We lost all of our locations pretty much overnight because we were leasing those locations. And that's three and a half years of hard work and money totally down the drain. We had to lay off the majority of our staff. When that was all done, I sat back and looked at him like, this is either the most depressing thing that has happened to me in a long time or there's an opportunity in here that could be much bigger than anything we were able to access before coronavirus. And I trained my brain and kind of our team's energy and culture around the fact that whatever has happened has happened since the past, it's done. What now, what's possible going forward from this? And how can we make ourselves better as a team? How can we make a better company? How can we provide a better service for people coming out of this? Because what we are offering is going to be more in demand than ever before when this is over. This is Startup to Storefront, the podcast where we inspire entrepreneurship through truth. Today's guest is Ben Seidel, founder of Neighborly. In much the same way as we work or Airbnb, reimagined how we work and vacation, Neighborly is reimagining how we interact within our community. Odds are high that there's a couple vacant commercial real estate properties in your town. Some might see vacant properties as nothing more than urban blight, but Ben sees opportunity. Instead of sitting empty while waiting for the next long-term tenant, Neighborly partners with the landlords to rent these spaces out for everything from one-time meetings, limited-time restaurant pop-ups to multi-year leases for retail stores. So listen in as we cover everything from how he shifted his mentality to succeed in a hopefully soon-to-be-post COVID world, the magic of turning vacant buildings into community hubs, and his bullish views on AI and how it will bring new significance to the humble parking lot. If you're not subscribed, can you go ahead and do that right now before we get on with the video? It helps us out tremendously. That's all we ask, and we're back. All right, guys, welcome to the podcast. On today's show, we're talking to Ben, the founder of Neighborly. Ben, thanks for joining. Tell everyone a little bit about your company. Hey, well, thanks for having me. That's awesome to be here. I've been following you guys' podcast on Instagram mostly, and it's awesome to be a part of it, so definitely thanks for having me. I am the CEO and co-founder of Neighborly, and we are on a mission to democratize access to commercial real estate. And what that means is a bunch of buzzwords, but what that really means is we are hoping to provide access to street-level locations in your neighborhoods and your cities that are vacant. We believe that the commercial real estate world looks at commercial real estate, especially street-level spaces as binary. They're either zero, which is vacant, making nothing, providing no economic utility or social utility. Or one, they are fully leased and that rent role is being collected. We believe there's an opportunity to actually build a layer of commercial real estate management inside of that to unlock a short-term activation layer that lets people create, test businesses, gather, meet, have art shows, all these different things that people want to do. There isn't really an affordable, accessible, and seamless way to do that in your community, on your main street, in your town, yet we have all these vacant storefronts everywhere. So we're on a mission to basically partner with landlords and property owners to open up these locations for short-term utilization. So that's in a nutshell, what we do, it's all about empowering creators, it's about empowering local citizens to take back their vacant storefronts and use them for good, create opportunities, bring their imagination to life, start a new business, build some memories, bring people together. There's all these things that we need real estate to catalyze. We need real estate to make these things happen. Yes, there are virtual versions to these now. Yes, almost all those things are possible to do online, but we're humans. We desire connection. We need emotional, psychological, and physical well-being, and that involves being around other human beings from a genetic standpoint. And so what we're really focused on trying to solve is how can we make our cities more vibrant? How can we reduce the barriers to entry mostly for people who have traditionally been barred from using some of these spaces? So it's a pretty exciting thing to try and take on. It's a big idea, it's hard, but what we believe is that this can really make it impact on the livability of cities and neighborhoods. I wanted to have you on for so many reasons, Ben. One, obviously I'm a real estate person, and so in this world I see a lot of opportunities, especially coming from the tech world where as a startup we were forced to sign a five-year lease in a space that was really big enough for 10 people and any startup in San Francisco or elsewhere is probably gonna outgrow that. And it just seemed really silly to me that there wasn't any flexible spaces. And this is just giving you context around like 2015. Obviously we work comes in and we work solves that. We work says these long-term leases don't make any sense. If we have sub-lease upon sub-lease upon sub-lease, really foolish, the landlord needs to be a little bit smarter, but they're not. We work comes in and kind of dominates this world. Which for me never really made sense to be honest. I just didn't see the economics of it working out and I hated their coffee. That's just me. You know, but I think there was something there. And I think people like you are onto that something I wanna give context to people since we're talking about this kind of in an almost post-COVID world. When was it that you first launched the concept of the company? Was it, obviously it was pre-COVID, but just to give people a sense of reference, was it 2018? We've opened our very first location in 2016 right around Thanksgiving. So we're about four and a half years old. I started the business with my brother who was the only person in the world that I could convince to move and to start up this wild idea with no money. And so you moved down from Seattle and neither of us had any experience in commercial real estate. I didn't even know what Elise meant. You know, I didn't get it. I was afraid of it, but we saw I was going to school in Berkeley and Berkeley is a very well-to-do place and a thriving Bay Area at the time, 2015. And there was just a wild amount of storefront vacancies. Beautiful spaces too, right? Like nice architecture, clean, ready to go, ready to be used. We just totally boarded up, signs in the window. Nobody calls you back if you call that number. And what I realized was like, this is just, this is mad. Why are these places big? And they're in the heart of the city. They're in the heart of these neighborhoods. They're great spaces. What's wrong? Of course, everyone's being impacted by the shift to e-commerce. Amazon was really having a big impact at that time and people were trying to figure out what to do and you could just see the writing on the wall that this vacancy issue was only going to get more severe as time went on. I never, of course, envisioned a time like we went through in 2020 where the world was turned upside down and the vacancy issue, we still don't know what it is because we haven't come out of it, but I will tell you that when we do come out of this, it's going to shock some people. And so we started the business to try and solve that issue and it's been four and a half years. We've done every number of iterations and versions of this business to get to this point today, but it's been a long, it's been a long, really fun and exciting journey which I'll never forget. And I think we're just getting to the best part of the story, to be honest. I would think that this presents an interesting time for you and your company because like you said, we don't really know the full extent of what we're going to come out of COVID into in terms of properties being vacant. And for neighborly, that seems like on the surface to be a really good opportunity. You can't necessarily take advantage or capitalize on that just yet because public gatherings are still really not allowed or and no one's, not many people I would say are seeking that out, but on the other side of that, do you look at this as something where you're going to jump as the opportunity arises or like how do you approach this kind of conundrum? Yeah, absolutely really good question. So I think like every small business in the world, but specifically for this podcast in the United States, we have been through the ringer. We got knocked out. We had eight locations of leases when the pandemic hit. Of course, we got banned from operating and we are still more or less currently banned from operating at this point in February, 2021. So it has almost been a full year without the ability to run our business. And we're really small business. And I think what every small business entrepreneur has had to confront is the duality of this situation in the sense that with every wildfire or forest fire, which is what this is for small business, there is very ripe future with fresh soil and ingredients and the ability to basically rebirth a new version of that forest. And that's what we're seeing I think and to look at, there's two ways to look at that wildfire of COVID-19 is like it's the end or it's the beginning. And it's certainly hard to look at it when it's burning to say I can see the other side of it. And that was I think the hardest psychological part of last year for any retailer or small businesses is keeping the faith, right?   