Once again, hello folks and again, so sorry about these technical issues my colleague commented on that title and set like they haven't told you because you didn't ask so here you have it and thanks you for coming, but actually I want to talk about software design which is frankly quite subjective. But there are some things I'm returning to when discussing code organization with junior developers. Now this talk has quite click baited title honestly and the abstract is well abstract. So what can you actually expect in this session. I will talk about some very fundamental principles from functional programming, but wait before you sign off. This won't be about category theory or first class functions and stuff like that. I would like to discuss some ideas useful regardless of language or platform you use. In particular, I will focus on distinction between actions and calculations or side or side effects. Maybe some of you probably consider this as a common knowledge every programmer should know. And I told so as well but I learned it's not the case so I designed this session mostly for that it should be approachable for beginners. And from that I will talk briefly about architectural patterns and some tips on how to use these ideas. I have code examples in basic JavaScript. I hope it won't be a problem even if you aren't familiar with the language, though I will refer to promises and asynchronous functions a bit. And I want to underline that no question is done. Just go to the Q&A and ask if anything is unclear and I look forward to continuing the discussion with you after the talk in work adventure. So briefly about me. You can actually start tweeting at me with this handle. I currently work as a developer advocate for Superface, though I currently don't do much advocacy, but I get to think a lot about architecture and code since our focus at Superface is on improving how developers integrate with APIs. I also occasionally teach web development courses for Chequitas and it greatly helps me to learn about pains of development as professional developers normally ignore. I previously worked as a developer and technique at Social Bakers and Czech Technical University and these experiences actually let me do this talk. At the university, I worked with the student developers on a project for aggregating data about research from various sources. At certain point, one student runs into a problem similar to this. He was transforming the data from one JSON file to another. And then he wanted to switch from local file to a remote API call. Something like this. Suddenly, he needed to deal with promises and asynchronous code and the code started to grow quite complex. Promises were popping up everywhere and also minded as soon as it wasn't a thing at the time. And it was an interesting learning moment until all of the code was synchronous. We didn't have to worry much about its side effects, but really it was a delusion. This code I outlined here is somewhat untrustworthy. The request can fail because the network is down. Writing the file can fail because we don't have the right permissions. This stuff depends on the outside world. And in between, there's a pure mapping logic. We can run this and be sure that we get the same result for the same input. Let's call the code which depends on the outside world action and the mapping logic is calculation. And actually this concept can sound familiar. Maybe you know it or you probably know it under different names. Actions are also known as impure functions or functions with side effects. They have effects outside of their realm. They change stuff, send emails, launch rockets or interact with outside sources of truth. Calculations are somewhat the opposite. Pure functions or mathematical functions. Given the same input, they give you the same output. This naming, actions and calculations is from Eric Normand, whose book I cite in this talk heavily. And I have a few more examples for illustration. So check this code. Do you think it's an action or calculation? Probably hit the chat. Let me know what do you think. No one wants to guess. Okay. So it's an action. Yeah. Thank you. Because it depends on current date. We literally get different results every time we run the function. We can adjust it like this. Now it's calculation because it operates only on the input. Also know that we are copying the input argument here to avoid mutation, to avoid changing the input arguments. How about this one? Okay. Is it action or calculation? Any guesses? Action. Right. This one works with a global variable outside of its scope. And the thing is if you run this twice, we get two items into the shopping cart array. So it has side effects. It changes. It doesn't, we cannot just run it multiple times without any side effects. So how about this one? This one mutates filtered array, right? So maybe it's an action. There is some mutation. Action, calculation. Okay. I am going too fast. Thanks for the feedback. Calculation. Right. Because the thing is the mutation is limited to this function. Actually, some folks tend to overdo it and they try to avoid mutations all the time at any cost. But really it's not necessary. You can be as imperative inside your function as you need. It's like whatever makes sense for you. How about this one? Action, calculation, action. Wow. Yes. Obviously, because we are fetching data from network and it isn't guaranteed to give us the same results. We can get JSON or maybe we can get HTML page or maybe we can even get a network error. And how about this one? Any guesses? So I would say this one is a trick question because we are calling the calculate payout function. And we don't really know what this one, this function is doing. So the thing is actions have this ugly property where they infect any code that touches them. So can you spot an action in this code? I won't prolong it too much. It's right here. The fact that function doesn't return anything or we ignore the return value is a strong indicator that it's an action. But since this function calls an action, it's an action as well. And so it's affiliate payout until we reach the top level of the program. When reading the code, I usually ask myself what color is this function? I've got this idea from Bob Neisturm who wrote about how hard it is to work with a synchronous code. His point was a bit different, but the idea of coloring the function stuck with me. Imagine that this is a call graph of functions. Functions on the left call the functions to the right. We can say they depend on them. Now, if we call our calculations as blue and actions as red, we can see how they spread. If the function touches the action, it becomes action itself, it turns red. In JavaScript, you can actually think of passing functions where they have actually very similar property. So let's check our previous code where all the functions were read. While it would be lovely to not deal with any actions at all, it would make our software quite useless. So the best we can do is to keep actions separate from calculations and ideally have them short and focused. So we can move this send payout call to main and we could also calculate payout separately before sending them. So I have introduced a separate function, collect payouts for that. It can look, for example, like this. Again, we are mutating the eligible array, but it's contained. Also, you could use, for example, a reduce function here, but personally I rather avoid it in most cases since I don't find it much readable, but your mileage may vary. You could do the rest of the code as exercise. I will upload slides after the talk. And I haven't really told you why we should care about this in the first place. And honestly, I feel sometimes forcing everything into pure functions is done for the sake of it at the cost of productivity. But personally, I believe this approach leads you to better code in the long run. Calculations are easy to test. They make unit testing productive since you test input and output. You don't need to run the whole application to check how they behave. Since calculations don't have any shared state, we can easily parallelize them, for example, put them on separate threads without risk increase conditions. And last but not least, it's easier to think about calculations. You don't need to worry about side effects and order of calls, just inputs and outputs. In the long run, this should help readability of your code tremendously. Sometimes when discussing the actions and calculations, I get a response like how does this fit into object-oriented programming or I don't use functions. And these concepts are perfectly well applicable with classes as well. I just find functions easier to reason about. And really it's a personal taste, but I'm not a big fan of writing stuff into classes. Say we have the logic with affiliates, I showed earlier packed into a class. Now I need also to also care when I initialize the object and keep its inner state. And coming up with names for functions is already hard. Now I need to name the class too. But in the end, I think the functional programming and object-oriented programming aren't opposites. It's a false dichotomy. And in fact, my next topic is heavily discussed in Java and C-sharp communities. So we split our code into actions and calculation. And that's a good basis for stratified design. While it sounds fancy, the main idea is to divide your code into layers. So the lowest layers define basic operations and are the most generic. As you go up, the code becomes higher level and specific towards your business domain. This can look for example like this. Know that the dependencies go strictly top to bottom and not sideways. The lower layer doesn't know anything about what's above it. And well, maybe this is obvious to you and I would be really happy if that were the case. Proper layering should help you avoid coming to this. Maybe you heard about spaghetti code and how awful it is. So I had a colleague who kind of embraced buggy code. So instead of testing, he wrote code with debuggability in mind. There were almost no abstractions. Functions were hundreds of lines of code, low-level code mixed with high-level abstractions. It was precisely one long spaghetti to follow along. He didn't find testing productive, but instead he was always busy debugging. There being said, no technique is bulletproof. If you don't plan or maintain your layers, well, it can end up like lasagna with too many complicated intertwined layers, but it will be probably less tasty. There are so-called architectural patterns which might help you design your layers. I picked a few names and some of them have multiple interpretations. For example, on an architecture, I will show you in a moment. There's also functional core imperative shell, which was popularized by Gary Behanert for Ruby and Python. In Java world, hexagonal architecture or ports and adapters is quite popular approach. And this one actually led to Uncle Bob's clean architecture. And I'm name-dropping them because in the end they are quite similar. They just propose different layers and different approaches for communication between these layers. Onion architecture somewhat is the most abstract of them. Ideally, this onion shouldn't make you cry. At the core of your application, there is language and libraries, low-level primitives. From those, you build your domain logic and the outer layer is for interaction with the outside world. Databases, APIs, user interfaces, and so on. Similar to stratified design, outer layers point to inner