One of the most enigmatic, mysterious, and least understood ancient structures to be found anywhere on Earth. Although many academic institutions and funded individuals throughout the years have maintained that these structures were tomb sites built for ancient Egypt's greatest leaders, the severe lack of evidence supporting such claims, along with the lack of any hieroglyphic recording of the enormous undertaking that these structures would have been, contradicts this explanation. Particularly Cheops, the largest of the three great pyramids, and the only one constructed to in fact have eight sides. The only one with tunnels, the only one with shafts, most notably the shaft which led to Gatenbrink's door, long thought to have been air shaft due to its steep incline and minuscule scale. And although it is the only one to possess such features, they were installed perfectly. These tiny shafts were not only perfectly aligned throughout the structure's internal stonework, built with unimaginable skill and accuracy, but these were somehow hermetically sealed during the pyramid's original construction. This would have been required to avoid them becoming blocked with dust, with the exterior shape of the pyramids built with such astounding precision. The subtle indent creating the eight sides is so slight, it is only visibly detectable under certain light angles, often requiring modern technology to actually measure the perfection these ancient feats were. As mentioned, Gatenbrink's door, leading from the king's chamber, was for many years assumed to be an air tunnel. However, after attempting to inspect the shaft with an intention to consider utilizing the structure's own design to aid in fresh air circulation, it was realized that this shaft led instead to a blocking door, the doorway to an undiscovered chamber within the bowels of this most mysterious of ancient remnants. However, after several years of apparent reluctance to explore this hidden chamber, along with the mammoth challenge Gatenbrink encountered attempting to develop a robot capable of reaching the blocking door, capable of traversing the obstacles within the shaft to eventually penetrate this inner sanctum. As the discovery came to its ultimate culmination of actually seeing what was hidden behind this door within this hidden chamber, a shaft deliberately designed to be near-impossible to discover without modern technology, thus clearly a room of great importance. The media was blocked, a blackout descended upon the Giza Plateau, and the investigations remained guarded for a considerable amount of time. When it was eventually opened up to the world, the supposed tomb found in situ within the chamber was conveniently empty, without any distinguishing evidence to suggest the chamber's past function. Many people would be forgiven to suspect a conspiracy ensued, one in an attempt to conceal whatever was found in the supposed tomb of Osiris. What are the Egyptian authorities, and even other influential countries' governments concealing regarding this mysterious chamber? Thankfully, it seems that this was not the last chamber to ever be realized. Two more chambers have now been discovered to still be buried, hidden, within this great pyramid, one which is located above the Grand Gallery is said to be of a significant size. The question is, what could be hidden in these two remaining rooms? Will advancements in penetrative radar allow its true contents to be revealed to the world before the Egyptian government have the chance to hide its contents? These are astonishing ancient structures, undoubtedly one of the most incredible wonders on earth. As such, they are highly compelling. On the 25th of January, 2011, the streets of Cairo were being ravaged by a rioting population, demanding the end of President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year regime. While the world was distracted by the dramatic scenes of chaos upon the streets above, but within the ancient dusty tunnels, a team of archaeologists, led by Suzanne Bickel, of the University of Basel in Switzerland, was quietly making one of the most significant discoveries of the past century. They had initially found the top of a large round stone at the eastern end of the valley of the kings. The archaeologists suspected that it was just the top of an abandoned shaft, but before they could investigate, due to Egypt's political process regarding finds within the valley, they had to cover the stone rim with their own locked iron door, inform the Egyptian authorities, and apply for an official permit to excavate. A year later, after gaining approval to excavate, Bickel returned with a team of two dozen people, including field director Elena Paula-Goth of the University of Basel, Egyptian inspector Ali Rita, and local workman. Each took turns, lying on the ground, head pressed against the shaft wall, one arm through a small hole next to the capstone, snapping photographs. They left little doubt that it was indeed an ancient tomb. On top of the debris rested a dusty black coffin carved from sycamore wood and decorated with large yellow hieroglyphs on its sides and top. Paula stated that she has never seen an Egyptian coffin in such a good condition before. The dating of fragments of pottery made from Nile silt and pieces of plaster, commonly used to seal tomb entrances in ancient times, together with the age of the other nearby sites, have indicated that the tomb could be more than 3,000 years old. The hieroglyphs describe the tomb's occupant as being named Nahimi's Bastot, Egyptologists currently believe she was a lady of the upper class and of Amun. People have been claiming there was nothing new left to find in the Valley of the Kings for almost as long as they have been digging there. The Venetian antiquarian Giovanni Belzoni believed he had emptied the last of the Valley's tombs during his 1817 expedition, while Theodore Davis, who excavated there a century later, came to a similar conclusion right before Tutankhamun's burial chamber was found. Fortunately, there is a growing number of people who are beginning to suspect that there is a wealth of discoveries still left to be made in the Valley of the Kings, the Nile Delta, and Egyptian as a whole, and thanks to discoveries such as these, interest in these existing mysteries grows by the day. It is interesting to see that in this period, even a wealthy girl was buried with quite simple things, Bickel says, comparing Nahimi's Bastot's coffin and steel with the elaborate pottery, furniture, and food found in earlier tombs. Her wooden coffin was certainly quite expensive, she says, but nonetheless, it lacked the elaborate inner coffins found in similar burials. Is this the burial chamber of an extremely ancient queen? After reinforcing the coffin and securing the mummy, Bickel's team have transported across the Nile to Luxor, where a full investigation is currently being undertaken into the true identity of the mystery female. With substantial insight into the controversial finds within ancient Egypt, we personally suspect that often the tombs, which appear the most crudely designed, containing wood and sarcophagus, are generally found to be the most ancient. Furthermore, their hieroglyphic writings were often far more exquisite in nature. Could this be the discovery of an original burial, and the crude hieroglyphic claim of the occupant's identity of fake, hiding the delta's true antiquity? A secret many fringe scientists have begun to believe is being protected by Egyptian antiquities. Many have come to suspect the Egyptians merely copied the original builders of the pyramids, after taking occupation of their structures many years later. Supportive evidence for these claims comes in many forms. Erosion upon the pyramids, and especially the Sphinx, including over 100 underground chambers we are currently researching, discovered under Giza in 1995 by a team led by Kent Weeks, which also show strong evidence of several flash flooding events involving seawater throughout their long existence. The lack of any written detail pertaining to the construction of either monument in any hieroglyphs found in ancient Egypt, and so on. We find it incredibly intriguing that more was not made public regarding this amazing find, which leads us to suspect it may be a highly important, albeit highly controversial, discovery. We will continue to do research on Nahem's Bastet, and will endeavor to keep you all informed regarding any notable findings. Who built the Great Pyramids? How? Why? Questions many have attempted, but seemingly fail to answer. Although claimed as tombs, with the different internal chambers within the largest, Khufu, named in representation of this purpose. Interestingly, Khufu, or Cheops, is the only one of the three pyramids with internal chambers. The other smaller two merely have tunnels beneath. An enigmatic box, whose lid has long been lost to history, lay within this enormous structure, long claimed to have been the sarcophagus of Khufu. However, although suspiciously small, no one seems to be able to explain how they got it into the chamber in the first place. It is as if the pyramid was built around, as it doesn't fit through any of the known entranceways. Since the 19th century, when these chambers were first rediscovered, a tremendous amount of research, though it must be noted, always supervised by official Egyptian antiquity academics, nonetheless, remarkable discoveries have at least been partially shared with the world. Most notably, Gontenbrink's door. Yet the tomb of Osiris, where this once inaccessible tunnel led, was once the media was permitted back into the location, found empty, claimed by officials as being found conveniently vacant. A room only discovered thanks to 21st century technology, according to mainstream Egyptologists, was somehow looted. However, there still lay many mysteries within this most intriguing of structures, and we would expect at least one, or possibly many more, which no matter how long it takes us to rediscover them will be too big to hide. For example, although we once thought the tomb Gontenbrink discovered was inaccessible, the chamber at the top of the structure, one of considerable size estimated at 30 square meters, is so inaccessible. It was only found with technology used to register cosmic rays. A technology usually utilized in high-energy particle physics. Capable of tracking particles called muons, produced when cosmic rays strike atoms in the upper atmosphere. These incredibly sensitive detectors were first developed for use in particle accelerators, but they have also been used to gaze into the inner bowels of many geological and ancient artificial features. In December 2015, physicist Kunahiro Morishima of Nagoya University, Japan, placed detectors inside the queen's chamber to detect muons passing through the pyramid. Thus, any large chamber still hidden within the pyramid would be detected due to a higher register of muons than expected from denser angles. The chamber's discovery was cooperated by two other teams of physicists. All three teams observed a large void in the same location above the Grand Gallery. It was a big surprise, says Teyubi. We're really excited, he continued. The researchers say it might even be made up of two or more smaller spaces. Teyubi suggests that it could be, quote, a second Grand Gallery. It is a discovery which we are finding highly compelling. Tutankhamen is not only the most famous of all the pharaohs, but he is unquestionably the character most wrapped in mystery. Although many are attracted to the legends of the unexplained curse or flock to the Cairo Museum to peer upon his wondrous relics, what many are unaware of is a rather incredible theory pertaining to an as-yet undiscovered vault hidden in plain sight within his own purported ancient tomb. Known as the second chamber theory, it was initially put forward by British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves. He argued that it was the secret burial chamber of Nefertiti, who is originally the wife of Tutankhamen's father Akhenaten. Legends say that she was one of the most beautiful women in history. Reeves argues that, due to King Tut dying suddenly, he was hastily buried in the outer chamber of Nefertiti's tomb, with the opening to her chamber then concealed somewhere within the tomb many millennia ago. Again, a tomb unlooted, filled to the rafters with priceless golden relics. Reeves even claims that he himself detected a hidden passageway behind a funerary painting on one of the walls of the tomb. Thus, in 2016, an American survey team harnessing ground penetrating radar peered into and beyond the walls within the tomb. However, they were unable to confirm nor reject the second chamber theory. Yet this did not dissuade anyone who had become convinced of the theory, coming to this conclusion via different avenues of study, continuing to be convinced of the theory's validity. So, after another unsuccessful attempt, a third was arranged by a new Minister of Antiquities set at a media conference, stating he would conduct a third GPR analysis to, quote, put an end to the debate. The third survey, led by Francesco Porcelli of the Polytechnic University of Turin, subsequently came forward to publicly state, beyond doubt, that there was no hidden chambers within the tomb. However, this entire sequence of events can simply be perceived as a rather hazy attempt to put people off from covering this story, diverting attention away from its possible truth. Firstly, why three attempts to confirm that a chamber did not exist? For why would the first two attempts have openly admitted that they were not able to confirm such claims without doubt? How could a person from such an institution, if not funded to come to such a definitive conclusion, make such a post statement? And why would so many from different academic backgrounds arrive at the same conclusion? Is there a secret chamber in King Tut's tomb? And if so, why is it being hidden? What could be inside it? We find the possibilities incredibly intriguing.