You might have to lose everything like we did. We lost all of our locations, all eight of them. We were in Sacramento, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley. We lost every single one of our eight locations pretty much overnight because we were leasing those locations. And that's three and a half years of hard work and money totally down the drain. We had to lay off the majority of our staff. So it was complete construction for us and like every other business who does in real life physical operations. And when that was all done, I sat back and looked at him like this is either the most depressing thing that has happened to me in a long time professionally or there's an opportunity in here that could be much bigger than anything we were able to access before coronavirus. And I trained my brain and kind of our team's energy and culture around the fact that whatever has happened has happened. It's in the past, it's done. What now, what's possible going forward from this? And how can we make ourselves better as a team? How can we make a better company? How can we provide a better service for people coming out of this? Because what we are offering is going to be more in demand than ever before when this is over. Our goal is to survive long enough to see that through. And in the meantime, it's triaging what you have to do to literally stay solvent. We flirted with insolvency multiple times, found our way through that financially and barely scraped by and we're in an okay place now to keep going. But that's obviously every business's first order of operations, get your finances straight, do whatever it takes to pull through this thing financially so that you can start to plan what the other side looks like. And we did that, thankfully, with support from the government, of course, PPP, SBA, supremely thankful for our country actually in this time. And there's a lot of ways to look at the failures of government or the confusion of government. But I would say that regardless, we pulled together pretty strong as a country and supported people as much as we could. And it certainly helped us get through that. So on the other side, the answer to the silver lining, we saw that A, there would be an incredible amount of supply that we could acquire. There would be B, poll hosts of new landlords and REITs and operators who would be interested in new models of business. And then C, there's an entire new generation of customers of users of people who can create things in our communities that are just waiting to rebirth themselves as well and are going to need a new system in which to do that. So if we compare all three of those opportunities together, access the supply, build new landlord partnerships, and then redesign our offerings to better suit the post-pandemic economy, then we could potentially find a much brighter future for ourselves after this. That was the way that we approached it throughout 2020 and even still now, or we're still not out of the woods yet, but we're close. Weirdly enough, it's been one of the worst thing that's happened to us and the best thing that's happened to us at the same exact time. And there are a lot of entrepreneurs who I think could say the same thing because it's forced us as entrepreneurs, especially physical entrepreneurs, to digitize our beliefs, digitize our offerings, digitize our data systems, spend that quality thought time to develop those systems so that when you come out of this, you're on the channel. You've got more capabilities and understandings than you ever had before because you retooled. And so I'm excited about the future of small business in America. I'm excited about the future of retail. I'm excited for our future, of course, and it's just gonna be a new generation for sure for creators all over the world, especially in this country. I think there's just a crazy amount of opportunity. It's easy to look at it like devastation, but the other way to look at it, which I think is healthy, is to say, wow, everything is possible now. Landlords who wouldn't have talked to you before will talk to you. Leases that might have cost double last year or 2019 are gonna cost half. You can access opportunities, resources, business partnerships like never before right now. And I think that's the bright side and that's I think what we as a company really wanna focus on and encourage our community and our creators and our network to think positively and look at all the great things that we're gonna do as a country and as a community coming out of this. I love that. I think it's spot on. I mean, I think it's funny pre-doing this. I remember Nick knows this well, but I remember like going to visit Facebook or Google and I was like, do you guys see what they're doing here? They're just trying to build you a home. Like you can get your haircut here. You can get your dry cleaning here. You can go to the gym here. I'm like, do you, you can like food, right? Like all these tech people I know we're just making decisions on who's gonna have peaking duck on Chinese New Year all over there. And it was like this thing that would just drive me crazy. It was like from a philosophical perspective. I said, do you not see that you're losing your humanness in doing this? Like you're just literally a robot. You might as well just be on a conveyor belt walking in and then walking out at 8 p.m. Like that's really the setup. People laughed at me. They thought it was crazy.  And that was just me. Like that my personal beliefs are different, I guess. COVID hits and I go, finally, finally people can understand that there's the whole notion of trying to build culture while you're all working together is silly. Like companies like Google and these major companies a large part of why they build these assets is a tax play. And so there's this notion that, oh, we wanna build culture. So we're all learning together. It's like, okay, that might be kind of true, but you've been sold that bill of goods. It's not how I'm programmed. And I certainly don't believe it. COVID hits and I go, this is great. And to some extent, because it's like no one can go to the office and now we have to reconfigure to, which I think puts your company, just like you're saying in a really beautiful position because it's like, I think people do wanna meet just like dating, right? It's like no one can do zoom dating full-time. You have to at some point meet the person and make sure they are who they say they are and hug them maybe, right? You have to do these things in person, you know? And it also creates a flexible environment for real estate to operate in different ways. I know right now your company's focused on meetings. We had a company called Popup Groceron. And so popups, you know, I feel like they fit right into your model where they're putting brands on for a week or two weeks, but it's a short amount of time. But in a really cool way, I know you're doing events, you're doing production, like video shoots, let's say here in LA would be a good example of it. One of the things we're doing, and this is something I wanted to chat with you about.  So it was just like this iconic coffee truck vehicle that just drove around LA. It was a 1950s Citroen, this old French vehicle. It breaks down. Only one person in LA can fix this vehicle, which does not make a business. And so they call me saying, hey, Diego, we can't operate this thing. We're thinking of selling it COVID hits, right? So they can't operate it anyway. And I thought, let's put this thing in the building, right? Let's put this iconic brand, it's their brand. And so to sell it, I thought was kind of silly. If we put it in the building, let's do that. And then as Nick and I were discussing, like maybe we can put our podcast studio behind the coffee truck, but in like a speak easy type way where it's kind of secret and really cool and unique. And so one day once COVID passes, we can bring in our guests and our guests, like imagine you walking in as our guests, like, whoa, cool car, right? Here's my coffee. And a big part of podcasting is like energy, just like beautiful design, right? There's a big like, there's a big part of it where if you can put people at ease or make them forget about their 20 employees or their emails, it helps. It helps have a more honest conversation. And Nick said, maybe we can rent this out and blah, blah, blah. And so as creators start, like how do you see from your own perspective sort of the, almost like the rise of the creator as a space that right now is something that no one talks about, right? And people think, oh, that's only in LA. That's only in small parts of New York because New York is so finance driven. And there's a part of me that like wants to double down big on this type of experience where I think there's something here based on what you do in terms of like just to recap the meetings, the pop-ups, the events and then some of the production value. What has been the best thing for your business and do you think that's gonna change post COVID? That's a complex question. You're right on about the range of offerings and kind of how we position ourselves. But if I could explain it in a simpler way, which may be a little bit too broad for a lot of people to comprehend, but we actually see ourselves as a layer, an operating layer on top of commercial real estate. When I'm envisioning these products or services that we're creating for a given space, we are certainly tailoring certain spaces for certain things, especially when our landlords are saying, hey, we're happy to give you a retail space in the row in downtown LA, but we'd like you to do retail only. Awesome. We need to have an ability to service that location with that exact use case.  Do you have any restaurant creators? Do you have any restaurants or is there any chefs who are looking to build something new? Yes, the answer is yes. And so what we're really looking to do at the end of the day is we don't actually see the network at neighborly as being any one thing. We hope that when you come to neighborly.com and it's not necessarily that today because we're still pretty small, but when you go there in a couple of years, you should be able to find the specific type of space that you need to express yourself, to build a business, to create something that you have in mind in your neighborhood or your city. And that can be any number of those things that you mentioned. Now, what COVID has kind of sprung upon us in a lot of ways was that challenge of that question, which is before the pandemic, we basically only did meeting spaces, event spaces and a little bit of film production spaces. So they were like these general spaces that we furnished in a general way and people can use them how they like for those things and booking them by the day. Well, what happened is as we have been growing throughout this pandemic with new partnerships and new landlords, some of them, like I said, have said, well, we only want you to do production. We only want you to do a retail space. We only want you to do a restaurant space. Can you do that? So we started developing new service offerings to tailor specifically to those opportunities. And so what I see at a high level neighborly becoming is more or less this short-term layer that allows you to access and test and be a part of a commercial real estate space for a short period of time to do something locally. And that could be any number of those things. So as a quick example, just to put it concretely, one of our locations that we have in Berkeley, we took over, it was an old restaurant that had been abandoned for two and a half years and the water main was even disconnected, like not even water services saying is that off the grid now? And basically left for abandonment by this massive property company. Did they want that? No, but there just isn't a, there wasn't a long-term tenant in hand for that space and then marketed it for years and basically wrote it off as not worth even the effort to show it anymore or spend time marketing it. We got offered the opportunity to activate this building. So we looked at it and we're like, okay, this is pretty rough and needs a lot of work, but this used to be the center of community and it's part of Berkeley. Could we get it back to that point? What would it take? Turn the water back on, deep clean it, fix some of these electrical issues, give it a little paint job, put some tables and chairs in here, get the wifi going, turn the lights on, put it up to the community to use. What's gonna happen? We don't dictate after that point what it is that goes on because what we love to do is look at these spaces as canvases for creators to say, if you have a need for real estate in your community and you can't afford or you don't want a long-term lease because you're not ready or you don't feel like it's the right thing for you, but you wanna take a step in that direction, let us help you. Come check out our spaces. And so we got a restaurateur who was like down the block who lost their lease and was running out and they had nowhere else to go. They're a great, very popular restaurant, but they couldn't line up the next long-term lease. And so they're basically gonna be business homeless for a period of time, which could be six to eight months.  