layers, never the other way around. And only the interaction layer can communicate with the outside world. This should help you easily test the domain logic and keep it stable compared to more volatile interaction layer. You can find something very similar with other patterns like clean architecture. It is just more hands-on with more precisely defined layers, their purpose and rules about their communication. And you maybe recognize this. So in model view controller, and it's many offsprings, your domain usually lives in models. And these models are also closely tied to database. Now, should we follow the ideas of onion architecture that the base would belong into the interaction layer? So, for example, we could split it like this, along with UI logic, roads. And while models and entities in this approach don't have any concept of persistence, usually we implement them just like plain objects. So how to put actually these ideas into action? Well, you rarely start with a green field project. If you have an existing code base, try asking yourself, how is your code structured in directories? Typically, you have these directories like utils, helper, slip, and other. And these names sometimes didn't fit elsewhere. So really, ask yourself and your colleagues what are there for, what they are hiding. Also, think about if you can identify layers of your application. It's usually useful to look at the dependencies, how functions and classes call each other. And of course, where are the actions? Are they spread in the system or located in particular layer? Speaking of actions, some very basic heuristics for spotting them is looking at input and output of the function. Even if the function returns a value, you would call calculation only because you are interested in its result. But if you are calling a function and you are not interested in its return value, maybe it's probably a side effect, really. Promises are also a strong indicator, but there are other uses for them without doing any side effects. When you implement a new feature, well, I can emphasize enough how important it is to communicate with your intents and ideas with your colleagues, especially now when most of us are working from home. So it's really, really important. But also consider if your feature can be implemented in a separate file or module and that one could be tested. Because from my experience, many times developers don't want to disrupt existing structures and existing modules, and they rather tend to put everything into existing code and existing files. So maybe it's not the best approach, try working outside of this. And speaking of tests, teams often sacrifice testing in favor of faster delivery, which hurts them in the long run. Or the tests are there, but no one uses them because they are slow or un-maintained. And personally, I think it's better to have smaller tests suite, which is actively used and ready for covering progressions than aimed at 100% test coverage from the start. And finally, I'd like to encourage you to keep things simple. Maybe you think you need to have dependency injection containers, microservices, or whatever, but there's no shame in keeping things simple. So I have a few resources to recommend. I mentioned that I cite Eric Normand, particularly his book, Croaking Simplicity, which covers these topics, actions, calculations, and also data in much more depth. I recommend it not just only for beginners, I think like even seniors can at least learn some language or communicating these ideas and these concepts. I have a few articles and resources which I am always coming back to. I have cited, for example, what color is your function. Also, my favorite regarding the object-oriented programming is execution in the kingdom of nouns. And there is also this website called the codeless code, which contains some really interesting points about programming and coding. I really recommend checking that out. And it's good to tend to your programming craftsmanship. And I believe like excellent event for that is Global Day of Code Retreat. They have even check chapter. It happens every November around the world. So check that out and consider organizing a coding dojo with your friends, with your colleagues. That's always a good thing to try. So now to you. We have a few minutes for discussion. There is something in QA, but here is how you can reach out to me, my website, my Twitter handle. And if you are curious about Superface and what we do, check out superface.ai. Okay, so time for discussion. Great. Thank you for your presentation. There is one question in Q&A. And what do you think about the BCE pattern? Well, I haven't heard that acronym to be honest. So I don't have any ideas, but I will check it out. Okay, thank you. I think there are no more questions. So still three minutes if you want to ask anything, please put it to the Q&A. So I don't see actually results of the whole video. I was curious about people attending here. I see we have a few beginners in the polls. And yeah, looks like the Python is the most popular here. I will do this. Okay. We have one more question. Do you know the relation of actions computation with Rust language? I know that Rust has some approaches for handling this, but to be honest, I'm not familiar with the Rust. So, but I will check it out. Yeah, I think like what specific to Rust that, but also like other languages is that you need to actually mark your mutations. So that's like really good start. If I remember correctly that you need to, for example, mark variable as mutable. So it's kind of the other way around compared to other languages where you actually need to declare stuff as constants or, for example, in JavaScript, you need to, for example, decrease your objects. So yeah, I would say Rust is great language for implementing these ideas. Thank you. Okay. So thank you for your attention. I will hop into the, what's this called? Worker venture. So if you would like to discuss it in person or like talk to me, I will be there. So I'm looking forward to meeting you and enjoy the rest of the deafcon today. Thanks. Bye. Thank you very much again for your presentation. So if you have any more questions, feel free to go to work in the chair. It's a really fun way how to interact with each other. It's a virtual platform, so hopefully to go there. And see you on the next talk.


In this problem, we need to find the deflection of this simply supported beam at x equal to 1.8 and we need to use McCollister function to find this result. So, as you can see here, we have this beam with two pin supports, A and B and we have this series of forces. We have this moment here of 3 kilometers meter applied at 1.5 meters. We have here this distributed load of 16 kilonewtons meter and we have a point load of 20 kilonewtons applied at this point. Then we need to use, as I said, McCollister function, but first of course we need to calculate what are the reaction forces at A and B. So, first of course we need to draw the free body diagram of this problem. Now, in order to calculate the reaction forces, R, A and R, B, we apply the equations of equilibrium and as usually we have the sum of forces in the vertical direction is equal to 0 and the sum of moments is also equal to 0. So, we define this positive upwards, so we have that and we have here that the sum of moments is equal to 0. We calculate this at A and we define positive clockwise. Then we have first the contribution of this moment, the contribution of this distributed load which is equal to the area of this load times the distance from this point to A, the moment that this force is creating and finally the moment that R, B is creating here at A. So, we have that. Then from the equation of moments, we find directly if we solve it that the reaction force R, B is equal to 24.36 kN and if we substitute the result into the equation of the equilibrium of forces we have that R, A is equal to 10.04 kN. Then now we can calculate what is the moment as a function of X using the McCulley-Steff function, so we have that M is equal to we define first our sine criteria, so remember that for us this internal moment is defined as positive, so for example R, A at this point for example is creating a moment like this but then the internal moment reaction is like that and it is as I said positive, so the moment created by R, A is equal to R, A times X. We continue with the moment of 3 kN, it is negative minus 3 X minus 1.5 we are applying this moment at 1.5 and the index is 0 and now the distributed force and here we have to do a trick because it is very important to remember that if we have a distributed force like this one, if we want to use McCulley-Steff function once we start having a distributed force we must have it until the end of the beam, so as I said we can do a trick so we can extend here the distributed force so now we have it until the end of the beam and we subtract the same amount here so this is equivalent to what we have before but now we can apply McCulley-Steff function then we start with the negative force and we have that is creating a negative moment so it is equal to minus the intensity of the load remember that the bracket for a distributed force is always divided by 2 and the index is 2 so now we have here X minus and this force is starting at X is equal to 1.5 so this is 1.5 now the second distributed force plus 16 divided by 2 power of 2 X minus and this is starting at 1.5 plus 0.9 2.4 ok so this is the procedure that we have to follow if we have a distributed force that starts at some point but doesn't continue until the end of the beam now we continue with the point load of 20 kN it's creating a negative moment so minus 20 the bracket has index 1 and X minus this is applied at 2.4 and what about RB in principle this is creating a moment plus RB X minus 3 but this bracket is going to be always turned off so it doesn't make sense to add this additional term so this doesn't change the problem then this is our distribution of moments using my callista function and now we can use the moment curvature relation in order to find what is the deflection of the beam we know that the moment is equal to minus EI the second derivative of V respect to X so this is equal to then if we integrate once we find that then this is the expression for the slope of the beam and we can integrate once more in order to find expression for the deflection and now we have to apply boundary conditions in order to find the values of the constants of integration A and B and now we have to use boundary conditions in order to find the values of the constants of integration A and B we know that this is a simply supported beam so then of course at A which is X is equal to 0 the deflection of the beam is equal to 0 and at B which is X is equal to 3 the deflection of the beam is also equal to 0 then from this equation at X is equal to 0 then this bracket is turned off this one as well, this one as well, this one as well so we have that minus rA divided by 6 X to the power of 3 plus AX plus B so if we particularize this for the point X is equal to 0 this is equal to B and we know that this is equal to 0 and from the second condition then if we solve this equation we find that A is equal to 12.6 then once we know the value of the constants we can use this equation here the equation for the deflection we can substitute the value of these constants so finally we have that the expression for the deflection of the beam is then finally the exercise was asking for the deflection at X equal to 1.8 then if we particularize this expression for the deflection for X equal to 1.8 finally we have that the deflection of the beam is equal to please note that in this case since X is equal to 1.8 this bracket and this bracket are turned off when we are substituting in this expression so remember that always that X is smaller than the value that is subtracting inside the bracket the whole bracket is turned off then finally this is equal to 22.4 millimeters


