Keo de kato, na mai haire mai. That's greetings and welcome to the session of EHF Live.  In this session, it's part of a series where you'll hear from Scott Cobat, a lovely Scott there. He's an EHF fellow who's an experienced operator and entrepreneur with a track record of building customer-friendly mainstream brands to compete in historically unfriendly categories. His experience includes subscription businesses, marketplaces, health care, internet of things and consumer packaged goods, but that's really good for you. So in this session, it's going to be building on your MVP marketing engine. So Scott will do a little presentation to start with and then we'll jump into the Q&A part of it. So if you've actually got some meaty queries and questions that you want Scott to cover, then ask them through the session. Now these are really informal sessions. It's they're planned in a way that you can leave after the 60 minutes and feel that you know the fellow enough on a personal level. Understand what their intentions are for New Zealand and that you can connect directly with them. And just to remind you that this is one of a few in a series and I'll touch on what the others are in the series afterwards. So just note that it is being recorded. It's on the website. Just stay muted for now, but you can unmute to ask questions. You can raise your hand in the functions on the Zoom or you can put questions in the chat box as we go. But Scott, over to you to Shiga's screen. Thanks, Michelle. I appreciate it. Let me get by the way, I shouldn't and don't feel badly because everybody does this. It's actually habit, my last name, but it's I've been called far worse than I could have. So I'll take it. I did wonder that actually, because it's supposed to ask you at the very beginning, my bed. That's quite a right way. Is that let me just put that in the full screen. OK, you've seen that. Good. Excellent. Hey, great to meet everybody. Bar, good to see you again. I'm glad you could join. This I'll just before I jump in on anything just to talk quickly about the flow and to reiterate that I really don't want to spend these sessions talking at you. I'll give you a really quick background of myself so you know where I'm coming from. I have a few very short number of pages in here just to give you some food for thought on considerations and standing up in an initial marketing function. And some of the risks you should keep in mind and then really what it is most of the time to hear your questions and have a lively conversation. So I'll share a few pages, but feel free to jump in with comments or questions along the way. You don't have to wait till the end. Let me just quickly ask since we we have can we quickly just go around before we jump in and just say who you are and where you're calling in from. OK, so, Brad, if we're going to do this, we need to do it really quick as it will eat into your time. So, Brad, if you just want to do a quick shout out then. Sure, thank you, Michelle. And thank you, Scott Bradley, both calling in from Walmart, which is a suburb of Chicago. I am CEO of an environmental philanthropy called Earthshare and happy to be here. OK. Agra. Rosalie. Kia ora koutou. So I'm Rosalie Nelson and I just head up this, the Edmund Hillary Fellowship and just all of us in the core team are just trying to find ways to serve the fellows and really showcase the expertise and the skills they bring to out here. Hi, Rosalie. Thanks for joining. Hello, I'm Nick. I am the Head of Growth for Limba. Just started a couple of weeks ago, so I'm really happy to be here and working with Bart. Awesome. Welcome, Nick. Madeleine. Oh, Bart, I missed you. God, how would I go do that? It's because you weren't even talking. All good. Hi, I'm Bart. I'm the Head of Growth at Limba. And looking forward to this because we have a direct e-commerce business. Love it. But the very cool product. I recommend it to everybody. Awesome. See, I'm marketing for you, Bart. There you go. Madeleine. Hi, everyone. I'm Robbie and Madeleine here. We're from Wellington in the Creative HQ office at the moment, currently in an incubator programme. So both very early stage founders. Nice. Hi, well. Mark. Mark Horlowski, co-work two. So one of the old school folks from years ago, based in Boston, and I'm founder and director of the Sustainable Endowment Institute. And we have a cloud-based web platform called Brits, which is focused on energy and climate and working with five institutions around the US and Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. Cool. Thanks, Matt. Julian and Mark, I just said that they are staying muted and behind in the background. OK. Great. Over to you, Scott. All right. OK, guys. So let's, well, I got to move this so I can see what I'm talking about. One, just a quick background on where I'm coming from. So is that advancing? There we go. Yes. So just foundationally, I kind of just coming out of university, grew up in management consulting, mostly consumer retail, got my MBA and then cut my teeth as a classically trained consumer package goods marketer out here in the Bay Area. That's, I always say about that experience, what it teaches you when you're working in marketing categories that are pretty low growth by definition. It means that your success is really predicated on whether you can understand your target market, understand your value prop and effectively execute against that strategy.  