Alright, thanks guys. Alright, so, thanks Mira for the introduction. So, just again, sorry, I designed growth product at a better forest and she gave a pretty cool introduction of a better forest already, so I just like skipped the bearing history. But a better forest has been an intense journey so far, so it fueled by rapid growth. By the way, I want to check, can you guys hear me at the back? Because there's a microphone here, I can just blast. Alright, cool. So, a better forest has been driven by rapid growth for the past like two years and I'm not really here to talk about our history and volume guys of it, but I'd love to share a little on some like how we think about growth, right? In particular, a few mental tools that help us like think how to approach, how to run product design growth together at the same time. Yeah, and hopefully we can all take away something useful from this. So, if you backtrack a little bit, as a designer or product person, we've all faced something similar before, right? So, we do our research, we learn something pretty interesting about users, identify a problem, right?  Why? Because we only have one small engineering team, so why work on this solution? We have a thousand other public solutions like mine, right? So, why would this drive revenue? Why would this drive user growth or anything metric that we care about, right? And this is a perfectly valid question because as a product person or designer, we create value, not just for the user's success, but also to help businesses grow healthily. And this is why it's super important for us to be able to think about growth in a structured way for us to make design useful in this regard, right? And that's what I'm here to talk about today. So, whether you're a startup or a corporate, the most fundamental question we'll ask ourselves all the time, right? Is what is the highest impact area we can focus on now, given limited resources? And we can break this down into three really simple questions, right? Which is just with anything in life where we want to strive for something, we want to clarify our goal, right? And then the next step, we want to reverse engineer this goal into the key levels we can pull to influence that, right? And then decide what to focus on. These three really simple steps. And let's walk through that, right? So, the most important thing at the start is to define really clearly what people like to call a north star metric. Who has heard of this term north star metric, right? So, basically, north star metric is it came from people who are selling, right? When they don't have a compass, they point to that one star and use it to guide themselves. That's like the north star, right? And that's true north. But in the case of companies and growth, this is the one key metric that you align your team on to drive, right? And this is super important because when you have one key metric to reference to, it helps you compare ideas later, apples to apples, and it sets the foundation for how you reverse engineer this later on, right? So, for example, therefore it's very, very simply. It's just revenue. So, we are driving revenue, but it doesn't have to be money-related, right? Especially if you're growing something free, right? For MailChimp, it's an email marketing platform and success product, right? So, MailChimp drives weekly active users. So, what does this mean, right? So, MailChimp's focus is a free product. So, it's driving adoption and because it knows its natural frequency of usage is at least weekly. So, if you're not using it weekly and you drop off, right, you're not considered an active user and you're not contributing to this business, right? So, what the track is weekly active users to make sure that they are growing the right numbers, right? So, Airbnb Marketplace, you track liquidity like nights booked at first. For Medium, it's a reader-writer platform. Who has saw Medium before? A chance to borrow Medium articles on the internet, right? A lot of people have. So, it's a place for people to write content, consume content, and it focuses on quality content and engagement with that. So, you can measure what the engagement is, which is the amount of time spent reading on the platform, right? So, this can form the key North Star metrics for your kinds of business, right? And to think about it, it's just a few principles need to be kept in mind, right? It has to be tied directly to the value you're creating for your user and also directly to revenue, right? Simple as that. So, now we have our number revenue. So, you can ask yourselves, how do we grow this? How do you grow revenue? How do you UX the crap-off revenue, right? But it's not so easy to answer because it's too broad. So, what we want to do is to narrow it down and figure out what influences this number at a more detailed level, right? So, take a better forest, what we drive is revenue, yeah? So, for an e-commerce platform, what we do, just with any other company, right, is we go stage by stage, taking this output metric and reverse engineer this into its key inputs, right? And at the very first high level, the easiest way to think about it is just what part of our revenue comes from new customers versus repeat customers, right? And this is interesting because our organizers are talking about how many of our users came from a repeat business new because it's an interesting thing to think about because the strategies that drive new customers are very different for the strategies to drive repeat customers, right? So, you want to account for that, right? The next level, what we often do is to segment new customers into various things like which target persona you're driving, in this case, we segment according to customer acquisition channels, right? And this makes sense especially if the people going through its channel experiences a really different part of your product, they come in different intents and they behave differently, right? And you want to account for that. For example, we track people coming from Google Organic Search, people coming from a referral program, people coming from our paid ads, right? And then this is not enough, so we go deeper. And let's take referral program, for example. So, the next step we want to reverse engineer the key inputs to this program, right? And the easiest way to do it is to walk through the customer journey or someone going through this. In any one week, there's a certain number of people exposed to the referral program. In this case, this is our checkout success page, right? And out of all these people, some percentage participate in the program, right? They convert it and by participate, it means they actually share, right? And they could go through a few steps to actually share and they could drop off any step, so you could account for that, right? And out of everybody who shares, right? Some people share one, some people share three times on multiple social channels, right? So, there's another number to pay attention to, this throughput. And out of every share, you get a certain amount of visitors that come through, right? For example, if someone shares through SMS, if you got one visitor, someone shares through Facebook, you might get 50 visitors, right? So, people call this the branching factor. How much does one share get you? And out of all these people who come to the website, some percentage of them become customers. That's our conversion rate. And these customers spend a certain amount of money per order based on what they buy, based on how many they buy, right? And if you multiply all these numbers together, you get referral revenue, right? And you can keep breaking down this now further over and over again, right? Any of these numbers. But then we are now at a place where we can choose to go deep into detail and ask targeted questions like, how do we increase conversion rates of not just users but invited users, right? Maybe you can personalize the website based on the person who invited you, right? And just use the, just leverage that peer pressure, just keep it on your face to make you buy, right? So, we can also zoom out. What's useful is it keeps us seeing the big picture that just, that's just one out of at least six levels you can pull to influence this one number, right? Which is, then again, it's part of a bigger picture, right? That drives your ultimate number, right? So, to do a quick summary, just going through the process of breaking down your North Star metric into these key levers gives us two important things. So, it tells us what the key inputs that drive our growth, not just random things, right? And it forms a foundation for coming up ideas, right? It's going to realize when you go through this process, you're already ideating multiple things like how to do this, how to do this, how to do that, right? Without even thinking that you're ideating or brainstorming, right? And also, you can, you can choose to focus on this detailed level. You can choose to go, oh, maybe you should add a new channel, maybe you should add a new persona, right? So, it gives you this multilayered approach to brainstorming. So, to show this on a completely different product, right? So, medium, let's use medium as an example. I don't work at medium, so this is the outsider's point of view, right? So, medium, community for reader and writers, for the benefit of people who don't know what medium is again. So, medium is a reader and writer platform. So, you can go on medium, you can write articles and publish them, and they look really beautiful, right? And medium itself is a really strong algorithm that surfaces the best content based on your interest. So, people like to go there and read and learn, right? So, medium wants to grow engagement, and you can measure engagement based on how much reading is being done in the medium community, right? So, you can start to reverse engineer this number. And the simplest vector is, again, you can influence two numbers, right? Grow the community and grow the amount of reading time per user in the community. So, that's the first step of breaking it down. And then, you can again go through the same process, right? So, you can break down, sign user base, how do you grow that? New users who sign in to the community by finding a medium article on Google, right? And people sharing medium articles on their social media channels, that's how you can find medium as well, right? And then, break it down again. So, for people finding medium on Google, it depends a lot on how many articles are on medium, right? Because every single article has a chance to be featured in the search, right? And this times how many articles gives you how many times medium is shown to you in Google search at any one point of time, right? And based on where it is in the search results, right? There's a percentage chance that people will click through and see medium. And once you read the article and you see this little button there to subscribe and get updates from this publication, you really like, you can click on it and then you can just sign up for medium, right? So, if you just multiply this, you actually get this number and you can actually influence, you can talk through design and see which numbers you should influence, right? So, just to open this question to the floor, right? Looking at this, let's say total articles published, right? Right now you are, you went from aggregate reading time all the way to, let's just grow the total number of articles published per week, right? How would you approach this number? Okay? Any ideas? Okay, fine. Okay, so let me just give my, we just go through the little same process, right? And the easiest way to break it down, you can break it out again, right? So total articles published, you can see it's in terms of how many writers are active at one point of time, multiplied by how frequently they're writing, right? So, then again, this is where we can start brainstorming as well. So, how do you grow total writers, right? You can work on the onboarding for writers, right? Some people have been reading non-stop, right? They may have blogs outside, their personal blogs, how do you get them to bring their blog onto medium, right? So you can design campaigns to entice them on the value of publishing on medium to build the audience, right? And create email campaigns, right? For people whom you can identify as bloggers, right? While