So they heard about us. They checked out this location in Berkeley. They were like, okay, it's pretty rough, but we have all the skills and equipment to make this thing operable. Could we make this into a pop-up restaurant? I was like, absolutely. And so they, within 36 days, went from it totally closed to opening for business. And they sold out on the very first day. They've been selling out week after week. It's just, it's like one of the hottest sandwich brands in the East Bay right now called Augies Montreal, Delhi. Best Philly cheese steaks, best economy sandwiches, but these are young entrepreneurs who, A, don't have the capital. B, you don't wanna lock themselves into some long-term situation without knowing what they're getting into. And C, they see what we're doing as in alignment with their mission and giving them the flexibility to talk and meet and serve their customers in the way that they want to. And so that is, at the heart of it, what we're doing is we're basically, in some sense, recycling commercial real estate that has been left for abandonment and saying there's value here. There's a lot of people who can bring a lot of value here. It's just that you're not talking to them. You're not positioning your property in a way that is accessible to these people. And if you did, watch out, because there is a storm of underrepresented, underappreciated, overlooked entrepreneurs and creators in our neighborhoods that do not get a chance because of the systemic way that this industry works to win and it's garbage, quite frankly. And we are on a mission to make sure that if you have a dream, you wanna work hard, you got a concept, you're willing to put the work in, it shouldn't be that you don't have the space. It should just be like, okay, maybe your idea didn't resonate or whatever kind of thing happened, but it wasn't because you couldn't try. And I think our country needs that to be able to basically democratize opportunity so that entrepreneurship comes back in this country bigger than it ever was before. Because if you guys know the stats, the last three decades before coronavirus, every single year, 30 years straight down to the lowest point in 30 year history in 2019 of the amount of small businesses started in this country. It's a crime. And everybody talks on Instagram about how great, like, you know, there's all these social media influencers that'll make you feel like in the startup world, that'll make you feel like everybody is creating the next billion dollar company and everyone's doing something and you're not, it's completely false. They've tricked us into thinking that everyone's doing it. So no one does it and our numbers are so low that I think it actually took this pandemic to wake people up and when they come out of this, I don't know if you guys have seen these stats, they're so exciting. 2020 was the highest amount of small business application registration in the last 30 years. It's like a wild spike. Quit your job, people, quit your job. I've been telling everybody. When these people come out of this and the economy is reopening, watch this wave, this next generation of entrepreneurs and creators, get these spaces, build their businesses, recreate our communities and express themselves. It's gonna be absolutely brilliant and breathtaking and I can't wait to see it. And that's the way we position ourselves for these people is to say that, do not let it be that you don't have the opportunity. Let us get you there, after that, it's up to you. I wanna cement something you said too. So traditionally, like, let's call it an office building that has a kitchen inside of it, right? And that tenant left because they couldn't survive because of COVID, so now they're out. And so what a normal landlord or even a property manager's gonna do is look to just fill that lease. And so they're looking for the same, they're looking for a copy and paste. So what they end up doing is bringing in a tenant with probably two years of free rent just to fill the space for a five-year time, which is good and bad. If you have a bad idea in the market, you wanna know quickly. And so a long-term lease isn't gonna show you that. And there's this thing I keep thinking of. It's like every single office that is, let's say, 5% occupied right now, every single huge tower they've built all around the world, there's a kitchen in that place, maybe two, maybe three. Literally it's the best time for you to be a ghost kitchen. Like just be a ghost kitchen, operate at all these places where there isn't anybody, just have an Instagram page and to your point, it's like you can now test your idea. We spoke to a ghost kitchen and as I was speaking to them, I'm like, this would be great if they did it in every single office space right now because it's also a free litmus test. It's like if the building's 5% occupied, that means there's some people that still want food inside this building. So at a minimum, you might have like 10 customers, let's say. But if you have an online storefront and you're a ghost kitchen, it's a perfect litmus test to see if your product's gonna resonate in the market. I think you're right. I mean, I think the challenge of it, right, is getting these old heads or this old school of thinking to start, to start, and it's almost like as you're talking, I'm like, what are the words we need to use? The no-no's are creator, creativity, flex space. Like we need to use words that they like. Yeah. Which is like, how do we boost your NOI with ghost kitchens? Like things like that. Absolutely. Yeah, passive income. Passive income, an immediate. But yeah, you're getting the crux of the work that we do. The work that we do is completely inglorious. It's behind the scenes, it's tough and it involves a lot of hard discussions and a lot of representing, basically going into things, representing this class of people who don't get a voice, don't get to see the table and saying, I'm here to speak for that and here's what's gonna happen if you open up yourself to these opportunities. And here's all our data to show you what will happen and we're giving you, we're inviting you on this journey to be a part of this.  Like try it out, what do you have to lose? It's a vacant space, you're making zero. We're talking about furnishing your space, making it operable, cleaning it and handing it over to people who are great and vetted and doing awesome things. So like, what's holding you back? And the reason why we are kind of are able to acquire a lot of spaces and close these deals with these old heads as you call them is that we're not trying to get in the way of the long-term lease. We see ourselves as supremely fitting right in the middle to say, we're only here to service your building to get you from vacancy to long-term lease, however long that takes, hire us to help you do that. And whenever it is, you call me and say, I finally got my five year lease, so happy. And I just get to say to you, I'm so happy for you, we'll be out next Monday. Like that is how it works. And when it's presented in that way, it's a no lose situation for the landlords. And so they have a hard time. They will try, trust me, poke holes in this and be like, here's why I don't want to do this or here's why it doesn't make sense or here's why it's a threat to my system. It's a threat to no one system except for being open to the future. And if you don't want to be open in the future and you want to just keep doing this and having your hands over your eyes and praying for the best that your long-term sentence is going to come around tomorrow is not a winning strategy. And so we've been fortunate enough to be able to tell this story at scale and to bring landlord partners along with us to help them do this. Because actually what's weird Diego is that most of them want to do this. They just don't know how. They don't know, it's hard work. They need a partner, they need you. They need someone that's gonna teach them or kind of show them success. Yeah, it's not hands off. We're good at everything from technology, software development, infrastructure, operations, management, customer experience, financial payments. I mean, there's this level of... And media, right? We talked a little bit about this. Let's talk, I want to jump into this because every company we have on here, it's the resounding, today we are a company that makes X but we're also a media company. And because X is new, the product is new and therefore the media company needs to either educate the consumer or make it really clear on what the product offering might be. And I think today we have a social media landscape that allows us to all kind of, even for us with the podcast media company on a real estate development, we film everything we do and we put together like this HDTV style show that was originally meant to be an investor update, to be honest, because I'm sure you do investor updates. I used to do them and they never get read because Jason is an investor in hundreds of companies and so why is he gonna take 10 minutes out of his day to read your PDF, right? And I would be like, I would get so mad at my investors and at some point I realized, you know what, it's not the, it's not, it's the medium, it's the PDF, we need to change the medium. And so I started it just as a way to, hey investors, here's what's happening. And it was like, great, it was like three minutes, Nick does a tremendous job with this, super fun. As you think about media, I know we kind of spoke about this, but what are you looking to do in the media landscape from a real estate perspective here in the coming years? We want to inspire that generation of entrepreneurs, those people who have been possibly sitting on the sidelines, have a dream in their head, have an idea, maybe consume a lot of content around that, but haven't actually done something. Haven't taken that step to open their first Shopify store online. Haven't taken a step to try a pop-up. Haven't tried to go out and start trying to wholesale to different accounts, but trying to really think about how do we use our voice and our platform to catalyze people to action, to get out of your house, to get off your couch when it's safe and bring about what it is in your head and try it. There's no harm in trying and when you try something that's been in your head, that catharsis, that creative catharsis that happens is one of the best feelings I think you can have as a human being who is passionate about something is being able to realize that in the full sense of that word of realization, bringing it into reality. And so we wanna really use our Instagram, our YouTube channel we're about to create, our whole platform, Twitter, to highlight what people are doing in your neighborhood, in a neighborhood space, what their stories are, what their challenges are, how they got this success, what it takes. And then also I would say it's a little bit deeper than that, just not just inspiration, but to catalyze someone to move, they also need to be trained, they need to be equipped, they need to know how to take the right first steps if they do take those first steps and that's what we're all about doing. So for the infrastructure that's going to help you do that safely in a fun way and in a way that is totally different than the way that commercial real estate used to work in the past. So we wanna be able to talk to you, inspire you, train you, educate you and then offer you the solutions and the infrastructure to go try, to go do something and let us help you with that in any way that we can.  