And then my years in tech have always been this sort of dual focus on likable brand and unlikable category. Going back, I'm dating myself, for those of you that remember the flip video camera on the left, that was kind of my first foray into tech. It's a dual focus on the brand piece and on building scalable revenue engines, particularly on subscription businesses. So it made my way through YC, Prezi, which is a SaaS business, One Medical Health Services. And then today, so I'm still in the Bay Area. I started 621 consulting five years ago, which I'll tell you about, we're a community of independent, 200 plus independent marketers from fractional CMOs to experience operators in various disciplines in marketing. And so we'll generally plug people in on a fractional basis to help companies build or up level their core marketing capabilities. And I'm happy to answer more questions on that. So I always think of this as an operator having been a startup guy myself from everything from two guys in a garage all the way up to being acquired by a big company like Cisco and working there. And, you know, just within our world, there's a certain amount of pattern recognition because I'm working with a lot of companies at your stages and I'm very sympathetic to a lot of these questions you're asking yourselves on, you know, how do we, how do we go about this whole marketing thing? So before we dive in, I just want to hit a couple of themes that I imagine maybe on your mind as you're, because you're here. Why? Why would you even think about marketing? You know, it's very common in the early stages of running a building a startup that you're under, you're very product and engineering focused on all likelihood. And so, you know, the answer to this is why we're here today. I was telling Michelle before everyone joined that to me the one of the biggest benefit I see to starting to think about this now. It doesn't mean you have to be committed to spending millions of dollars in marketing or advertising, but the reason to start thinking about it is it's incredibly important to start to build the habits and practices within your company around understanding your target audience, figuring out how you're going to connect your mission and values like hearing you guys introduce yourselves, a lot of you as most EHF participants are very closely connected to a really important mission and the way you connect the why you're here and who you are to the external manifestation of your business and your acquisition funnel and all that becomes really important and you as soon as you can start to build some of that cadence of experimentation and iteration, the more that benefits, not just your marketing, but everything you do, products, customer success, etc. And we'll talk more about that. I hear sometimes that, you know, both on the, well, a lot of times I hear B2B people say, I don't know, that's just for B2C folks, it's not relevant to us, or I hear B2C people say, our problems are uniquely different, it doesn't, it's so different than B2B companies and one theme I see a lot and it's been a soapbox topic of mine out here in Silicon Valley is that I think we've gotten too over rotated on the differences between them. I wouldn't be happy to debate until I'm blue in the face why, you know, each is relevant to the other, right? A lot of B2C companies benefit from a B2B orientation, having some B2B DNA and how you think about nurturing and converting leads. B2B companies can use some consumer DNA and how you think about what you're defining your core value proposition and engaging them in a meaningful way. So I would argue that everything we'll talk about today is relevant for both. Some of the examples will skew a little more towards consumer B2B, but, you know, I would suffice it to say I think this is relevant for everybody. And then the last thing I'll note here is that what's inherently uncomfortable about marketing is that it's there's just a lot of ambiguity. You can bring some science into parts of it. Some of it can be very quantitative. But, you know, I find that a lot of times that even the it's shocking to people to have to appreciate that even the stuff that feels scientific has some heart in it. And there's rarely one right answer. So a lot of the ways you get toward yourself on the road to building a scalable marketing engine is through getting a lot of different perspectives and debating them and litigating. It's not it's cut and drives just, you know, writing a line of code. That's marketing by definition. So next I'm going to hit on just a few areas I'd suggest that you focus on first just in getting started. This is not the sum total of everything you'll do, but to me if like, if you asked me for a starter kit of which should be the first things I do if I'm if I want to start to build the DNA of a marketing engine. First, I'd say, and it sounds so simple and I, you know, I learned this as an operator and it's certainly like my combinator with a pound over your head all the time. Who's your customer, right? What's the need you're serving? And how do you best solve it, right? And feeding those insights into your organization become incredibly important because it's always it's like the curse of I've seen this with so many startups. It's really easy to get trapped in the world of building a solution for a problem that you haven't really defined, right? And so so much of the early work you do in marketing helps you create downstream efficiency by creating the playbook and the roadmap so developing a real understanding of what's going on in the market. What's going on with our core customer? What are their pain points? How can we best solve them? Is it incredibly important, right? From there, once you have a theory on that, then you can start to build out your basic your core positioning and messaging. And I do find this is an area when I'm talking to early stage companies that, you know, a lot of times when the nature of our conversation is they're wanting to get into driving demand right away. And sometimes I pull them back and say, look, let's make sure we're first clear on, you know, who we are and what we want to say. What's our elevator value proposition? What's the core message that we want to push out? Because particularly to remember as an early stage startup, you're generally in a world where there's very little awareness of who you are, right?  And, you know, see this all the time where within this, you know, frankly, even in bigger marketing organizations, you have a lot of people in their kind of parallel swim lane, and they're all saying something different because they've interpreted the customer need differently or the value proposition differently. And that's some, it keeps me up at night as a marketer because that's just wasted opportunity to convert attention into interest in real business. The next, you know, I touched on this a second ago, there's been an interesting evolution in marketing over the last several years and that it's, you know, it used to be that marketing decisions were more binary, right?  