Thank you for the introduction, Andres, and welcome everybody. Thank you so much for being here. Let me go ahead and launch my screen share now. As Andres mentioned, my name is Brittany, and I have a really fun job here at Loom because I get to work with our customers right at the beginning of your journey and not only help you understand what is Loom and how to Loom, but today we're gonna be diving into why Loom is so impactful, especially for PM teams, where to Loom, when to Loom, and how Loom fits into your existing tech stack. Using Loom is gonna make you about 75% more productive with the tools that you do have. So today I'm gonna be talking about all of your favorite tools and how to use them together with Loom. I'm gonna be throwing out a lot of prompts to you all in the chat, and I would love to hear from you all as we are going along today. So do feel free to add any questions you have to the chat. I'll try to answer those in real time if I can, and I will also allow about 10 to 15 minutes at the end for anyone to come off of mute. Now, before we get started, I would love to know from you all in the chat, scale of one to five. How familiar are you with Loom? One being I have no idea, never seen it before. Two might be I've seen a recording before, I've never tried to record. Five might be I'm a pro. You know in the chat, one to five, one is not familiar, five is super familiar. Four and two, okay. One, love it.  You will walk away with an aha moment today. I promise you, and a moment where you're gonna feel like, wow, I can really see how this is going to be transformative in my role. So do me a favor, if you have that moment, if you see a feature today, let me know in the chat. I love to hear as you guys have those moments as we go along. So here's what we're gonna talk about today. First, we're gonna meet Loom. For those of you who haven't met Loom, I'm gonna be showing you a lot of real life examples of how you can use Loom in your roles in the product world. I'll be teaching you how to get started. It's really, really easy to do. You'll probably hear me say several times, Loom is really delightfully simple to use. And I think you're gonna see that today as we conduct several demos of all of our features. I'm gonna be talking to you about our different quarters and when to use each of them and showing you all of our different features. And I'm gonna be showing you our top tips and tricks and best practices, how to get as many people as possible to engage with your Loom and view your Loom. And I'm also gonna give you guys a sneak peek of some of our new releases. Now we just released a series of awesome new features, which I'll show you today. And we also have a couple in the works that aren't out yet and you guys are gonna get a sneak peek of those today. Okay, everyone, let's get started with meeting Loom. All right, at its core, Loom is a video communication tool for async work. Now up here in the right-hand corner, this is your quintessential Loom. It is a recording of your screen and your camera bubble. And that's what's really special about a Loom rather than just sending some other sort of async communication is that you have your face attached to your voice and to your message. And there's no chance your tone is going to be misunderstood. When I first saw this quadrant at our summit last year, I was like, ooh, I'm snagging that because this really helped me to understand where Loom fits into my existing tool tech stack and when it's the best time to use Loom and when is the best time to use other tools. So let's talk about some of these more traditional forms of communication, which most of us are familiar with. So traditionally, if we are gonna be communicating asynchronously, we're probably doing that today in something like an email. You can email somebody at all hours of the night and there's not this pressure to respond right away to an email. But let me know if this resonates with you. Let me know in the chat. Have you ever found yourself several paragraphs into an email? You find yourself rereading it multiple times. Maybe you're spell checking it, then you check for grammar. And then you start asking, is there any chance my message could be misunderstood? Now, chances are if you have a long form email like that, there is definitely a chance your message is going to be misunderstood, especially in your role as PMs. If you're trying to announce a new release or explain to your support team how to support any bugs that might be going on in a new release and you're trying to explain that in text form in an email, there's a good chance your message could be misunderstood. In those cases, it's a much better option to simply hit record, one click, start recording. There's zero chance your message or tone is gonna be misunderstood. Now let's talk about our synchronous text communication, such as the Slack message. Slack is great for one to two sentence, quite sized pieces of communication. It is not great for delivering something that you want attention on or something to be delivered with some weight to it. Let me know in the chat if this has ever happened to you, you have a new product release or a feature enhancement, you are really excited to announce it to your org, you dress it up in Slack, you add emojis, maybe some movement in there, some exclamation points, some bold, some highlights, and you're really excited to get eyes on it and to announce it, but your announcement kind of falls flat. And somebody else types a Slack message and yours gets covered up and lost in the shuffle. In that case, it would be a much better option to simply again, one click, start recording, record a loom. You can embed that in a Slack message and I promise your message is going to be delivered in a much more impactful way. You're gonna get a lot better engagement on it by having a video embed in your Slack message. But of course we have our synchronous video communication like Zoom, that's not going anywhere. Zoom is awesome when we truly need to meet live, but we're gonna talk more today about to loom or not to loom, is there a chance that this live meeting could actually be a loom instead? Could I delight my whole team by canceling the live meeting that we all have on our calendars and simply send them a five minute loom? And by the way, they can watch that in 1.5x speed and watch it quickly when they want to or go back and rewatch it later, okay? So start to think about that. Now, a lot of times we determine, yes, we do need to have that live meeting, it's really important, but one of our best, I would say, entry-level use cases for loom is the meeting pre-watch. So start to ask yourself, yes, I need to have this live meeting, can I make the best use of our live meeting time together by sending a quick pre-watch ahead of time? I use this a lot in my role in customer success. If I am going to be meeting with a new customer, for example, and I wanna ensure I get the right people on the call, so I communicate the agenda in a pre-watch. I wanna infuse some excitement into the meeting. So I throw up some confetti in my pre-watch and make sure my face is in there, so it's a much more personal touch. It's gonna improve your show up rates to meetings and make sure everybody comes to the table ready to have a truly productive live time together, okay? So that's where loom comes in, asynchronous video communication and we're gonna be double clicking on that today. Here are just some of the reasons why PM tools love to use loom and I being on the other end of things in CS love that my PM team uses loom because it makes it really effective for me to gather the information that they are trying to convey in a way that is very digestible for me. Now, as adults, we only retain about 10% of things that we read and about 20% of things that we hear. So if today you are documenting, let's say you're documenting information about a product or a feature and you're sharing written documentation with your internal teams or with your customers, we're only gonna retain about 10% of that. If we're talking about it on a live meeting, especially if it's a large format meeting like in all hands, we're only gonna retain 20% of that. You can instead record a loom and we are now gonna retain 50 to 75% of that information. Most people know without even looking at statistics that video is the number one most engaging content type. Think about what the kids are doing these days with the TikToks and the reels. We are really interested in viewing videos. So why not infuse this into your product management? Food for thought. So here's a question we can all start asking ourselves. If you guys wanna put this out and put it on your wall, I won't judge, I have it on my wall too because I find myself asking this question even today, working a loom. And here's how I determine what's the best way to deliver my message. First question, is a tone of your message important?  We always say, don't fight over a text or don't say anything important over a text. Well, the same thing applies to communicating at work. This is a good way to save yourself from being misunderstood. Next question, do you need any visuals to explain? If you do just record a loom, it's so easy. You don't have to worry about preparing a slide deck or taking screenshots or marking up anything like that. It's gonna save you a lot of time, I promise. And the last question is, can you communicate this in less than a paragraph? Remember, one to two sentence, bite-size pieces of information, great for Slack, great for MS teams, anything longer than that, record a loom. So here is a little challenge for everybody and this is a great way to start using loom if you haven't yet.  