All right, here we go. Here's the giveaway maps resistance. What's that you say? It's the new maps program We designed it for people getting started with resistance training And then what we did is we included three workouts in that program body weight and bands Dumbbells and barbells and dumbbells Okay, so if you're watching you just found us or you stopped a while ago and you want to get back started You can get free access to that new maps program But you got to do the following leave us a comment the first 24 hours that would drop this episode So it's got to be in that time frame Subscribe this channel and turn on your notifications if you do all those and if we pick your comment We'll notify you and you'll get free access to the new maps program maps resistance now That's not all we are running a huge promotion right now So here's what we did because we're releasing maps resistance and we know it's for people getting started We also included a bunch of free stuff with the launch Okay, so just to help people out So here's what's included you get maps resistance and then for a short period of time You also get a year access to our private forum that way you have support if you have any questions We give you the intuitive nutrition guide to help you with the behavioral aspects of diet And we included two ebooks written on macro nutrients macros explained and macros applied that was written by Jason Phillips He is the founder of NCI coaching So we've included all of that together with the maps resistance launch So if you want to sign up, it's only 77 bucks and you get all that stuff So if you're interested head over to maps resistance calm and then use the code resist 20 For all of that and the discount. All right. Here comes a show Merry Christmas. Oh, you know what? I've been doing that to my son and he's I'm trying to get him to do that too Yeah, you know what you know the one of the number one questions we get I'm just telling the audience you guys know this that we get especially around The holiday season and then January right when everybody really wants to get into fitness Special for you guys today. Yeah that one of the number one questions that we get from people who already work out who are already Consistent who already have like a good relationship with fitness is like how do I get? My friends or family members started and then the other common question is those people themselves will ask us I've listened to your podcast or I really want to get in shape. I really want to improve my health How do I get started? What does that look like because we obviously make the case that if you do it the wrong way like so many people do I mean the statistics show that there's an 80% fail rate in the first year alone To your three or four. It's like 97% right So the fail rate is so high because people start the wrong way So and they're so motivated right now, which is like, you know That's that's the point to where you really want to make sure that you have the right plan The right focus established in order to even get to a good place where you can then build upon that Yep, well, I'm excited about this episode because obviously it was structured with the idea of Helping a family member or friend out get started on the right track at the first of the year But really this is for anybody who was Inconsistent the last 30 to 60 days which happens to a lot of people right including myself right now I've been the most inconsistent since pretty much Halloween Now that I have been all year long, which I think that's I think that's more common than it is not Just the holiday start rolling around it gets colder interrupts everything it does and it just easier to I'll get there tomorrow I'll do the next day and I think the biggest mistake I made most of my fitness career And I think a lot of people fall into this is when I get back into the swing of things is Going right back kind of where I left off and there's no reason for me to do that And what does it what does like the ideal scaling up of a program look like which just so happens to be? What I would recommend to somebody who is also just starting. Yeah, and I think it's this is an important point to make that How you get started with your fitness and health journey is so Important in the context of how you're gonna be able to maintain Those results and goals and how if whether or not you're gonna hit plateaus or get injured or feel pain The way you get I would guess I would actually say that the way you get started will I could probably predict with over 80% accuracy Whether or not someone's gonna be able to stay consistent and whether or not they're gonna get long-term success Well, you know what else this brings up We get a question all the time too is like if you guys were you know your 20 year old self Like how would you do it over again?  How would you like I have definite opinions of how I would have adjusted and done things You know a lot more appropriately for myself to set myself up for the long term totally Now the biggest mistakes that I can think of and let's start with that like the biggest You know, I guess mistakes people make right when they get going and the biggest one I can think of is the programming is inappropriate and the programming refers to The workout itself, right? It's too much. It's it's always too much It's even too much for the like that that was my point of bringing that up is I'm guilty of this even being a fitness professional that when I go back into training Overdoing it when when and it's why you hear me on the show all the time Talking about my goal is to do as little as possible to elicit the most amount of change and it's really easy to overshoot that Especially when you're somebody who's motivated to change. Yeah, and this isn't just because if you overdo it You increase your risk of injury. That's true But also, even if you don't hurt yourself if you over apply The intensity or the volume, right? That's how long your workouts are or the frequency. How often you work out Now don't even if you don't get injured You're not you're gonna get to your goal much slower because Exercise is a stimulus that tells your body to adapt But if you overwhelm your body with too much stress from the exercise You're not gonna adapt nearly as fast because your body is really mainly concerned with with healing now Someone may ask what is the right stimulus if you're just getting started? It's not much and more than not much is too much and you'll get there slower So it's really important to understand that the right kind of programming and the right kind of workout We'll get you there faster and the wrong kind which is most workouts most workouts That are popular on social media or on YouTube or with fitness influencers are inappropriate for somebody Getting started. There's also the wrong exercise selection. This is another big one for me because People will do exercises that don't have a ton of value for them Now all exercises have some value if they're applied in specific ways for the right person but oftentimes people do the wrong type like I watch some of these workout plans that are popular and Good 80% of the exercise are so wrong for someone to get started I mean they'll sweat and they'll get sore and they'll move but they're not gonna move in the right Direction in terms of getting help but think of like my friends or my family members who they might Find a program that they they'll do from online but for the most part they're just gonna fall back on to what they know when they walk into the gym and Typically, it's like a few things And a lot of times it's it's not the appropriate exercises for them Or they're not trying to expand and really learn the the ones that may that move the needle the most Yeah, now here's a good rule of thumb.  Well to Justin's point I think that the people go in there Just doing what they know and I think that leads to another one of the big mistakes Which is just lacking support.  And I think that's where they go wrong They don't know that they don't know and so they go in with with not enough or no support whatsoever And I just think that's crucial to the beginning if you want to lay a solid foundation and make sure you start Right is making sure you have the right kind of support. Yeah statistically even when we would manage big box gyms We would look at the numbers in terms of how often somebody would use the gym with people who worked with a trainer versus people who didn't and Typically when people work with a trainer average they'll work with a trainer between one to two days a week That's the average So we would look at how many more days they would come and how consistent and long they've stayed as members versus people Who didn't work with the train and it was like three to one I was like three times longer and three times as consistent the difference is when you work with a trainer They are Teaching you the right stuff. They're showing you the right technique, but it goes beyond that right not it also is not having support on the journey so if you look at studies on Consistency with exercise nutrition when someone does something alone versus when they do it with a friend or let's say a spouse The consistency the adherence is much higher When you have that kind of support like a support system, right? It can be really hard to get started and you kind of are alone and this brand new journey So it also means do you have the support of some of people around you? Supporting what you're doing people that can help you stay consistent and kind of you know be with you when let's say You go out to eat with them at lunch.  I think is also important I think it's a mistake that people go into a new fitness journey Without having that kind of solid support as well along those lines too is is the nutritional guidance I think another big mistake is people go in there and they Think they know what they should be doing eating wise and I don't know how many times that I've had to correct a Family or a friend who was going in with this idea of oh, yeah I'm just gonna restrict calories and move more and yes Initially, you might see some weight loss from that of course because you're moving more and you're eating less But quickly the body adapts to that and you're now at this place where you still want to lose 20 or 30 pounds But you're only eating 1300 to 1500 calories and now the body is stalled and you don't know what to do and how you start Nutritionally and exercise wise is so important to your long-term success as as complicated As Individualizing a workout or following a good workout program or finding a good workout program can be it pales in comparison to the complexity and challenges of nutrition, okay, so if you're trying to improve your health By the way, there's nothing wrong with with starting a good exercise program and not looking at your nutrition Everybody starts somewhere. There's nothing wrong with that. However, if you're expecting like body composition changes getting leaner Noticing big health improvements and you don't address the nutritional side of things and do that the right way It's gonna be much slower much harder and much more frustrating So the nutrition side is also very important and how you apply that also needs to be appropriate Okay, so what does that mean just like with the workout? You don't jump in and do everything all at once with nutrition Same thing you kind of start one step at a time allow your body to adapt get your behaviors to adapt Get used to the changes because whatever you do to get in shape is probably we have to do to stay in shape forever So they have to be lifelong changes. Yeah, and then nutritionally speaking.  