Hi, and welcome to our session. Let us discuss the following question. The question says, integrate the following functions. Given function is 1 by cos x plus a into cos x plus b. Let's now begin the distribution. We have to integrate the function 1 by cos x plus a into cos x plus b with respect to x.  We have first multiplied the numerator and denominator by sine a minus b. And then we have adder and subtracted x in a minus b.  Now separate both these terms.  This is equal to 1 by sine a minus b into integral sine x plus a dx minus integral tan x plus b dx.     So this completes the session. Bye and take care.


I wanna bring a message to you entitled Why Israel Matters. And let me just give you the background to this message this morning. I had intended on beginning a brand new series from the Gospel of John this morning. And we are gonna start that, not next weekend, but the following weekend where we're gonna, most of the summer we're gonna be spending our time looking at the seven IMs and the seven signs in the Gospel of John and really looking forward to that, but there are some things recently that have come up on the scenes and questions that have been asked me several different times about the subject of Israel. And so I felt just kinda out of the blue, the Lord just say, Lee, I want you to go in this direction this weekend. So one of the things I always wanna do is make sure that I'm walking in step with what Jesus, who's the great shepherd of this church wants to say to his people. And so this morning I'm gonna bring this message to you entitled, Why Israel Matters. And we're gonna talk about the subject of Israel, the people of God, as well as the nation and the land of Israel. And I believe that this is gonna be very helpful for all of us. What we just saw this morning, both here and at Portage and downtown where people have made the decision to follow Jesus Christ, believed that he is the Son of God, that he came into the world, died on the cross, was raised from the dead, is alive and soon returning, is a faith that actually began 2000 years ago in Israel, in the city limits of Jerusalem. And it is a faith that also as Christians, our faith will culminate also in the city of Jerusalem with Jesus reigning and ruling as the king over all the nations of the earth. That's what we believe. So it's important for us to know that because the faith that we have, even though here we are, we're in West Michigan and I don't know, we're kind of a melting pot now, but 20 years ago, if you weren't Dutch, you weren't much. But I've got news for you, Christianity and followers of Jesus, the original followers of Jesus and the movement that Jesus started on the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter two in the city limits of Jerusalem where 3,000 people got baptized. We just saw 20 or so get baptized. Can you imagine one day where 3,000 got baptized? That's where the Jesus movement began. That's where Christianity began in Jerusalem with a service with 3,000 being baptized and a command for the gospel to go to the ends of the earth and a promise and a promise in Acts chapter one that Jesus would return to fulfill all the promises that God the Father had made to the nation of Israel. So this morning I wanna come from that different direction and talk to you about why Israel matters. The subject of Israel in my experience is one of the most mysterious and misunderstood subjects for the student of God's word because it has to do with the significance of Israel, oftentimes people, especially those of us who are not Jewish, don't come out of the Middle East. We read the Old Testament and we ask the question, why does Israel matter? Why does it matter today? You know, I get that it matters in the Old Testament because we read through our Bibles and the whole first half of the Bible is all about God's dealing with this people called Israel that he chose for himself by election to be the subject of his focus and his covenants and his eternal redemptive purposes in the earth. And obviously we know that Jesus was Jewish. He came through the line of Judah. We know that he was an Israelite in John chapter one, verse 11, when John is describing how God the Son came into the earth to be our savior, it says in verse 11, that he came to his own, that's Israel, and his own did not receive him. So I think we all know that Jesus is Jewish. His first disciples were Jewish in the nation of Israel. That's where Jesus did all of his ministry. And we also know that the church began Israel centric. You know, it was really about 30 years before there were any Gentile believers really to say anyways. I mean, the early first 30 years or so of the church was primarily a bunch of Jewish followers of Jesus, the Messiah who believed he was a fulfillment of all the Old Testament promises. But then the gospel goes to the Gentiles and it begins to move outside of Jerusalem and Judea to Samaria and then into Europe and Asia Minor and Africa and over into Persia and even beyond that. And then something took place in the year 70 AD. And 70 AD, the Romans came surrounded Israel and came surrounded Jerusalem, destroyed the city of Jerusalem, destroyed its temple and took after those Jewish people that did not get killed, took them, the rest of them, marched them back into the Roman Empire, scattered them throughout all the nations of the Roman Empire at that time and then even beyond that and it appeared that Israel as a nation and the Jewish people were done. But yet the church kept going forward. The church of Jesus Christ kept growing and expanding but now there was a tilt to where the church became primarily Gentile.   The Bible will talk about barbarians. How many have ever seen that in your Bible? And you wondered, am I a barbarian? Well, if you are a German descent, that's what they described as barbarians. So all of you Germans, we always knew you were a bunch of barbarians but the rest of us are classified either under Greeks or Gentiles, which is just general for the nations other than Israel. And this is how the church began to grow and expand and flourish throughout much of medieval period of time and then even expansion, colonial expansion. We see Christianity growing among the nations and among the Gentiles. When that began to take place, when the Jewish portion of the church began to diminish and almost disappear and the Gentile portion of the church began to expand and dominate, there was an insertion of a false teaching and that false teaching is called replacement theology. Here's what replacement theology is. Replacement theology says that God has replaced in his economy, the church in place of Israel. Israel has been replaced by the church. And so therefore all of the promises that God made in the Bible to Abraham and to his descendants, Isaac and Jacob, who is Israel, all of those promises about the land and about redemption and about a kingdom have now been all spiritually transferred to the church, which is primarily Gentile and that God has nothing to do with Israel anymore. Israel is under judgment, Israel rejected their Messiah and therefore God doesn't have anything to do with them. And the problem with that is that doctrine of replacement theology began to be taught as the dominant theology in our seminaries and in our Bible colleges. And by virtue of that, it has infected most of the pastors and the pulpits, even in our present day. I would say many of the leading theologians, pastors, seminary scholars, and even major denominations embrace what's called replacement theology. Now I could probably spend multiple hours just talking on this subject, but here's the problem with that. When the church embraced replacement theology, it opened the door for persecution of the Jewish people by Christians. And the medieval period of time is a dark hour for the church of Jesus. Jesus who came as a Jew will return as a Jewish man to reign and to rule from Jerusalem over the kingdom from Israel over all the nations of the earth. His church, Jesus, his church spent a thousand plus years brutally persecuting the Jewish people. And so now we're living in a time period where for a lot of Jewish people around the world, some 10 million or more of them, they look at Christianity not as the fulfillment of God's promises, but they look at the cross, the symbol of a cross, as basically a death warrant for their people. And it's important that as the church we expose replacement theology and we understand the significance of Israel so that we are able to partner with God in his plan that he has and has always had for the nation of Israel and will ultimately fulfill it when he returns. This is important stuff. Now, I know that when we talk about this, it's not necessarily, oh, Pastor Lee, you're not gonna give me five steps to a happier, healthy life today. This is not a life application message, but this is an eternal purpose of God application message because what we wanna make sure is that in all of our daily practical living, we are aligned eternally with what God is doing in the earth and make no mistake about it. We are living in a time when God is still active and pursuing the nation of Israel and he is at work. Israel is not a secondary issue. It's a prophetic issue for us as God's people and ultimately for God's redemptive plan because, and here's why, God is a covenant keeping God. God is a covenant keeping God and what we find is that right from the very beginning of your Bible, the very first book, somebody shout out the name of the first book in your Bible, it is, thank you, y'all get an A. Right from the beginning in the book of Genesis, we see that God steps into a world that is rebelled against him and he could have left it to be self-destroyed but what he does is he inserts himself into human history in order to redeem mankind and the nations back to himself and how he does it is he establishes a everlasting covenant with a man named Abram. Let me read to you a couple of scriptures. Genesis 15, it says in verse 18, on that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, or