See if there's just one meeting this week or next week that you could try canceling, know it sounds scary, cancel the meeting and send a loom instead. I want you to see what the response is to that, to the audience that you share it with and I promise you they're gonna feel real delighted to have that canceled meeting. If you don't find one that can be canceled, is there one that you could supplement with a pre-watch? Try recording a one-minute pre-watch ahead of time, send it ahead, communicate the agenda, infuse some excitement, make sure you get all the right folks on the call and make sure they come prepared to share all of their ideas. If you have any ideas so far about how you might start using loom in your work as PMs, let me know in the chat, but we'll be diving more into specifically how to use loom. Now in just a minute, I'm gonna be conducting a live demo for you guys of looms. I'm excited to share that with you, but let me share with you just how easily it is to get your message across using loom. Step one, one click recording, up pops your cam bubble and your screen and you are ready to go. We also have amazing instant editing tools. They're really delightfully simple to use. You don't need to be any sort of video editor in order to use them super user-friendly. Next thing you're gonna do is share your loom and you can share your loom anywhere, far and wide. I'll be showing you all of our different sharing options today. You're also gonna notice that loom integrates natively with a lot of your favorite tools. You're gonna notice if you paste a loom URL in a lot of different platforms, it's automatically going to create that embedded thumbnail preview for it, which has motion in the beginning of you waving. That's really nice. Now another thing that's really special about loom is this creates an amazing sense of personal connection, whether this be coworkers with prospects or with customers, that we haven't really had in recent years when we are working remote and hybrid. Even on meetings, it is hard to get that authentic human element that we are really missing. What's special about loom and sharing a loom with somebody is there are a lot of options for them to interact with that content. They can do this by adding timestamp comments. They can do this by adding emojis. They can add their own video replies. Remember how I just shared with you our adult learning brains and how we only retain about 10% of what we read. Now the most important thing when sharing a message is you wanna turn your viewers into actively involved participants. When you do that by giving somebody the ability to add an emoji or a comment, they are going to retain about 95% of that message. They'll be actively listening to your message. So it's a really fun and authentic way to connect at work. Loom is going to help you guys. I know you're gonna love this. Create reusable institutional knowledge. Because you are recording things, you can say it once, share it a thousand times. All of a sudden by recording it, you have this really context rich video documentation. Use this on your help center. Use this in your internal company wiki. We consider a loom to be evergreen or reusable if it is still receiving views five days after you have recorded it. And in fact about 95% of our users say they are using loom in that way. It's really great to amass this great video documentation. Great for new hires and embedding anywhere that you would typically share text communication. Okay, I'm probably gonna say several times this is my favorite thing about loom, but I have a lot of favorites. So one of my very favorite things about loom is the second you hit done recording, your loom is instantly rendered and available to share. I'll show you what that looks like on our live demo. So when you hit stop recording, it's instantly gonna pop up your video, you can share it right away. There is no downtime, no waiting time for it to render. So if you guys are pre-recording something today, perhaps you are already working a little bit asynchronously by recording something in a Zoom or recording something in QuickTime. It's gonna take a while for you to get that email from Zoom letting you know that your recording is rendered and ready to share. And the sharing experience really is not great when you're sharing a Zoom video, for example. Your viewer doesn't have any option to interact with that content and it's not a very fun, great experience for them. We have a feature available on our enterprise plan called Zoom ingestion. And essentially what happens here is if I record something in Zoom, it automatically uploads to loom for me as a loom recording. And it's a much better experience for the viewer if you share the loom recording. You're also gonna be able to see analytics on that video. Who's viewed it? How long did they watch it for? Did they click through to your CTA? What percent of time did they watch it for? So that is a very cool feature of the loom. If you don't have our enterprise plan, you can still upload any videos of your choosing into loom. So you'll click new video and you'll be able to add any MP4 or video file from your computer into loom and turn it into a loom video. If you haven't signed up for loom yet, let me talk to you about how to get started. It's really quick and easy to do. You can go to loom.com and you're gonna see several big buttons that say get started for free and you can try loom out on our free forever starter plan. Now there are a couple of limitations on that plan such as a five minute time limit per loom and 25 loom recordings maximum per that account. You can upgrade to our business plan in a self-serve way if you'd like to remove those limitations. And then we also have an enterprise plan available if your organization needs things such as SSO, SCIM for provisioning and deprovisioning and some additional security and privacy settings. We have three different recorders available and this is a question I get a lot is which of these recordings should I be or which of these recorders should I be using depending on the type of loom I'm recording? So I use each of these daily in a little bit of a different way. Our desktop application is my personal favorite. It's our most robust recorder. What I love about the desktop app is it has a drawing tool. If you never need to mark up your screen which I imagine you guys do work in in the product world the desktop app is great for that. It also has some additional fun features like different frames for your camera bubble in a brand new feature called speaker notes which is like a teleprompter. Our Chrome extension, a little bit more lightweight awesome for recording on the fly especially if you're already working in your Chrome browser. We have a brand new feature in here called the blur tool. So if you're sharing anything externally that is a good one to use so you can blur out different pieces on your screen. Lastly, we have our mobile app and I know you guys are gonna love this product. Have you ever wanted to record something on your phone before? Perhaps you wanna record how your platform looks on a mobile device. You can hit record on your mobile and you can record anything going on on your mobile screen. So I record looms all the time in my mobile app maybe I'm showing my husband how to use a certain new app on the phone. So it's really cool. I also use my mobile app to view looms on the fly as well as receive any notifications or for fun things like a cooking demo or a quick loom of my kids. This is where your recorders are gonna live. You're gonna see your Chrome extension up here be sure to pin it to the toolbar. Really important that you download the Chrome extension if you are a Gmail user. This is going to allow you to embed looms in your email really easy. And here's our desktop app down here at the bottom. You're gonna be able to record your screen, your cam or both. The quintessential loom is the both option where you have your little cam bubble and your lovely screen. We do have some other options in between which I'll show you guys today such as our canvas option if you don't have a visual to display or a photo instead of your cam if you're having a bad hair day. We get it. Okay, enough talking about loom. Let's show you loom. So what I'm gonna do now I'm gonna go ahead and stop my zoom camera and I'm gonna pop up in my loom camera. And the first thing I'm going to do is show you guys my Chrome. My Chrome recorder. Okay, here is my cam bubble. There's a couple options that I can set up before I hit start recording. So I'm gonna wanna make sure I'm recording the right desktop or tab. You can also select only a certain area of your screen if you'd like to do that. Of course, check that your audio and video are working as you'd like. And here's the blur feature that I mentioned that's currently in beta.  It gets pretty granular.  If I'm ever recording a loom over an email for example, which I'm often doing I'll be typing that long form email like we talked about. That'll be like, this should be a loom instead. And I just start recording right in there. I will blur out the folders within my Gmail account.  It's not something you can add on afterwards in your post-production. I'm gonna give you guys a real life example of how you might use looms. I'm gonna do this in a little bit of a role play day in the life style. And I will also make sure my cam bubble is how I'd like it. Now you can make your cam bubble larger or smaller. I typically recommend starting out your loom with a larger cam bubble. And then I will shake it down and move it as I start recording. You can move it around as much as you want. Make sure that your cam bubble is not dead in the center of your screen. That's because when it renders instantly, you're gonna have a play button and it's right in the middle.  In the Chrome extension, you have some different background effects. You can blur your background here or you can add one of these colorful and fun backgrounds to use as well. We have some additional options for this in the desktop recorder. All right, I'm gonna hit start recording. It's gonna have me confirm the screen that I'd like. I'm gonna get a three, two, one countdown and don't forget to wave. Hey everybody, I am currently working on some updates to the slide deck and I would love your help if you can come in here and make a couple edits to these slides for me. The first edits I would love for you to make are here on slide 12. I think this is the old view of our website. Can you please grab me a fresh screenshot and put that in here? I would also like on this slide to be able to talk a little more to our plans. If you have some visuals I can add, that would be super helpful. Here on slide 13, is this still the correct Web Store look? I think that we might have updated this logo. And lastly on slide 14, we currently only have this mockup of a Mac. I would love to add one for a PC2. I will link this slide deck in the CTA for you. Go ahead and click that button so you can come in here quick and easy and thanks so much, talk to you later, bye. Okay, remember instant render, it's done. It's ready to share. So this is what your loom looks like the second you hit done recording. We're gonna come back to this loom in a couple of minutes and we're gonna move into talking about editing. But I wanna show you a couple of other cool recording features first. Anyone having their aha moment yet? Can you start to think about how you might use this in your product roles? All right, so in this next example, I wanna show you our canvas option. Now, while you will typically be presenting some sort of resource on your screen like a slide deck or your product, something like that, there might be times where you just wanna talk about something in a meeting pre-watch for example. So in that case, you don't have to go out of your way to create some sort of pretty visual to put on the back of your screen. Loom's got you covered with our canvas tool. You have this both in the desktop recorder as well as the Chrome extension. So let's launch that now. I'm gonna show you all your different options here. So you can add different backgrounds. So there's different solid colors you can choose. There's these different fun templates you can use. And as you can see on my screen, I've added text to mine. So if you wanna just have a couple high level bullet points which is great for a meeting pre-watch or if you're launching a product and you wanna just highlight some bullet points to talk about, that would be a good option for you to use. And then we also have some other fun templates in here that you might wanna use like breaking news. We finally released that new release or hey, I'm a new team member. This is my personal permit to use. So let me go ahead and show you how I would record a pre-watch in Loom. I'm gonna put my text back on. Now this text is sticky. So it's gonna stick in here until you delete it out and add new text to it. I'm gonna get another