We have to consume something, right? So that's the difference between that and then having like this new fitness routine that you're trying to be consistent with It's so those alterations and those adjustments need to be, you know, not too extreme And they need to be able to fit in and be similar to what you're doing, but just start really refining that as you go Now these are some of the biggest mistakes What do you guys see as some of the biggest challenges for these people's that deciding to head into this one of them Which I think is just because people don't They lack the knowledge around resistance training because if I say resistance or strength training someone They immediately think that you need lots of equipment. Yeah membership. Yeah, like I need lots. I need weights I need machines. I need to have cables. Like, you know, if I go run, I don't need anything but tennis shoes First of all, that's false. You can do resistance training with almost no equipment or resistance bands can be used For resistance training or strength training So long as you use resistance in a way to build strength and muscle, then you're doing resistance and strength training I mean just body weight. I could do just body weight, especially when you're getting started and they'll produce tremendous results You don't need equipment. That's the first. I think the biggest I guess challenge for people. Well, I think too This is why when back when we were trying to develop a fitness app and like kind of looked at the landscape of what was the Most popular and what people were doing the most they were all running based or walking based and this is just Something that people just recognize right away They don't need a lot of education to get into it and just get going and moving in General but if you refine that movement and really have a good solid plan where you know You're you're activating your muscles. You're you're really like going through the strength training program the resistance program You're gonna benefit so much further This actually kind of takes me back to like early years as a trainer when I I had clients that were like family or friend and They didn't have a lot of money to pay for personal training But you know probably once a year they come back around they want me to get them in shape for something and Actually, one of the first things that I'd have them do just to save them some money is I would write them up like a Very basic body weight type of little routine for them to follow for a couple weeks before they actually started paying me money And I was like one I know that's it's very low risk because they're just doing their body weight pretty easy for them to figure out and then always be like No, I want to start the weights right now. I'm gonna listen. Let's maximize the time that you have with me I know sending you this direction right now.  Yeah, recognize that. Yeah You just doing these body weight exercises watch how great of results if we also are Changing your diet and eating correctly in addition to you sending this this signal right this stimulus right now You're gonna you're gonna build muscle You're gonna burn body fat and it's a perfect place for you to start and then you come see me in about three weeks And then I can start to ramp that up and increase increase the weight So I love this as a strategy regardless if you have access to all the equipment in the world or not It's such a good place for most people to start. Yeah, some of the best exercises actually don't require any questions Which brings me to the next one which a lot of people this is why they don't even get started Because they look at their schedule They look at all the stuff that they you know have they have to do I have the kids I have my job like when am I gonna Schedule this in to my life like I don't have the time and I think it's because People have the under they they have the false belief that it requires a lot of time Yeah, you know like I need to I spent a lot and you have hours and hours and hours Dedicated to this in order to make any significant results. That's not true Especially with resistance training with resistance training now unless you start to get to advanced levels I mean you could do a lot. I could do so much With somebody just getting started with two or three 30 to 45 minute well planned workouts I can send the muscle building signal very effectively which is that little amount of time And in fact not only will I do it effectively but oftentimes any more is too much for that person Was this the number one excuse or obstacle from preventing so because I feel like yeah everybody I've ever talked to you like Time or it's not in my schedule. I just I'll get to it eventually like that was always like the excuse of Why they haven't just started and gotten into their program. It's all it's always time and money It's always it's always time and money and honestly, I think as a as a young trainer I made the mistake of blowing a lot of people out because I thought they needed to be in there dedicated like if I was gonna have success With coaching them I needed them five six days a week so I could burn the most because you and really back then the thought Process is I have control of that many hours in their week So I knew even if they were fucking up on their own I could counter a lot of that by training them hard enough inside the gym And so I wanted to see everybody at least three to six times inside the gym And it's so the opposite way of the way I look at things now It's like, you know what if I could meet any wherever you're at so if I'm not training at all I'm happy if I can get one or two days a week with you to get you starting so I can start to let I think you're right. It's they think they have to do everything at once Yep, and that again if that's your thought process like I have to tackle this Okay, all my tuition, right? I got to make sure I get at least three or four times a week Like it just seems daunting and so they pull back Yeah, how many begin how many people can you get started with resistance training and get them great results with 330-minute workouts or 45 minutes workouts a week. It's funny Doug when he hired me He had been working out He wasn't even a complete beginner from an experience standpoint and I convinced him that we're only gonna work out twice a week And he's like alright, I'll trust you we got to a 400 pound deadlift with twice a week, right? And he got significant results. You can get very very far doing that kind of stuff So it's not time is not an issue Especially when you first get started, you know 30 minutes 45 minutes two or three days a week is plenty when it goes far with resistance training right now the other one that I think that people fear is Just the lack of someone there to help them with like the cues and making sure they do the extra right And that's a real one, right? I think that's I feel like that's a valid very valid right if you are Completely foreign to the weight room and you've never trained and you don't know these body weight exercises you don't know these strength training exercises and Someone is telling you go do these things and you know, they you've never done it before I Understand the the hesitancy from that point like the fear of I don't want to hurt myself Or I want to make sure I know which also goes back to why I said the body weight thing It's such a good place to start these beginners is to get them to kind of just moving and moving the right way But I that's another big One that gets in the way for yeah I would say the only Achilles heel the resistance training is and it's also it's it's hallmark benefit It's it's it's so many different exercises and they can be applied so differently So it makes it incredibly individualizable. It makes it applicable to most be almost everybody But that also means there's a lot of potential complexity, right? So it's not like just getting our treadmill walking or getting on a stationary bike and riding There's squats and deadlifts and presses in different ways to do them in curls and press downs and rotation And so if you don't have that initial coaching this is why training and coaching could be so valuable It could be really hard to know what you're doing right what you're doing wrong So that I see as being a very valid, you know potential challenge for most people Now this last one has more to do with the fact that the programming is wrong Which also could be connected to lack of coaching, which is injury pain and over training, right? This this will stop anybody in their tracks, but it's so common for people when they get first when they first get started It's like they oh, I started working out. I was feeling good kind of tweak my back I had to take a couple weeks off boom momentum is gone. They stop working out where my shoulder always bothers me So I can't do those extra or not even be able to recognize what type of pain it is, you know If it's even just the burning pain That is just part of building muscles and getting some kind of you know Like a hypertrophy style training session where you're getting this pump you've never had before it's just like I think it the Unawareness of it and also to how to navigate through that when you do get joint pain when you do get these these things that come up You know, where do I go? How do I alleviate this and and how do I change my form or adjust things to make sure it doesn't happen? Well, I would make the case of one of the reasons why or one of the main reasons why this happens is is the poor programming is the I'm following this fitness influencer or my buddy wrote me this workout or so-and-so does this work out I did ten years ago. Yeah, so I think a lot of this stuff happens because I wish I remember What the what the the they did a thing I remember when we worked for 24 fitness They were talking about the number one reasons why people fall off their gym membership and this was the number one I want to say the average person Fell off within the first four to six weeks.  What's two pounds?  You don't have to have injuries or pain But you can just over apply intensity volume frequency and what ends up happening people start to get burnt out It's like they work super hard They see some results and they start to feel kind of crappy and they start to dread working out and it starts to feel like This is not fun. It's too much and it's often because they're just overtraining or less dramatic They just don't see as much of results as they would have seen how they did it right That's true And that's the trap I think I fell into even being a trainer and coach for as long as I did because I you know the stubborn side of me They want to get right back in the swing of things would try and you know I cared more about getting right back to where I was benching and squatting versus why I do all of it Which is for the results, you know It's like if I really cared just about the results And I wouldn't be worried about this arbitrary number that I'm moving on the bar and just go for regular people But I'm a train. It's true though. I can accelerate. I mean, I know I'm guilty. I'm all you guys But I'm so guilty of this when I come back. And so, you know that I mean, yeah, I would still get results I think that's the part that I didn't realize that this was a problem because I would I would work my way through it I would still get results But as I've gotten more experience, I've learned like, you know, god I can I can turn it back on and just barely ease my way in and just slowly ramp up and see great Progress week over week with minimal effort combined compared to all right. It's January 1. I'm back, you know And then just like sweating and killing myself on day one.  