Abram, saying to your offspring, I give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kennesites, the Cadmonites, the Hittites, the Parasites, the Mosquito bites, and all the otherites, Amorites, Canaanites, Gyrgishites, Jebusites. But seriously, it says, Genesis chapter 15, God established a covenant with Abram and he said, all this land is the down payment on the covenant that I'm establishing with you, it's yours. And then we see a couple of chapters later in Genesis 17 when God reiterates this, it says, the Lord said, I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout all generations. Somebody say, all generations for an everlasting covenant to be God to you and your children after you. Now, what's interesting about the covenant that God cut with Abraham, and by the way, I want you to understand, as Gentiles, and especially as Americans, modern, postmodern Americans, we don't understand covenant. We are a contract society. Contract says this, I don't trust you and you don't trust me, but we're going into business together, so we're gonna write up a contract that's enforceable legally based out of mistrust, but that's not a covenant. Covenant is the exact opposite. The word covenant in the Hebrew language means the cutting. It means that covenant is sealed in blood first by an animal that represents that if I don't keep the covenant that I'm making with you that is sealed in blood, it's everlasting, it's unbreakable, that means death to me. And I'm actually doing it not out of mistrust, but I'm doing it out of a commitment.  When God made a covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15, it was not a two-sided covenant. Most covenants in the Bible are two-sided, which means you and I are coming into covenant together and we're both making vows to one another. If one breaks it, the other one is free from it. That's what divorce is. Marriage is a covenant in the eyes of God. It's not a contract, but there is a breaking of covenant when there is unfaithfulness. The covenant that God established with Abraham and therefore Israel is described as an everlasting covenant. Here's why, it's because in Genesis 15, God initiated the covenant.  We know that's fulfilled when Jesus comes through the lineage of Israel as the Savior. But then when he separated out the animals, he told Abraham, Abraham, I want you to take animals, these bowls, I want you to cut them in half. And I want you to do it at night. It says, normally two people come together and they walk in the midst of the animals that have been sacrificed and they take vows upon themselves. In this particular case, only God came as like a burning torch and he went through the animals and he said, I am making a covenant with you. It's an everlasting covenant. What that means is it doesn't matter what you do, Abraham, I'm taking it upon myself that no matter what you do, I will fulfill my covenant promises to you and to your descendants or I'm not God any longer. The day that God breaks his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the day that God ceases to be God. In Jeremiah, he says it this way, if I forget you and if I forget my covenant promises, may my hand no longer work. In Zechariah chapter two, he says, Israel is the apple of my eye. So God has made an everlasting covenant with Israel. And yet Israel very often, that's what most of the Old Testament is about, Israel very often has been unfaithful to the covenant.     And what has happened is throughout history, throughout the Old Testament, we see the cycle of God bringing them in, then them worshiping idols, becoming apathetic and complacent and God warning them through prophets, them refusing to repent and then God taking them out in captivity, whether it into Persia or Babylon or Assyria and then they began to cry out to God, God, we're so sorry, we forgot your covenant with us, we've gotten sucked into worshiping idols and being just like the world and God says, yeah, I hear your prayer, so guess what I'm gonna send a deliver. So he sends a Moses or he sends a Zerubbabel or he sends a Cyrus and he delivers them and he brings them back into the land and for a while everything's good and then they go back into rebellion against God again.  But even at this moment, at this day, even though Israel right now after 2000 years of being in captivity among the nations, in 1948, May 14th, 1948, Israel was born as a nation again and they came back into the land, even though they came back into the land in unbelief, they're back in the land and it's interesting because Israel unlike any other nation that's ever existed on the face of the earth, it's the only time in world history that you will ever find a nation that existed that ceased to exist and was destroyed and then was born again. Israel's the only nation and it's a signpost prophetically for you and I to know that God is still dealing with the people that he established a covenant with, Israel. That does not mean though that because the covenant that he has with them, he also has a controversy with them. He has a controversy with them and the controversy is their unfaithfulness. In Micah chapter six, verses one through two, this is King James. This may be the only time you ever hear me quote the King James Bible. So listen very closely. Hear ye now what the Lord saith. Arise, contend thou before the mountains and let the hills hear thy voice. Hear ye, oh mountains, the Lord's controversy and ye strong foundations of the earth for the Lord hath a controversy with his people and he will plead with Israel. So what's God's controversy? Other translations say indictment or some say that he has a conflict with them. What is it? It's their covenant unfaithfulness. This is God's controversy and I wanna teach a whole bunch on this. I just don't have time to do it. Here's where we sit today in this present hour. God has made covenant promises to Abraham that he will be faithful to complete. They have been under discipline scattered among the nations, but God's promises is that he would bring them back into the land and he would allow them to go through difficulties and troubles and trials and what the Bible describes as tribulation so that they would turn back to the Lord and the reason why the Lord is allowing this and will allow this to happen even near the end of the age in a very intense way that Jeremiah refers to as Jacob's trouble is he's not doing it to destroy them.  I love this. Zechariah chapter 12 gives a promise in verse 10 11 that there's gonna come a day when God's gonna pour out his spirit of grace and supplication on Israel in their darkest, most difficult moment and they are gonna look up when they are surrounded by all nations and about to be wiped out and destroyed and they are going to mourn for the one that they see who has been pierced. How many know who's been pierced on the cross? They're gonna see the one who's been pierced for them. They're gonna mourn as for an only firstborn child and Jesus is going to return to rescue and save them and all of Israel is gonna be saved. But ultimately God's gonna bring them to a point of difficulty in order for this to take place. So all that's just kind of a panoramic view of from the beginning until where we're at. This is where God is at right now. God is still very much dealing with Israel. So what is God's agenda with Israel? I want you to open your Bibles to Romans chapter 11 and I'm gonna take one of the most difficult chapters in the entire Bible and I'm gonna explain it to you in seven minutes. Are you ready? Here we go, you're welcome by the way. Romans chapter nine verse 11 is by and far away three of the most difficult chapters in the New Testament. And the reason why it's difficult for us to understand is because for about 1500 years we've been taught all wrong about Israel. And how many know if you've been taught to do something wrong? It doesn't matter if the thing is easy if you've been taught wrong to try and rebuild like a golf swing. How many in here have ever played golf? How many have ever hacked at golf? How many still hack at golf? I've got a slice that should be in a Hall of Fame. But it's because I learned how to swing it wrong. If you learn how to swing properly the first time golf can be easy, but if you're a baseball player like I was and then you try take your baseball swing and swing it at a golf ball, it messes everything up. If you've been taught replacement theology or no theology of Israel your entire life, reading Romans chapter 11 is challenging. But if you read it the way that it was written it's very simple to understand. So what is God's agenda from Romans chapter 11? Well, first of all, look at verse number one. It says, I ask then, has God rejected his people by no means? For I am myself an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. I mean that should just solve the problem right there, right? Has God written Israel after the flesh off? He says, no. Then how do we write theology books that say yes? God is not finished with Israel at all but will fulfill his covenant promises. It's right there. Number two, what's God's agenda? Look down at verse number seven. It says, what then? Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking which was salvation. The elect obtained it, that's the church but the rest of the Jewish people were hardened as it is written, God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that would not see, ears that would not hear and down to this very day. Now look over at verse 25. Verse 25 says, a partial hardening has come upon Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles come in. Verse 26, and in this way all of Israel will be saved. So number one, what's God's agenda? God's not finished with them yet. He's not finished with Israel. He's not written them off. He's gonna be faithful to his covenant promises. Number two, understand that the reason why God has a controversy with them is because a hardening has occurred in part because of their unbelief. So here's what God did when they rejected Jesus as the Messiah. A small remnant of them believed and followed Jesus. A small remnant of even the Jewish leaders believed and followed Jesus, but many of them hardened their heart. So God allowed a hardening to come upon natural Israel for a period of time in order to deal with them and also to open the door of salvation for the Gentiles. God's original plan was through Abraham to raise up a nation that was different than all the other nations who would then be a light to the nations, who would then be missionaries to the Gentile nations and tell them and teach them about God. But when the gospel and then when Jesus came to Israel and they didn't receive him and only a small portion of them did, God allowed a hardening to happen, their own choice. Then he started the church, took the gospel to the Gentiles and it says very clearly in verse number 11 that that hardening or chapter 11 verse 26, verse 25, that that hardening is only going to happen until the full number of Gentiles come in. So in other words, God says, harden the nation of Israel and the Jewish people in their discipline for a period of time. I'm gonna deal with bringing the gospel to the non-Jewish world, but there is a full number that I have of those that I pre-know are gonna come into the kingdom and once that number is complete and the gospel goes to all the nations of the earth as a witness, remember Jesus said that. The gospel will be preached to all nations, Gentiles. Once all the nations hear the gospel and have a chance to hear, God is then going to turn his attention back to the nation of Israel and that hardening is gonna be dealt with. So God's agenda is he's not done, he will fulfill his promises. Number two, why are the Jewish people the way that they are right now and their unbelief? It's because a hardening has happened in part. Number three, Israel in God's economy has been broken off like branches broken off of an olive branch and Gentiles are now being grafted in and the vine is Jesus. The vine is God in his covenants. So what he says in verse number 17 is he says that Israel, which are the natural branches were broken off and you talking about Gentiles where a wild olive shoot had been grafted in and now you're shared the same nourishment of the olive tree. The olive tree is Jesus, the anointed one. The natural branches were Israel and their unbelief, God broke off their branches and he grafted wild branches in. That's us, we're the wild olive branches. It's a great name for a football team, wild branches. And so here we are the Gentiles and we're grafted in, but Paul warns us.  Don't look at Israel after the flesh and say, oh, you guys, I can't believe you didn't believe in Jesus. I can't believe that you rejected your Messiah.  God is gonna take natural Israel and he's gonna graft them back in and he actually describes this taking place in verse number 12 of Romans chapter 11. He says, now if their trespass, in other words, their rejection of the Messiah means riches for the world, in other words, you and I as Gentiles are all benefiting from that. We're all saved today in Richland and Portage and downtown Kalamazoo today as Gentiles because the door of salvation was opened up in some part due to the way Israel responded.  That's future. This isn't him being done with Israel. He says, no, they're gonna be fully included back into the covenant people of God. And if you look down at verse number 15, it says for the rejection, in other words, they rejected God. Their rejection means the reconciliation of the world. What will their acceptance mean except life from the dead? Now two weeks ago, we just celebrated Jesus the Messiah's resurrection from the dead. We call it Easter, but it's the resurrection day. Jesus dead in the tomb for three days on the third day rises again, it's a miracle. It's profound. Do you know that the way that God is dealing with the nation of Israel, his covenant and his controversy is following the same path of how Jesus the Son, the Messiah came to deliver and to be the savior of Israel.  The same spirit that God poured out on that tomb to raise Jesus is the same spirit of grace and supplication. He's going to pour out on the nation of Israel and they are going to be resurrected as if back from the dead. This is God's dealing with Israel. This is Romans chapter 11, God's not done. They're hardened in part, but there's coming a day when they're going to be grafted back in and it's going to be like the resurrection all over again and it's going to be profound when this takes place. And listen, the stage is set in our current day for many of the things that the Bible prophesied 2000 years ago to occur. The stage is set. I'm not saying we're there yet because Israel is dwelling in the land after 2000 years. They've recaptured the city of the great king Jerusalem in 1967 during the six day war, but yet they're still in the land in unbelief. And the promises that we read about in the Old Testament that are connected to God's everlasting covenant always talk about the moment that they turn their eyes and they believe and they turn their hearts to Messiah. That's what we're looking forward to. That is what is going to take place in the last season or the last period of time in this current evil age that the Bible refers to as the day of the Lord. That's going to take place in the future. And I want to tell you church, we are quickly approaching that day. Here's why this message is so important. From a theological perspective, replacement theology has fed like lighter fluid into a campfire, an evil demonic spirit that is dominant in our world today that has been around. It's referred to very often as the ancient hatred. And today we would call it anti-Semitism. Anti-Jewish thought, belief, even political ranker towards Jewish people and the nation of Israel. Anti-Zionism, anti-Israel, anti-Semitism. It's all the same thing. It is not motivated by politics. It is motivated by a spirit and that spirit is the same spirit that motivated Pharaoh to want to destroy and enslave the Israelites in Egypt for 400 years and wipe them out during the Passover.  It's the same spirit that dominated Herod when he wanted to kill the Messiah, when he killed all the children that were under a certain age. It's the same spirit that dominated Rome when they circled and destroyed the city limits of Jerusalem in 70 AD. And it is the same spirit that is at work right now in this age. And I wanna promise you that it is a anti-Christ spirit that is going to accelerate and become more dominant in the days ahead because when that figure arises on the world scene that the Bible refers to as the anti-Christ, the one who opposes God, he is going to also take up the controversy with Israel and he's gonna persecute them. And it's important for us as followers of Jesus that we know how to respond in this era. How do we respond to Israel? Well, there's about five different ways you can respond to Israel.  I'm gonna give you one today. Everybody say one. Here's how we should respond to Israel knowing what we know. Should pray for them. We should be people of prayer for the nation of Israel. Here's what I know. Not everything that Israel does politically today is correct or is even righteous. But it doesn't matter because they're in unbelief. This is not a political statement. We need to be able to see through the eyes of faith and deal specifically as people that know we're engaged in a battle not with flesh and blood but against principalities and powers and spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places. Isaiah 62, which is far and away one of the most beautiful prophetic pictures of what God is going to do in Israel in the future says this in verse number six. It says, on your walls, O Jerusalem, I have set watchman all the day and all the night and they shall never be silent. You who put the Lord in remembrance, take no rest and give him no rest until he establishes Jerusalem and makes it a praise and all the earth. So Israel is coming up on its 75th anniversary. May 14th will be at 75th anniversary. And if you don't know much about how Israel was birthed as a nation, it's a miracle that's worth looking at in 1948. The first nation on the face of the earth to recognize Israel as a nation was the United States of America. President Truman recognized Israel as a sovereign nation and other nations continued and followed in suit. What's interesting is that at the same time, all the surrounding nations, Arab Islamic nations declared war on Israel. 1967, Israel made a preemptive strike against all the surrounding nations.  Israel is at its most critical hour ever right now. It's facing five major challenges all at the same time. First challenge is this. Iran is within days of achieving nuclear missile weapons, days. And here's what they intend to do with it. I know that some people are like, oh, Iran just wants to have peace with Israel. Now, listen, this is from the deputy commander of operations for their military. His name is Abbas Nilforah Shun. He says, Iran has encircled Israel from all four sides. Nothing will be left of Israel once we achieve nuclear capability. Doesn't sound like peace talks to me. So right now, their first challenge is Iran is days away, maybe weeks away from getting nuclear capability.   