And so because of that, those people wanna support him whether or not he's open for in-person dining, outside dining, whatever, they want to be a part of what he's built and he uses media as a way to connect with those people. And I see that happening with the most impressive creators in our network are people who don't actually have a physical footprint. This is some crazy like next level retail where your address no longer matters, you don't even have an address. Your address is your digital audience and the content and the value you create for them. And the addresses that you acquire in the future are ways to monetize that and to connect with those people in real life. They're ways to build your business. You do need to have an address. So use a neighborly pop-up and Santa Monica Place to do your art show and a hundred of your followers coming by art and you make 2000 bucks in a weekend. You don't have to have your gallery on Monday morning and pay rent for the rest of the year. So like what we're seeing a lot of is these newer, these new generation of creators is really digital first, audience first and content first. And then they are on the back of that building businesses to monetize that in smart ways. Not like cheesy ways, not selling themselves out but thinking about what it is that they love to do that supports their audience, that the audience would consume and serving it up to them. So if you're just a hilarious Instagram account that's always doing memes and people love and you're just a comedy based account, how can you like bring that into the real life and bring those people together to do a one night pop-up at a space and do a comedy show with your friends? Like how do you, how do you do that? Easy to do if you have access to the system and the utilities. But in the past, you had to have a physical address start your comedy club at because that's the only way you could get an audience. Now your audience is infinite, it's global, it's free to access. Just like whoever creates the most entertaining and engaging value for people to connect with will then win later on in the physical world. And so it's a complete reversal I think of the way when social media first came out, we all were like, hey, cause I'm 35 and when social media came out, I was in my 20s and it was just like, what is this? How does this work? I watched physical businesses adopt social media to build these followings. But no one really knew, okay, now I have these following this voice and this platform, now what, maybe it'll buy stuff online, cool. But that was the reverse of what's happening now, which is people are starting digital only and then adding physical later to enhance their business opportunity. So it's a really, we see media as the beginning point actually of a creator's journey in a lot of ways. And that's exciting because it's a whole different way of framing how to bring your dreams into reality. You have the ability to do it right now and no one's stopping you. Open a $29 a month Shopify store, open an Instagram account, connect them together, do what you need to do and see where that goes. And if you can do that, then there's a million ways you can grow your business but it's very hard I'm seeing to do the opposite these days. People who are physical only or haven't adopted kind of an audience based content strategy really suffering right now because the foot traffic that they relied upon is gone, not coming back anytime soon. And they're grasping at straws because they haven't built up or thought about that strategy before. And there's gonna be a tough transition period as we go through that in the next year or two. But again, looking at the bright side and not the negative side, the barriers to entry are basically zero now if you care about something. Hell yeah, like it's one of the best things the internet's brought to us is the decentralization and everything. So let's ride that out. Let's be positive with our content. Let's create content that helps people that's looking out for one another that's engaging and entertaining. And then let's figure out ways to serve on top of that and provide another layer of business. And so we really, really, really are pushing within Naverly right now to enhance our storytelling and content creation so that people can get a glimpse of what people do in a Naverly. So it's not just like, one of those websites like I can rent a meeting space or an event space, what do I do now? Like you should see what people are doing. That's incredible stories. But we have been really bad in the past at doing that. And when I talk about physical businesses not having an audience, we were one of those. Literally up until two weeks ago, we started focusing on this. It's never too late. That's my also message, never too late. It's not too late for us. It's not too late for anyone listening to this. Yet going, gotta start. The best day to start is always today.  It's a good way to look at media. And I think if we do that, then you're really like building a moat around your business. Just a fascinating way to look at it. And I interpreted what you were saying is by leaning more into the media aspects, you're inspiring a new generation of entrepreneurs like you talked about like 2020 was a big year for small business applications. And so you're also creating a moat around your business by really incentivizing new consumers and customers who are going to be inhabiting neighborly spaces and using them to host, like you said, their comedy shows, their art pop-ups. And it all steamrolls into solidifying the next generation of entrepreneurs as we know them. And it got me thinking like, you know, all these spaces, like I'm sure that not all spaces are good for all things. Diga mentioned offices with kitchens, good for ghost kitchens and stuff like that. But like when you walk into a space and you're first thinking, okay, can we use this for this or that, are there any spaces that you've found that you walk into and you're just like, I can't use this for anything. It's not good for us. Have you ran into problems like that? And if you have, what are the issues that cause you just to be like, God, it's not gonna work out for us or how we can use it? Good question. So from a use case, as long as we have a wide enough net that we're able to connect with, the amount of users from every different kind of possible commercial real estate use case, restaurants, retail, office users, events, art, what have you, then, you know, at least from the use case side, we can pretty much adapt ourself any type of street level real estate. But from an infrastructure perspective, there are certainly spaces that are too hard for us to do based on our financial model. So we're all about affordable access and to create an affordable opportunity means that we ourselves have to run as an efficient operations machine to deliver these spaces in the cheapest possible way. And that means taking spaces that allow us to move fast to only have to do small kind of restoration tasks to get it going, so clean the windows, deep clean the space, painting a couple walls, patching some walls, doing certain things like that. And then furnishing, we don't do any construction. We won't take a project that's raw. We won't do anything like that because it's too cost prohibitive, it's too slow. And by the time we got that done, we'd have invested so much time and money in the space that it'd be hard. The price to use it would be way too high. So we look for second generation turnkey, street level, mostly retail spaces that are ready to go. And frankly, all they need is clean, a deep cleaning and it's an elbow grease and some furnishings connect to wifi and ready to go. So that's, we're very selective about what we work with and the types of spaces we take on because our selection process ultimately impacts the price point by which someone can use the space. So that's to answer your question. Do you ever think about, so sometimes in development I run into like city council or zoning, right? So like, oh, it's not allowed, it's allowed. Oh, you can only have one event, blah, blah, blah, all this junk. So I feel like what you're saying is also very useful just to start speaking to Chamber of Commerce and kind of get this on their docket, like make them aware that the future of real estate is coming and it doesn't look or sound like what you're doing today and these planning departments need to start to think different or at least just consider the opportunity, right? Consider the opportunity for their cities all across America and what it could mean.  