three, two, one countdown. I'll show you what it looks like. Don't forget to wave. Hey team, I am super excited for our meeting tomorrow. Thought I would send along this quick meeting pre-watch so that you guys can come prepared, start thinking about this overnight. And I would really love to hear from all of you guys on the following three topics tomorrow. Number one, we're gonna talk about our Q1OKRs. We have just launched those into a new product tracker. Wanna get everybody's feedback on those. I'm gonna link those in the CTA. Please take a quick look at those ahead of time. The next thing we're gonna do is a little brainstorm around how we are currently conducting launches and betas. So CS team, we wanna hear how are we doing in the PM world at getting you guys the information you need in order to communicate product launches and betas to your customers. Come prepared to share your thoughts. Lastly, we're finally getting around to our little bit delayed Q4 Retro. Thanks everybody and see you tomorrow. Bye. Here we go. We're gonna have an instant rendering and we're gonna have our bloom meeting pre-watch is ready to go. Okay, question in the chat. Quick question, the demos Brittany just did are all still just using the Chrome extension, correct? Yes, that's right Veronica. The first two demos I did were in the Chrome extension. The first was recording over my slide deck here and the second was using the Chrome extension and the Canvas feature. And now I am going to show you guys the desktop application. So the first thing you're gonna notice is this pops up is my favorite feature. This is the frame option. Now you have some additional options in here that you don't have in your Chrome extension and these are frames. These are seasonal. So you're gonna see fun different ones pop up. Does this resonate with you guys bug report? Do you ever have to report on any bugs? Perhaps you wanna say I'm on vacation. This is my loom out of office message and I typically love this flower frame here. Now I'm gonna give you guys my top tip for you in loom. Leave your camera on. It is really so much more impactful when you're delivering a message to have your face attached to your presentation. That being said, there might be times where you're like, I really don't feel like being on camera today. Loom's got you covered because we have a couple of cool options that I think you're gonna love and I use here all the time. So remember, you can make your camera bubble larger and like really out of the way. If you're really not feeling it, just make it small, move it out of the way. You'll also notice if my skin looks nice and clear here, that's our touch up my appearance filter. So I've got mine cranked all the way up. It will adjust for low light and it'll make you look super smooth. My husband was using my loom account the other day and he's like, oh, my beard looks so flawless. Like please turn this down. So you can toggle that up and down and add that fine filter to your loom. If you really, really, really don't feel like being on camera for the day, you can also click on this little handy guy here and that's gonna add your photo instead.  It's just a photo of better hair days. You get it, we've all been there. Okay, let me start recording here in our desktop app and a really cool thing we have in here are called speaker notes and these act like a teleprompter. So here's what I like to do. I put my foot by a Campbell smack dab behind the teleprompter, the speaker notes here and it will not show up in the rendering. So it just really looks like a note I'm talking about. I'm gonna show you how it works. Start recording. Hey there, my name is Brittany and I'm one of Loom's customer success leaders. Today I wanna show you our brand new speaker notes feature which will sort of act like a teleprompter for you to read while recording. There you go guys, that's how that works. Really cool, I'll show you what it looks like in the rendering in a minute. Ready for tip number two? And this is a big one. Leave your errors in your Loom. If you stumble on your words, if you say something funny, if you've got ums and odds, keep rolling with it. I promise it makes your Looms so much more engaging to watch.  This should not be robotic communication. This is about real, human, authentic communication. You might even get a laughing emoji out of it. However, there might be times where your Loom needs to be just a little more polished and this would be for those cases where you're creating those evergreen Looms.  You have a couple options available first while you're recording as well as in your editing suite. To polish up your Loom, I'm gonna show you those now. Okay, so while recording, here's a couple things you can do. Number one, you've got a restart button. If you pronounced something wrong and you really just need to restart your Loom, click the Sandy Dandy restart button. You're gonna get another three, two, one countdown. Wave and smile and nobody will know. You also have a pause button. If you wanna pause, maybe edit your speaker notes.  You can pause your Loom. Now you can also just trash it, burn it, click the delete button, cancel it and start over fresh if you wanna do that. What I might recommend doing though is stopping your Loom, letting your Loom render and you can record multiple clips. We have a stitching feature available. You can stitch up to 150 clips together. So don't feel like you need to get it all right in one take. If I'm recording in evergreen webinar, for example, I'll record that in 20 different clips and what's great about that is if I break it up and record different pieces of the product, if we get a new release, I can yank once clip out and pop a new clip in. Stitching is also great if you need to have multiple people presenting. So you could have multiple PMs present, stitch it all together into one nice package. So those are my tips for polishing up your Loom while you're recording. A few other things I'll show you in the desktop app before we move on. You've got a handy-dandy drawing tool here. You've got different colors. You can mark up your screen. And these will stick on your screen for about three seconds here and then disappear. So you can be like, here it is. Pretty fun. And of course, we have Confetti, which is a great thing to throw up when you're talking about something you are excited about. There's a keyboard shortcut for that command and control-nsc. One more time, one more Confetti for the red. Okay, let's go ahead and stop our Loom and it will instantly render for us. Again, so cool. Okay. Let's move on and talk about editing. If there are any additional questions about recording, let me know in the chat and I'll try to get to those. And I'm gonna move on and talk about editing. Okay. You guys, we have a brand new feature coming out. It just got released to us internally. I was, yes, the market features in the desktop app. Thanks Veronica for the question. This new feature I am obsessed with. I posted it on our Slack channel today that it's maybe the best thing that's ever happened to me. And this is automatic titling. We are taking advantage of AI and the second year Loom renders, it added a title for me. Yeah, whoa, right, Glory? Mine is blown. I was like, this makes me sound so much more polished and cool and coming up with all these creative titles, but I'm not coming up with them at all. It listened to my audio. I was talking about slide deck updates. It even added an emoji for me. Mind blowing, really cool stuff. Ready to have your mind even more blown? It's also gonna create an auto summary for you. So it says, I'm working on some updates to a slide deck. I need your help on slide 12, blah, blah, blah, slide 13, slide 14. I'll link it in the CTA. So it's not like the whole transcript. We have that too. It's just a summary, which I can paste into an email or something like that. Very, very cool. This will be coming to a Loom screen near you guys in the near future. We are currently piloting it here internally, but it's the best thing that I have ever seen. So let's come into this Loom and make a couple of additional edits. Let's make some suggestions and a couple of little tweaks to this subject line. So of course you wanna make your subject line, the subject of your Loom and exactly what you're talking about here. I also like to indicate in my title, how long the Loom is. And the reason for that is if I'm sharing a Loom with somebody, you know, you don't wanna click into a Loom thinking it's a one minute watch and you can watch it between meetings and it's actually 16 minutes. Now as a best practice, I want everybody to try to keep their Looms under five minutes long. Three minutes is even better. The shorter your Loom is, our research shows the better engagement you are going to see on it. So indicate in your title how long the Loom is.  And what I also like to do in my subject line is suggest a playback speed. This is really important if you're sharing with people who aren't necessarily like using Loom on a day to day, they might not know that they can up the playback speed. So we're gonna do like a little sneaky enablement up here in the subject line and say, watch in 1.5X speed. That's a good trick to get people to watch your Loom because they're like, oh, I can watch this in 1.5X speed. I've got time for that. I can click into this message and digest this during my day. So there is your suggestion for your title.  We are all about saving you guys time here at Loom. So you're gonna see directly there exactly the saving. Now I mentioned to keep your Loom under five minutes whenever possible. If your Loom is gonna be on the longer side and longer than five minutes, what I would recommend doing is add timestamped chapters into your description. So what you can do here is you can say at the 30 second mark, I'm talking about updates to slide 14. Okay, now when I refresh my screen, that is gonna turn into a clickable timestamp for me. And it will take the viewer right to that point. So that's a great visual. So if you are going to be recording like an evergreen demo or product walkthrough, add those chapters in so different people can access the Loom at the part that is interesting to them. Now your Loom is private just to you until you choose to share it out. So we're gonna make a few more edits here before we share it. You heard me mentioned a couple of times, I'm gonna add a link in the CTA. Anytime you're talking about a particular asset and you're asking somebody to do something with it, I would suggest you add it in the CTA. I'm gonna paste my link here. This is my slide deck. You can choose the location of your button. You can add your company's hex code here if you wanna brand that. You can choose where this will show up on the screen and whether or not you want it present throughout the whole Loom. So they could click on it at any time or if you want it only to show at the end. If your viewer is watching this on a mobile device, it will always only show at the end just because we have limited screen real estate. So add that CTA here. You will be able to track who has clicked on that. So that is pretty handy too. Everyone's favorite feature is the trim and stitch feature. Now remember, if you wanna record multiple Looms and stitch them together, this is gonna be your new best friend. You can also edit out anything that you want to cut out from your Loom. So I might cut out some from the beginning, I might cut out some from the end. I might have said something silly in the middle here and I'll just take that section right on out and I can click add clip. This is gonna pop open for you any of your most recent Looms. So I can select any of those here. You can reorder these around and remember you can stitch up to 150 clips together although I wouldn't necessarily recommend that. And you can also add clips from other people. So another use case for Loom might be a birthday card or a work anniversary card or a goodbye message to somebody. We can have everybody on our team record a 20 second Loom as long as they give me their URLs, I can paste them here, I can stitch them all together into a Loom Supercut. Pretty cool. You can change the thumbnail on your Loom on our paid plans. So it will typically default to this moving thumbnail preview of the first couple seconds from your Loom. That's why it's important to smile and wave. But on our paid plans, if you want, you can add your own thumbnail here. This would be great if you wanna polish up your Loom with some branding, add a bumper, a logo or something of that nature. You have some additional video settings.  