All right, so let's talk about then how people should get started to maximize results Minimize pain injuries over training and really maximize the odds That they're going to be able to stay consistent that this is going to be kind of permanent Not this a lot of people experience where they get some results And then they go back to where they were before this up and down that people tend to experience I think to start with Your best bet is to focus on training your whole body, you know, two to three days a week That's a great play. It's a good generally speaking. That's a good place to start For almost everybody when it comes to resistance training most people if you're not doing anything now Really or you haven't for a while Two to three days a week you not only is appropriate because there's lots of different ways to apply exercise within that But it's probably the best application and you could get very far with that I mean you could actually get very advanced with three days a week. Well, there's two things I really like about that It keeps you from doing uh too much on a single muscle group And then it also it sets you up for if you don't get three days in that gym So if you end up having a slow start and you only get in the gym twice or let's say worst case in a one time At least I hit the entire body. This was a this was something that took a long time for me to register Also, I was a body part split guy forever And when I started training full body, it was kind of like this aha moment for myself like dude, of course You know because it shit happens It's inevitable that I'm going to be consistent for a while and then something's going to come up And I'm going to have a rough week in that rough week. I might only get in the gym once or twice Now running a full body routine. What's great about that is if I only got in once or twice I still evenly hit everything on my body that volume for your entire body that way And then it it yeah, it solves that problem not being able to make it As consistent as possible out of the gates plus two you really got to spend time figuring out what your Perfect dose is like what what does that look like in terms of You know, did I do too much? Did I do too little? It's better to do too little because guess what you could just ramp that up and it's not like a deterrent when you go to work out again Oh my god. I just I can't I'm too sore. I over did it. It actually limits you from keep progressing Yeah, actually it's easy to like as Justin said it's easy to move up if you're not doing enough When you started to do too much You're now so far behind often that you have to go through this recovery process Before you can go back to working out. It's a much harder set you back Not to mention most people double and triple down in that situation because they don't know, right?  It's so common And this is also what leads to the what we talked about earlier about I think that's what the injury happens Is you already were over applying the intensity and volume that you didn't need to to start And then when you hit your first plateau your first answer is to Apply apply more volume and more intensity. Yeah, and then this next one. I think it's also really important Which is start out by using minimal equipment. Now. Why why is that important because if your workout as you're getting started, which is the The most touchy period of whether or not you're going to be consistent Whether or not you're going to be able to get that momentum going and build some discipline Whether or not you're getting things going on the right track If you're relying on equipment that is only available in your gym Or complex exercises that you don't always have access to Then the odds that you'll be consistent start to drop, right? Let's say you don't make it to the gym Well, I can't work out at all because I they only have the machine that I use and I don't my workout doesn't have any exercises Or to replace that or whatever So I think it's important to start out with very basic Or minimal equipment with your routine because it just increases the odds that you'll be consistent And it gets it gets things out of the way, right any potential Blocks or hurdles you're moving out of the way. Like I said, I've had that happen before where I'll help a family member And they'll because their workout depends on several machines and they can't go to the gym Well, what do I do now? Like you know, so but but if your workout depends on no machines doesn't matter, right along those lines I think too you should you should stick to 30 to 45 minute workouts Probably two sets per muscle group the full body routine that you're talking about Is a great place to start you don't need to be in there for an hour or two hours when you're first getting started 30 45 minute workouts two sets or so per muscle group I think is is plenty especially if you're getting in there two to three times a week That's plenty of volume for the there's a big myth that you need to work out much longer. I'll tell you what I often have workouts that are about 45 minutes long. I've been working out for Decades, um, and you know, how do I do that? Well, I mean at my level, which would be more advanced My intensity goes up. I'm resting less in between sets. I'm still resting but not as not as long I'm doing more challenging exercises. So there's a and resistance training is literally it's imagine a light switch You got to set that switch on to send the muscle building signal. That's all it is So if if you send that signal on any more now is just taken away from your body's ability to adapt, right? So 30 to 45 minutes when you first get started is a great place to start It's a great place to get going and then again you can go very far with that now along with that Now I don't I know we talked about earlier how valuable coaching is now in a perfect world Um, if for anybody who got started with resistance or strength training They would hire a really good trainer or coach and I'm going to be honest here case scenario. That's nothing can replace that Nothing can replace a really good coach that's going to train you one-on-one Watch your form design your routine for you make suggestions be there, you know supporting you Nothing's going to be better than that now the the challenge of that of course is a finding a good trainer and b Can I afford it? Personal training is not cheap. It's not inexpensive Here I know where we live here in silicon valley We're gonna pay about a hundred dollars an hour For a decent coach and even in other places where it's much less expensive. It's still 50 bucks an hour And for some people that just doesn't work Um, and so you know what we did is we created a resource and and this is true now This side of our business makes us almost no money But we did this literally because of this because we are all trainers We created mind pump tv, which is a youtube channel That is dedicated to exercise demos right so when you do your workout if you really need like you want help And how do I do this right? What are the coaching cues? What to look out for look up the exercise on there and odds are we'll have it on there Especially when you're getting started Yeah, no and the way to do that I've had to do this in my dm So maybe I'll do in the podcast right now I was like if you literally go to youtube channel And put in mind pump and then think of any exercise you name the exercise We've probably shot it. There's not too many You know standard movements even donkey kickbacks. Yeah They're they're in there too Uh, but yeah, like salis point. I mean when we first did this the the podcast we knew we would be able to Uh in long form articulate our points that we're trying to make when it comes to exercise and fitness The youtube channel was designed to complement the conversation that we have and then also the mind pump free.com Those things are all really designed to Basically help you for free and if you want to go build your own program if you want to go figure things out for yourself We wanted to give you the resources for free there Then of course we make our money by selling programs And that's I mean because I'm sure there's a lot of people that are just like myself Which is like, okay, just I'd rather have it all done and organized in one place than have to go search But it's there though when you look at the mind pump tv when you look at all the episodes that we've done Any question that you could have around like what should I be doing for these first? Couple months of getting started the the answer is in there. Yep, totally. Um, which takes me to the next one, which is Listen to your body or at At the least don't ignore your body.   They're not sleeping good because the workout is too hard But they're ignoring that it's all about the scale You got to listen to your body because if you work with your body, you'll get there much faster and more consistently If you ignore your body, your body will win by the way It's not a battle that you're gonna win if you're overdoing it and you're ignoring the signs the stiffness Over soreness the pain. I don't feel good those signals will get louder and louder and eventually they'll get you to stop working out Or they ignore those signs and symptoms because they look at this as a temporary Uh goal that they're trying to achieve and get to and then it's just going to get easier Once I get to this certain place that they've had, you know, in their mind of how I'm going to get there So I have to push through I have to do this by all means necessary And a lot of times, you know that leads you down a dark path because your body really is Talking to you and in trying to communicate whether or not you need adequate rest whether or not You know, it may be too much intensity You know a lot of those other factors like you have to just be very aware of how your body is responding Not to that point. So how much uh, how much content is dedicated to that on maps macro.com I know we built you built that pillar page out on there Yeah, and there's a ton of like free resources on there How much did you talk about that on there? Do you listen to your body with nutrition? There there's definitely there's uh articles on there Talking about that. So maps macro.com, uh, you know, that speaks to the nutrition side So you can figure out how many calories and these are rough. Okay, the rough estimates But they're way better than you know, running in the dark Yeah, so you can get kind of a rough estimate of how many calories your body Is probably burning and then how many calories you should eat if you want to lose weight or gain weight And then there's lots of articles and blogs connected to that That help you with you know food intolerances and behavior stuff And this is that like the nutrition guidance that I think a lot of people need But you know, when we're talking about listening to your body think of it this way, right? And the first thing your body will do And this is akin to you know, how we communicate with each other, right? You're trying to get a hold of someone and it's not that urgent You might send them an email. So what the body first does, right? It sends you an email ignore the email and then you'll get a text You ignore the text you get a phone call. I'm not going to answer the phone. Now.  