All the time, proactively. It's not that I run into it, I seek that. Okay. Because that is a critical component to offer the right service, right? To a given city or community. I come from a nonprofit background actually, spent four years in Haiti and Dominican Republic and working in kind of the nonprofit sector. And so a lot of community development work that I did in the past kind of informs the way that we go about providing this service in a new market. So we're just about to expand into Chicago this week, right? We just expanded into San Diego and Santa Cruz and when we do that, one of the first orders of business is to connect with the city. Even in an advance of opening any of these locations is to say, hi, we're here. We think Chicago is awesome. We see so much opportunity here. Here's what we've done in the past. Here's the cities we've worked with in the past. Here are the results. How can we help you? How can we help alleviate issues in certain parts of Chicago that you think need activation, that need help, that need have our commercial real estate blight is everywhere and there are not opportunities for people to build businesses. How can we leverage our system and our skill set to help advance a neighborhood in Chicago or the city as a whole? So we've partnered with the city of Santa Cruz, for example, where I live. They've helped us acquire vacant buildings that have been closed for years and we've turned them into thriving crater hubs with their help. They're introducing us to them and they're even sending us leads because actually a lot of entrepreneurs reach out to cities first when they get started, which makes sense, because that's where the permitting happens. So a lot of leads get just lost in these city halls because they're not designed for servicing that. And so in a really cool example of Santa Cruz, small town, they not only hooked us up with supply by connecting us to landlords and vouching for what we do, but then they're also routing locals who are trying to do things who are unable to afford or access the opportunities that are available in the market. So we're helping on both supply and demand to solve a civic problem. And that is absolutely essential for us as we grow to remember that this is not some type of singular impact business. This is a very complex, multi-tiered impact that this concept has when it opens up. And for a lot of people, it's confusing. For a lot of traditional government people, like you said, it's hard for them to wrap their head around, this used to be a bank and now an art show is happening in here. How is this legal or is this okay or something? And what you realize is that it isn't really a question of they're necessarily against it or for it. It's just that it doesn't fit the mold in these specific government forums that they've created 20 years ago of you're either one of these 10 types of businesses in one of these four types of zoning things in one of these 10 sub types of zoning. And because that's the way their system is coded, it's their job to run things through that system the way it's built. When it doesn't fit, they just get flustered and they don't know what to do and they don't wanna be at fault. So they ask a lot of questions and they just wanna understand generally. But if you can, I find that if you're proactive and start with the value that it can create and be coming from a position of service, their ears and their hearts are open to help and do something about it. They wanna be included in the conversation and not ramrodded like Uber or some of these services where it just felt like tech just decided that they could just have infrastructure for themselves. And nothing against Uber specifically, just a lot of startups have done that. Scooter companies, I mean, there's like, knowing as an example of where startups in the last 10 years have treated cities as if they are their playgrounds for profit making and there are no rules applied to them because they smartly came up with some way to code themselves or think about it and that broke the rules. I'm all for innovation, but that approach wasn't, I don't think it was very good. I think it was very arrogant. And so what we at Naverly have learned from that process is actually cities are cool with rideshare. They are cool with alternative mobility. They are cool with home sharing. They're cool with all these things to a certain degree, yet they wanna be included in that conversation because it's their entire infrastructure and their entire way of doing business and running a society. So include them in it. Maybe you don't like their answers and maybe you need to press their answers and then push the limit a little bit. But to just say that the city, the government or these people that are in public service don't matter or they're old or they don't get it or we should just do it anyway, I think is a dangerous way to build a business like we're building. So we really, really, really try to work with the cities right off the bat and include them. That's a fun way to do it. Like we've had the mayor of San Francisco in our spaces a couple of times in Mayor Berkeley. We offer up our space for civic engagement. We do all kinds of things where we donate our space to local causes because that's the right thing to do but also because we wanna be a resource. It's not just, this is not just a private profit taking initiative only, it's just a way to look at real estate as a service for the community as opposed to looking at real estate as this stoic asset that is either winning or losing. It's a weird way to think about it. Another thing too, I mean, some of these cities are just sitting on properties that they own themselves and so it could be a super easy way for you to just say, hey look, we have this crazy idea. Do you guys have any properties? Next thing you know that you're touring 10 properties and they're like, we would like this here and it just happens that there's a symbiotic relationship with the offering. So yeah, great point. Don't discount cities for sure go ask them. That's how I did my first real estate deal actually was talking to the city first and ended up being great. I mean, they were a great partner in the whole thing. And they trust, right, right now, there's a kinship. They go back there and they know you and you won over, you earn their trust and that's a relationship and resource that's gonna be very valuable to you as you grow in your company because you need to build everything based on trust and people don't, I don't sometimes think put enough emphasis on building trust when they start something but it's integral. I have one question for you then we can wrap. Parking assets. So Nick's father is the chairman of the International Parking Institute or Mobile Parking and Mobility Institute. Oh wow. And so parking assets, I was also in parking for a while. She was on the board with his father as we think about parking today. I think they're at max 20% capacity. Obviously no one's going to the office. Therefore the parking assets are suffering. I've had some calls here in LA where there are some groups that are trying to almost set up like the simple version is hey, let's lease out the roof and let's put like a gym. All the gyms need places to go right now to be outside. That seems like a no brainer. Kind of difficult to monetize because these companies, it's not like the gyms are doing great, right? It's not like all of a sudden they have all this cash to now pay and then move their equipment to the roof. But I think given that in the next three years if we say in the next three years offices won't go back to normal in terms of an occupancy then it leaves these parking assets either in trouble or right for opportunity. I don't know if you, and this is not to put you on the spot but it's something that's always back on mind for me. Have you considered anything in the parking asset world that might be kind of unique or different? I don't want to unveil our ultra secret strategies around parking lots right now. This is the place to do it. No, to be quite honest, we haven't only because there are some awesome companies really focused on like reef technologies that you guys have heard of them before. They do a really cool thing of activating these parking lots and they're totally focused around that. And also the other reason we haven't really, that was one thing a lot of our team and supporters were urging us to do when the pandemic hit of course is like, okay, how do we bring neighborly outside? And I don't know if I was right or wrong but I kind of made the executive call that it wasn't worth our time and energy because it was a fleeting moment in time and it would be over before we could even monetize the amount of work and energy to shift to some crazy network of real estate that we don't first of all have access to today. We got to attain, figure out and then remarket and I was like, we do this correctly, cool. We're gonna get some people who might do some popups or they might do something, we might get a COVID test operator who needs to rent one of the parking lots but how much value are we gonna provide to that versus like, let's fix our technology. Let's build, let's invent some new things so which I haven't talked about on this call. Let's invent these like new business models. Let's go after landlords, the ideal landlords we've always wanted and so we actually decided against and even Jason's advice was do the parking lot thing and he wasn't wrong but we just, we decided to double down on internal projects, kind of hibernate a little bit knowing that when we came out with these projects that we're about to come out with we're gonna make a bang in the post COVID world but that just means that in the moment we're not really hustling to find COVID opportunities and a lot of that was I looked at the landscape and I said there's reef and there's a bunch of other people there's parking lot owners themselves like why do they really need us? But yeah, but I think I have an entire vision for parking lots that I think is, I think parking lots are going to be awesome in the future because I'm just a big believer in autonomous, I think I've just always been bullish on that and I know the timeline's been longer than everyone's thought and I continue to just drink the Kool-Aid and I will forever because I think it's gonna change everything for cities and if you believe in autonomous you believe in parking lot because that entire infrastructure needs to be built from scratch and it needs to not be in parking garages it needs to be in flat open areas with no walls and you can do new wiring, electricity so I'm super bullish on how parking lots can play a big part of our communities in the future but that's not something that we work on. I like it, honest answer. Yeah, Ben it's been great talking to you. Please just let everyone know where they can find you and support your company, all that good stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Our website is www.neverly.com and you can check us out on Instagram at neighborly or Twitter at neighborly and yeah, we'd love to help any of you listeners with any of your awesome ideas. I know this is a creative podcast and there's a lot of you out there we're building the future so if there's any way we can be of service to you guys or help you with our locations feel free to reach out.  Neighborly, fostering the new wave of entrepreneurship. I love it, I love it. Thanks Ben. Yeah, thanks a lot for coming on. Yeah, it was fun.