they are on medium, you could personalize pop-ups, things like that, to get them to think about starting, right? How do you do writing frequency? Writing frequency is all about once you start writing, what's the value of writing more and more on medium, right? Versus some other platform or whatever it is, right? So you could just help them see the value through, say, if you know their job, the reason why they write is they want to build an audience. Then you could reverse engineer what features could help them build an audience better, right? It could be better analytics to understand engagement of your content, so it becomes a more useful platform, right? It could be, if you know that people like to write because they like the attention, then you could just look at how to design the feedback group when people comment on articles, when people view articles, and then you design the notifications that get people feeling really proud of themselves, right? And this can get people to write more, but you realize that we just went from not knowing what the heck medium is to ideating features, really, that kind of makes sense, right? So this is a really powerful tool for doing anything at any company, right? So, but now we have a map, but it's not enough, it's like one lens, right? And it sort of brings back to a better phrase for a while, and here's a scenario, a very common scenario actually, right? So after you went through something like that with your team members, they have started to talk business value when ideating, right? So team member one says, we should work on improving our conversion rate on checkout, right? People, 56% of people, after they add something to their shopping cart online, they leave. This is unnatural, who does that at a supermarket, right? So team member two says we should focus on increasing how much people spend for order, right? Because when they study the customer service tickets, people have been asking for various fasts and suites, right? And we can easily just source that and sell that. So what should we work on, right? Because both requires us to change the website. We have one engineer, what should we work on? It might take a month, right? If it becomes very complicated, right? So the fundamental way to approach a question like this is to be able to compare these ideas apples to apples, not just think about it as individuals, right? And what this means specifically is can you compare, can you determine the estimated impact on your north star metric of each of these things? And then reverse actually the cost to create that and then decide which one is more profitable to do now, given your limited resources, right? And what we do at a better forest, we build a predictive model, right? To be able to do exactly that, right? And here's what it looks like. People hate Excel.  I love Excel. So what we do is we took those inputs, reverse engineer, all the ones that matter, right? And we plug them into the model, right? So what this looks like is how many people visited us on, say, organic? How many people decided to stay on the site? How many people viewed product, added product to cut, went through all the checkout steps, right? And then converted. And we do this for the various parts of the model. And then we plug in our baseline data through analytics and connected this to our revenue number, right? So what you can do right now is you can just tweak one number here and then you can see the impact of revenue on revenue over time, right? So, for example, if you believe that you can improve a metric by, you can improve our checkout completion rate by 20% because you realize that a certain percentage of customers have this problem and you know how to solve the problem, right? And then you can just tweak this and you'll see the effect. You can compare between ideas, right? And what we often find as a result is that something that has a, say, 2x increase on an input actually has a smaller effect on revenue overall than something else that only has like a 50% increase, right? And this is very interesting because it removes bias. It keeps us, it keeps our mind on a model of reality that's often more accurate than what we have in our bias minds, right? And the reason why that often happens is because the effect on revenue is not just the effect on the metric, it's the effect on that metric times the number of people that's involved in the metric, right? And some metrics, some inputs like retention and virality over time, they compound, right? If you improve retention, people stay longer, they do more things, they buy more products, right? They tend to refer more customers, they tend to do more things that fits into other inputs, right? Versus say you work on one campaign that affects one week, right? So, make sense? Go. So, I wouldn't go too deep into this. If you have questions, you can ask me later. But what this does for us is not to be super precise, accurate, but to give us a really high level direction for how to make data informed decisions, right? And speaking of direction, very often we set goals without a clear path to hit those goals, right? And that's often problematic. It keeps us, it keeps our confidence really shattered when we just start and then, oh, crap, it's too big a goal, right? So, you realize that with those tools that you went through, it gives you what you need to map a realistic path to that goal, right? Here's what I can show you. So, let's say we double, double revenue by January 2018, right? We set a specific goal that we can measure that's time bound, right? The question to ask ourselves now is what are some possible scenarios we can take to get here from where we are right now, right? So, what we do is to go back to our map, right? And as one tool out of many, go into our user research to validate parts of the map, use the model to see the impact of inputs, right? And then we come out with these scenarios, right? So, if we grow revenue by 100 percent, which we know because we have a revenue program that a lot of people see, but we haven't touched in ages, right? And we believe we can, we can probably do a lot here. If we know that we have an advertising channel that's at least as big as the ones that we have already made work, that we are not touching, right? We can at least double our pit acquisition revenue. If we know that retention is pretty shit right now so we can work on that, if all these things come true and everything else stays the same, we can realistically get this number, right? So, what we do is to map a predictable path, right? With your inputs at the first step. So, now that we're closer to reality, the next step then is to figure out what strategies you want to take to grow this specific number, right? And this really depends on your company or your product, right? And speaking of strategies, it often just starts with research, right? Deeper research. And in this part, I just like to go through a little bit on a few simple experiments that a better for us ran, right? Just to show you what kinds of strategies, tactics we can run to grow. So, who has seen graphs like this before? People know what a graph like this means, right? It's for the benefit of those who don't really do analytics that much. This is a funnel diagram, right? So, what this tells me is that out of all the people who see this step, right? So, these are basically steps through the product, right? People do action one, action two, action three, right? Out of all the people who did action one, only this amount of people did action two, right? And then this amount of people did action three, right? So, this is basically the drop-off of people. This is the inefficiency in your funnel, right?  It's full. By the time you reach home, only one quarter of the water is left. So, you just wasted all your effort getting the water, right? So, the same thing. You take all this effort to acquire customers and only a certain percentage of them become actual customers, right? So, pretty simple as that. But the thing about this is we noticed an unnatural drop-off from here to here because we didn't expect people to really drop off at this page at all. So, these are actually pages on our website. And that page happens to be the page where people write a message, a short message for the person they are sending flowers to, right? And if they didn't want to write a message, they can just skip it, right? Press next. So, I didn't think this was a problem. I thought it was curious. And until the day when we had a couple of people reach our office, right? And this guy used my laptop to make a purchase. And he actually got stuck on this page for 10 minutes. He was like wondering, how do I write a romantic message for my wife? I don't know. He was asking me for ideas. He was like, then I come out with some cheesy ideas.  I don't want to. So, he got stuck for 10 minutes, right? And then at the end of 10 minutes, he got distracted. He got up and started talking to someone else. So, this is actually quite reflective of what could happen in real life. Not real life, but like, if he was in his house or at his own office, right? The longer someone gets distracted, the more likely someone is to stop buying. And the more likely the person is to decide later on maybe he doesn't need to buy flowers, or maybe he can buy for someone else, right? So, we didn't want to just take this data point, this single data point as gospel. So, we went back and did some qualitative research, which is really important for finding causality, right? So, what the goal here is is to uncover what's causing the problem with that target input, that metric, that two final steps. Why are people dropping off, right? And we are very focused on this, not just the entire thing, right? So, what we want to do is to study actual users who recently exhibited that behavior, not just random people, we go to Starbucks to use a test, because the context those people at Starbucks will be really different from the people who actually did drop off. You won't know the difference, right? So, through our data, because we collect emails beforehand, we can reach into our database and pull out all those people who dropped off on this set in the past three days. And then, I just send them an email asking them basically, why you drop off, right? And then, they will reply and we synthesize our data. So, a really useful way to synthesize this, there are many different ways to do it, right? It's to do it by frequency, right? So, we notice there are many different reasons, not just that, but in the, we kind of validated our assumption that the biggest reason is not sure what to write. And the good thing about frequency is that now, you know that if you manage to completely remove the reason not sure what to write, you can save maybe up to half the people who will have dropped off. And that's just a way to estimate the impact of that. Should I work on this problem? Should I work on that problem? Why are there some people actually add, if they do deeper research, they can add a level of intensity, like this person said, I'm really pissed with this thing, right? So, you have two different levels, but in this case, you can keep it simple, just look at frequency, right? So, we decided to do a really simple experiment that we built in the day, right? So, we added a button that when people click, right? We put in cheesy lines, like funny lines, romantic, like weird, retarded, whatever it is, right? So, we put in like 30 lines, and people can click until they see the one they want, right? So, the impact of this on our conversion rates, we grew it by 11% throughout the funnel. Just simple as that, just one day of going through research, and the email didn't even take that much time, right? So, what I really want to show you is that it's not that that type of thing will work for your company, but the process of identifying, like, oh, here are the things I can look at in terms of the map, right? And then, oh, here's the opportunity, and how to determine causality for why the opportunity exists, and from there, if you've got a solution. So, I'd like to end off with another experiment. So, if you remember our referral program from the Bell Forest, this kind of referral program says, get your Nix Bokeh free, right? And all you have to do is to share your $15 off gift card with your friends. And when two friends buy, you get your Nix Bokeh free, right? Completely free Bokeh. And all you have to do is share on Facebook, or just share this kind of link, yeah? It's like, okay, okay.   