Yeah Before you know it it's your body is Over you while you're in bed screaming at you. Okay, so that's what happens as if you continue to ignore your body The signals get louder and louder until you absolutely can't ignore them anymore So this is a very very important part and then for the nutrition That's complex that takes time. So the best advice I can give you now for free is to Be patient and start slow and we've done podcasts dedicated specifically To this process with nutrition But our maps macro.com page is free And that will help you with the information aspect proteins fats carbs calories that kind of stuff Let's talk about that a little bit though because even I think that we have one of the best macro calculators on the internet That's free for you to use but even that is it's still Not perfect, right? I've had people message me. Hey, I plugged everything in. I've been following this and this is what's happening Or I'm not seeing results And and I think that's why and you you alluded to but I think we should expand on it that Those those calculators. I don't care ours. Anybody's is not perfect now Somebody might experience plugging in and it is perfect for them. It might align just right, you know It's up but for the for most people it's a good place to start Yeah, it's a general guideline Yeah, and the idea is that you have a place to start And then based off of these body signals that you're talking about what you're seeing Am I putting on more weight on these calories? Am I losing am I losing too fast? Am I staying the same? Am I how's my energy levels and the idea is to kind of figure out? Okay Here's where I feel most comfortable and now okay if I want to build muscle Let's add you know 250 or so calories a day Maybe bump my protein up a tiny bit like it just gives you a baseline The idea is not for you to follow it like it's a rule like this is where your body is supposed to be It's some generic guidelines And it's a bunch of formulas that we've put together to get as close as we can To give most people a good starting point But the answer is not to just follow it blindly. No, and that's why listening to your body is so important You got to pay attention To those signals and take it slow with the nutrition like you do with the with the workouts and you'll get there You're more likely to get to your goals and more likely to stay There when you finally do get there now again, we're trying to provide answers We're trying to help people get started But the truth is a lot of people watching or listening right now They want things kind of you know planned out for them. Like I need it mapped out. I'd like It all condensed and put together So that I can just see when to play turnkey. Let's go Yes, and so what we've done is we've actually created a new maps program specifically for People like this So we have programs that are great for beginner beginners But we didn't have one for people that are maybe a little bit a little bit better off That really want to get started with resistance training and we also didn't have like all the support that we're talking about So here's what we did right? We created a new maps program called maps resistance And it's exactly for this person somebody that's getting started doesn't have any major movement issues Isn't so deconditioned that they they got to be very careful when they get started But they just they just haven't done resistance training before and they're ready to get started or somebody who has In the past and they just have been off. They haven't done it for a while, right? So a lot for a while right or if you're listening and this is when your friends or family members This would be good for them to get started So what maps resistance is it's exactly that and then in that what we did Is we actually put three Different workouts and all three of those workouts are phased and everything right so full blueprints but just like tailored to body weight specifically Dumbbell specifically and then dumbbells and barbells. Yes. So you can even progress through So it's like it's like you could progress through that with minimal equipment a little bit more equipment and then even More equipment all the workouts include Priming exercises to avoid injury They're all designed around this two or three days a week 30 to 45 minutes All kind of what we're talking about and then of course there's videos in there so you click on an exercise And to speak into sort of the accountability piece. There's one feature in here We didn't put on any of our other programs that I I thought was a great addition Where actually you could follow along so beat by beat you can actually Play this either on your tv or on your phone And so if there's any confusion or you haven't done any sort of the any of these exercises before you can Just follow along directly and go through the whole workout right right You also are throwing the forum in there so you have that support and guidance so you're talking about Yeah, so so and then of course as while we're launching this we were talking and we're like, okay We're going to tell people like all the mistakes and all the things they need to do We need to be able to provide them with a solution for all of this So the workout portion is taken care of with maps resistance But adam just said support and we said we would about support We just talked we're going to talk about that in the episode. What can we provide for support? Well, we have a private forum that you have to pay for normally to get into We're throwing that in for free and what you can do is you can get in there And if you have a question about anything or hey, I felt this with this exercise or I noticed this thing You go on the forum We have other trainers in there other coaches other people who follow the programs Doctors and then ourselves you can even tag us in there Normally that's $97. We're including that in for free for the first year Um, and then we put in more good Yeah, and then we we this is the first time ever that we're doing this Which I'm really excited about because the number one question we get asked all time is nutrition related And we've stayed away from that It's the reason why we partnered with nci is because we wanted a A trusted source that would provide that information for us We know that that's a full-time business in itself to help people along those lines And what we got was for jason to provide both of his ebooks, which are 97 bucks for those two books that for absolutely free with this program And it's macros explain and macros apply to really help somebody Figure out what they should be into a combination of that with our our macros.com and all the resources that we have Plus the forum should really help people formulate the ideal nutrition plan Well, there's also the intuitive nutrition guy that we included So and the reason why we did that is so intuitive nutrition guide is much more focused on behaviors And helping you identify and work with behaviors around nutrition if you listen to the podcast You know how important we think that is and and of course the studies Back and support that so that's also in there. And so what we've done is we've put it all together As like the perfect, uh, you know bundle or a combination of things that help someone get started Whether it's you listening or for all the tools you need just in one spot Yes, and and this is how we priced it 77 bucks. So 77 bucks you get all of that Access for life except for the form what you get for one year Which is included with that and that's pretty much it So you can literally apply all the stuff that we talked about in the episode and you'll be just fine It's going to require a little bit more work a little bit more searching But we also have free tools that can help you like mind pump tv. Of course, there's the podcast Uh maps macro.com which can help you with macros But if you want it all in one place and it's all written out for you with demos blueprints and the whole deal Then what you want to do is you want to go to maps resistance.com And it's only it's it's for a short time. We're not going to offer this forever with all those things But it's there and again 77 bucks And you get all of it. So and I don't think they need a code. Do they dug? Is it resist 20? I know they do not Well, they do need a code. Yes, it's resist 20 to get the discount Okay, so resist 20 is the code you want to use and that's 77 dollars for all that stuff So we hope that'll help and if you have any questions, of course You can find us on instagram and try and dm us We can't get to everybody but we try to answer as many people as we can You can find Justin at mind pump Justin me at mind pump sal Adam at mind pump adam and one more place to get free resources Mind pump free.com. There's more free written stuff there that can help you get started as well So we wish you luck and we hope you can stay consistent


This research paper investigated the possibility of neurostimulation by shock waves generated from a focus carbon nanotube fc-NT transducer. Electroencephalogram, e.g., signals were measured before and after shock wave stimulation in three rat brains, and the results showed significant increases in the number of peaks in the e.g. signals after stimulation. Additionally, the researchers found differences in three frequency bands, theta, 4-7 Hz, alpha, 8-12 Hz, and 1-30 Hz, before and after shock wave stimulation. These findings suggest that shock waves may be used as a viable method of brain stimulation for precise targeting. This article was authored by Jiho Lee, John W. Laracco, and Dong Guk Peng.


Thanks, GavTech, to the value of food, speaker, and slides and manager. Thank you. Alright, so my name is Leonard. I'm a product manager here in GavTech. But this presentation is more about this. So let's talk more about FormSG and what it is. Alright, so FormSG, what are we? We're basically like a Google Forms for government. And our tagline is the ability to give agencies the power to build government forms in minutes. So when it first came out of this, it was actually a bit ironic for some of the users because when you think of government in minutes, it sounds odd. Normally you don't think build government forms in minutes. You might think of like more of a negative months maybe. But we managed to do it. And let me first dive into what was the problem that we're trying to solve in this blue screen. Paper forms. Today in government, we are still using a lot of paper forms. Not sure if any of you have filled in a paper form from government in the past year. Maybe some of you might have. Okay, so that should be on FormSG if it's not already. So when we ask agencies how many paper forms are there? What is the size of the problem that we're looking at? We've got all kinds of answers. But we decided to search for an answer on our own. So we went to Google, our friend, and we tried to estimate the number of paper forms on government websites. So we just did a search for form within government sites and of file type PDF. Because PDF forms aren't actually digital forms. They're just paper forms converted to PDF. And we saw 60,000. Pretty large number. Some of you guys might argue that this number is obviously inflated. Because in RP 60,000, how many of these are actually forms? Maybe the query form is not that accurate. But it's a rough order of magnitude, tens of thousands. Even if you divide this by tens, it's still thousands of paper forms on government sites. It's still a big problem. And if you were to imagine if all of these were to be digitized without FormSG, there would be a nightmare. Because imagine if this form, let's say it's an IRAS form. Without a self-service form-builder tool, the agency would have to contact an external developer to digitize it. It would cause the engine to digitize forms. That's pretty expensive and really slow. Which is why we built a form-builder tool. It knows how to digitize all of these forms. There's thousands of forms. And that's FormSG. Alright, so how does FormSG actually work? It works in a slightly different way compared to Google. All the form-builder tools out there. Four steps. So the first step, you know in government we have both internet and intranet. Internet is what everyone in the world uses. Internet owns a secure intranet. An internal internet. But for FormSG, you can build your form on the internet at form.gov.sg. We took an extra effort to make this mobile optimized. Because in government, most agencies do not have an internet-enabled laptop. In government, the internet section, most users can only access the intranet. But we're not winning the whole thing on intranet because intranet is quite expensive. So if you're hosting on internet, we better make it mobile optimized. Because they'll be building their forms on their form. So the first step, you build your form on the internet. The second step, you share the form with a link. And the citizen can fill in this form. We're very integrated with government authentication. Some of you might have filled in a sync pass before. My info card pass, you might have heard of all these