Hamas controls the Gaza. You've got Islamic Jihad that is within the land of the West Bank. And you have Hezbollah that's up in the North and Lebanon and Syria with constant missile launching into the cities, the villages of Israel. And then on top of that, you have very uniquely in Israel now, you think America politically is polarized, Israel right now is in the middle of what many say in the next couple of months could turn in to an internal civil war between the Orthodox religious right and the very moderate or liberal left. And they're being pulled apart politically. That's happening inside. And then on top of it, you have the UN Security Council members wanting to impose massive terrorists on Israel and declare it an apartheid state. So you've got all these challenges that are taking place all right now during the month of May. So all of that is to let you know that we as a church are going to participate in something that has never happened in human history. In the month of May, from May 7th until May 28th, there is a prayer focus called the Isaiah 62 Prayer Initiative. And here's what it is, it's 10 million, everybody get that number, 10 million intercessors, around the world, through thousands of different churches and ministries in every nation of the earth, 10 million though, have committed to pray and fast for the nation of Israel for 21 days in the month of May. To pray for their protection, to pray that their eyes would be open to see Jesus, to pray that God begins to shift and draw Israel back to themselves, to pray that the promises of God are fulfilled. Israel is the apple of God's eye, his eye is on it and the days we're living in are urgent. 10 million, think about 10 million watchmen on the wall, Isaiah 62, praying and calling God into remembrance of his promises over the nation of Israel, praying for our Jewish friends to receive Jesus, Yeshua, as their Messiah, praying for grace and supplication to be poured out. Imagine what that will look like. That's never happened in 2,000 years of church history. Mike Bickel, who's a friend of this house, was talking about saying that to a Jewish friend and the Jewish friend who's now a believer said, with tears in her eyes, he's like, you are gonna pray for us for 21 days? Church, you know what that does? It's gonna melt away. It's gonna melt away the ancient stigma that we as the church are opposed to Israel and we're gonna pour out the love of Jesus' body, the church, all over Israel, standing on the walls in the place of intercession and letting them know you can count on us. Because Romans chapter 11 says the way that Israel is going to be changed is they're gonna be provoked by how God has been good and blessed the Gentile church. In other words, our love for them is gonna provoke them to take a second look at Jesus. And so we're gonna participate in the prayer room downtown for 21 days. We're gonna be praying for Israel and we want you to be a part of it. We want you to lean into it. If you wanna pray about something that's on God's wish list, you know, oftentimes we're like, God, here's my prayer list. You know what this is? This is us saying, God, what's on your prayer list? And Jesus says, Israel. And us saying, guess what? My gift to you this year is I'm gonna invest some time in prayer for the people that are on your heart. And you know what God will do? When we bless Israel, God will bless us. I want you to stand with me all over this room if you would, and wherever you're at, Portage or downtown. I know that this is maybe a different type of message but it's an important message. It's not us centric. Unless you are Jewish and if you are, and I know we have several that are within our congregation, we want you to know that we love you.  You belong in this church. If you're listening or you're joining us and you have not yet come to that point, doesn't matter, we want you to know we love you because Jesus loves you. And we love Israel because Jesus loves Israel. And we long for the day when all of Israel says, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. How many know that's gonna be a glorious day church when Jesus descends, when he returns, he returns to wipe out the enemies and to establish his kingdom in the city of the great King, Jerusalem.  I wanna invite the prayer partners if they would to move into place. I'm gonna pray and then we're gonna dismiss. If you would like prayer for anything going on in your life, in your heart today, we'll invite you to just come up and to receive prayer. Father, thank you today and we do, we bless Israel. We pray, Father, that as we join with 10 million other intercessors across the globe that our prayers fill up the bowls in heaven and that it adds to and it even hastens the day of the Lord and your movement and your hand upon the nation of Israel. God, we bless Israel. We know that everything that they are doing, everything that they are right now necessarily isn't them walking in the fullness of their promises. But Lord, we remind you of your covenant promises that you are faithful and we're here today because of the promises you made through them and to them in the past. So we bless them and I ask today, Father, as we leave this building today, help us to be people who are true to the covenant we have with you. Help us to walk faithfully before you as representatives of Jesus Christ. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen and amen. Everybody, you're dismissed. Come forward if you'd like to receive prayer today.


Good afternoon everybody and welcome to Unfiltered. Pastor David, always a welcome. Thank you. Good to see you. I want to thank you guys for tuning in to watch us and join us. Pastor, I wanted to tease out your message that you'll be teaching for Sunday in Acts chapter 12. Well, as Herod reaches out his hand to begin to or persecuting the church, can you give us some some insights on that? You know, I'm preparing the study right now as we were just speaking before we started recording. And yeah, when you begin to look at the book of Acts, you see that from the very beginning, chapter one and all, all the way for several chapters, you see the Lord moving in wonderful ways. You know, God is moving and all Peter has preached the Pentecost sermon. People have been saved, places that were traveled to were beginning to have an explosion of salvation. I was sharing recently that Jesus had said, you'll receive power and you're going to be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and other most part of the other. So we see that. And you see how that on Pentecost Sunday, Peter preaches a message, people get saved, the church is birthed. Then you begin to see the mounting rejection, the Sadducees arrest the disciples for preaching the gospel.  We are upset that you're blaming us for the death of whom you refer to as Messiah. So you see all this kind of thing taking place. And yet in the midst of that, it's almost subtle, but you start seeing that persecution begins to grow, grows even more. It speaks of it being inflamed with the efforts of Saul, of Tarsus. And then revival continues, not so much revival, but evangelism and church continues to spread. You see Ethiopian eunuch get saved and tradition holds that he went back to to his country and preached the gospel there. And you see Stephen being used in Antioch, Syria, all of that's taking place to say this. So you have good and you have resistance. You have Jesus's words where you say the time's coming when those who kills you, the one who kills you will think he's doing service and to God. Well, here's Herod in chapter 12. And Herod is a man who is a mixture of non-Jew and Jewish. And Herod has been given a certain amount of authority in the north. And he reaches out his hand and begins to harass the church. And more than likely the harassment coming from the king Herod from the north is occurring in Jerusalem. More than likely that's where it's taking place. But seeing that it pleased the Sadducees, those who were rulers, he reached out and at first he had killed James with the sword. And then he reaches out to persecute the apostle Peter. And so you see governmental persecution under religious guise, which is interesting. And I think we see that kind of thing now in our day. It's never stopped. But you'll see governmental intrusion into the rights of and the religious freedoms of Christians. We're told that we don't have a right to raise their own children now. We're told that if somebody is teaching their children what male and female is and there's a divorce and all that, there can be a disruption of relationship between the children and the parent if there is a desirous part of one of the parents to cause that problem. We're seeing is a stealing of the minds of the children, John. And we're seeing intrusions in the church, rather the government and church life telling us when to meet, how to meet. We can't conduct funerals. We can't have weddings. And they got their slippery little hands into the life of the church. And it can be done under this, what we're only doing you good, that kind of that guise. And then you have people of various religious persuasions who will say that if you don't abide by what the government is ruling as it pertains to your church and the opening of your church and your worship of your church, then you do have religious people who will oppose you for actually exercising your religious freedoms. And so we'll be looking at some of that kind of thing this upcoming Sunday. And we need to always remember that God hasn't given the government the authority to govern our children. God gave to us that responsibility. And when we allow intrusions into our Christian faith and our raising of our children, and I'm not speaking about some of the exceptional weird cultic ways that people think of us, I'm speaking about the average evangelical Christian who wants to do devotions with his children and make sure that they go to church on Sunday. When you see that the government beginning to intrude in that, and there are those who will take that in a positive light, well you're seeing something similar that took place back then, except for the death. They beheaded James and you go after the apostle Peter, but it's still a desire to stop the church from being the church. And we see it all the way again as you mentioned. And this is where we stay true to God's Word. Amen. So well, Pastor David, thank you for sharing on that. And do want to invite you guys to come join us on Sunday. Actually, tonight we have service at actually Sunday. Yesterday. I got my days mixed up. We'll see you on Sunday, 8.30 and 10.45. As Pastor David just mentioned, we'll be going through Acts chapter 12. Great opportunity to invite your friends and family. We look forward to seeing you. God bless you. Amen.