Perhaps you're gonna be embedding this somewhere and it's gonna be really distracting to have you keep waving over and over again. You can turn that off and it will just have a static image for you. You can also choose if you want to have your filler words removed. This is on our paid plan and you can choose whether or not you want these removed from just your text. So that's your transcript and your closed captions or from your text and your audio. I typically say leave them in your audio. It sounds less robotic, but you can definitely take them out of your text. You have some different options here for your audience and I will tweak these depending on who I'm sending my Loom to. You can recommend a playback speed for them and it's going to default to that playback speed when they log in. So I typically like to do that. You can turn on or off people's ability to comment, record or apply, add an emoji reaction, download the Loom, stitch this into their own Looms, view your analytics or view your transcript. When I'm sharing these internally or with just one customer or one audience, I'll leave all these on. If I'm sharing this with a broad audience, such as I'm sharing a webinar with 500 people, I turn some of these off just to keep the Loom clean. Now for analytics, I want to give you guys a little peace of mind. If you turn off analytics, you the recorder, you're still going to be able to see the engagement in sight, such as who's watched it and click the CTA. Your viewers just aren't going to be able to see that. There's no comments in my Loom yet. My transcript is currently rendering. It takes just a few minutes to render and it will search for those filler words. All right, there we go. You can copy your transcript, paste it anywhere you're choosing if you also need to have text available. These will show up in the closed captions, show you. As a viewer is watching it, they can turn on closed captions. You can edit your transcript. So if somebody's name gets mispronounced, you can go ahead and edit that here. And of course, you can see any of the views and engagement. So when somebody watches your Loom, I'll show you on another Loom here what the engagement looks like. You're going to see who watched it for how long. Did they add a comment? Did they add an emoji reaction? Did they click my CTA? Are there any questions on how to edit your Loom? And we're going to move on to sharing. Feel free to drop those in the meeting chat, okay? My Loom is polished up. It is ready to share out. I'm going to click on my share button here and I have several different options available here. I can type in the name of somebody who's in my workspace with me. I can type in somebody's email address and this will send an email to anybody that I share this with. So you can kind of skip the step and show you what happens here. I type in my personal email here. You can skip the step of having to go into your email separately and you can send it directly from Loom and add a message that way. It's a really easy way to share. You can post it to Slack if you guys have your Slack integration set up and you can also share it in a space. I'll talk about spaces here a little more in a minute. You have some different social options if you want to share this on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Gmail. Let me show you what happens if I share in Gmail. It's going to create a moving thumbnail preview in my email for me. It's going to add that auto summary feature for you guys and the title. And it has the word video in the subject line because even having the word video in an email subject line is going to increase your open rate by about 6%. Be sure you have your Chrome extension downloaded in order for that Gmail integration to work properly for you. You can also manually embed with our code here if you want to embed that somewhere. And we have a Salesforce integration as well on our enterprise plan. You can also simply just copy this link, copy the URL and a rapid share it anywhere that you'd like. Slack message, email, website, text message. You can choose if you want the video to be shared at a certain point in time if you want to call people's attention to a certain point in the video. And you also have some additional privacy and security here. If you want only people who you share this loom with explicitly to be able to view it, anybody at your workspace, public link, and then you have some different options such as password protecting as well. If you have any questions on sharing your loom, feel free to share those in the chat. We're gonna move on and talk about viewing a loom and how you can interact with a loom that you receive. So I'm gonna go ahead and go into my loom library. This is where all of my loom videos live, 528 of them here. And I can see who has watched my looms. I can see how many comments have been added or how many emoji replies have been added. So let me go ahead and find a good example here to show you all. Let's see one that has some good engagement on it here. Let's find a good one. Okay, here's a webinar that I did. Loom 101 webinar. And remember that zoom ingestion feature it automatically uploaded my zoom recording into a loom for me. I shared this out with the participants afterwards. I added a couple of hashtags here to make the looms searchable within my organization. And here's what my engagement insights look like. 16 views across 12 unique viewers. I could if I wanted to click specifically into each individual, I can see how long they watched it for, their completionary and their view times. If somebody is not logged into loom or they don't have a loom account, it will show up as an anonymous view. And you can see the overall engagement on that as well. So as your viewers are watching it, they can add any emoji of their choosing. That's right, any emoji. So maybe they wanna add a lobster for some reason or a dumpling. They can do that with our new feature that allows you to add any emoji of your choosing. These are timestamps. You'll see exactly where Chris threw a hands up sign. Wonder what I was talking about at that point in time. Your comments are also timestamped. So you can really tighten up the feedback cycle, especially in your product team. If people are asking questions about something, they can ask it right there on the loom. They don't have to add any context about what they're asking about because it is right there and timestamped. Well, I think I wanna show you guys today before we open it up for questions, is our loom homepage. Now, if you create a loom that you wanna bring visibility to across your organization or across your whole team, you might be sharing it, not just by URL or with one individual, but posting it to your workspace or within a subspace for your particular team.  You'll see looms that are trending. You'll see news and looms from individuals that you follow or people that you follow. You'll see which tags are trending and things that are newly shared and the spaces that you follow. For you guys as PMs, what I would recommend doing is creating a space. Now you might create a space for a particular feature or product and anytime you want to communicate about that, you will share the loom to that space. Individuals at your organization can follow that space and they're going to get a notification every time you post a new video within that space. So it's pretty neat.  So now I've been cam off for a couple minutes. I'm getting my three, two, one count down here and we're back. So to reiterate the most important best practices and tips and tricks, share yourself in your loom. Mistakes are human. It makes your looms much more engaging and fun to watch. Keep your looms under five minutes. Your engagement is going to be quite a bit higher. Try not to be a rambly loomer and get to the point quickly and be sure to link a CTA if you have an ask for somebody. Don't forget to wave at the beginning to create that moving thumbnail preview. You could move your camera bubble around as much as you want throughout your loom. Make it larger or make it smaller. You have the pause button available if you need to take a minute to gather your thoughts as well as the drawing tool which is in our desktop application as well as the seasonal frames also in the desktop app. And here is that really cool shortcut for throwing up some confetti. All right, with that everybody, I would love to open it up for live questions. If anyone wants to come off mute at this time, let me know if there's anything else you guys are hoping to see today. Can also put additional questions into the chat. So do you mention earlier, there would be a recording. We are recording this session, Christie, and I will be converting this recording into a loom and I can work with the product school team to make sure you get a copy. What other questions can I answer for you all? And Christie, one thing I will share with you as well. We have an on-demand version of our loom 101 webinar. I'm gonna share that with you guys now in case you'd like to just share that right away. I go to by loom.com slash support. We have a couple of on-demand webinars on our support page here. And the one you are looking for is loom 101. I also run a live webinar every single week here at loom. So it's also on our support page here, support.loom.com if you wanna send to anyone there. And here's the one you're looking for, loom 101 where we do a full demo and feature walkthrough. I just put that in the chat for you. And Veronica, I see a hand raised. Yeah, this actually, you might've kind of answered it by sharing this, but I was just curious if there were any tips or tricks on just how to encourage adoption to anyone who might be skeptical, like any coworkers or anything that might be skeptical of loom or just like, if loom is not already like incorporated into the workplace. Yeah, that's actually a great question. I'm gonna share a resource with you guys, which is our change management toolkit. And this is great for if you are thinking about trying to get loom launched at your organization, really the key to having this be effective is getting people to share and share looms and get views. People who have this kind of aha moment and habit moment within their first couple of weeks are really likely to adopt loom. So I'm gonna link this in the chat for you. This is a step-by-step guide about how to help your organization to adopt the tool. Awesome, thanks. You're welcome. Thanks so much everyone, take care. Thank you. Bye. Bye.