things. We actually integrate with them. Which means that it's easy to enable such government authentication with a click of a button on your form. And the third part is an interesting part. So we don't store form responses. That's how we're different from all the other forms with the tools out there. So for every response, you get an email. Which means that our server doesn't store any data at all. So a complete lightweight. It's basically just like a collect and forward kind of model. You can build a beautiful form using our tool. But we won't host that data for you. We'll just email the responses to you. But of course, you get this nightmare where if you have a survey of like 30,000 people, you get like 30,000 emails. No one wants to receive that number of emails. Which is why we have Step 4. We developed this compilation tool. A hack for you guys to aggregate the emails back into an Excel. I'll talk more about this later. So we've been around for only like a bit above a year. But as of today, we've had quite a bit of damage. The 90 government agencies in Singapore, 84 of them are aware that at least one officer signed up. Many of them are active, having created forms with thousands of submissions. But I'll say our penetration is about 20%. Everything are really active users. Not quite there yet. But the speed is picking up pace. So we're seeing this nice looking graph finally in terms of user sign-ups. These users are government officers signing up. You can see in the last month's loan, there are almost 900 officers that signed up in one month. So given this speed of growth, actually in another year, we're hitting 100% penetration. The whole government. But of course, to the end, we expect a slowdown in the take-up because of the laggards. But people are not just signing up. People are actually using FormHG to build forms because you can see the usage graph as well. In green, it's picking up one month as well. You can see at the beginning, we struggled to find this product market kind of fit.  But if people download and will not download, it will sign up and do not use that it might not be the right product to solve it. So at the start, we're kind of struggling from that. You can see usage, it does increase, but it's kind of flatlining. But in the past few months, we seem to have a bit of traction that's finally happening as usage. And there are about a few, like a thousand other forms of various types that are being used across government. Some of these are public-facing. You can find these forms on agency websites, such as, you know, application, the one in Brown, MOE, you know, this old-level music cost application that's on FormHG. And even for research polls as well, such as LTA Transport Master Plan E-Poll, these are done through FormHG. All right, so at the end of all our forms as well, we have these toilet smiley questions, you know, the five smiley faces, turns out a lot. Around 20% of people actually fill in this additional question. And 86% of the respondents are actually satisfied with filling in FormHG forms. All right, so all that, it's about where we are today. It's been like, I guess, okay, 15 months since the very, very, very beginning. And that's where we are. Let's rewind back and talk a bit about the journey and some of the, I guess, product issues and product thinking that went into designing this. All right, so this is where we are. But actually, it really didn't start out that way. So it started more like this. So we actually didn't start out with a form-builder tool. It started off with me manually building HTML forms for our users. And then the citizen will fill in your ugly form. I'm not a UX designer. I try to be knowledgeable about UX design. But I'm obviously not an aesthetic person. The responses still go to your outlook. That was there from the beginning. But we also had to spend 10 hours setting up this macro. The earliest version was some macro written in DBA to aggregate responses from email into Excel. Even worse is that it was basically this output of code that had to pass around to agency offices. And you know, agency offices, many of them are not the most tech savvy. So I have to explain to them what is code. And this is DBA. And you've got to change this line of code to put in your email and all those set up.  But the whole point is that at the beginning with something so ridiculous, we still had users. Some people that are willing to sit down with us to solve their pain point.  So they were willing to sit down with us to talk about the solution with us at the beginning and spend that time because that would save them hours every single week from their workload. So at the beginning, we had our first two use cases of this. They were for very obscure things. They were not for fancy MOM, M-O-E applications, large volume, no. For things that many of you might not have think of pigeon inspections, with tracking pigeon inspections, the poor officer was doing it to paper. That's horrible. So we decided to digitize them. For house visits, the previous process for the officer to take down notes on paper, go back and manually fill it in. There was an observation in HGP who were manually collated into Excel. A lot of manual work being done here. And why can't you use Google Forms? Actually, the first thing I told them was, hey, just use Google Forms for this. It's a lot of work to build a whole form on your own. And their reply at that time, that was 17 months ago, was classified census data. I can't use Google Forms for this. And their proposal was really, hey, why don't you build a Google Forms for us? Some secure government data centers and how much does it cost? We'll pay you. They wanted to pay us, but being mindful, civil servants, I guess I would call it, we thought that there could be a better solution than just implementing the whole thing ground up, hosting our expensive government data centers. So what I've really learned in red at the bottom, it's really to... it's not always a good idea to listen to your users for their solution. You have to talk to users, obviously. We talk to our users to understand their pain points and their problems. But sometimes when you ask a user for, let's say, they're riding a horse, you can ask them, hey, so your problem is that you're not traveling fast enough. What is your proposal solution? They'll say, okay, I think we need a faster horse. Maybe feed the horse better food, whatever. But they would probably have thought of a car. So it's it's sometimes up to someone external to the problem to bring some a better solution to that problem. And that's what I learned so far. So the version zero was the email method that we came up with. And the main reason is to avoid hosting on expensive government servers. We are hosting on AWS. That's more low cost and it's all the good stuff that comes along with it. It's pretty good reliability, availability and etc. And so for that, the very first version was really just each response sends one email to you. But that doesn't really solve the whole problem because the problem is still about manually filling it in. So how do we go from emails to the Excel? That was the second challenge that we had to face, which is kind of like version 0.5. Which you thought about that VBS script that aggregates emails from look into Excel. So that works. But of course with VBA, it's a whole nightmare. I wasn't well versed in VBA. So I mean, I'd pick it up as well. And I guess this is where I learned that sometimes it's okay to even pick up the old stuff. If you find it useful to code out a quick solution, it might not be the best solution at the beginning. Of course deploying the VBS script was a nightmare. At least it helped solve that one user's problem. So maybe we can start from that and clean up later. That's what a user wanted. I unskided the user for two hours going back and forth on how to install the script. There's a lot of interesting problems here. So the script I could distribute the script through an email. It's not like I could package it inside some executable or something like that and push it down centrally. The government system worked that way. So I had to email the script over to them and the user was so happy that they actually saw the response. This is a dummy response by the way in the Excel spreadsheet. This is an actual email. As you can see the title is called VBSession from Hell and the user said, this is what Trion looks like. This is pure joy from solving a user even though it's very inefficient to solve at the beginning with this VBA script. So from there the user actually was like, hey, this works. What if they want to change fields on the fly? Just call me no problem. I can add in those extra fields for you on the HTML form. Just not VBA.  I want this field to add an extra s word smithing. I want the extra field. How about a new form? I decided to ask them to do the work to build a form builder tool. So we borrowed two people. There was Abby and Nam. Sorry, I couldn't find a picture for Nam, my colleague. So we borrowed this guy. So it's a basic backend engineer and front-end engineer to start building a form builder tool. And what did we do? We looked at open source tools out there. Of course you wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel. Probably not trivial to build your own form builder tool. So we found a few. We found JQuery as some of you guys know. Maybe a bit dated. So we didn't like this because we weren't designers but we felt it was ugly as you can see. Form HG looks better, right? And there was also no user login implemented. Which is why we watered in the early days. Because obviously you create your forms. You want to maintain them yourselves. You need some kind of login to prove that those forms belong to you. So you don't end up messing other people's forms. So my colleagues wanted me to use something else called line survey. Actually some of the words are off at the bottom. But this was another alternative we didn't use it as well. It's written in PHP and no hate for PHP. I think parts of Facebook probably still use it. But I personally worked with it. Don't really like it. It was also kind of ugly. There was a free version that was open source. But then there was also this paid version. I think I wasn't a big fan of that because I would imagine that if our company offering a premium version of something and a free version if you put a business hat you'll probably say okay. Maybe I'll put some traps in the free version such that you will use the free version at a certain point and realize that your desires are not satisfied and you don't pay. So I didn't want to fall into such a trap. So I didn't want this either. But the main issue that we had was that there were actually millions of lines of code in this repository. There was a lot to navigate through and it was quite hard to find the piece of code that wanted to change in order to send emails over. There's all these form builder tools. They all store data. So I don't remember what... I mean it's PHP but I don't remember what was the actual backend database language that they used. Probably some kind of SQL I'm not sure. But we basically wanted to change the part of the code to instead of storing data and using SQL, no SQL, whatever, we wanted to change that so that responses would be emailed over and that part of the code was so hard to find. We just couldn't find it. You had to probably change maybe 20% of the code in order to add in the functionality and that was millions of lines of code 20%, hundreds of thousands of lines of code to code. No way. So we didn't stick this. Finally we found something. It's called teleforms. If you guys are aware, another popular form is called typeforms. I call it the beautiful Google forms. But teleforms is an open source version of typeforms. So we found that and we loved it because it looks beautiful. The user account is done first. It was in JavaScript. So no PHP, yes. Minstack, Mongo