Thank you very much. Good afternoon, Slush 2021. My name is Sabah.  So me and my co-founder Tim, Bootstrap Veed, from just about zero to six and a half million in annual recurring revenue in just over two years, and it's a lot of fun. There's a lot of ups and downs, and I want to take you on that journey right now. So hopefully we have something that's going to resonate with founders and investors and everyone in between, too. So let's start with what actually is bootstrapping. And I think it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, right? But to me, bootstrapping is when you start a company and you do it about any external capital. So potentially you've been saving up some money at home and then like once you're ready and you have the right idea, you'll go straight into the idea and try and build it, or potentially another popular route is you build the company at the same time as a full-time job and then take that transition once you have enough revenue, or potentially when the product gets feature-rich enough, right? So in VC, there's this thing that a lot of people are saying which is there's so much money in the market, capital is so cheap, it's a great time to raise, and I agree with all of those things, and it's very, very much true. However, I would also like to argue that it's a really good time to bootstrap, too. There's thriving online communities such as indie hackers where people are exchanging great ideas and learning from each other. The cost of actually creating products has massively got reduced, too, and there's loads of really great marketing automation tools. So yes, it's a great time to raise, but it's also never been a better time to bootstrap, too. But to take you on the story today and tell you about my journey, we have to rewind the clock all the way back to 2016. And in 2016, if you asked me what I wanted to do, I would have said I wanted to be a YouTuber. I loved YouTube. I was addicted. I couldn't stop watching videos, and I was amazed by the audiences that were being created in the communities around just posting videos. And so I thought to myself, I want to do a bit of that myself, right? So in, I think, yeah, 2016, I was just like shooting videos, I was editing, I was getting them on YouTube, and it was great. And this is an example of one that I made. It was like Snapchat spectacles were just in the US, so I wanted some myself. So I decided to make some. I got a webcam. I taped it to an old pair of sunglasses, put the USB cable into my backpack, and then I'd film as I went around the city. And it was a lot of fun. I had a great time doing it. But the thing that was really, really slowing me down, creating more content, which is a byproduct, would help me grow my audience, was this. I was editing my videos in this really, really clunky video editing software that felt like it was designed for making films and TV shows, not four-minute YouTube videos, let alone a 20-second TikTok video. So as a very naive young entrepreneur, I thought I would do something about it. And I kind of gave myself a little bit of a challenge. I was like, okay, what does the future of video actually look like? And I thought, okay, well, everything's moving to the browser. So video editing in the future is going to be browser-based. That makes sense. I thought to myself, it's going to be really simple and very, very accessible, too. And I kind of had all these hypotheses, and this isn't a penny drop moment at all. It was just like, this seems like a really interesting idea. So me and a good friend of my co-founder, Tim, decided to basically take all the money that we've kind of saved up and one day sit down and start a company, because that's what you do, right? And just for some context, in terms of risk, at the time, friends of mine were moving into senior positions in their jobs. Other friends were putting down deposits on houses, and there was me and Tim deciding to start a company. And anyway, so we get going, we start building, we're having a lot of fun. And the flywheel of creating a company basically starts to turn very, very slowly. We then hire a couple of junior developers that graduated from university. And then we started doing pitch competitions like this, like the one next store, actually. And we got a little bit of recognition. And then a venture firm in London says, hey, do you want to use our office? We're like, yeah. So we did. And then what we found next was funding a company of 20,000 pounds with a team of four in London doesn't go very far. And cash started running out pretty down quickly. So we did what we thought the next logical step in the company building cycle was. So we went out to a bunch of investors. We spoke to angel investors, pre-seed and seed investors in London and tried to build some relationships and some networks. However, I think we were a bit too early or we didn't really know what we were doing. And rightfully so, it wasn't right for them. But as money was running out, things were getting tough. And the two developers that we hired both quit on the same day, which left us in a really bad technical spot for maintaining the code base. The office that was given to us for free were eventually kicked out of because you don't want a failing startup in the side of your office, obviously. We clearly failed to raise and now at this point we've run out of savings. So I kicked this wall. And what happened? And I didn't kick it out of rage, actually. I didn't want to underestimate, I didn't want to ever forget how tough it is to build a company. So it was almost like a physical kick to solidify my brain how hard this process is and I would never take it for granted. So now money is pretty much at zero. Me and my co-founder Tim were pretty upset and we don't know what the next move is. Then Tim comes up with this great idea, he's like, hang on, I'll get a job and I'll give you half of my salary and you can continue building Veed. So that's exactly what we did. He gets a job and the next thing we know, I've got enough runway in a couple of months to get the initial products live and do some very, very basic marketing collateral. So like get it on product time, get some blog posts up, some of the basics. But I was tired. I was really, really tired and so was Tim and my Kirk has stopped working. No, it hasn't. So I get a full-time job as well now. So Tim's working full-time, I'm working full-time and what we do is we take a portion of our salaries and we hire two more engineers to continue building Veed while we're working full-time. The other portion goes into another pot which is the runway pot and there's a little bit of money left over for us to sustain our lives. And this went on for eight long months, right? Eight months. We're working full-time but we started to get some results eight months later. We get to about 30,000 monthly users, the product's doing quite well and it feels like we're on a good track, right? We're on a really good trajectory. So we thought the next stage would be to instead of just jumping back in to building the company and maybe getting it wrong again, we thought let's try and go to like this world-renowned startup accelerator called Y Combinator and if we get in there, we'll move to San Francisco and then we'll do a series A round and then we'll be like the next Unicorn and Y Combinator. We've got all these amazing companies and stuff like that. So what we do next is we make the application, we go there and on the flight there we're pitch practicing, we're at the hostel, we're pitch practicing, we're having dinner, we're pitch practicing and then we go in to the final interviews, we come out and we feel like we've done a pretty good job. It's not a home run but we've been doing this for a little while now. We've got 30,000 monthly users. We think that odds are in our favor. And so for those of you who don't know how Y Combinator works on interview day is if you get in, they give you a phone call at 7 p.m. If you don't get in, they email you at 7 p.m. saying why you haven't got in. So we're now back at the hostel refreshing our emails, checking our phones, making sure no one's calling us and in my gut, I felt that finally things were going to go our way. But unfortunately, the rejection email came in and we were just devastated. It's like, oh my God, after all of this time we now get rejected from Y Combinator, it was painful, right? So we let off some steam, we have some drinks and the next morning all puffy eyes, we wake up, we're eating our cereal and we're looking at this email again and this one line sticks out to us and it's like in the end, we didn't understand why you waited so long to start charging for your product and we agreed with them and we had loads of excuses why we hadn't charged for the products but that didn't really matter, did it? We were trying to think about what is the next step forward now. So we thought there's no time like the present and then we had a genius idea. The genius idea was it was a Friday. If we started charging for our product that day, we could go back to Y Combinator on the Monday and on the Monday we could show them that we got 20, 30, 40 paid users and then they'd reconsider and would be admitted to their program. So we opened our laptops and we started executing on this idea. We were like building accounts, we're building paywalls, we're adding watermarks to the videos and to our amazement when we get the paywall up, the first $5 comes in and it was amazing. It was only $5 but it was fun and over the course of that weekend we got 20, 30 paid users on subscription and we were just like, we got this, we got this. This is going to be an amazing story. Everyone will talk about the time that this company changed Y Combinator's mind. And so I remember on the Monday at 9 a.m. on the dot 9-0-0 I made it a point to send them this email being like, hey guys, look, we're good for this, we work super hard, we're like willing to take risks, come on, give us a shot, please, this is the best thing for the company right now. And even though we got that far, they came straight back and said, look, sorry guys, not now, apply for the next batch. And at this point, we're numb, we're numb to rocks being hit at us. And so I now just want to quickly recap the amount of sands that me and my co-founder ate for the last one and a half years. We put all our money into starting this company and we burnt through it. We then hired a couple of developers that quit on the same day a couple of months later. We were given an office but then kicked out of it. We then worked contract jobs for eight long months to support the company. Then finally we get to Y Combinator and get rejected right at the last minute and then we try and change their mind and they rejected us again if you can get rejected twice or maybe just once. And I think this is the point, right, where most founders might be like, you know what, wrong idea or like it's the wrong time or the market's not ready or we're not the right pair. And me and Tim thought, let's just do it. And our mindset massively changed at this point. No longer did we want to make this huge company but instead we thought, look, if we can get to five, six thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue, no