All of all these people who reach our landing page, less than 10% of them decided to actually refer. So, people actually see, like, okay, maybe I'm interested in this, and they don't follow true. They're like, what the heck is going on, yeah? So, we did the same thing. We looked into people who saw the referral landing page and then didn't refer, right? So, these are what we call the marginal users that we are trying to get, but we lost, right? So, we did the same thing. We send the email to those people. But in this case, we also added something else, which is a live chat. Real simple. This is Zendesk chat. And we trigger this pop-up with an automated message that asks, that tries to engage the person when it's on the referral program. And just to see if, are there any usability issues? Do people have questions that they want to ask but don't get answered on the referral program? They're stopping them from doing it, right? So, that's really helpful. So, we get a whole new range of problems that stop people from referring. And it could be, I actually really shared true other means. I don't need your, like, I forgot, whatever. So, I don't want to be seen as a discount hunter. I don't know who to share with, but the biggest reason is not worth it. It's too much effort. And it kind of makes sense because when you think about it, how many people in your life right now want to buy flowers? It's very hard to think, right? It's not Valentine's Day. It's not Mother's Day. You don't know when your friends' anniversaries with their girlfriends are. So, it's very hard to just go, hey, buy, buy, help me buy flowers so I can get free bouquet. It's a hard thing to do, right? So, we decided to change it. And so, we formed a hypothesis that we could vastly reduce what you call this activation energy to refer by not rewarding people when they succeed in getting some to buy, but we drop the reward by a lot and then reward them when they do the act of sharing, right? So, this is the principle of instant gratification. You just need to do it again straight away, right? So, now all you need to do is share it on Facebook. You get $20 credit straight away, right? And then you get $10 for each friend that buys, right?  So, just to show you the process going through it again, how adaptable it is to many, many different problems that we see, okay? Did you have to confirm your margins and make sure like that $20 is not going to affect that? Yes, yes. So, we have to measure that it's accretive on that, right? So, if you just go, if you just look at things like this. So, we know what we call unique economics, we know the cost of a bouquet. So, we know how many people come through referrals, we know how many people get their additional $20 credit. So, we can map out how much money we are giving out, how much people are coming in, right? As long as we stay kind of like steady, we don't, we don't kill ourselves and we are growing as a result. So, that's a win, right? All right. So, to conclude, this is what we went through, right? So, the first thing, I didn't find enough time metric, right? Many companies actually have many, different metrics for different departments, but it's usually quite useful to be able to have everyone aligned to something important, right? And they reverse engineer your key levels to drive it, like map out those inputs. And you want to quantify your inputs in order to be able to get your baseline for how to estimate impact here. And then, use that to map a realistic path to success and then focus your experiments, right? What's that? Thank you so much. Yeah, awesome. So, we'll open the floor for Q&A. Anyone has any questions to ask? Any predictions to make? Flowers to buy? So, the numbers we get is primarily from Google and Android. All those tags, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, they are from Google Analytics. We also use another software called but not as much as we use Google Analytics because you have far more built-in capabilities with GA for a slight like hours. Yeah. But then when it comes to tracking things like retention, whether someone does certain events, other apps are more useful than GA. People tend to install something like an event tracking tool. Events are actions, like segments, and then you just try all the various analytics software and you see one that fits. Yeah. I'm interested to know after you guys filled to deliver some orders on Valentine's Day, what did you have to do as chief of product and grow to win back your customers? Good question. All right. So, some of you might have seen that happening and it was a square experience. So, after Valentine's Day, if any of you have actually bought from us, for context, we took too many orders on Valentine's Day, actually 20x what we thought we would do. And that was a very big mistake because we actually overreached and thought we could fulfill that. We couldn't. So, we are late for many orders. And flowers, sometimes they got squished because our careers were also overclocked, per se. Normally it's not like that but Valentine's Day, we actually overreached. So, if any of you actually experienced that and if somehow we actually went through a really intense recovery process and if you didn't experience that, just let me know. I'm happy to do something for you. And so, what we did after that day is everyone stayed in office for the entire week doing nothing but customer service. So, we caught all customers personally. We apologized and we found make-up bouquet. Even if it was okay, we sent you a new bouquet. So, second chance to surprise your Valentine. So, on Valentine's Day, you sent bouquet. It's not really a surprise. You sent it a week later, it's kind of a surprise. So, we just try to do our best to make up for it. And it's not easy because Valentine's Day is a special day and it's not just, yeah, I give you free stuff, it goes on make-up for it because maybe the moment was ruined. But then, we just do our best to show that as authentically as possible to all our customers who trusted us for that that we are really sorry and want to do waver it takes to make it right for you. And based on each customer, we did our best to do it right. And so, I realize that's not very chief product of it. So, it is not data-driven or waver it is. So, it's really just, at times like this, you just go down into the business and just sit down there and it's called the whole team was calling. Did you guys get back to finish to get back at least? Yeah, in fact, there were a lot of people who were really nice about it, even though we scrub and nice there. They were like, hey, I understand.  You see, I saw the news and they're like, okay, cool. They're not the only ones. It's not the right thing to think about, right? So, yeah, and people will say they understand and all they really wanted to know that is that we are trying to make up for it. Sorry? Stop it happening again. Yeah, so there are multiple processes where they put in place, right? So, the reason why that happened, if we reverse engine or what like that, is because we had a certain amount of resources in terms of forest, couriers, things like that, right? They are stable and really strong. So, those could fulfill, say, 500 orders in a week, right? Confidently, all the time, everything amazing, right? And on Valentine's Day, in one day itself, we did 2,000 plus orders, right? So, basically what we did is because we had a flexible process to hire new couriers, basically we were just hiring new couriers on the spot and we were also running an algorithm to optimize routes, right? So, we thought that we could stretch it. We thought that, okay, cool, it's 2,000, so all we need to do is hire 3 more couriers to hit 2,000, but it wasn't as simple as that, right? So, given the lesson, for future hike volume days, we're in advance, we will be monitoring what's our max already and we're just going to stop it. Yeah, we're just going to stop it because the customer experience is more important just like that, a bit more money. Yeah? Yeah, let's put a cap on it. Yeah. Oh, you could funnel them to another drink. Yeah, what do you suggest? Well, like what Amazon now is managing, right? They're putting slots on there, then they're kind of like letting you select a different time and date instead. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, so we have roughly, we have like four time slots in the day, so we have other caps for each time slot, right? So previously, we didn't have it, so that's one of the fixes, so that makes a lot of sense, right? We have like 9 to 12, 12 to 3, 3 to 6, and we didn't have a cap, but now we do. So once night, we know that we have, say, 3 couriers for morning time slot, the moment we grew past that limit, the time slot disappears, so we can't book that anymore. So that's how we funnel. How can you get retention rate for the Valentine's Day Order versus the Longmore Beauty Order? Very nice day orders? Yeah, to see if you guys made up for it. Made up for it? Yeah. Oh, okay. So recovery. So the average, you definitely not, okay, so because we don't actually have a control group, to know what's the impact of making up this, right? So what we could do is just look at Valentine's Day retention versus like normal retention is someone's first order was on, it's May, right? And it would obviously be worse than the typical order and someone who didn't experience Valentine's Day, right? And so on average, people or customers, they buy like three to five times, like people who are really into flowers, they buy three to five times a year, right? So some people buy one to three, one to two times, it depends on the kind of persona and also sometimes how you acquire them, right? But that's like correlation. So we realize that there are people who buy, like people who buy for things like birthdays, get well soon, things like, so not like really events, really fixed event driven things like anniversary of Valentine's Day. So those people somehow they buy much, much more often because they have more triggers over a year to buy flowers and they tend to prefer flowers over other gifts, right? So these people, their retention is much higher, right? For people who buy on set dates, very often, like their max is like three times a year, right? So when we look at this and we can compare, like if we acquire more of a certain kind of user, we'll get higher retention versus another and then based on certain events, like we did really well for a certain week of something or we run a really nice campaign, we're giving out flowers and then people have a extra strong impression of a brand that retention tends to go accordingly. It's not easy to attribute cause that like this costs retention, but we can attribute like this cost, I love your brand, and then that costs retention. Okay, so what do you think about metrics? I understand it's hard to watch and it's safe for example, let's say it was about the record program. So what we showed us is something that is shared through social media, so you can actually track the metrics that it's true and honest, but what about word of mouth, referral I say for example, if I buy the bouquet from you guys, and I have another friend that say, you know, anywhere that you buy good flowers, so I would recommend word of mouth. So how do you capture metrics like this as a measure? So this is one example, and another one is that because you know some metrics is revenue, right? But what about people who say for example, you know, you buy like three, two months, come back, how do you capture the effect on the revenue that's happening like one month later or two months later? Because for me, I don't buy flowers for every week, so how do you actually capture these kind of metrics that it's hard to capture? Okay, so from what I understand, you have two main questions, right? The first question is there's some things happening in the world that is not really captured digitally, as a result you can't actually measure it, like how people normally measure. Then the second question is how do you track retention for single users and its impact on revenue? Is that right? Okay, and I'm guessing you're asking in relation to that excel sheet. Is that right? Or just another context? Or just