Express, Angular, Node.js. Angular 1 fine but still at least Angular and not vanilla for example. Although maybe some people out there do that. And the most beautiful thing is a point from a form because it basically took us a minute to find where the code we had to change to email responses over. Which means we're going to take this code and we just modify that part and we're good to go. So that was why we chose Telephone and at the same time I knew that two engineers that we borrowed, we only borrowed them for a limited time. It was a very hackish setup where we borrowed them for another team for two weeks just to set this up. And after we set this up we can move on and do something else. It wasn't really like a real project at the beginning. So I knew that time was limited but this project had a lot more potential. So we needed some permanent help. Which is why we got our good friend here, Asher. We said it's seated over there as well to join the team. So at that point in time, Asher just joined and I asked him to join FormSG. Because what I learned is that at the very beginning, when you have no users yet, the litmus test is to convince capable people to join you. Because you can't convince someone to follow along with your vision it's probably even harder to get users and their bosses to come to that vision. So thankfully we have him. Now that we have a team, we can do all the team stuff. All the code stuff so we go to the beginning, think of a name. Let's start with thought of like FormR. It's basically like the Spanish translation of forms I think. At least from Google translate. But then I wanted to buy FormR.SG but realized that it was taken. I was so sad. But then I removed the A and realized that Form.SG wasn't taken. So obviously call it Form.SG. Can't believe FormR was taken but not form. So yeah, we renamed because of that and we created a logo. Form.SG that was the earliest logo. It was not done by a professional designer. It was done by one of us. If you realize it's actually like a form but tilted 45 degrees. I don't know if you all realize that. Form.SG. We chose what I call developer colors. Because all of us are developer. That shade of blue and that shade of green. It's not the air B&B kind of colors. Sorry, the beginning team did not really have designers in it. So we set up Pivotal. It's one of the task management tools. There are many Trello, Asana, etc. We just use Pivotal because we're comfortable with it. There isn't a lot of processes at the beginning. We deliberately kept it lightweight because we're a small team. It's just a GitHub repo. You send a code review before PRS merged into master. Simple as that. Some daily stand-ups at the beginning because we wanted to move fast. We still wanted to make the team in sync. We had daily stand-ups, Slack channel for communications, and also a weekly sync up with our boss. That was all. At the beginning, it was all about the product. It was all about solving the user's problem at the beginning. It wasn't about spending two months thinking of a team name, what's the best team name, what's the best domain we can buy, all those things at the beginning. I learned that at the start we probably shouldn't spend too much time even developing full-blown agile or scrum, especially if it's a small team. Because throughout the whole process of forming into the 15 months, we really carefully think about how much time we're spending on processes and how much time we're spending on the actual work. If we end up spending more time on processes than the actual work, then this is drop those processes. For our small team, we found this, this would be sufficient in terms of all the processes they would have to do. So we didn't really do a lot of those things that you might do in scrum. Like all those retrospectives, sprint planning, story-pointing, all those things we would go that deep into all these things. Okay, so we're excited. We've got a team. We solved the user's problem. We're going to get our forms deployed. We want it to be actually used by our team. Because although the worker, all the way at the bottom in pink, that we talked to liked it, actually there are all these layers in red, purple and all that that had to approve it first before you can finally see it live. How do we solve this? We dog-fooded. We said, okay, this external agency agencies, whatever. Understandably, it takes them time to get the series of approvals, especially for a prototype project. So we did it internal. Maybe it could work for our team first. We did some productivity gains to our team. So we had a colleague who was basically thinking of a checklist form before open-sourcing. And we had another one, another colleague, Lee Wei. He was thinking of using forms for judging a data challenge event. So we asked him for help and great things came out of them. On the left, we discovered some bugs. We also realized a very critical feature that we missed out. The ability to allow new lines on your form. Can't believe we forgot about that. And on the other hand, for the judging event, our then CEO at the time, Jacqueline, was a judge. She was a judge. And the past year, she went to the same event and she found a paper form. This time it was a digital form. She was elated about it. And she asked, where does this form come from? And we told her, this was created by one of your departments. Which is why she became our first senior leader ambassador to actually help promote form SG to other senior leaders. That's how we got a bit more traction, a bit of the buy-in from the top. And that was something that we obviously didn't expect at the beginning. This whole dog-fooding thing was something that we didn't think was such fruits of labour, I guess. But unexpectedly, Lena some users from the senior leadership level and then we made a video because we think that form SG if I have to go down and present all these senior leaders, it wouldn't be as impactful as if I just made a video to carefully explain how form SG is. Because form SG in the early days is quite complicated. A video works. So I just got together learn some iMovie and all that. I haven't made a video in my life before this. So I'll play the video. It's a bit ancient. It was done like 14 months ago. And it's 4 minutes. Let's see if I can play it. Video! They set music at the start because the current process came through. The music switches. Officer had to do manual data entry for all the responses. This was the early UI. This was sent to senior leaders by the way. This was the VBA script. So they had to go into the code and change a few things. And then press the tiny run button over there. And then you get the responses in Excel. So that was the early version of form SG. There was the marketing video that we made. It wasn't the most professional but it did create a lot of buy-in. So senior leaders understood what the product was about through this video. And that is the result. We got a 10 times number of sign-ups. September 4th, October 53. We're excited seeing this. By that time we were euphoric over this. And we started getting invited to present at various agencies. And now we have a first world problem. We have a bit of attention but we have all kinds of feature requests. We have people wanting to build all kinds of form fields. And how do we tackle that? For example, we just look at two dimensions really. Intensity of problem and frequency of appearance across agencies. Just like that. So the ones in red are pretty insane problems. So those are blockers for those agencies. So without those features, they will not deploy something on form SG. So you can imagine like four agencies, A, B, C, D, right? And just by eyeballing it, we'll probably work on something like F1 because it's like red and all the agencies A, B, C wants it. We'll work on F2 maybe because it's a blocker for agency C and really want them to use form SG. And F3 maybe, F3 is maybe not a huge blocker but it's a common enough problem that occurs so we might want to tackle that. But the point is that we have to walk away for something like agency D because we'll build a lot of engineering resource to code out for features F9 to 12 years for agency there are blockers. You have to convince them to use it. Why not focus a bit more on ABC especially at the beginning which is the main thing that I learned at this stage was that we had to learn to actively walk away from difficult customers at the beginning. I mean, often times you think about customer centricity it's all about satisfying the customer but especially when you're lean and it's early not every customer might be a perfect customer to begin with. There were a lot of big issues. Chief among them is this VBA script the agency that have to sit down with those agency officers for 2 hours to 10 hours to figure out what's going on. So I rewrote it from an Outlook macro to an Excel macro big improvement there still in VBA but now there's UI now it's a script with a run button it's basically an app in Excel so what users can fill in now they don't have to do code anymore they just fill in different fields here such as what is their form title and all those things and they press one script and that will transform their emails into an Excel spreadsheet with those email responses collated So this saved me a lot of time because I don't have to spend 2 to 10 hours each time 10 then I'll set this up but I still have to accompany this with around a 10 page Microsoft Word document explaining to them how to install this but it's still not that straightforward to install you can generate like a self signing service and all these kinds of issues I have to explain what script means users are saying could I check out what script is is it a document file, is it code, what is it and agencies have to ask the IT department to whitelist our script for running I guess because of security issues it's a macro after all there's no email around so it's challenging for us to centrally push updates can you imagine if you're like installing uber app and then you have to email uber hey can you send me the uber app by email can you be sent our way just in case they got blocked and dropped I wanted to check if you send me the uber app imagine that but we had to do it like this there was no other simple way to deploy our script it had to be to email which was painful we were thinking of version control and all these things so we thought of a solution joined one of these innovation challenges bought a server on the secure government data centers just one server and we coded a tool so how this tool works pretty interesting so the first step out of the vba world the first step is to export your emails to a .psd file so on outlook you might archive emails on outlook actually I'm not sure how many people here use outlook maybe a lot use gmail I use gmail more than outlook but if you're out of outlook you can archive emails and the file extension of the archive file is something like maybe archive.psd so everyone's familiar with archiving emails at least in the public service so they receive all these emails they can receive the formage gmail responses to .psd second step is to visit this link on the government intranet and then you can dump the pst file there and we have this parser that parses the .psd file extension to a .xls an excel file it's basically a parser that we actually we didn't write it ourselves we found it open source I have no idea why someone wanted to pass .psd to .xls but I can find all the interesting things open source online so we found it how to pass something from .psd.xls and we implemented it we made some tweaks and this became our new way to collate email responses into excel and people started using this even more because what we realized before this was that the script was so hard to set up that people just didn't collate the emails in fact they bought email inboxes of larger and larger size to store all the email responses and worked off the