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What's going on guys? Welcome to a new video. So today I'm going to be taking you through the three keys to any successful Shopify store. If you take a look at any successful Shopify store that we do in each of these three things really, really well and they'll be kind of like the three fundamentals or three core elements that contribute towards their success. Think of this video as kind of like a really short course. I'm going to touch on each of these three points and go into them in detail and show you some good and bad examples of what to do. Sometimes more importantly, what not to do as well. So hopefully by the time you finish watching this video you'll learn something new. You'll have something to take away and implement into your own store which ultimately is going to help you find some more success. And with that being said guys, thanks for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed the video and let's jump straight into it. So point number one is a professional and trustworthy website, trustworthy Shopify store. Before we jump into this in fact I just want to point out if you want to get your copy of these notes so you have access to all these links, these stores and products and so on. You can download this document that's on screen now for free. There will be a link in the video description down below. So point number one is a professional and trustworthy site. This hands down has got to be one of the most important things because if somebody doesn't trust your site they're not going to hand over their payment information and they're not going to buy their products from you.  So if we have a look at these three sites that we have on screen now, first up we have salavoshup.com. These guys are actually featured on the exchange marketplace. So if you want to go ahead and find them and see what kind of numbers they've done, I believe it's over $2 million selling this one product here. So they've obviously done really, really well. They wouldn't be able to produce those sorts of results if they didn't have a nice and clean professional site which you can already see here. So what I'll do is I'll run through these three sites to just kind of point out the things that stand out to me but then I'll go through the notes. I've kind of consolidated all the key points and all the key mistakes I see people making to kind of help you improve and take away and integrate to your own site. So straight away we can see it's quite a kind of clean and modernistic look. They've got a super kind of high quality hero image at the top here which has some kind of cool coloring effects. So obviously they've paid a designer or they've done this themselves to kind of match the theme and look of their store. So the page you're on is highlighted in the same green which is kind of like the same faded out green in the hero image. It's also the same green which they have in their logo too. Again, some really nice images that are blacked out, high quality, black and white, nice and clean font. It's not just an aerial or really basic font. It just everything kind of combines into one really nice look in and feel of a website. If we move on to store number two, we have bluecrate.com. I'm sure you guys are familiar with these guys. They started out as a typical drop shipping website, drop shipping of physical products but over the course of kind of like the last 18 months they've transitioned into print on demand products. So if we use our Shopify inspector tool and go to products best sellers, their best seller is indeed this MiniMe. And again, these guys are a proven seven figure site. So if you're looking for products to go ahead and sell then on screen now is a tried and tested proven product you can take away yourself now. And as long as you do the other two things correctly as well you'll be able to find some success. So again, it's the same kind of similar points. Everything looks really neat. Everything looks really professional. Everything is really condensed and easy to read, easy to follow. Nothing really looks ugly and out of place if you know what I mean. They've got plenty of reviews about the products just to kind of reinstill the social proof and trustworthiness of the site. And then in their photo they've got all the kind of required pieces of information that customer wants to see or would expect to see. Even if they're not kind of consciously thinking so many people when they go onto a site they won't be looking for say a privacy policy page but if it's not there then they might notice because something else has kind of triggered that thought in their mind if that makes sense. So subconsciously people don't necessarily look for these things but if they're not there something in their brain will tell them that something's not right about this particular site and that's going to be enough to put them off especially if they've never come across to you before. If we move on to prosleepy and these guys are one of my favorite sites I just really like the look of how clean and crisp and obviously when it comes to sleep then sleep is kind of like a calm and not spiritualistic I can't think of the word but it's just obviously it comes with a certain kind of thought. When you think of sleep you don't think of like loud noises and loud music and raving you think of just kind of calm and collected and everything they've picked in terms of the design and feel of the site, the colors is all geared towards having that same feeling which makes the site look super professional they've got custom images, high quality they've put like the most important pieces of information in bold so you naturally join to that so when you read it it's always going to be a positive thing which encourages you to buy the product. So for example try prosleepy a night and we guarantee you a better day so straight away it's positive and it's encouraging people to actually go ahead and buy the product and the same thing here, so top sleep experts immediately creates that kind of sense of professionalism and trustworthiness in the site. So to recap when it comes to building a professional trustworthy website these are some of the things in which I see people kind of not taking advantage of or certainly not implementing in their site so if you are making some of these mistakes and you fix them then I can pretty much guarantee it's going to affect your conversion rate for the better. So branded with colour schemes we saw that in all three of the sites they're not just using the default stereotypical basic fonts the theme and the feel of the site matches the types of products they're selling so BlueCreator obviously selling really kind of fun and exciting products and that is kind of reflected in the type of imagery and the colours, etc. that they're using. Prosleepy is obviously quite calm and relaxing and again that's reflected in the type of images and the kind of colours they view sorry in the fonts as well. Next up all three of these sites have a track your order page I can't stress this enough if we go to the bottom of Prosleepy I believe it's down here nope I am mistaken it must be at the top so track your order BlueCreator.com I think these guys are at the bottom track my order and then if we just double check so now we're in a good place it's at the top there so track your order what this shows to customers coming onto your site is that once they've placed an order they can track their order which shows you're an active business and they can, people want to know they have access to you as a business and they have access to us as to their questions should any potential issues come up. Next up we have extensive contact information so this is something I see so many businesses not doing they'll just have a simple at Gmail address and that's not good enough a simple contact form only that is not good enough people want to know you're a legitimate and professional business and if you want to succeed and go to those big numbers then you need to be a professional and legitimate business so you need to have a telephone number you need to have a physical address if possible you can pay for all of these things for a telephone number will cost you about five or six pounds a month and a physical address a bit more expensive probably about 30 pounds a month depending on how you decide to do it whether it's a virtual address, PO Box or you simply just use your home address. Next up we have high quality and original imagery this is super important again it comes down to that whole subconscious thing if somebody's seen your ad before and then your site looks exactly the same as the next Shopify dropship and site then again it's just off-pointing for people subconsciously and it's just not going to feel right for them whereas for instance if you come up pro-sleeping they've got this really high quality original image that you probably won't find elsewhere on the internet then it just reinstills even if customers aren't necessarily thinking about it the fact that it is what it is is enough to kind of subconsciously make them think you're more professional and more legitimate if that makes sense and obviously the more they feel like that the more comfortable they're going to feel shopping with you just to go through the final few points then extensive customer reviews we've seen this on all three sites loads and loads of reviews for every single product that seems to be selling well for them it's something like 63% of people will not buy a product if there isn't existing or positive customer reviews to prove that it's a good product no default tax notes on product pages so by default depending on what theme you're using it will say tax included, ship and calculator check out none of these three sites use that, get rid of that custom icons and gifts so something I want to show you for pro-sleepy so images like this, you can see the mask it's got the pro-sleepy brand name on which makes it look original and creative specifically for this site tractors that probably wasn't but the fact that everything is just kind of in keeping it has those little details and things makes it a little more professional again eliminate neck and back pain or get your money back they've got this really nice gift here which illustrates how the product works these custom icons here and I believe there's some further down so you've got a real life person there demonstrating how the product works and again some nice kind of custom icons about the particular product and then again a really kind of a perfect gift really just to illustrate potentially how big this company is now the chances are they didn't pay for this to happen they didn't film this gift themselves but the fact that it's on their site makes them look like a big company that have robots to actually test how good their products are when I'm pretty sure you can get this product on AliExpress the final point which is a super super important one when it comes to professionalism and trustworthiness is there's evidence of real people behind the business so when you have real people featured in images and you're about us page then it