welcome back to another video in our Power BI series. So the last video we showed you how to download the Power BI application and a very brief introduction and getting started and pulling in your first piece of data. And this is exactly where we pick off in this video. So you can see we've got our simple piece of data here. So we've got the employee ID, employee name, but this is only one table out of three available to us in our Excel file. And again links to that file is in the description to this video or any data that we refer to in this video you can find the link in the description so you can obviously create it and follow along at home. If you look in the actual Excel file you can see there's actually three pieces of information or three tabs. So the first one is employees. You can see simple two-column data set that you've already gotten to Power BI here. Then also got a sales tab so you can see we've got an employee ID, the location that employee is based in and the number of sales that they did on a particular date. So these are just the days in the last year or we've actually got some future dates so please just ignore that. We shouldn't have been the case but hopefully it just proves or works as an example of purpose. And then we've got other locations table as well. So what we want to do is we want to pull all three of these data sources into Power BI and then we want to join them based on their relevant information. So at the moment how that would work is you can see in our sales table we've literally just got an employee ID and a location ID and some sales data. What we want to do is join the sales, the simple sales data to the employees data so we can actually have the employee name rather than ID here and likewise for location rather than having a location ID we would like to display the city name. So hopefully that makes sense. So what we're going to do is pull that into Power BI and show you how to join based on those IDs. So we're basically starting to create a relative database in our Power BI. So just move that Excel to the side. So what we need to do is just repeat the steps we looked at in our last video and go into get data and just go into Excel. Actually what you can do is you can just put this Excel button here I believe it in the last video but just to make it more simple because it just follows or flows. Get data, Excel and then obviously it's opened up for me at the actual path where that file is stored. If I just now click company sales once again and go open and then once it thinks about it it'll then open up our navigator. So we've already got the employees information so we don't need to click that but we're going to just click both the locations so you can see that looks very much the same as what we just brought up in the sheet and we're also going to open up sales as well. So let's click that. So you can see this is a this is probably my fault something's gone wrong here for me. Again similar problem of employees it's not picking up the first the actual headers it's picking up column numbers but you can see for sales it has actually done it correctly for us so obviously something I'm doing wrong here but we'll just need to go into locations just amend that or transform that data like you did with the employees one as well. And you can see we've got a transform data button here so you can do that as you're going or installing the data. Bombs from the load both of these and then do that transformation after. So just click load and just let them think about it for a bit as it's putting the information in to the processing queries and then once it's finished processing what you about to see is we'll have another two tables available to us on this right-hand navigation side. So there we go we can see that if we now expand locations we can see the locations fields and if we expand sales we can expand the sales fields and really interesting as well because we haven't put this to this yet. The date you can see is identified as a date value in there so if we go into this drop-down you can see that we've got a date hierarchy available to us. So if we didn't want to just use that particular date so the actual day date that makes sense we can actually pull out just a year the quarter or month applicable to that date. So that become beneficial to us down the line when we're working with charts or we want to summarize the data in a different manner to what it's pulled into. So again this gives us more flexibility than potentially when we're working with data in Excel. So let's just collapse all of those. So I'm just going to go into locations and just sort out these column headers once again. So we'll go into home and we'll go transform data and you can see it's opened up on this page. We just need to make sure we navigate to the correct table so it was location so I've got locations selected here and you see this is the issue. Just use first row as headers, click that button, it does a transformation for us, close and apply and then that will be now forced into place for future iterations where we refresh the data and pull the information in as well. So we can see that looks better. So again all the employee fields here, all the location fields and the same for sales as well. So on this left-hand side and I appreciate I'm jumping around but I want to try and touch on these things as they become relevant. So the first option we have on the left here is the report. So the report tab is what we have here. It's our dashboard page where we can bring in various piece of information whether it's tables or graphs and summarize them on the page. If we go to the second one you can see this action with data. So this allows us to have a very similar view where we've got the navigation on the right-hand side which allows us to have a better look at each data set and you see sales got a bit more in it for us to look at so that we can either do things like reformatting the data or alternatively we have the ability to add calculated fields to each data set. So if you wanted to have something on the lines of let's say total sales divided by the number of units sold to achieve those sales we could do an average or a division sum here in the new column and this is the screen from which we do it. We won't be touching on that in this video but again this is another one we'll be touching on later in the series. The last one we have available to us is the model. So if we go into model you can see that these are all the tables in the fields available to us in our data model what is power BI and because we've used good structure and our employee ID is the same as our employee ID in sales so let me rephrase that. So employee ID is obviously the employee ID. If we were to call this NID in employees but over here we call it ID obviously it wouldn't be able to make the automatic connections that is already done for us therefore we need to click and drag to do that manually. So as we've done good structure as we put it in here power BI will automatically find the connections for us. If however let's just delete this one so delete that way of relationship. If we needed to do this manually or whether it's either the names are different but obviously I would encourage you to make sure that naming conventions are maintained the same across tables but if we needed to do this whatever manually all you need to do is go to our employee ID click and drag and then hover over employee ID in the sales table and you'll see it'll make that connection for you so that's how you can get around it if it hasn't already done it for you. So that is the model. So the model is really useful when I say as we get more and more tables into our power BI it allows us to visualize all these different connections between the tables available to us. Well this is the basic structure of our data as we go so a lot of sales everything basically results around the sales table. So this is where it allows us to connect to the final employee name based on the ID and also find the location or the city name again based on the location ID. So let's just go back into our dashboard so we now know the data is connected by that model sheet. So if we now wanted to pull in additional information here let's just make this table a bit bigger or what you need to do again if you're not already selecting that table you'll see nothing is allowed you're not really able to do much we just want you to put in your visualization but to update an existing visualizational table just click on that table and you'll see you then have all the variables available all the fields available to edit or add more to it. So what I want to do now is just bring into the city so let's go drag city or city. You can bring the city a location ID if you wish as well so let's just put them all in and then likewise for sales let's just bring in the employee ID, location ID and let's go total sales and total units and the only reason I've done that is just so you can see that the employee ID in both the location the sales and employees is the same. So we know the days were joined and because that is we don't need all that on there so we can get rid of both the employee IDs we can get rid of both the location IDs and there we go we have our complete dataset available to us. So we've joined three pieces or three data tables together what has enabled us to summarize our data overall so we can now see the individual the city they reside in the total number of sales that they've done and in the total unit of sales as well. So I think that I'll do for this video so you're now able to obviously install Power BI and you're able to also bring in three pieces of data or three data tables and have them join in Power BI as well. Obviously if you want to use the data we're looking at here you can get that in the links in the description below this video or if you want to use your own data obviously you're not limited to just three tables you can do this with a lot more than just three tables but I wanted to start with a smaller dataset just so everyone got the idea of how it worked. So if you enjoyed that video please do give the video a like also if this is your first time find our channel and see in our videos please don't forget to subscribe to the channel and hit that Bell notification button so you're notified of all of our future videos. Like I say we're currently looking at Power BI in this series but we've also done videos on Excel and VBA so if you haven't seen those or you would like to learn more about even one of those topics make sure again you check out the channel and those playlist available and like I say you can learn some more information about those as well. So thank you very much for watching and we'll see you in the next video.