tracking in general? In general, it's safe for example you have a campaign for any measure revenue, but some rabbits, a loss, a big part of source of revenue may be something that is hard to measure through like a single user journey. Safe for example, if you say for example, you can push recommendation, and then for example, if you push like a very expensive loss, and then I just buy all the costs, and when I receive it, I regretted it, and I'm like, okay, I will never buy it again, because I make this very bad by decision. So this is actually, you know, it's a loss revenue, but you guys will be very hard to discover if you didn't really ask at the same time, why you didn't come back after. So how do you capture things like that? Yes, okay. So I see the pattern here, which is that a lot of these like quality, some part of your qualitative feedback, like actual things happening that's not that we don't actually track on Google Analytics for instance, or Mixpanel, whatever it is you use. So for word of mouth, unfortunately it's quite hard to track. So we have nothing set, really set up to track word of mouth. Then the closest metric to track that is actually direct and organic branded traffic. So people actually coming to our site, new customers that come to our site, even though they have never actually interacted with any other paid channels before. So and we can track this by separating new customers from old customers, because we kind of like cookie the browser, so we know if someone has been to our site before and has bought. So based on how many visitors and then customers that has not bought before, that came through direct channels, that means they type in a bare forest into the browser and search a bare forest on Google, we can track, are we growing in terms of word of mouth or are there other ways or just like sing and add and then later converting. So it's really hard to just segment the word of mouth. And the other way to come with a leading indicator word of mouth is what we call a net promoter score survey. So they call it NPS survey. NPS survey basically we send it to customers and we ask them the question, how likely are you all to recommend a friend? And then people choose one to 10. So this is two parts. One is how much they love our service and when it comes to word of mouth, how likely are they to do it? Is there anything blocking? So we measure that and once they click the number that actually gives us some feedback, why do you give us number 10? Why do you give us 7? Why not 10? And then we get a lot of qualitative results based on that and we focus on growing our number and our ops team is actually focused on growing NPS. Keep growing NPS over time, which means that everyone focuses on customer success. And that's basically our ops, sub-Northern metric NPS. So when it comes to retention, so how do you measure retention? So I think there are a few couple parts to this question like how do you visualize retention and how do you measure it? So how do you think about retention when you look at it? Actually quite typically, so many companies they use like cohort analysis. So a cohort analysis basically just takes cohorts of users and cohorts really depend on how you choose to group them. So the most typical way to do it is to group them based on when they first became customers. So let's say week one, someone becomes a customer, then you can track over say a year, two years, and you can see over the next one week, two week, three week, a month or quarter, how many of them actually came back to buy? And because you track by cohort, you're not mixing this up with people who bought today. You're keeping the core of people who bought last year as an isolated segment so you can see how they're retaining over time. And then we will compare cohort number one, which is last year, all the way to cohort number 20 and see if we are improving over time. And then we segment this based on like short term, mid term, long term. Can we get someone to buy again in three months? If we notice that our three months number keep going down, then maybe people are not happy. If we notice that they are stagnant, so how do we make it better? Can we improve our marketing to create more use cases for forecasting, for example, or just be there when they want it? And then that's how we track it. Did I answer your question? I think the other way to see it is, is it necessary to track that metric? How much impact does it make to your bottom line? Is it worth the effort? Yes. Okay, so to make sure I understand your question, it's actually interesting. So you are actually proposing an idea which is, right, if you could create a solution that helps us connect, helps us figure out the relationships between people or actually help people build relationships between when the relationships didn't exist, but they had maybe second degree connections. And we can connect people together, right? Firstly, we'll get a better idea of someone's social circle. Secondly, when we know relationships, we can start telling people, hey, this guy's birthday is coming. So maybe we can get something for this guy. So there's a question I've never considered. So it's really interesting. So I'll say it's actually useful, but it'll be useful to the level of how deep that data goes and what kinds of relationships. So in this case, the way you think about this, there's one part of it, which is what exactly is the solution. And then once you know, is that you know how the solution will impact various key inputs on your model. For example, I can see impacting a few inputs based on how we design it. The first way is through acquisition. So someone is not a customer, but maybe someone gave you an email. And through this email, you found this LinkedIn profile and you realized that these are all colleagues in the company.  So get him something. So actually it's a very powerful way to get that first purchase. And this exact mechanism can get you repeat purchases, exact same thing. Just telling people, just telling you that someone you care about event is coming, or maybe someone tweeted something sad on Twitter. So maybe you want to do something to share the person out. So right now, I don't really know how to make that happen, to make the connections. But then if you think about how to think about the opportunity, you just think about, so if that happens, you could do like a, there's no real way to be really precise about that. But if you just think that previously someone has customers usually only have, say one or two people, they buy four throughout their entire lifetime. But if you could expand this to five or six and at the same conversion rates, so you could 3x purchase this if it works out at a max. Then obviously not everyone will participate and not everyone will be as influenced by that. So it's not going to be 3x to be at some level less. So if you go, maybe I could 1.5x revenue, 1.3x revenue. And then so is it worth it to build? And then that comes to complexity. So like, do we even know how to build it in the first place? And then how long it takes to build? And then we could take that and kind of like map out how much development effort it takes. And you compare this to the other ideas that you have and see which one makes sense to build first. Interesting idea. Yes. I'm just very curious like how do you really manage your inventory in real time? Like how do you keep track of stock more to start, let's say for the situation of the one time they were actually, how do you keep track of it in real time? Do you use an Excel or do you use an in-house tool or maybe another technology? Yeah. Have you heard of Mergento? Yeah. Yeah, it's an e-commerce platform. So that's what we use. And Mergento comes built in with some features like that already. So you can set an invent, you can set that you have 50 of that bokeh in stock. And then once it hits 50, it takes it off the side. So that's how we track inventory. And we could set, we could plan our inventory based on, based on how we understand our suppliers are going to change over time. If we know that our suppliers have run out of tillips, two of our suppliers have run out of tillips. For instance, we will limit our tillip bouquets by a lot just to make sure that people don't hesitate. The first number we look at is how much we have and that's ready right now. Not even just like open the box. How many, how much is ready? And we'll use that as the first number. And then if our suppliers cannot get us, and the reason why we do this is because not all flowers when they come from a supplier, they open it, not all flowers look as nice as you think. Even though it's completely fresh, some buds might be smashed because they're tied together, for instance. So we don't use flowers that look like that. So at any one point we might use say 80% of all the flowers we get.  So we have to take into account this risk. So we only look at how much ready do we have in our fridge at any one point of time. And use that to track. Does that answer your question? Let me know if I answer a completely different question. So you asked me how do we track our inventory, correct? Or how close to real time? How close to real time we track our inventory? So this is not an Excel sheet. It's all in Magento. So if someone buys Bokeh A, then it automatically reduces the number of, let's say if we say that we have inventory stock 99, instantly it becomes like it. It's just based on Magento. And with the moment it hits zero, it disappears off the outside. Just want to check that I answer the correct question. One last question. You can take a conversation for a later with the German. I'm sure our second speaker. Based on your slides, right? Most of the time you have to make a quantitative data. So you're blasting emails etc. So what is the waiting period? Then how do you validate the result?  The differences will be different. Just want to make sure I understand your question. So the data we get from blasting emails to ask, do you have any problems with this part of the product? Those kinds of emails. So you're asking me, what's the waiting time? That means how long do people take to reply? Is that your question? So there are multiple waiting times. It's a process. The first waiting time comes after we send the email. So people, it could take maybe three to four days before enough people reply that I have enough. For that one, I blasted off to 600 people, and like 65 of them replied, roughly. And there was actually enough data for me to get like a good idea of how many people are feeling a certain thing. And it took about three, four days for them to reply. And then after that, after the synthesize of turning into a pie chart, that's almost nothing. It's just a little bit like Excel. And after that, so deciding what to do, creating the experiments. So whenever we do experiments, what we do is we plan it out. So our hypothesis, for example, for the referral program is that people, we map our hypothesis very clearly. People are not doing it because the friction is too high because the reward is not worth the effort. So if we make it, the reward more worth the effort by using instant gratification because we believe that if someone only gets a reward, and God knows how long, because who will want to buy? If we change this around, we get a lot more. And let's say we can put an estimate just based on a guess. It's not going to 10x it. It's going to be maybe 2x it or 50% increment. And then based on this, and then we map out how we're going to run it. So what's the minimum variable test to do? So in this case, we didn't have to redesign entire UX. If you redesign entire UX, it will make no difference probably because no one said anything about I don't understand what's going on. It's hard to navigate. So all we did was change the text on our back end. So we used referral candy. It's a referral program software. And we just need to tweak a few inputs and we launched it in less than a day. And then so when it comes to collecting data and validating, so there's a little bit of like stats comes into play. And so there's a few ways to think about it. So we don't accept results until it hits at least 90% statistical significance. And to hit that, we need a certain amount of people who actually went through the program at the time. If we can't do an AB test just due to the nature of the situation, we look at pre and post. And this also depends on, and when we look at pre and post experiments, there's no, we won't see success if we make very, very small changes like change the button color because there's too much variation. But if we base it on say like on a psychological input that we believe makes sense, that we believe is a big change, we tend to see really big increments. And basically just goes like this and it goes like this. And if you stay steady, we accept the test. Once enough people has gone through, once you have enough people in the post-stage sample and the pre-stage sample where we map out. And usually this could take about two weeks, one to two weeks, depending on how much the impact is. And this is a little bit of like statistical math.  But if you create a change that could 2x your metric, you'll need far less people because the difference is far bigger, it's far more obvious that there's a difference. So in our case, we ignore all the change button color, change a little bit of text thing. We focus on things like that. And as a result, we could shrink test dates. And that's a very long-winded answer. So about two weeks, two weeks plus to validate. Yeah. Yeah, I hope that helped. Sweet. Thanks guys. Thanks for being here. Hope that was helpful.