emails they didn't rely on excel but after this we realized that we were actually aggregating and using this feature alright so and then through the months after using that framework that we talked about intensity and frequency we implemented many features such as collaborative forms auto acknowledgement email when you finish your form you can receive a confirmation email that can be customized by the agency various types of fields attachment fields where you can upload a picture to send over as an email attachment check box video about other fields even some kind of logic on your form where you can edit one field which decides whether to show another field or not and even with all these features we still have pretty stagnant growth in terms of both sign ups and usage as you can see from this graph especially the sign up graph I think for the first 6 months we jumped from September to October and I was really happy about that 10 times growth but obviously for the next few months there was this small growth people were signing up right it's just not signing up at a faster pace so what happened we needed something better we had to join our team as well we wanted to build a better user experience and we talked to users even more when I mean talk to users we talk to end users we talk to citizens we wanted to build beautiful forms it wasn't just government forms they can collect classified data but beautiful forms how do you do that actually at the back on this floor we have an eye tracker kind of room we basically invite the user down in a form and there are these cameras that actually track where the user's eyes are looking at so we invited all kinds of users we invited the young and tech savvy we even invited someone who is in the 60s as well who has just taken one computer class and even she can fill in a form as you form actually and also at the end of all our forms we added in that feedback to try to gather different forms and we even got some features suggestions from there as well and we found some interesting things actually I want to share a bit about some of the things that we found that were actually not so necessary so there were these four things there were many others but I'll just share these four progress tracker on some forms you see 0 or 4 answered sometimes it might be a percentage 20% of the form done we realized that people were actually not staring at that part of the screen when we use eye trackers we can see that they'll put a heat map of where people are staring at and realize that people are not staring at that so how are they measuring the progress to a form found something interesting people were staring at this so it's the height of the scroll bar and where it is relative to the screen so all the way the bottom people are almost done and if the scroll bar is really thin it means it's really long form so people are paying a lot of attention to that which means that actually we can remove the progress tracker and then there were these multiple pages forms sometimes we had a form with like 100 questions and then agencies would come to us and say hey we have 100 questions we need to separate our form into like 5 pages we have to do that that's like the best web design standards so we actually thought about this experimented if you talk to users we actually realized that end users aren't the most satisfied at multiple pages because number one I mean based on the previous feature they decided to remove with multiple pages you can't really track progress through the scroll bar because you can't see the scroll bar of future pages and secondly people are just most of our users playing the forms on their phone and on the phone it's more optimized to scroll through things imagine if you are using Facebook and you got to click on some next button in order to view the story of the next person the feet of the next person it's pretty annoying to use the scrolling on the mobile phones which is why we said no multiple pages mobile first we'll put all your questions on one page and you can hit us to separate them and users will scroll then there's this other back to talk button right my thing is a good idea some websites have it what we realized is that back to talk button actually causes users to skip questions because they think they can go back easily you can imagine someone feeling the form like this you feel in question 3 and then go which questions are easy to fill in I can always go back to talk there's that innate desire to not fill in the heart to fill in questions first because it's an easy way to go back so actually by removing this this actually saves user frustration at the end because they start filling in questions sequentially and we even add an error message that appears along the way to prompt them to fill in the questions as they go not leave it to the end this actually makes the user's life a lot better imagine filling in the whole form and because it's back to talk button because they don't warn you they haven't filled in questions all the way to the end it tells you 6 questions not filled in that would be quite frustrating for quite a few users and save as draft as well so everything save as draft is a great idea but we realise that this makes users dive into your form when you have a 1 minute toilet break horrible so the simple fix to this to prevent users from diving into a form without having the prerequisite materials available and enough time to fill in the form is really mandating this mandating agency officers to put this on their form estimated time to complete 30 minutes but this along with also section on instructions prerequisites they need fill in your form make users set aside that amount of time so that they can fill it in in one sitting that's a much better solution than coding a save draft functionality and along the way we also remove the passwords earlier I was talking that we had this user login system we realised that actually managing our own user login system is not that straightforward logins are everywhere you might think they are quite non-trivial to implement but not necessary you know with logins there are a lot of things to think about there's like forget password, there's change password when you first sign up there's this verifying link they generate there are a lot of things to consider it's quite a lot of code complexity so we removed it what we did was email OTPs because forms are one of these things where we hope a user doesn't login every day actually it's probably you login once and maybe three months later you create another form then you login again so people are not going to remember their passwords which is why we have temporary passwords they are sent into their government email accounts and this means goodbye lines of complicated code and has a security side benefit as well because now our form builder is linked to the secure government email server to login you're going to get the email OTP from your secure government email also we designed a whole user interface in the video you saw that it was there now it's this for home page new logo by the way as well looks a bit like okay fine clipboard maybe a couple other companies but it's more design type not those developer colors so build your form tab very developer kind of style you can see even the buttons over here and all these icons they're from an icon site that developers often use I can't remember what it was called I wiped it from my memory my designers are happy I did that so sorry yes babycon, gliffycon, gliffycon yes gliffycon and fevycon those are the developer ones the designer ones are I think box icons pretty good icons over there like the plus over there see you see the L, E and X plus the plus is from box icons and the I also the preview the I you can see it's more sleek you know okay the form used to look like this looks a lot better now and it also created a beautiful landing page today you can go on form.gap.su on your phones and you can see this landing page and this was a very powerful feature that led to the recent traction because instead of passing around that video okay fine the truth is I'm lazy to make another video but instead of passing around that video or maybe a deck of slides to government agencies it's better to pass than the product itself so a landing page that describes what the product is about especially if you're accessing on your phone form.gap.su we put all the information there what features do we have how do you get started and of course at the top as well the numbers are one part because you know there are many people they work with that are quite wrist of us so if no one's using it they probably wouldn't dive in here first so these numbers are proof that other people are already using it which gets them started and that's really how we are getting the recent traction because of this beautiful landing page and this new refresh user experience what's this oh yeah I remember the point here is yes that at the beginning we were not really focused on selling that hard because we don't really want to sell a product that doesn't work you probably will spend a lot of time banging on doors and people will sign up but people will probably not use your forms because it's a product that doesn't solve their problem so at the beginning we spent a lot of time building those features prioritizing features making sure it works before even getting a designer on the team to think about a better user experience to think about a beautiful landing page we're not concerned with that at the beginning at the beginning it was all about product features does it solve your manual data entry problem does it solve your manual data entry problem yes okay we'll code that feature and then when the time is right which is a few months ago when we knew that we roughly had a good product that can solve quite a lot of form related problems digitized paper forms then we started pushing the pedal and here's what we add and really to be what I call future proof we are moving away from a form builder tool as well as of today we like to call ourselves an eService Builder so we're more than just building a HTML form you can also enable SyncPass Mindful and CogPass just like that from your form do you think of forms as basically like apps at least for government because a lot of the apps that we have are just taking in information so they're basically forms so if we can incorporate more of those app-like features in a form builder we can move towards a simple app kind of builder such as integrating with digits ePayments and all these things we're not there yet but we could consider such things and we're also thinking of a way to move away from emails so one of the possible ways is end to end encryption but the server never sees the private key the private key could be emailed to the person that creates the form and of course once we start storing data it opens up a whole world of opportunities where it's more convenient the script was bad, the data collection tool was a bit better but it's still not as convenient if you see the responses there on the same side and once we start storing these encrypted responses provided the private key from the user it can link up to analytics and visualization results and also to integrate directly with back-end agency workflow systems, all those case management systems client, CRM, CMS, whatever you call it those they can supply the private key and they could fetch data from a form builder tool as well and we are going to open source back again after doing a bit more cleanup and the goal of that of course is to contribute to open source community but also for open agencies to perhaps get their own developers and all that to quote niche features if they want to that's how we could augment our engineering team because you know there could be a certain agency such as let's say NEA for example they might need like a dual fencing kind of feel or something like that so it's a very niche