From declaring things in your CSS that you don't even need to have there, to an over-reliance on band-aid solutions that can cause more problems than they help fix, I see beginners making the same mistakes over and over again, so in this video we're going to look at those mistakes and better ways to approach things. Hi there my front-end friends, thank you so much for coming to join me for yet another video, and if you're new here my name is Kevin and here at my channel I help you fall in love with CSS and if I can't get you to fall in love with it I'm hoping to at least help you be a little bit less frustrated by it and today we're going to be doing that by addressing mistakes that I see a lot of beginners making and one of those mistakes is declaring things that they don't even need and I'll be honest it's not even beginners that I see make this mistake I see this just commonly all over the place so as an example let's jump into the code right here and we'll start with just with the HTML we're just looking at this header that I have here where I have a class of article header so in my CSS I've selected that and I've put some styles on here and one of the things that I see declared all the time is a width 100% and the width 100% most of the time isn't even doing anything it's just it's just like automatic thing where people go I want to make it full size so they throw a width 100% on there but most elements like our header a paragraph an article a div a main all of these things are block elements they're already taking up all the space that's available to them anyway so declaring that on there doesn't really do anything and actually it can cause some problems if you also have margins that are coming on there as well so like really what you probably want here is auto but auto is the default so we don't even really need that and you can just not declare it at all and I also see this same thing come up with people declaring heights on things of either declaring a hate auto which always you know that's the default behavior so unless you're overwriting a previous thing and you need to change it back to the default maybe you want to do that but I also see things like fit content come in here and if you've never seen fit content it it's an interesting property I'm not going to deep dive it now because I have talked about it in a previous video but basically means fit the content that is inside of it so if we're going to add more stuff here like say in the header we add a paragraph with some lorem text and I'll just do a short paragraph my header got taller and it's fitting the content that's in there but when it comes to height that's basically the default anyway because if I put that auto it looks exactly the same or you know that means I can just remove it and it looks exactly the same because that wasn't changing what the behavior was so my first thing that I'm going to say is don't declare things unless you actually know that you need them so do it hit save refresh your page and actually I always get asked this how do I auto refresh the page I'm not using it right now but if you're very new the easiest thing to use in if you're using vs code is an extension called live server it gives me a little button down here I can click and as soon as I save an html css or javascript file it will refresh the page automatically without you manually having to do it but if you're not using vs code and you're using a different text editor you can probably find a similar extension unless it's something like notepad plus plus in that case I'd actually recommend that you switch over to something a little bit more robust than notepad plus plus it's fine but there's better solutions these days but yeah circling back make a change and make sure that change is doing something don't put okay I know I need it to be with 100 so I'm going to put that there put your stuff in see what it looks like and then if you need to declare something to change what the defaults are then add that in but if everything's falling into place and you don't have to do anything don't write css just for the heck of it because sometimes like that with 100 it can have unintended consequences if you have to add margins or do other things to it so you're actually better off not declaring that unless you really need to have it and sometimes you do every now and then you go actually this this would be perfect for that I need to change what this behavior is that's fine but declare things only when you need them not just randomly putting them in hoping for the best now another thing that I see happen and I don't know how this actually came about but it's an overreliance on flexbox and I think it's partially because when we early on learn about doing layouts and stuff we learn about flexbox it's one of the early things to actually create a layout so here I have this section let's just go find it or a div here of cards and then in there I have three individual cards so when I do my display flex on that it's giving me three different columns because that's the three children that are inside of there so I'm not entirely sure how this happens but I see it where people declare flex everywhere and it just becomes like this de facto and it's a little bit like I just said of putting a width 100% for some people doing a display flex just becomes this automatic and I really would discourage doing that for some use cases where I've actually seen it as these cards I mean they're not they're not beautiful by any means but one place I actually see them come up is people doing a display flex on here and then it goes to columns so then they have to do their flex direction I have column on here to fix everything and basically go back to what they had in the first place and not using any other flex stuff in here if you need this card to be a flex item for whatever reason by all means turn it into one but if I just need to keep the same flow of content going there's no reason to do this at all and I see this all the time people are just declaring display flex all over the place thinking well I might need it and then it just causes more problems and they run into issues and usually the solution is remove your display flex from there and you're not going to have the issue that you're running into and another just to show you like extreme versions of this I have seen this done which obviously causes lots and lots and lots of issues and then you have to either that or even like on the body and then doing the display flex now there can be use cases for that but they're usually far and few between and then the flex direction once again column and then never doing anything with that and it's not actually serving any purpose so it's sort of I guess one and two are very similar but this display flex is this like epidemic I've seen with some people that just feel like they need to put it everywhere please don't do that use it when you need it and it can be very useful but don't get locked in and feel like you have to use it for everything and even there's grid out there too and for some of the things I see people using flexbox for grid might be a better solution this video is not about that though I'm not going to worry too much if you'd like to know more about choosing between flexbox and grid I'll link to another video in the description though and continuing from there and another mistake that people make that I see a lot is an overreliance on like hard coded numbers and this one I totally understand I know how it happens I get and it really takes a mental shift to break away from doing this but if we look at these columns that I set up here you can see they're actually a little bit like this one's the smallest so someone's kind of medium and this one is a little bit wider and that's just because of how display flex works when we do that on the parent so if we come back to here and we take a look in the html I have these you know these three cards are the children and so each one is turning into a column but because of the content and other stuff and the way flexbox works they're all coming out to be different sizes so what we can do to fix something like that is we could go on each one of the cards that's inside there and what I see people do is something like a flex basis of 33.333 percent I'll just do 33 percent because if not I might break some stuff and even that might cause an issue no it looks okay and that works because they know that my cards and I have three cards here so it's setting it up and each one is 33 percent so they're all taking up the right amount of space so that's perfect and it's sort of working the issue with doing something like this is later on in your site you might have somewhere that has the exact same setup so I'm going to just be lazy and copy and paste this a little bit lower down in my site to reuse the same example but this same one maybe only has two columns and then well I can't use my cards and this is like becomes cards two right and then I have those ones that are inside so then I have to have a we're going to come back to this idea in a second too but the cards two will also be a display flex and I'll have a gap of two rem on that but then I guess well this works but then I need to do a cards two dot card and that one can have a flex basis of 50 percent right because now we have two columns so okay that's working I have my three columns here I have my two columns but when I say this over reliance on these like fixed values are things like this where I need to code in all of I need something for 33 percent something for 50 something for 20 percent something for 25 percent you start running into all these different situations and part of this is just the way we think and you get to hear I need two columns I need 50 percent I need three columns I need 33 percent I need four etc etc so a hundred percent I understand how how we get into that thinking and the other thing with that is if you go to old enough tutorials this is how the web used to work when we had float based layouts which don't worry about if you don't know what they are it's not the way we should make layouts but this is how we had to do things back then it was the only way to really get things to work and I think a lot of that thinking stuck around and found its way into future readings and tutorials and other stuff like that to those two forces combined lead to this being a very common pattern but we could make this a lot easier where I could say cards and then my flex basis this is going to be a little weird I'm going to do a hundred percent on them and it still works and then over here it still works and that's just because these are flex items they're able to shrink so even though I'm saying they should be a hundred percent and this is a little bit like the width one hundred percent that we want to avoid unless you need it and this is one of those cases we're doing this actually fixes the problem so what we're really doing is telling them all to be the same size and then because there's a flex shrink of one on these as a default behavior they're shrinking and they're off they're all fitting and becoming the same thing it's definitely a little bit of a weird thing if you're not used to flex and going well a hundred percent makes them equal and there's other approaches you'll see another very similar one of just doing a flex one which gives you the exact same result even though it takes a little bit of a different way to get there but same the same principles at play we're making them all the same size and then it doesn't matter if you have two columns three columns five columns ten columns and then you don't need this cards to anymore