Most companies that sell products make money by selling them to consumers Pyramid schemes typically make money selling overpriced difficult to sell products to their own distributors Who are typically aspiring entrepreneurs hoping to build a business? Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the procrastinators podcast I am the best guy ever Faro best guy ever because we're talking about Egypt today, of course And we've got mr. Mummy hippocrates What was that entire intro? I don't know you're a mummy now for this episode. Okay. Hello, it's me.   That's what Tom Oliver is. He's one of these Pyramids weren't made by the Egyptians are made by aliens who were worshipped as gods in the past Google the Anunnaki.  I just want to relate an anecdote that my Spanish teacher in high school Mr. What's his face? Mr. Oh God, what was his name? Mr. Sub they called him mr. Bella. Mr. Cibella mr. Cibella Legitimately believed that the Incan Ziggurats were made with some kind of advanced lost technology that used sonic waves to love to levitate stone blocks in place I've watched ancient aliens.  I have a couple questions one one Why is it that they they have like the skills of like a level one a tier one minecrafter these aliens? It's gotta be some sonic some sonic nonsense. Yeah, of course We make up for our lack of technical ability with our creativity.   There was a there was a lot of sonic powers back then. There was a real sonic mania. Yeah Sonic boom back in the day Relevant to our friend hypocrite here Well, all right. Let's let's begin everybody. So our egypt theme episode is about pyramid schemes. Yay Boy, I understand it was the was the was the process of Worshipping alien skygods. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Okay. Let's let's check over our buddies over at Urban Dictionary to see what they've got to say on the situation Okay, here we go pyramid scheme This is definition number two the best scheme to ever set up once you learn to never underestimate I hate this already the stupidity of the human majority. Just make sure you don't get caught though Oh, I regret reading that.  I know I know right? Yeah, let's okay. Let's try another one Here's the top definition. I should have just gone to this one Um a fraudulent business model illegal in most places in which participants are paid to recruit more Participants rather than commissions on sales frequently passed off as multi-level marketing by incorporating sales of an Unmarketable product or service into the scheme in such cases participants are usually required to maintain a monthly purchase quota to qualify for payments All right. Well, that that's really it. That's that's the one Now Version of like a zombie plague Multi-level marketing is the is like is like the the softer gentler form that is supposed to be a correct term if you will Yeah, that's what your schemes call themselves to get away with being pyramid schemes, right?  There's no brains to eat. We're all And they all fall over that's a fair point It's interesting that you brought up protein powder cuz just the other day I was I was coming back from the gym and I happened to stop in I think CVS or whatever And I was getting my my gigantic five pound box of protein powder in the things and like as I was buying it This dude's like hey hold up their friend. Oh, and this is like just like two days ago I have I got something for you and he runs out to his car. He's like don't leave and he runs out to his car Wait, was this the guy who worked there or just no it was he was loitering in the in the lobby I think he was like buying something legitimately, but he happened to see an opportunity and he dove on it when he saw me buying protein powder He's like oh, this is actually kind of sad He he so he gives me like he comes back with like a pamphlet and like a little packet of some substance He's like here. This is like the best protein powder ever. We grow it in like Greenland. It's new.  No, it was Ireland Ireland some it must be some soy protein then if it's ground It definitely was but then like he was stumbling over the pitch He had clearly just learned this and had like internalized it yet So I don't think this is really a pyramid scheme as much as just like a sales pitch in general But it was interesting. It was it was a similar sort of situation I just happened to find myself in and needs to say I threw it all in the trash as soon as he was out of my eye Why did you even wait? Why did you wait? I? Be right in front of him to send a message, but that's the thing in order to deal with these kind of situations I make it seem like I'm on board and then immediately throw everything away once they're gone so that I don't to deal with the social ramifications of rejecting someone You just like mmm. Thanks. This is some good information dumps in the trash. Well, I'll look all this over and get back Let me pass this off to my secretary dumps into garbage can I'll be back soon and then Oscar the crash comes out. He said that You said I could go home at five. I don't want to come down.  It's a super food that is protein Yeah, what is our angle on pyramid schemes because I don't think any of us like it I know I think some of us have experience right yeah tell stories. Yeah. Well. Yeah.  It's it's a it's a pretty gripping read and it's absolutely Disgusting the way it all the way it all goes down And then there's a documentary called betting on zero that is about this investor called Bill Ackman who is um He's he's gone. He's going after have you seen it Tom? I watched that it's funny because like I watch this like three days before you brought up this topic So I'm prepared for this. Yeah, it's it's because he basically he invests tons of money in the idea that That or a company called Herbalife will fail because he's convinced that the company is a pyramid scheme So the movie is basically his quest to like out Herbalife as a pyramid scheme So the business will fail and he'll recoup a huge amount of profit on his investments. Interesting. Yeah Anyway for me my personal experience is that I was almost recruited by a vector marketing to sell cut-coe knives That's what happened to me This is when I was this is when I was pretty freshly out of college living at home and Desperate to find a job and they prayed on me because I was weak and I didn't know any better Yeah, I think I was on Craigslist or something and I saw an ad for vector marketing and I you know Responded to the ad and they said coming for an interview.   Yeah, and I was like I was like really relieved I was like, oh, thank you. I was like I'm really grateful It's embarrassing looking back on it because now I know what was really going on, but I was and so I went home And I was like mom dad I'm gonna sell knives and and Looking back. I don't know why mom philosophy physics Right and looking back. I don't know why they didn't be like then this is a scam Like they should I don't know why they didn't just do that But they were like, um, are you sure about this? Are you really sure about this? And I was like mom dad? What do you want to do? You're always telling me to get a job.  What more do you want from me? God But at some point considering I was like, I gotta pay like a hundred and sixty dollars for this knife set Like I can't fucking spare that and also it doesn't seem right that I need to buy product to work for a job So I ended up so like the fact yeah my lack of money ended up my lack of money got me into that situation But then it also Stonewalled me from getting any further into it so I couldn't go through with it Years later. I was again jobless and I responded to another ad for some other company They'd said they'd give me an interview and I went to this office building It was a piece of crap in the middle of nowhere underneath. It was underneath a karate dojo But yeah, but I went inside and I waited around and it turned out that this interview was not even one-on-one It was basically a group presentation and this was not Quite the same. I didn't have to buy in to do this But basically I would just be selling insurance policies on commission, which is pretty much the same thing It's no risk to the company.  How about you guys? Well, Ben, that's cool, but I prefer people who succeed at multi-level marketing I want to hear I want to hear a champion who's who's made world the world his bitch Someone who really had the hustle the hustle they need to make it work Exactly like to be honest I would kind of like to know some insider stories from people who have risen up in the ranks at least a little bit Become that recruiter guy. I that's like I serious.   Nobody in the chain was making any money They're all they're all in the hole the people that are maintaining their high rankings are literally buying the products for themselves and keeping them Keeping their quote-unquote business afloat that way.  That's that's not how capitalism is supposed to work It's purely parasitic you succeed you succeed in an MLM by duping people into doing into falling for the same trick You fell for yeah once you realize that the products won't sell that's the only way to make it work So what I want to know is did the girl ever cross that cross that evil bridge and become like I mean I know that she was advertising it for her Did you ever willingly like acknowledge it like I am now duping people and you know what? I've got to do it if I want to dig myself out of here. Did she ever get into that place? No, not quite there was this kind of thing where like she got her like step sister to buy some makeup at a kind of a shitty Price and then she like couldn't refund it even though the girl changed her mind But she wasn't like no, she didn't like act. She did recruit some people but she didn't like No, no, she wasn't too like clearly there are worse people Sure, but the funny thing is even in a situation where you're doing this like the human beings are crazy adaptive You can get yourself in the headspace where you don't think you're doing anything wrong with this stuff Wait, no, I changed my mind because she did the fake it till you make a thing and she did recruit people So yeah, she absolutely duped people never mind.   I have like 15 sports cards now Urban life's the best. Yeah, everybody was like cheering.  That's like through that trade That's where all the great stuff that we have in America has basically come through this process But like nothing is being created in this system. It's kind of like it's kind of like the banking system only that actually lending money does sort of allow growth in some ways the the business model of these of these, you know Pyramid schemes that pass themselves off as MLMs by having a quote-unquote product That's for sale is that the the product itself is not anything special and it's overpriced for what it is So it will not sell on its own The old the but but the structure of the way that you recruit people and then you you incentivize these people like you need to Sell you need to sell the stuff at any cost if you're gonna make your quote-unquote business work So that creates the incentive to buy and sell so like the products are designed to be bought by end users They're designed to be bought by the people you recruit. Yeah, they can sell Yeah, so the only people buying the products are the people suckered into it Are the employee the quote-unquote employees, right?  