feature that only caters to them so as a platform servicing so many different agencies at this point to provide different agencies we might not necessarily want to focus on that feature but they will want that feature it might be a blocker for them what they can do is they could you know our code is open source they could hire maybe a developer to quote that's the feature and send a pull request back and then all of a sudden this feature can be available for everyone as well although it serves their niche need so I think I've come to the end of the presentation what do you guys think? it's a tricky question in front of my boss at the back just kidding so for everyone's sanity I just joined my job yesterday so I wanted to go home but I think normally it goes to 30% to 9% so I hope if Gotet has no issues maybe folks could just ask let it any questions and go around to maybe 825-9 yeah any questions? always ready to question you thank you so my name is once I'm from Germany so my question is I forgot my question for people it always happens to me first question is how did you even end up looking for was this like on a road map somewhere was this something that your boss has said they got a problem or did you just have a request one day on email and decided to solve it and then you kind of walked this whole thing second question is I don't know how many months 15-16 months or so with the benefit of retrospect if you could reverse time what would you have done differently if anything and by the way my wife works for PA I asked her yesterday she said yes it's a true market test yeah so we don't know how to start as well so basically our team has had a library of ideas that we've been trying to come up with like we have a drive ball and a poster of ideas you can have and this is one of them somebody did a form development what if you build a form build security hard so it's like don't have a database that was pretty much like the one paragraph when I joined the team there was a couple of projects forms was not on we were working on data development like parking like this this was a CCA no one told us to do it this seems pretty deep we have some cycles and I told him and he got some users and once you've got enough users it seems like a real project we get some funding for it we have to do the thing first and then get the funding out it really was just between other projects that's it I think that's basically it so let me answer the second question what would I change probably start thinking about this end to end encryption thing a bit earlier the whole email data collation tool thing wasn't the most user friendly for users I think if you probably ask people in PA they'll probably say oh it's really easy to create a form but people always say listen to the thing after the but pay special attention to that but it was so hard to collate the data back emails was the great hack at the beginning that was off the ground because we didn't have to think about hosting on our data centers but it would probably help us if you think about the end to end encryption solution a bit earlier what's up you have to fill out a constant form or in Singapore like the entry exit form and there's still paper can you use your tool for that? yeah of course if you can tell us the form if you have the form link or something or in the name of the form we could approach anything in Singapore I think people normally fill in the form of the plane with just no wifi connection maybe connection of the plane maybe I'll try yeah I agree I think some countries even made that online not on the plane I think some countries have been sorry yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I'm concerned that this is something that actually counts for a lot the email is very powerful we can circulate it people think that the government I can tell you that as a government worker our internal opinions we spend months on citizens email like civil servants or email ministers last few things things happen really quick if there's stuff you want us to do to try emails have been good it really counts so my email is landed at data.caftersg any other questions yeah yeah so technically we are still a pilot program technically so KPIs are mainly defined we actually define the KPIs and we discuss it with our bosses then they give us the funding KPIs revolve around usage we get KPIs on forms created KPIs on users sign up and stuff like that so we've hit those KPIs in terms of how much we actually find that on the email so if we can actually share it so basically the way to think about it is that one of the way to think is that when we present these products a lot of the work goes for government systems are actually quite large compared to what governments spend on verification systems the amount we spend running forms I would say less than 0.1% more fraction and the reason this is the case is because if you think about the system there is no answer because you wouldn't destroy any data and you just send it through a email you usually have a server which sends a form which can be visited cash technically and it's faster if you know your government email address so our total infrastructure cost for running this is virtually no the main funding is pretty much like approving or manpower to work on this and that's it I believe proportion of amount we spend on infrastructure compared to salary working three people involved in this people for this project it's probably 90 to 10 manpower 90 infrastructure 10 that's one of the the fact that you're doing a project basically you want to type it up and think how this is going to be the biggest thing everyone's going to buy it it doesn't look like you're trying to do the opposite you're trying to punch it down it's just a small project you know what is up that's kind of what we don't do that's what we hope that you don't cause any disease because if you have to charge if you have to use the link for you it just wastes everyone's time the whole point is that someone can get up from literally 30 minutes one of the cool demos we did was Sir Asha we gave a talk at one of our conferences about phone messaging and in the talk itself he on the spot created a feedback form for the talk live from everyone the fact that he didn't have to like use the link for this so from the point of how we did this so getting that small project and no giving cycle understanding like in the government agencies there's a lot not very tech literate they probably have a lot of problems like one of the we have problems understanding was so like cause what I do is and customers are SMEs I face a lot of problems all these customers they don't know like how to even access application so what are other than eye tracking thing that you have done is there anything else that you have done to that is like to help this slightly older in the agencies to your application so the best way to educate and support users right now we have 65 agencies to identify ambassadors in each agency so a lot of these are actually volunteers so I mean some of them are actually so I guess the way gavtech works is in this building we have all the practitioners project managers, engineers, designers in this building but a large part of gavtech is actually situated across different government agencies for example at MOM we have a CIO over there and his team that helps out with the IT in MOM so what we did was actually work with people across various agencies and they will be the ones that hand hold public officers to digitize their forms let's say you know if there's a less tech savvy public officer in these agencies we could contact the CIO team which will help them build formagy forms help them understand what the script is and some cases also organize workshops we've organized quite a few some for MOM, MND etc what we do is that our team of let's say 4 or 5 will go down spend maybe 4 hours and they will invite even hundreds of their public officers to come down and we will digitize the forms for them on the spot on that day yeah Hi, my name is William, I design I have one question about open sourcing the project what are some thoughts behind open sourcing this project and like are there any special government if you decide this project it's going to be open sourced you have to fill in all the check forms open sourcing with the team okay let's open sourcing I think I think so thankfully in the government we are in sort of weird crux here because we personally believe that this public money insurance will be public it's about the same argument for like public dependent research that we opinion publish and if we spend taxpayer money doing this there's no reason and we don't make profit of it there's really no reason to not share this with people that's unsolved on the practical level we are in this nice juncture where like our senior leadership doesn't care too much about this stuff but they practically don't find the side with the sourcing so we don't have to bring the people to the tech community so go ahead that's pretty much it there is like we are sufficiently ahead of our time that there are no regulations around open sourcing things yet so we pretty much do you see that our bosses are like hey we're going to open sourcing we have dozens of things open sourcing already so if those guys follow the audios and things and they're nothing super major just yet but we have a few things like the line is partially open sourced forms from the open source parking can be open sourced once you clean up the whole little bit but yeah nothing the major concern open sourcing is that someone will basically build the sort of scoop replica fishing site which should be a concern because it's a little bit easier but really if you have that kind of vicious act that you can do that anyway because it's not what the HDNL man so realistically the risks are very low benefits are pretty high it brings in good will everyone starts using this thing that works a lot better also you're completely right so we actually haven't thought of this process yet so our thinking is as in the beginning maybe work with a few agencies to figure out how this process works I was I mean just on the comment here I was thinking that we will want to conform to our design guidelines at least so it's either a choice between just giving the agencies I guess something like you know you know just giving the agencies I guess some components to work with or letting them make the logic based changes and then for us to do a bit of work to make sure it fits in with the user experience so it could be either or perhaps any one who has the left and right this is a process that we still have yet to work on right last question send me those paper forms do you have a question? I have a question so like are you open to contribution from external actually you can say like if I'm just a random insider maybe it's like for an issue or that we're coming forward yeah definitely I mean in fact right now we are iterative, same class, all those things but our plan is to like shut them out before open sourcing as well to become this like generic form of the tool as well when we first thought from telephones we realised that there were quite a bit of messiness in the telephones code as well we spent a good like 13 months cleaning up a lot of messiness so we really wanted to contribute back to the community we saw that there were a few thousand stars a lot of dead fox so we wanted to contribute back to it that would be part of the team too that would be part of the team too that would be part of the team too that would be part of the team too that would also be there you guys can hang around the network for things to come big thanks to Michael the friend said we're not able to make it because in the YouTube channel there's a lot of cool stuff from other videos as well so thanks for coming please don't finish the pizza if you don't finish we don't get to go home see you guys next time thank you