is your goal, which is my target client again, if that is your goal, then that is a high value proposition. The free book I give away is 18 Essential Lessons of a Self-Made Millionaire. That goes through and shares all kinds of valuable ideas I learned along the journey. I give away transcripts to podcasts for opting in. I give away a free PDF of any article. I am known for extremely long-body content. I write articles that are almost as long as e-books. I did a whole expose on Whole Life insurance and how it is sold incorrectly and how it should be sold correctly and who is in it for and who gets ripped off by it. I give common business sense principles around Whole Life. 12,000 words. It’s almost an e-book length article. A lot of people don’t want to read that much online so I give away a free PDF of every article. There is no ads on it. It’s all beautifully formatted. All you have to do is opt in. You can get a free PDF of any article on the site. Also, my calculators. I have one of the largest collections of financial calculators on the Internet. I give them away for free. You can use them all you want, no opt-in required. However, if you would like a screen print of all your calculated results with all the tables and charts and everything cool with it, then when you opt in, I will send it to you. What I am pointing out is there is giving at every step. I will give you the article, and if you want the PDF, just opt in. I will give you the calculator for free, and if you want the printed results sent to you in a nice format, opt in and I will send it to you for free. I will give you the free book and the free course. I give, give, give. Always a value. Something that is relevant and valuable to where you are anywhere on my site at that point. The giveaways are so consistent throughout the site that I actually tested what most marketers do, which is pop-up boxes, or interstitials in the business. In the old advertising business, it was called interruption marketing, where you just interrupt them personally over their screen until you irritate them so much they opt in, or some crazy idea. I actually tried them one time. I did an experiment for a month, and my opt-in rate dropped. My time on my site dropped. All the quality standards of the site dropped. Like time on site, page views per visitor, all those numbers dropped, and my opt-in dropped. That stuff only works when your site doesn’t have proper opt-in bonuses. If you have proper incentives for people to opt in, they will opt in. If you chase them around with all these interstitials, you will chase them away. Let people choose to opt in. That’s your quality subscriber. Give them something worth subscribing for. Hugh: If you have a big list, it’s actually meaningless. The free e-book that they get, would you give us that title again? Todd: 18 Essential Lessons of a Self-Made Millionaire. Hugh: That is worth going right there. Wow. Todd: It’s free, and it’s a short read that is packed with value. If you delivered a junk e-book on the back end of it, what did you accomplish? It’s got to be good. If they come in and trusted you enough to give you their name, and you deliver a piece of junk e-book that is two pages long and says nothing or is a bullet point list, that didn’t build trust or relationship. The whole point of this is to build trust and relationship for the high-value conversion. In a dating analogy, it’s the equivalent of saying, “Do you want to go for a cup of coffee?” That is the opt-in. If you immediately say, “Come home with me. Let’s have sex,” it’s not going to be a conversion. There has to be trust and relationship built. The desire has to exist before the conversion takes place. Hugh: Such wise words. We’ve had a lot of information in the last 30-40 minutes here. This will be transcribed, and it will be on the podcast and on my website. Your links will be there. I would encourage people- What is the name of your podcast by the way? Todd: Financial Mentor. Very original. Everything is Financial Mentor. Facebook, Twitter. It’s Financial Mentor everywhere. I have the branding across the board. Hugh: That explains itself. It explains itself. Todd: Yeah. Again, I was lucky. I got it back in ’98. I started the business early on that you could get a decent URL that matches the business. It’s a financial education business. I am mentoring people on how to build wealth. Hugh: You make it sound easy, but you have worked hard to make it sound easy. Todd: Very much so. That is the mark of- You know somebody understands it when they can explain it in a way that simplifies it and makes it actionable. You only get to that point by walking the talk. If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have fumbled this thing left and right. It’s only because I have now done it. Once you really know it at a deep level, it’s pretty simple stuff. It’s not complex. But it’s a lot of work to do. To do well, it takes some effort. You don’t just throw it up there. Hugh: I find a lot of people make it harder than it already is. It’s already hard. When I try to simplify it, I liked- Todd: Let’s clarify. I want to clarify something. It’s not hard; it’s a lot of work. It’s relatively simple to do. You just have to be committed to do the work to create all the value for people. If you’re willing to do the work to create value because you care enough to give that value, it’s not hard. It’s just a lot of work. Hugh: If people are tired of their subsistence, getting along with what they’re making, they can go to http://FinancialMentor.com or listen to your podcast. It’s on iTunes, I’m sure. Financial Mentor. And your Facebook page is Financial Mentor. Going to your website, there is a lot of free stuff. Todd, you’ve given us a huge amount. Todd: I guess I wasn’t lying, huh? Hugh: That doesn’t do any good, does it? It’s the antithesis of those people saying, “Come to my webinar, and you will make a lot of money.” They give you a couple of tips and they tell you you should buy something to get the rest. What you are doing is giving people a large body of information and saying, “If you like that, there’s more.” You have really given people something of value. That is so key today because there are so many people trying to trick us. You’re giving people really solid information. We found each other on LinkedIn, and I was looking for credible people to do an interview for my podcast and vice versa to exchange with credible people and grow my network and help you grow your network. I am really glad that you and your team responded. You have a high-functioning team that responded on your behalf. My area is leadership and organizational development. Our work is very similar. Somewhere in here, you had a quote that was very similar to what Jim Rohn used to teach. It’s not making your goal that is the most important thing; it’s what happens to you and your business in achieving the goal. I wanted to highlight that. Todd: Think about it. Business is just one of the stages on which you play out your stuff in life. You have various stages you play out on. You have relationship, money, business, spirituality. There are all these different stages on which you are playing out your stuff. This is just one of them. Ultimately, what is life? I like to think of life as becoming the best version of yourself. Treading a path of personal growth. You are growing and moving into whatever you can become. It’s a never-ending journey, and that’s what makes it fun and exciting. Hugh: It is. We have had some interesting people. I like to record these live on Facebook and see who shows up. It is totally unannounced. We randomly picked up some interesting people. As we do the wrap here, Todd, this is incredibly important information. People will get to track it by looking at the transcript. What would you leave us with? What closing thought or challenge would you like to leave the listener with today? Todd: Just do the work. To quote Steven Pressfield, Do the work. Overcome your resistance, and move your life forward.” Guess what? This isn’t a trial run. You can look at Hugh and me here. We are older dudes now. We’ve been down the road. You’re going to get to our spot really fast. Surprisingly fast. It’s not a trial run. Don’t waste your days. Get out there and make it happen. Just do it, to quote Nike. Why else would you live? What else is the point of your day? Don’t waste time. Get out and make it happen. Hugh: Todd Tresidder, you made my day. This was certainly not a waste of time. It was very important. Thank you for giving such value to me and my listeners. Todd: Thanks, Hugh for having me on your show.