I'm not that dedicated to this cause You know Good going time gone. I was gonna say we're all we're all missing the important question here because we're all morally vacant We need to the question we need to ask is how do we make the PCP a Pyramid scheme so we can all make tons of money clearly that's the question question here I like I like where your head's at Well, I'm actually the head of a pyramid scheme.  Well, yeah, like there's there's a big culture of like oh go out and patron everybody keep forwarding money to your creators But the thing is or to the creators that you like as an artist But the thing is every time that you patron anyone Patreon takes their 10% or their 5% cut or whatever from the money that's being patron So if you if you if somebody patrons you a dollar and then you're like great All right, let's say ten dollars and then you decide to patron somebody five dollars or something Like and you're using the money that you're making to do that Like you're just giving patreon the money and no more is actually getting to the creators, you know, you know what I'm saying Yeah, like if you yeah Patron gets like double and triple dip on that because like it's the same $10 But they've taken their cut twice out of the same $10. I remember I remember seeing someone's patreon that was like He posted like inspirational quotes and writings and stuff But his model was like my model is like you patron me all patron you and in no, that's the yeah Way like I like it boosts both of us But like yeah only the only person getting paid in that situation is patreon itself. Everyone else the money is just disappearing Dupest thing I've ever heard.  Oh, I that thanks Thanks I'm with you though I have never patroned anyone and will never because I would much rather just pay pal the money directly if I was inclined to do So yeah palace is a better for that although for me to you It would it would still lose money because of the the country difference PayPal That's true PayPal's recurring payment function is it would be a superior alternative to patreon But nobody wants to do it and and I kind of The masses need their centralized platform in order to make up for the fact that they have no brains I don't really blame them. I mean I just doesn't I mean it just doesn't have that I Don't know like I can't put my finger on it But there's something more friendly about doing it through patreon Yeah, there's just a there's just a culture now The PayPal is better but patreon just is so much more like appealing I think what it is is that for PayPal You need to be given a link to and then type in stuff for patreon you go there and you have an account You just press a button Really yeah, like it's it's it's one of the downsides It's not to pay that much simpler, but it's simpler enough that people would do it over PayPal and not to mention It's like a far more customizable thing.  They're so like normal Patreon has the edge of being like oh, we're all into indie art guys You come to patreon and and everyone's like oh well, I guess I will Actually killed the first site to do this cuz patron wasn't the first Yeah, they were running that for a while But the thing is they never got it out of like beta or whatever cuz like only certain people could Where use it could join subbable like you had to be chosen for it And they kept that up for like a year or something and patreon just like fuck that We're gonna do what you did but let it be open for everybody and then eventually I was sad I was sad about that because I actually liked subbable's model better Yeah, it was like model was way better It was the way that my patreon is set up where I give rewards based on total patronage not on like right So like when you donated money to subbable it like built up like your bank And then you could spend the money in like lump sons to get rewards instead of like having like monthly things So it was like a hundred dollars and you pledge five dollars a month once you pledge a hundred dollars total Then you could unlock that reward and claim it. That's good. That's good So but they they got killed because they didn't develop a site fast enough that's the market baby and I assume you guys know about the little bit of controversy that's been going on about patreon demonetizing or you know Shutting down the accounts now there's a lot of sides to that and we don't need to go into it too much But I was actually pretty pretty pretty convinced by the arguments that mr. Patreon man made in the in the video that he made need he did like an interview with The interview that he did with Dave Rubin and it was it was I Felt like I was concerned by the fact that he just said like a lot of the situations like I don't know what I would do I'm like dude you wrote the rules You're the guy you're the guy dude What who am I supposed to ask these questions to the thing is is though like people were saying because like it was Lawrence Southern who got demonetized and she's like a right-wing political commentator and people were like pissed off This is a political thing But if you look at like the history of patreon like banning they've also banned like you know Antifa things and like left-wing stuff too. So it is like they are sticking to their their their terms of service or whatever it is But it still is like a bad precedent I guess about this I have a thought about this I've been thinking about for a while And I only recently was able to to articulate it clearly. So let me tell you let me ask you guys What do you think about this so so common these days when someone is like Let's just say like when when Sargon of Akkad for example got kicked off of Twitter as he was recently You know like people good reasons fair enough It doesn't matter how you feel about it But the point is as he's kicked off the people like his side of the argument says like oh You know that's not fair. This is shutting down free speech You know I mean not everybody's making that point and like he would acknowledge like Twitter's a private company But that's the thing the other side would then say You know the leftists who are happy that he's gone. No Twitter is a private company They can do whatever they want dude. You just have to deal with it. That's you know fuck off And so okay, so that's a fair argument, but here's what I'm wondering about that situation So as time goes on more and more these companies like Twitter are the ways that we actually Communicate in the real world like this this is becoming like just the public marketplace I guess it's like post a gathering of the town square a better example for this is it like Twitter is bad enough But like Google Google is super politically motivated at this point and like that's been made clear Essentially is a public utility at this point like you can't function without using their services So like if not like legally from an ethical ethical standpoint, they should be apolitical and not Mingle in that at all despite the fact that they're a Private company like there's like you know just recently when I watched the interview with mr.  I am pretty sure I'm pretty sure I am aware of Like like models and like they're definitely cam girls and stuff on patreon Photographers and like you know erotic photography that is definitely being funded through patreon at least as far as I am aware I have definitely seen such things before maybe they've been shut down But some people would argue there's a difference, but I think it's bullshit I think like at that point like there's no difference between porn and like like why Jessica Negiri for example has a gigantic patron one of the biggest and I only watch her to jack off That's what I do. That's what her content is for so I don't know what other utility it has So I like that seems like a clear case I don't know at least I just think it's dumb to ban porn entirely. I think I think it's it's as valid Because that would that's like I I'm just guessing but that's probably a huge amount of patreon's income is like various porn things Oh, I'm sure it is very Like that girl who makes like the Sikimi chan that's exactly what I'm thinking of yes her every time I think about her I just want to kill myself. She makes what like 50 grand a month or something It's like she makes she makes over six figures a year like easily well There's a decent amount of paid. Okay, but the point I wanted to get to about this was like yeah It's basically this issue of like being it being treated as a public utility like right now There's this whole thing about net neutrality going on right now And I actually don't know the status of it right now.  You can't you can technically do that. I mean that's happening right now Cuz is that so?   We are ladies and gentlemen I was I was just gonna say we ventured pretty far afield by now We have but I still want to get back at some point to turning the PCP into a pyramid scheme I think it's a very important topic. I think we can do it if we put our heads together Okay, okay. Let's let's think about this. All right. Well, we just will use the product joining the PCP I've got hang on. I've got it everybody Okay, all right the product that we're selling is podcast on the PCP channel what we do is we outsource people like Templates of like images or maybe like the theme song or whatever we give them assets to make their own Sounds like react world. I was just gonna say exactly That's that's where I'm going with this and so we this is sort of a licensing deal for us We give them people that they make their podcast and then they make money on them but they have to pay us a royalty for the usage of that shit and And then there you go Sounds like a great idea, and I no longer hate react world because I see that they were actually geniuses We need to succeed where they failed agreed They were visionaries. We need to we need to corner the market on actual literal PCP and Starting a multi-level marketing a corporation Drugs Brought to you by PCP guys. We've we've this is embarrassing.  There's no problems All right, well, I'm down where just where where can we find drugs? We just gotta hit up my boys someone send send send someone send best guy ever's P. O. Box some drugs No, we can't do that because then we're in their pyramid scheme because we're relying on them for the drugs We can't that that'll fucking obvious obviously we're gonna start we're gonna start from ourselves We're gonna start with donations like our initial our initial source of capital will be will be donations It was donate drugs to the PCP pyramid scheme a hashtag PC pyramid scheme Find five people who will tweet it for you And then they'll find five people to eat it for them and on and on Yeah Here's how it works here.  This is not a joke everybody. This is real. This is real everybody. I go hashtag PC pyramid scheme tag five your friends and keep it going forever Yeah, I'm gonna do it right now actually good. All right.  I'm okay. I'm gonna wait I'm gonna wait until the day this airs and then I'll do it. Good thinking.  Yeah, can you can you schedule a tweet? You have to be able to there's no way you can't schedule. So I've never heard of such I've never needed to do it, but you can schedule a word. There's no I've never heard of anyone scheduling a tweet You can you can schedule a patron post Okay, here's what you can do if you have to do a workaround you can have a video on YouTube You can schedule that video and then you can associate a tweet with that.  That's uh, just Just the text hashtag PC pyramid scheme. It'll be like an ARG No one will know like just like a storm of videos hits starts hitting YouTube You know tag wait, can you tag people on YouTube? You can't can you know you can't you can put You can put their Twitter name in the title and when it tweets it out, they'll get hat mentioned on Twitter Okay, that's something. Yes.  President's Club President's Club You you make and make a video and tweet at the PC people who are gonna make video responses and they got a tag five more Yeah, we're gonna be rich guys Where does the money come from exactly? It'll it'll come it'll come From drugs like once everyone's excited about PC pyramid scheme done. We start selling drugs Everybody will be on drugs and everybody will be asking what is hashtag PC pyramid scheme? They're gonna look us up.   