one, absolutely no one can tell us that we can't build our company. We won't have to rely on any investor, any Y Combinator. We wouldn't have to do contract jobs. We could just build our company and that became the new goal. We're just going to get to five, six thousand in monthly recurring revenue. So we already had those 20 paid users, right, from that Y Combinator weekend and then we already had 30,000 monthly users and things just started snowballing a bit, right. So we're getting more paid users every day. We're growing in traffic every single day. And when we started charging for the product, our users started getting a lot more articulate about what they wanted us to build next, what they'd be willing to pay for. And we took all this information, we put it straight back in the product. We were tweaking copy and landing pages that would resonate more with our users. We were going on as many calls as possible. And then to our amazement, five months later, we're eating ramen because we got to five thousand in monthly recurring revenue. The point where you can't stop me and my co-founder running our company anymore, which is a great point. And that was a lot of fun, right. And a lot of people asked me, like, oh, what did you do to grow the company? How did you do it? Well, I can tell you exactly how we did it. I did 160 posts on Quora. I made 30 YouTube videos. I did 10 blog posts, 20 landing pages. I was active in every single Facebook group. I did 15, yes, 15 product launches on Product Hun. And I also built external tools that will funnel people into the product. So that's how we were doing it. I was just solely focused on growth and that was the only thing I was doing. So, yes, videos continue to grow and exactly 12 months since that Y Combinator rejection, exactly 12 months, we hit 1 million in annual recurring revenue. And we were just so happy. We were, like, speechless. It was amazing. And what you might realize is when you put a tweet like this on LinkedIn, a tweet, sorry, a post on LinkedIn like this, and also send a tweet, something strange happens. Loads of investors start flooding into your inbox like you've never seen before. Honestly, I would say over 100. It was crazy. And, yeah, but, you know, just 12 months ago, we were not the cool kids on the block and we felt quite burnt by this experience and we were just like, you know what, we're just going to keep running our company the way we know how. So that's going to be what we do next. Obviously, when you start getting to the point of making a million dollars in ARR, your team grows and as the team grows, you can pour it back into products and do more marketing initiatives and everything is now going up into the right. Everything is growing and it's really exciting. And then when you get to that 2 million ARR, for us anyway, it felt like we really had product market fit. We knew who our users were. We knew what they wanted from us and we were able to build it and distribute it to them at scale. And it felt awesome. Now, Veed is a lot more complex than when it just started as a basic trim and crop and filter tool. It's a fully fledged video editor with ways to create videos, to edit them and distribute them and share them as well. And I'm so proud of the work that the team's done to get us to this point and the belief that a lot of those early teams had because as I said, we didn't have investors. It's the team that believed in us. It was our customers that paid for us to be there to do it for them. So it's incredibly meaningful for me. So, yeah, that was really awesome. And so, yes, as of today, we're about 6.5 million annual current reverie. It's just over half a million a month. And that's awesome. There's no sign of it slowing down any time soon. Well, that's all great. But now, I want to go into six lessons I learned as a Bootstrap founder. However, I don't think these lessons are exclusive to me as a Bootstrap founder. I think there's something for everyone here to hopefully take away from the experience that we had. So the first one that I'd like to go over is start niche, but start niche in a big market. So there's so much advice about starting companies in niches. It's a great way to start your niche. However, if you don't do it in a big market, you hit ceilings incredibly quickly. A good example of this is a company like Adobe has a whopping 300 billion, yes, 300 billion market cap. It is enormous. Ridiculous. Inside Adobe, video is a relatively small part of their creative suite. However, it is quite a meaningful chunk of revenue. Under that, you have another public company like Vimeo who has a suite of video tools, and they're valued at about 5 billion. So when LittleVid is doing trim filter crop video doing 1000 MRR, the good thing is it's quite easy to see how we can then start making more products and building out that better video editing and then going into hosting and potentially live streaming. So there's ways for us to expand, and we never hit the limit. And so if you're building in a niche, what you might find is you get to an upper limit and you can't break through it, and that's because your market's not big enough. So number one, start niche, but start niche in a big market. Number two, every product has an acquisition channel. When I started my company Veed, I knew nothing about growth at all, but I needed to, and I needed to learn as quickly as possible, and I started recognizing trends across different products and product competitors. So above us here, you can see Veed and two of our competitors, and there's something, and this is public data from a website called SimlaWeb, and what you'll notice is that search for us and our competitors is the primary acquisition channel that is used to get users onto the platform. The sooner you are able to identify the primary acquisition channels in your company, in your industry, in your niche, the better because you'll be able to product market fit much quicker. This is something we identified very, very early on in our journey, and it's allowed us to scale incredibly quickly. So find the acquisition channel in your industry market product category. Brilliant. Number three, make something people search for. So I clearly have a chip on my shoulder about the whole Y Combinator experience, that's fine, we're right with that, and Y Combinator say make something people want, and that's a brilliant tagline, right? Of course you should make something people want, but making something people want is really hard, it's very arbitrary, it's like of course that's what you need to do, but I think make something people search for instead is a lot more actionable, and I'm going to explain why. So when you make something people search for, you're doing two things, one is your identifying demand for that product, and number two is your identifying the way in which you're able to ship that product to the user, so you've identified idea and acquisition channel at the same time. We have used this technique at Veed to work out what features we're going to build next, and in what order, based on the potential monetary value that that tool can bring. For example, would you build trim that has, for example, 100,000 searches or crop which only has 50,000 searches? Of course you'd go for trim, but if the CPC cost per click value is much higher on crop, it might actually outpace it and to the bottom line of your business have a more meaningful impact. So I've prepared a few examples up here of how this system works. You can see the keyword chart maker generates about 100,000 searches every single month with a CPC of four and a difficulty ranking of 50. So there's 100,000 people looking to make charts, right, and no one's really solving this problem. And there's this huge long tail as well, you've got Gantt chart maker, Flip chart maker, Pi chart maker, Donut chart maker, and I just think it's really interesting that I was going after this, and another really good example is like signed PDF, right, so slightly more 115,000 searches, but this time of a CPC of eight, and this is an example of higher monetary value, but of course PDF signing has higher monetary value, it's because it's used by businesses and there's public companies after, you know, trying to solve these problems. So yes, number three is make something people search for, don't make something people want.  So when we got that Y combinator rejection, there was this like shift in me, like the way I thought, the way I operated everything that I did, I was just solely focused on growth. And I have to bring this slide back. What did I do to grow the company? I did 160 blog posts, I made 30 YouTube videos, I did 20 landing pages, 10 blog posts, I joined every Facebook group, I did 15 product launches, and built additional tools to funnel people into our product. So again, if you are struggling to grow or want to grow and you haven't done these things, do these things. And if you've done these things and it hasn't worked, come talk to me, I'd love to help problem solve that with you too. Okay. Number five, the goal of a startup is not to raise money. So a lot in the tech press we read about all these, all this fundraising that's going on and how there's another fundraiser, another fundraiser, another fundraise. And I think it can almost cloud our judgment a bit of what success metrics are for startups as the only thing the press really talk about is how much funding we have. Instead, the goal of a startup is actually to make a product that people really, really love and find a way to distribute that product to users at scale. If you're able to build a product users absolutely love and you are able to distribute that product to users who need it at scale, everything clicks into place, revenue clicks into place, hires click into place, investors start coming into your inbox. So it's very important to remember what you're actually doing. You do not want to optimize evaluation, you do not want to optimize the size of your funding round. The only thing you should optimize for is building a great product and distributing to that product to your users at scale. Okay, so final one and this is an obvious one and I'm sure everyone's heard this a million times before, but it's care about what you do and work with amazing people. So in the story of how we bootstrap Veed, there were so many pitfalls and there's so many points where it all could have just done, right? The time that we ran out of money and then Tim paid me half of his salary so I continued building the company, if Tim wasn't such an amazing co-founder we would have stopped or potentially that long eight-month journey that we went on when we were both working as contractors. If we weren't loved, like if we didn't have like affinity for the products and love the products that we were building, maybe we would have just sacked it in and moved on to the next idea. So it's important to make sure you're working with great people and you really care about what you're working on because that gets you through the hard times. So that's everything. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this talk. It's been really fun, so thank you so much. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, cheers, guys.