makes it look so much more professional because there's actually real people behind the actual business if you know what I mean same for your ads as well it's always better to feature real people in your ads moving on to point number two then we have a product people want to buy arguably one of the most important things because if you have a poor product doesn't matter how good your site is nobody's going to buy it so when it comes to picking products then there's three kind of main points or main ways to identify products number one is in very high demand for example home gym equipment during COVID gyms shirt here in the UK everybody was buying second hand gym equipment or home gym equipment it was super high in demand and therefore that made it a good product to sell because people were buying it everywhere point number two very unique and not seen before on other typical platforms like eBay and Amazon like the knee braces when you see a product like this it's not necessarily a product you think I've seen that on Amazon before because chances are you haven't which makes the customer think this is a unique business specializing in this particular product so I'm going to buy it from these guys and that is just perfect kind of like a perfect recipe for success when it comes to advertising on platforms like Facebook and then point number three one of my favorite is super personalized to the customer like the Mini Me Pillows by Blue Crate so when somebody comes across this particular product I wouldn't have a clue where else to get this products from it makes you think this company is the only guy selling it and they can personalize it to their friends and to themselves which you just can't beat when it comes to relevance which is why again just another recipe to success when it comes to selling products like that on Facebook the more of these points by the way that you can combine in one product then 100% the higher chance you've got of success so for example the reason why this Mini Me Pillows done so well is because it's super personalized people can get their friends face their parents face their own face on it which makes it super relevant to them and specific it also gives you that humor factor and it's also very unique too it's something that people won't have seen anywhere else before so it combines two of these three most important points but the more you can combine into one then the more success you're going to have so to illustrate a scenario where I see a lot of people going wrong when it comes to selecting products they'll go into AliExpress they'll see something like this over 4,000 units sold and they think oh it's a great product there's tons and tons of units being sold that's not the case thousands of orders does not always mean an easy product to sell or a good product to sell the reason being a platform like AliExpress many people forget is it's super popular in places like Russia and other eastern countries where it's always going to be the end user the actual consumer buying the product so somebody paying 30p or 2 pounds from this on AliExpress does not always translate into somebody paying say 20, 30 pounds through a Facebook ad so you always have to keep that in mind point number two is not in high demand i.e. it doesn't have a spike in popularity at any point if your product is just kind of consistent throughout the year then you're always going to find it harder to sell a product like that versus a product which is going to peak and spike in popularity through different times of the year point number three a product like this is not very unique it's easily sourceable from eBay or Amazon or any kind of bathroom or DIY shop so when somebody sees something like this and you're selling it for 20, 30 pounds because you're trying to make your margins somebody's going to think I know half a dozen if not a dozen different other shops or websites in which I can get this from I'm going to go check out the price on there first and you're never going to be able to compete with some of the big guys like Amazon or eBay number four it's not personalized either so being able to build that kind of relevance what you ideally want is when somebody actually sees your products they see it and they think I have to buy that and because it's super unique and super personalized to them they don't even consider trying to look for it elsewhere and then the final point which is pretty obvious is also too cheap to make a profit I see this all the time especially with the new VAT rules in the UK there's no need to sell cheap products now we can go out and sell products to have 20, 30, 40, 50 pounds profit margin trying to sell this for a challenge anybody watching this video to try and sell one of these for 30 pounds it's just not going to happen moving on to the third and final point also another super kind of key ingredient to any successful e-commerce site is the actual marketing campaign slash brand itself so most people watching this won't have an established brand which means they're going to have to resort to spending 10 pound on Facebook ads to see 20 pound back in order to make a profit so they can keep reinvesting into the business and running ads and so on if you have a brand, if you're Kim Kardashian if you're a household name like Amazon then obviously you don't need to spend as much on marketing because people know who you are and because of who you are they're going to buy products from you so brand doesn't need to spend as much on marketing new businesses do obviously otherwise you're not going to get any traffic so to give you some examples of really successful Facebook ads and I'll show you why they're successful then I'll just open these up first so first up we have the Defuser by Wunderdream the kind of engagement, et cetera, speaks for itself 15,000 engagement, 5K comments and when you flip through the comments too they're always really, really positive this is the hardcore kind of evidence I look for behind a product before I go ahead and test it if people are commenting really positive things about something then there's no kind of like argument whether it's a good or bad product or not because the evidence is there if you like Moving on to add number two is this dog bed anxiety dog bed, I'm sure you would have seen this before if you've been in the drop shipping space for a while but just look at the engagement nearly 50,000 reactions which is just crazy 11,000 comments, the ad itself, the video itself it's not even that high quality but it's just super to the point it shows a real dog enjoying the bed with a silly grin on its face and that is enough to sell a product to a particular dog owner but again, if you look at the comments took a few days but he loves it now 37 likes and loves all the customers coming back posting images of their bed that's been received and this is absolutely brilliant when it comes to converting people into customers because when people can see real people on Facebook posting about the product then it just kind of removes any kind of hesitations it removes any kind of wall they may have built about whether they should trust you or not ad number three, this is the best one to save the best till last so only 21,000 engagements but look at this, 153,000 comments that is nuts I don't think I've ever seen an ad with that many comments on and look at the type of products it's just perfectly suitable for Facebook as soon as you see this the first thing you wanna do is tag your mates in it all that organic reach they would have got off this one ad the amount of money they must have made from this one ad must have been incredible just to finish off the video then and reiterate the points they were all original content by the actual dog bed maybe this isn't original and they've probably sourced it from elsewhere I'm guessing they have by the fact that they've just kind of put a weird looking logo in the top left so by that one ad it's all original content it shows the product being used or by the actual consumer so obviously they're not just demonstrating the belt they've got somebody putting it on their buckle and actually showing you how it would work in the real environment too and that's super important is that you show it in a realistic and the real environment and that's super important the dog bed is obviously being displayed in somebody's living room because if you display a product being used in its end environment it makes it that much easier for the end user for the consumer to kind of picture that product then being used in their house or for them to be wearing the belt buckle at the next party or whatever it is point number three is responding to comments so if we have a flick through down here we can see the actual seller of the product so NiniPet is very active in the comments section which again it just kind of legitimizes the business they're active and it makes it look like that if you want to ask a question or if you have an issue then it's super easy to get in contact and they're super responsive too so any potential issues then you know they're going to get sorted which again just eliminates any kind of hesitations you have about whether you should trust a business or not and then point number four super important is it works with or without sound or subtitles so obviously not everybody's going to click to listen to the ad but if we watch all three of these through you can see this kind of like the key points and key features of the products that always kind of pops up the way through just to kind of explain what the product is should somebody not have their sound turned on and with that being said guys I'm going to wrap the video up there if you've stuck with me this long I super super appreciate it I really hope I've taught you something new or given you some ideas anyway to take away from this video and implement your business and ultimately help you be more successful that's why I do these videos and the final kind of point to take away from this is take your time when building your business definitely quality over quantity if you skip some of these corners ultimately it's going to lead to not the kind of results in which you'll be hoping for so take your time put out something super professional super high quality and trust me it will pay dividends in the end with that being said then before you go one final thing if you are looking for a course but more than a course like a support system somebody to learn from who has experience that can take you through step by step so make sure you check out my Ecom Academy it's run by myself I created it myself being based in the UK once you join as well you get lifetime access and you also get access to me as well so as you go through your journey of building your business you can get in touch with me ask me any questions you want and I can help you out as much as you need me to basically there is a free callback service too so if you want to hop on the phone with me directly go through any questions or hesitations you have about joining and we can do so so just make sure you check out the link in the description below thanks again for watching and see you in the next one