So when everyone hears this one, they'll be oh, that's a good idea include Include them at TP Crastonators in your in your PC pyramid schemes tweet. Yes, please Yes, well, it'll have a hashtag PC pyramid scheme. So yeah, we can search for that. That's okay. Okay Well, I just meant to people I just meant so people would know that it's this is our this is our scam and and we're the one We can get immediately arrested when they figure out what we're doing Yes, this is good. This is good. I like this. I like where our heads at gentlemen. I think we've got big things coming to us Is that it wait? No, no, you gotta link our patreon. You gotta link every way. We don't have to go viral Oh, yeah, of course Oh and make and make sure to fake it till you make it tweet tweet hashtag PC pier Pyramid scheme and talk about and talk about how now that you now that you watch the PCP Now that you're getting all these sweet bonus episodes through our patreon.   Is that what's happening right now be the Got it. I've got it the you're being paid in attention. We're gonna pay attention to your tweets Ah Yeah, you gotta find five people who will pay you attention and then they'll find five people who will pay them attention Yeah, it's brilliant. It's it's it's gonna work guys What we're selling what we're selling what we're selling in this multi-level marketing company is mine chair in the public zeitgeist That's right. That's right. We're selling our current age of social media. What is more valuable than attention? Not money.   We'll pay you an exposure. It's This whole this whole scheme is just it's just it's the exposure is just traveling up the line More exposure being paid to your upline and they're paying their upline and on and on until it all reaches us and we become legendary viral superheroes Fantastic, that's the end goal, but don't tell anyone We're doing we're this we're gonna pretend we're doing a public service, but we won't say what that service is the PC public service PS we got the PC PC the PC PS what else the PC PC D the PC be I don't know These are all the sacred words of our viral marketing campaign words of power attack kill These words used by an elite group of online hackers known as the PC Alright, so there you go. We've rolled out our whole whole operation really We've really made a lot of progress. We banged out a whole business model in what like 40 minutes. Yes. Yeah Yeah, and it's not a joke. It's not a joke.  Yeah. Yeah, the publicly available one to to to get him in to get him on board Yeah, yeah Give him a taste show everyone how much better your lives can be with with hashtag PC pyramid scheme in your life All right. Well that said I feel like we're good. Let's how about we go over to questions now I think we're all set any any final points to make about pyramid schemes in general Don't do them Not right not recommended. Oh, I did just want to say that my only exposure to one was in Welcome to the NHK welcome to the NHK. Oh, there was a Simpsons one too But when that lady was doing it and it looked real spooky, so don't do it. It's not good Oh, it's Sato like the main character bought into him. Yeah, they're really sad The way they pray on like vulnerable weak people is like the most evil thing in the world So remember all of our audience, please hash treat the hashtag PC pyramid scheme Oh, yeah, I changed my mind do them do them do them all start while you're young Well, that's what makes our special ours is the one that's not like that ours is really good and remember It's multi-level marketing. It's not a pyramid scheme hashtag PC pyramid scheme That's what they do by the way The biggest repeated phrase in MLM is like it's not a pyramid scheme pyramid schemes are illegal and what we're doing is legal So clearly it's not a pyramid scheme guys. That's our quote. That's our that's our Fray that's our story and we're sticking to it hashtag not illegal Again, were you saying something about this?  I've only ever heard about it No one's ever approached me to say, please buy some matches or something I Want there was a traumatic event in my life that was directly related to a pyramid scheme So I was at a football game and there were a bunch of cheerleaders and they started climbing on each other's shoulders And it was it got more horrible.  Yeah, I There was there was a scheme It wasn't those crafty sluts.   That's for sure.  No, I Think you're maybe supposed to I just know I'd really like to rent that house. I can't live in it, but you know, that'll be fun The pitch gotta be a money thing It's got some for the person owning that property that sounds amazing because you can definitely charge more than just regular rent Yeah, and then you get it for 12 different people.   What are they doing? The pitch for the pitch for time shares is like like imagine being able to say I've got a little place in the Swiss Alps cuz like for one month out of the year So you can go on like holiday for one month and just lie Just I guess you can just lie. You can just lie.   I'm gonna be there But I think they knew master puppeteer you know I think they could tell from my tone cuz the lake cuz my tone changed and the lady started being like um So and I was like, yep, I'm gonna be there. I'm good cuz I went from I went from skeptical to like full-on Enthusiasm and I think she knew something was off, right, but I did my but I did my best I I own an entire tectonic plate guys Oh Come visit for one for in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for one sixteenth of a second out of each year I own the continent of Australia. Yes, excellent. You're the king All right, let's let's go to our questions everybody. Let's okay. Here we go Okay, here's one that I don't understand why it's here at meaty learner 509 asks on average How many times does the best guy ever say? Sorry, okay on average how many times per day does best guy ever say, haha. Well, all right Pretty much constantly I don't do I say that is that like it? Sounds like the kind of thing you say it's the number of houses very specific Yeah, only two you can't have more than that. I'll give it 20 20 times per day That seems reasonable. Oh It's somebody check in the other the patron one for questions.  Yeah, so there you go. Just be like just ask this question and you're safe Yeah, there you go. That's the answer to that one. A good a good question But it is not some meme shit like a good question like actually demands some like discussion to come to an answer a Good a good question is something that like one or more of us is actually interested in addressing. Yes. Yeah, and also Nothing ever to do with favorites Yeah Basically basically a good question is a question that we couldn't answer on Twitter itself It has to be more than 140 characters requiring the answer So we can actually get into it and actually think a little bit as opposed to just being like, what's your favorite anime? That's a yeah, that's I gotta say that what's your favorite anime is the worst question It is the worst question possibly as Like a lot of people ask questions that are like the meme that currently makes them giggle Let's ask about that like I mean someone tweeted here like death grips is online Like I know that's a meme going on right now and I know death grips are cool and all I guess that was a little bit better because it is kind of like a but what are we supposed to what are we supposed to say about that?  Yeah, I would say that's fair But then again, there was exceptions to everything So if you just have like a genius idea then shoot it out But you know, yeah, that'd be a genius You can take that risk if you want but you you risk public ridicule for everyone to hear so indeed Step forward brave. So well here's a kind of a question by fado on the fado on the patreon lounge Is there a difference between favorite and best? Absolutely No Some people say there isn't but I've always disagreed with that I think that if you wait, I feel like deja vu I feel like I argued this a long time ago vehemently and was furious about it for weeks I think that's true. I think but I don't remember when but my position my position on this is that if you think something If something is your favorite that means that to you it is the best so like To be like oh well this thing is my like I like to me.  Is that true across all categories? Yeah, I think so I don't think it's a true across categories dealing with like like Observable facts and figures If you're talking about if you're talking about like I don't know some medicine or something and maybe like some medicine in like 90% Of cases has no adverse side effects and is great But to you it has adverse side effects like sure you can be like yeah like well This doesn't work for me like like to me this other medicine is better But in but okay, but if we're talking if we're talking about statistical something about art But if we're talking about art and opinions I think it's really disingenuous to be like this one's my favorite But I think this one is better, but not for me. Yeah, I agree with Ben on this with regard with regards to art I feel like there's no like like like I think of it Where it would not sound weird like who are you just who are you to speak on behalf of the General population no you can only speak for yourself on these matters you can okay Like if there's a show that you like because you were a kid and you really liked it So you have like a personal attachment to it But as you've got older like for me the Bible black English dub is horrendous, but I love it It's like my favorite thing in the world It's like it's like the best dub ever to me even though there are dubs like I don't know Bakano or whatever they're like technically wonderful But like I like the Bible black dub because it's so fucked up and retarded like it's clear Which of those is better, but I like the Bible black one because it's got this you know special thing that I like about it What about that business well you did the I mean It's one thing to recognize that more people like another thing than then your favorite thing But like what's the point of being like okay? Well, this one's my favorite, but this other one that other people like that one's technically better like what's the Personal preference those are two different things.  Okay, hang on. All right. Yeah, I think the way it should be is that cuz like a lot of people us included say Oh man, that's the best thing I've ever seen and we don't actually mean like best. We're not thinking of it like that We're just saying I really really like it, right? It's um so I feel like if you're talking if you're going to say this is what's considered the best you just say This is the consensus masterpiece. This is consensus favorite and But this one's the best this because you're trying to convince people usually Yeah, I feel like I feel like best and favorite are interchangeable I see nowadays I think we all understand what the word favorite means It's just like the thing that you get the most enjoyment out of you like the most if we're just talking about art You know as one subcategory, but I think we need to define the word best I think that's entirely where the problem lies in this discussion So what do we actually mean when we say best here like the one that the most people like yeah me But is the one that the most people like as it is like it's got the on average highest score Or is it the most technically provisioned? I think the scientists would say this is the most perfectly The technical proficiency, okay, like this is the best art like the most like technically There's like there's like tears there's like very obvious tears Within which there's like very you know like there's the stuff that's like really well done But it's what's the best it comes a lot down to personal preference, and then this thing Oh, you said what's the best comes to personal preference, but it's the best of sort of objective all right I'm saying oh lord Okay, okay saying is what I'm saying is there are say video games There are games that are just broken and don't work and nobody likes them And then there are games that are you know really really good But nobody not a single like there's no consensus on what is the best So the word best is