Everybody forced here up being 2023 dynasty baseball hobby five bucks. Hey number 31 left side serial numbers Do the random right now and then we'll open the case best of luck everybody We're gonna go six times on this random five and one the world. I don't know it wasn't called that were the one I was out last night, so I don't know six times all the names one two three four five and six John a denikrism and then six times on the numbers One two three four five and six One down to seven. All right, John a with one and three Scott F2 Nelson P. Nine Thomas J 10 Christopher L six Neil with eight Eric with five Christopher L four Chris M7. Let's get the posted Yeah, let's open this case Here's link if you want to check it out again The hang the hang gliding one's pretty cool though It's more chill It's like something like way down on it's like a thing where like three people fit on it No, like locks you in. Yeah, that's pretty cool. She goes up slower than some other ones, but It goes like an angle. It's pretty cool a little more easy less jerky and like intense Stop Joshua now. We're gonna see a big rookie. Let's pull a big rookie for somebody here All right first up. You've got a GTO Muto two-color patch out of four out of ten The four spot is Christopher L As illegal would say best catcher in baseball It's pretty cool Patrick the league of the league of select is very nice It's a nice product. All right after the run Muto Is a Wade Boggs? That's pretty sick three-color patch out of five out of five Eric R Boggs he looks kind of like me Yeah, that's what I was thinking camera because we pulled like three golds a bunch of zebras We pulled the tie dies. Yeah, it's it's got to be low print run Plus the autos are really good and like we pulled some solid ones that weren't even numbered So select the league is legit six of ten Jose Altuve Three-color patch auto is that an astros patch? I was like a city connect of the The D-backs Although it's like old astros colors Huh six of ten six spots Christopher L That'll be all that aside Next up is a mani machado four of ten three-color patch auto that is navy camo down there So it is three different colors four spots Christopher L Nice nice nice and the last one Five of ten of Lattie jr. Three-color patch auto Eric R. Vladimir Guerrero jr. Okay, that will do it for the case. Thanks again everybody on to number 32


Everybody forced here ripping eight box NBA mixer impeccably select choices number seven random teams You can find the results on your screen anytime of late in sports cards calm I did drop your link in chat as well. We'll go ahead and get started Let's start with select hobby so a three-site hobby for optic choice and an impeccable Good luck y'all. This has been fun. We've hit some big cards in these as well I know Sean just wants more sapphire breaks the top load It's 249 Carlos boozer on the jazz auto first take on to Utah Concourse light blue Kyrie Irving Maverick set of 299 Thanks Christy Market and ear and Fox you got snapshots Ricky Matherin for the Pacers try color concourse Middleton for the Bucks Jalen Brown court side Where's everybody at? You guys want to talk about It's right your favorite book Sean loves books got Jalen Williams Concourse coach well in bead for the Sixers. I can't even tell you I Can't even tell you right now Silver concourse Devin Booker for the Sun's Sean has no books does it go to the movies? Nope Man this guy. I don't even know what he does anti-davish Jersey card Lakers Game use Lakers Jersey, that's not good And that's called professional man. I don't know Of course read Sexton semi-pro like a movie Sean is the Flint tropics of fortnight and if you're Matthew and rookie Premier level silver Jason Tatum Celtics. We even got corn dogs Yo, bitch try color concourse Zion Williamson for the pelicans Red Mist warned dude if only Brad were here to talk to you about a JC Favorite thing we're talking about those those darn books Try color premier level Jimmy Butler for the heat courtside rookie chat homegrown for the Thunder the rookie there Sits in a darker waiting for work start again.  Premier level blue Christian Wood for the Mavericks number to 249 Jabari Smith jr. He premier level hearty silver sensations Jabari Smith jr. Rockets concourse over Kelvin Johnson spurs Johnny Davis rookie Otto wizards to 249 Ricky premier level tri-color Patrick Baldwin jr. For the Warriors Sean actually has a sleeping bag. He just sleeps here most of the time Premier level silver clay Thompson Warriors Yeah, he'll sleep right but I don't stand up right behind that shack cardboard cut out and sleep there Pickle Rick and it pretty much is a body pillow.  No, not if it's like older. I was wondering what you're doing with that Gotta do it. Oh, Cole Anthony magic is 75 on the Jersey Auto. No magic Now we don't have any golf right now concourse neon John Marant Grizzlies out of 75 Premier level rookie Jalen Williams for the Thunder scope concourse is Jalen Green Rockets Kiehl's mark Williams. We got premier level or Concourse tri-color rookie is Mark Williams for the Hornets Matherin premier level rookie Pacers Dude the general car insurance we're talking about shack and the general car insurance commercial came on concourse silver Kyrie Irving Mavericks Eason Daniels Lamello game use Jersey Hornets concourse scope rookie concourse blue rookie is the abate Clippers out of 249 Oh, what that is? Carrow a silver rookie premier level band caro. Where you go Orlando? Nice. I would just Google it figure out what it is Takes half an hour to get someone from spectrum on the line premier level tri-color Paul George Clippers It takes a while either way concourse tri-color Christian Wood for the Mavericks Courtside rookie Kessler for the jazz. I hope now we've got that fiber to home grin Purple premier level yokich for the nuggets to 99 Unstoppable Steph Curry warrior silver concourse rookie Caleb Houston for the magic Rookie Jersey auto Nicola Yovitch for the heat out of 99 nice card for the heat One of 99 the first one. I thought that was damage. It's just like a Different image like from where it was cut on the left side edge there So steadily not damaged premier level rookie scope is Christy for the Lakers update Marlon's Orioles The other crew is a base here silver premier level diamond Mitchell Cavaliers. Yeah, it was good Anthony. It was good Hey, I got all the the fancy cookies. They made I got everything but the chocolate chip pretty much Well the chocolate chip was tempting because they finally switched it from milk chocolate to like semi sweet I'm like there we go now we're talking milk chocolate chocolate chip cookie Yes, semi-sweet So I'm Chris. Yeah Ever get that shirt well J. Nivey. I need to get some so I can start wearing on Fridays. I'm Fuego. Yannis Silver premier level rookie Christian Brown for the nugs We get how do you get a graphic together we had a graphic she can make it actually so on Yeah, can you channel to 249 on the rookie auto for the Grizzlies Like blue concourse Kyrie Mavericks out of two ninety nine. Yeah, the honey bun was really good to Oreo one was a The cream the cream cheese frosting on the Oreo was meh. I scraped it off. I cut it in half I scraped it off the second time. I had it concourse try color key Keegan-Merry Kings rogden Lemon one was my favorite the lemon cream pie was delicious Yeah Bars with junior rookie concourse But my favorite one was the cookie butter. It was fire premier level tri-color Jalen Green Rockets the road trip Well, it's classic beef jerky concourse silver chat home room for the thunder. We'll have to Maybe that Sunday we go to like Sam's or something I mean we're traveling so technically we can use the company card for that so Chris Paul Jersey for this for the Hornets that goes to the pelicans though that is New Orleans stays in New Orleans Definitely tied this pelicans Pelicans get this one. It is the New Orleans Hornets, which are still the pelicans now same franchise CP3 their premier level maroon be all the 175 wizards Maybe like a thing of trauma.  Yeah, premier level silver Jamal Murray Nugger I see the quick snap It's all big graffiti trash. We should we should do that no joke on one of the wall like a wall or something Don't like it's paint over it Concourse try color Jalen Green Rockets That's so awesome Premier level scope Jimmy Butler for the heat. It's awesome We should have got Sean his own booth at the National that just said trash. Yeah Concourse White rookie pain Watson It's 149 nuggets. Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly what happened at the National sports collector's convention There's actually gonna be a lot more than that. Oh, yeah They're like they're from even from 21 to 22 the difference was super noticeable Concourse over kid cutting and pistons Andrew Nemard Dude men are smart wet women are smarter than men. I truly believe that so they're like they're the ones that can wheel and deal to tie a tie to 49 rookie Otto for the Rockets and Try color concourse step for the Warriors. All right four optic choice Noticeably different from 21 to 22 and even in 21 there was quite a bit. Yeah, it is awesome a lot more kids too So like the diversity was super real It wasn't just like middle-aged to older people Hello McDermott Spurs when no more junior T. What's up like all right kids? Hey, you have to try and learn how like it's done, you know as even as a kid like you can still learn a lot from it It was one jang thunder radar key signatures choice redemption red to 88 Clint Capella for the Hawks Red and green grimes for the Knicks paint Watson nuggets You've got paint Watson and Mark Williams Rated rookies. Nice. Yeah, this is what we need them a beat tonight where they jump around Castellanos basses use one to count Hollow Grayson Allen for the Bucks and Terry smart and Hawks Markey optics autograph T. Wolves Wendell more junior red to 88 it's gonna be Gordon Hayward Hornets Red and green van Blee Raptors blue Trey Jones Spurs.  It's going on dude. I Have a good ride a great night red to 88 Kyle Lowry heat black and gold Terrence man clippers Number four of eights nice card clips Plus he gives kids something to do Play video games though, right and green McElbridge's Nets Love video games boy. They own Terry Bulls. I know check Baji jazz. I put video games a lot, but I'm an adult I've been through all the public school and playing sports and all that Kids got time to kill all right Hollow Aaron Gordon nugs picked your own depot heat rookie auto rookie optics autograph is shade on sharp with the Blazers Blazers ready 88 is Jada McDaniels T Wolves red and greens of Reeves for the Lakers Autonobie Raptors and rookies of Chet Holmgren and Andrew Neymar I'm saying all right impeccable hobby Come on. Let's finish with a bang. Oh, we got a bar. All right parallels of Bane for the Grizzlies to 99 Michael never swing the Rock Porter junior to 75 of the nugs the same we call him Anthony Davis to 49 Lakers Nikola Vucovic on the auto bulls to 49 on-card vooch 2122 impeccable card Nick Slotrel Sprewell watercolor auto 17 of 25 Keith rookie auto Nicola Yovic 55 of 99 impeccable stars auto for Utah is John Stockton 9 of 10 Stockton at Gold foil impeccable stars auto and Jazz again his is running mate there two of five illustrious ain't Carl Malone Alone in Stockton jazz duo great hits for the jazz there Blazers seven to ten Troy ounce of fine silver NBA logo Damian Lillard Sweet Lillard seven out of ten Nice finish there. Nope. No big rookies, but these decent box. Let's go ahead and do a recap For that I'll get you guys link for crown Royale Royale with cheese Oh two to go whoo bunch orders come in crowns it to first Trinity is sold out So there are only about Let's see 41 spots left for the full sellout promo a bunch of Star Wars Sapphire to crown Royale and Some leave Trinity football. That's it. I've got Jersey going to the Pelicans Chris Paul That is a New Orleans Hornets, which stays at the Pelicans Well mellow Anthony Davis autos of Stockton and Malone Busevich Spreewell Yovitch Shade-on-sharp Dyson Daniels Wendell Moore jr. Ty Ty Washington jr. Kennedy Chandler Nicola Yovitch Cole Anthony Autos of Johnny Davis Carlos boozer redemption Thunder Uisman Jang rated rookie signatures choice In silver bar Blazers Damian Lillard seven out of ten Thanks again everybody on to prism choice