you can just have your regular cards anywhere you want and maybe cards isn't even the best class name anymore which gets to my next part of things like cards two where these class naming becomes a little bit of an issue and leads to a lot worse maintenance where you get things like this of cards one cards two cards three that are often doing the same thing or I'll even see here where let's just go up to where we have the three and we'll make this a little bit bigger I'll see something like this where it's card one card two and card three something like that and then you need the same CSS on all three of those and this is super common you know like or even worse than cards sometimes like I'll see p class equals p1 and then class equals p2 whoops p2 and they're just like naming everything they're doing which if you need to select it that's fine but I would suggest more descriptive names and more reusable names a big purpose of having classes is that we can use the same class over and over again so having card one card two card three unless all three cards need to be different from one another it's kind of useless and one time maybe you'd want to do something like this is you have your card card card and then you have your one your two your three we're gonna fix this in a second as well but this approach at least the cards are all working through all the same and then if I need to I can do my card two has a background of red and it has the different background or whatever but I'd even suggest maybe a different name here instead of card two you can have your bg accent and make it something that could be reused instead of being something that's locked into this one use case that you can never use again even if you're only using it one time on your page right now something like this is more useful because then I could take this and do it's a card with a bg accent we don't need this one here we don't need this one here but then I could come and I could say you know what this area at the top my header it has my article header but I also want that to have my bg accent on there so I can give that the right background and then you know what maybe this for whatever reason I don't know why but this paragraph could also have a bg accent and so saving that and then we get into a much better situation and the best way to be able to think of this way and to be able to go that way is first if you're doing something that's like a one-off style think about it can this be reused elsewhere look at the rest of the design that you're building and always try and think a little bit bigger picture than being super hyper focused on that one thing you're doing especially when it comes to your class names is this something that could be reused in different places and again don't do card one card two card three just make a generic card unless each one is wildly different from each other one so yeah thinking bigger picture and just coming up with class names that can be reused and trying not to get like two locked into very specific things of setting and even with the paragraph example I gave before I've seen things where it's like paragraph one paragraph two paragraph three and then setting the same font size on all three of them just set your paragraph font size or your body font size and rely on inheritance or little things like that that can make life a little bit easier the less css rewrite the less maintenance there is usually the better everything works and I guess that last point comes down I'm going to take off this bg accent because it's a little hard on the eyes comes down to the last thing I want to talk about or the last mistake which is relying a little bit on like band-aid solutions that cause more problems and the the one band-aid solution I see used most often is using position absolute position absolute has its purposes but it should be a last resort rather than the first thing that you go to because positioning especially with absolute has some side effects to it so as one example I want to select these images that are inside my card so we can do that we're just it's the image inside my card or we can do that with a direct child selector so an image that's the direct child of my card so if I select those we can come and look at these cards I have my card and then I have my image that's directly inside of it so I'm selecting that we could also give each image a class and select it through that whichever one works but we'll just do it this way for now and say I need the image to be outside of the padding or I need to move it around a little bit I see so many people do something like this we'll put a position absolute on there and then say a top of negative 0.5 rem and then a left of negative 0.5 rem just as an example and it pulls it out of the flow a little bit it gives it this little unique look I guess the problem is where'd my titles go well they're underneath the image now because when we do something like that we're pulling the image out of the flow and nothing really sees it so then I have to go into my card h2 so let's do it like that and then I'm going to do a margin top of like 10 rem I guess and then you know I have to sort of guess at the value that's here and then I can eventually get it and I go okay there we go everything's working except that's not going to work down here because my images are bigger and it also wouldn't work if we came back up to these other ones and I had a card or an image that had a different aspect ratio on it so here I have one ready image for and then we get a tall image like that and it's completely breaking everything so when we're running into situations like this position absolute makes things not really reusable now there are times I would use position absolute for stuff and I'll mention it a little bit in a second but for something like this I think there's other solutions and I always go how can how can I do this and try to find ways that you can do it without position absolute and if you have no other choice then bring in position absolute I mean in this case I could actually do this with position relative probably I'd have to change some of these values but then we could get rid of that giant margin underneath and we could get things to work this would probably become a negative that way and then we sort of get that same effect and the advantage with position relative is it doesn't pull things out of the flow so something like that would definitely work or my go-to if I need to move things around within sort of where they are but I need to sort of adjust the positioning a little bit would be instead of using positioning at all would just be to do a transform and then I can do a translate negative 1.5 rem negative 1.5 rem and I realize here let's just put this on another line so we can see it all and so having something like that if I save it looks exactly the same as we had when I used the position it just moves everything over a little bit now this can lead to going okay well now I have a space that's a little bit too big so just to show you that it did work let's just make it a little bit more exaggerated and make it too so you can see it shoved over a little bit extra and the disadvantage I guess with either the position one or the transform is it it saves the space that these things were originally in but it moves it so the rest of the site doesn't really see where it's moved to so it leaves the original space as is which is better than position absolute where it pulls it out of the flow and then all the content goes underneath it so one solution here and this is something else that maybe is a mistake and people might not like me looking at but is using a negative margin on the title to pull it back up into the space negative margins another one probably a good thing to try and avoid unless you're have a specific use case we're go here I need to suck it up and fill in that empty space and in this case it works actually pretty well and the advantage with this is it's just going up negative one based on where it originally was and that means that if I did change the image or I have different sized images it's going to work regardless of what's happening there so don't use negative margins if you can avoid it but every now and then they can be actually a good thing to use and I see these this is one of those things like negative margins are a hack you should never use them use them with care know why you're using them and that sort of wraps up everything that I'm talking about is don't blindly throw things at it circles back to the beginning when I said always have a purpose for what you're doing so if there's a good reason that you're using it and maybe the transform translate because it leaves that empty space is causing an issue or you know these images I'm not using negative margins to move them because that could have other consequences whereas I feel like doing a translate and then if I need to I could fix a few little things with small tweaks but everything I'm doing has a purpose to it that I can explain so like don't just start throwing coded stuff and if it doesn't work piling more code on top of that and then piling more code and trying to throw as many things because then all these things that weren't working they're not they're sort of going to be potentially in conflict with one another or causing other problems so try something so first write code to achieve a specific goal if you have something that's full with don't add more code to it to make it full with if it already is if you need to balance things out though because they have uneven columns then a flex one or a flex basis 100 percent that's fine because it's actually accomplishing something that isn't working already and then for things about moving stuff around in general transforms or position relative if you need to just to sort of nudge things in the right direction can be useful I did mention I'd say times when you should be using position absolute I use it when you do want to pull something out of the flow I don't want anything else so maybe you need overlapping items we need to pull it out of the flow to achieve what you want to achieve so a lot of time it's little decorations that you need maybe a quotation mark that needs to be somewhere unique or things like that those are the times that it can be useful but be very careful with positioning try to come up with other solutions and if nothing else is working then maybe you can go back to that and I did also mention earlier in the video that you know we were using flexbox here but grid is a very good layout choice as well so if you want to know how I decide when I should be using flexbox and when I should be using grid I have a video that is right here for your viewing pleasure and with that I would like to thank my enablers of awesome Jan Johnny Michael Mr. Dave Patrick Simon and Tim as well as all my other patrons for their monthly support and of course until next time don't forget to make your coin the internet just a little bit more awesome