kind of meaningless and it's interchangeable with favorite when you're saying like what's the best of a Series of games that are all great a brilliant like nobody will ever agree So best and favorite will be interchangeable in that situation But what if you're comparing like okay? Something that just doesn't work with something that is really good Then there is a clear usage of that while this is better I guess I guess my my perspective on it has always been that the best is referring to technical measurable Quant like aspects of a work and favorite is just like emotional like how you feel I don't I don't think it makes sense to judge based on Use best as a substitute for favorite I think that the way it is is like that the closer you get to the the the mythical best thing The less useful the word best becomes Because people stop agreeing with each other I think using the word best to describe an opinion is worthless because it doesn't mean anything But if you're talking about best in terms of a quantifiable aspect it totally makes sense And how do we deal with the issue of ironic enjoyment of things like my Bible black dub? That's like my favorite like I like that basically ironically It was not intended to be good, but it is good in like the room and shit like that's a whole like best versus Favorites when you consider that shit like those are on the opposite side of the spectrum people people still use the word best But they say oh, it's the best worst thing ever I would say the room is like but but if I like the room is like my favorite movie Which it is one of and I then like it totally would not be even close to like the best movie ever made But it is among my favorites. I think like how do you get that? I think that even if you're enjoying something ironically if you're getting the most enjoyment out of it out of all the things then Yeah, it's your it should be your favorite thing So even if it like accidentally became entertaining it good like the room then like it's still it still is what it is And you can judge it by like I really think that it all just comes down to how much enjoyment Do I get out of this thing and like looking at it from like oh well? What's technically the best? What's done? What's most popular? I think those things are like I don't see the point in evaluating a works when somebody when somebody has When somebody has a best and they say it's the best technically I I don't feel anything from their recommendation because it's not their favorite I Think what what it comes down to is that the technical best is kind of useless for me because I don't get the sense that Like I don't know what they mean. Hmm. I don't know it's it's it's hard to explain. I had a point Yeah, like yeah best If you're if you're talking about art, what's the point of knowing which is the best wouldn't you rather know someone's favorite?  I mean I see where that's coming from I just I just don't think the word makes any sense if it doesn't mean what Tom was saying it means and it's like some sort of Yeah, but the thing is people people just use it like that Best incorrectly all the time because I don't think the best talks about subjective opinion I mean eventually best is going to mean favorite because of the way people are continually using it wrong, right?  Yeah, it's a meme. I don't know. I was thinking Z it's people people will get it. They'll know you force Oh, those are good. Those are good guys. Would you want to name pick another question? I think all right I think I think we've Run this one into the ground ladies and gentlemen. That's an example of a good question. Yeah Yeah, that one insights debate cuz it's like who couldn't you can know the truth Hey, here's a question from my at on Twitter at lamp pros from gr. Yeah, okay asks Do you like horror films? If yes any expectations for the upcoming movie it I do not really like So Yeah, no, I just wanted to say it sucks Make a video with as the title it's not out yet. So I will believe it A couple people I follow on Twitter saw and they said it was amazing. Oh, okay Well, I'm amazing did they huh? They said it was like any of the general consensus from what I can tell us That's the best even King adaptation I just saw the dark tower dude, and that was a 10 out of 10. I didn't actually see it I Have no fear. I don't care about horror really. It scares me It's either scary or boring. Oh, okay. Well, dude, that's the thing Okay, so I hated horror for a million years until I played Silent Hill 2 and 3 and now I have found myself games are different games are different because Like I love Resident Evil 1 on PlayStation.  You are the guy who is not gonna go in there But you have to do it to conclude it's like the tension is so much higher because you have to do it Work's way better in games than it does in movies for sure, you know About you it's happening to you. I just watched um it follows the other day Which I thought was it was like more artsy than it was like horrific though. It was pretty scary Yeah, I think after I play Sound Hill like I do have more of a taste for them And I I'm enjoying them more. I I said before that I don't like horror movies But not too long ago. I watched one called creep. Have any of you seen it? No, no Creep it it's it's it's really great.   How old is this film? Not less than a decade. I think like it's not it's not recent, but it's not old either at least I don't think so. Yeah, I highly recommend a creep So um, yeah, but that doesn't say anything about it. I don't care about it I'm not gonna see it. Oh, right.  I quite like that and I was Definitely not.  So can't say I was really looking forward to it But I am sort of interested to see because I just like horror movies now And uh, I don't know like this guy looks kind of cool And I'm just curious to see if it does well and whoever just said that it's been getting good reviews Like that's the first I've heard of its actual quality. So I probably will go see it and uh, yeah You know I'm kind of excited to see it. I just I just hate being afraid because I'm constantly Afraid of my own inevitable demise. So I don't need to add to that fear So I I agree generally the feeling of being spooked is not a pleasant one that I don't know not at all Creep didn't spook me. Well, I guess it kind of did.  No, no, no, just I have a question about this topic And it was just were horror films invented to to to force teenagers to sex each other Is that what they you know, you know what I'm saying Do you mean to force them to sex each other in the films or to force them to sex each other in the theaters In the theater in the theaters. Is this a a breeding scheme? You know to make them be spooked and I don't think they were invented for that But they've been co-opted by teenagers and we need to we need to take them back We need to wage war. I agree. They have terrible. Would you not agree? I mean, I've only watched a few horror films because not my thing But would you not agree that the PG-13 rating is the kiss of death for a horror film? I don't know enough to say but it seems that way. Let me let me look and see what creep was rated You know what?  God, I don't want to say but it's the one about the black people that came out recently.  I swear guys.  Yeah, it was it follows and like so that movie was good But then I remember the moment-to-moment experience of watching it as I'm like wanting to die because like okay, so the the scary thing in that movie is like There is a creature it or whatever that just it follows you but it walks very slowly But the thing is it can take on the appearance of anyone at any time So like in a crowd it could be any of the people there And you get it by like having sex with someone who like it's following currently it doesn't matter But like oh the spooks. Oh the spooks really got to me. It was uh Oh was painful like that's like the pain of watching But it's the release that comes when you get like you get through it and you're okay And you can reflect on it that feels that feels good. I like that Creep creep is rated r although. I think it pretty easily could have been a pg-13 So I had dude. What if because you were saying about ratings. I just had this idea What if just like spicy curries and stuff the the spooky things would have a rating system Instead of scoville units or whatever it is. It'll be like spookville units And how it is will be denominated by little little ghost emojis next to the thing and if it's got five You want to see in the world, dude Wow I I would like that It's like it's only got two two ghosts on that on the spookville rating. That's not scary enough for me Uh, that that's good. Uh, well, we're basically out of questions on the twitter. We got any others on the that's not true I'm looking at the twitter right now and I want to answer this one from ajcase 997 Uh, you're on a deserted island with one other pcp member. Who do you take munchie? No one survive Well, well you you're stranded on a pc on on an island you get to have one other pcp member with you Who do you take munchie? There's no question. There's no yeah, mage. I'll fight you Too late. You have munchie. All right fine uh Can I take another of myself? That's That's what I would take if I oh, of course I really am the best Oh my god, I can imagine both of me. You just jumped the space. I ever jumped the shark. I forgive me everyone Uh, okay, I I'm out of questions on here. Do we have any others to answer in the in the thing? Oh, it's terrible Here's a question. I want to know the answer too. Uh, funky asks hippo. Will you ever talk about jack x? Um Maybe I have played it, but I'm not enough to have an opinion yet Wait a minute hold the presses everybody. Oh, actually, sorry finish your finish your point that I'll that I'll respond I'm sorry. Uh, no my point's done. Okay. It was just uh, I see an important question here by malady on the patron lounge The thing it says how can I throw money at the pcp? Oh my god, everybody go on over to patreon.com slash the procrastinators You've got a great great question. Great question. Best one I've heard so far. That's an ideal question That is perfect. That is perfect.  Oh, yeah, five dollars to get into the bonus episodes. There's four No, there's six out now including the death note one. We just did uh, we got t-shirts available There's a link in the description.  Yes, wait, wait, wait before we end. Um, I Is a pressing question from uh at santita mulis on twitter. Uh, are you going to throw a turning 30 party for ben? I don't know guys. Are you?  And then one day, you know in like 10 years or whatever when we all turn 30 Only mungee will remain as the sole surviving member and then it'll be his job to decapitate the He'll he'll just he'll just wear a necklace of our skulls. Yeah.  That's true. As our power levels dissipate, they will be absorbed by Munchy, as we're all executed internally.  Alright, well that's it everybody. We're all done for the week. Here we go. I just want to reiterate again. Hashtag PC Pyramid Scheme. Tweet it. Tweet about how great your life is. Tweet about how thankful you are for the opportunity to watch the PCP. How you're your own man and how you're making a sustainable living by watching the PCP. Hashtag PC Presidents Club. Make videos showing how rich you are. How many material goods you've accumulated. How much wealth you've achieved with the help of the PCP. Tweet it at everyone. Tweet it at five people and they are obligated to do the same or we will feed them drugs. You want at least five retweets on your tweet and just remember to fake it till you make it even if you don't get it the first time. Don't get discouraged. You're rich from watching the PCP. They can be too if they just hit that retweet button. Make that video. The mere payment of five dollars to get into the PCP Presidents Club has been so quickly recouped by the paying attention that we've been doing. You made that money back tenfold. Yes, exactly. At least. Don't be afraid to... Nobody hates an exaggerator. They're the most celebrated people. You made that money back tenfold in exposure. Exactly. Put that in parentheses and in small font. You may not be rich but we have enriched your lives. Exactly. Okay, that's it everybody.  Use hashtag askPCP. We review them here. We'll answer them and there you go. Go to the Patreon, buy our shirts, etc, etc. Thanks everybody and we'll see you next week. Bye.