And the reality is that the marketing world has become a lot more flexible and a lot more iterative as it's ingested a lot of the best practices of agile product development, right? So I think what's incredibly valuable, even if you're doing it in a really scrappy, low-fi way early on, is to start to figure out what hypotheses you have, what assumptions you need to validate, and how do you start to just do low-stakes experiments so that you can understand who's the right audience, what's the right message, what's the right conversion tactic, and building that kind of muscle and the team yields benefits again and again at scale. So getting that instrumented early on is really important. And then resourcing, I imagine you guys have a lot of questions on that. That's always a tricky one. You know, one thing I hear a lot with what's very common is I see, you know, very early-stage companies very product-oriented. They get some traction, they raise a little bit of money, and they say, great, we got to start marketing. Let's go hire a CMO. And the reality is at that point, you don't necessarily need a CMO, right? There's always this question of what's the right balance of seniority and doers, and within marketing there are a thousand different specialties now. So figuring out what skill sets to optimize for in the short term versus the long term becomes really important. So there's a whole lot to discuss there. I just want to put that out there as a topic worth exploring. Let me pause for a second. I've got, like, I think two, maybe three pages up. Any questions I could answer so far? You're free to raise your hands or put them in the chat. Great. All right, I'm going to keep going. So here, I just want to talk and please don't take this as preaching fear. I did want to hit on what, you know, as I, in my experience and what I see in the marketplace, there are some common mistakes or risk factors I just want you to keep in mind. All right. One is it's really tempting to go too big too soon, and that can take a lot of different forms. There's always this question of, well, when's the product ready to be introduced? And I'll qualify this comment by saying, I really do believe in the agile process of mindset of, you know, get feedback, learn, iterate. At the same time, there is a base level of product readiness you need to feel comfortable with. I always say, and it's a little bit of a counterintuitive thing to hear from a marketer. If you gave me a million dollars and said I could spend that on marketing a lousy product or spend it on getting the product right first, I'd say let's not spend anything on marketing. Let's get the product to where we think it's solid and it's ready to be introduced into the world. I think a great product is the best marketing you have. You know, we talked some about the minute ago about building out DNA around experimentation. I think it's important that you get, before you start to aggressively invest in marketing, you want to get to the point where you feel like you've got a machine that's at least partially working. Right? It doesn't mean it has to be fully optimized, but you know, before you're doing it at scale, you want to make sure you know what you're investing in and that it can work well. Sometimes in the early stages, it's easy for us to get caught up in the hype like funding rounds and glamour and big, you know, blog posts and press coverage. I just want to make sure that there's a there's a there there, right? You know, focusing too much on the bright shiny object without anything really to put behind it can can get you into trouble. This is a very common challenge for startups because it's in fact, it makes pretty good sense early on to focus your initial marketing on a mid funnel like ads on Facebook and Google and SEO, right? Which are really about harvesting the demand that you've created other ways and converting it. It's incredibly important. It's a great testing laboratory. It's all measurable, which is wonderful. The thing you have to look out for is over time. You'll notice I didn't say that that doing that is the mistake. The mistake I see is relying on not alone because over time you've got to build out your organic flywheel. If you're only focusing at the middle of the funnel, you're going to hit diminishing returns there. At some point it becomes more and more expensive to find new people, new customers, whether they're businesses or consumers to convert. Yeah, I talked a little bit about messaging consistency. I would say, like, look out for being too self-referential. See this a lot. It's like, hey, we have really bright product and engineering people. They've built cool stuff. Everyone should care about it, right? And that again is or if you don't have your insights in your positioning, right, that can be risky. The learning mechanism gets back to what I was talking about. Make sure, like, when we run the test, let's go in in advance knowing which metrics we care about and what success looks like, so that we're ingesting the learning and building that into the organization. And then, yeah, that organic flywheel I touched on a little. I think, look, it's important to recognize that you don't turn brand awareness on overnight. So taking time to do things like thought leadership content that kind of tell the broader story, like for those of you in the climate space, like plugging into conversations in the culture around, you know, green energy and climate challenge become really important in getting your name into those conversations. So it's important to be thoughtful about how you're at word of mouth here or case studies if you're a B2B business. The more you can let your existing early customers be the mouthpiece for your brand, the more successful you'll be in building an authentic brand and driving demand as opposed to having to just pay for it all the time. OK, last thing here. So I do think it's important to just whenever you're talking about marketing, there's this whole notion of situational awareness, right? Where I see expectations get missed online sometimes, it's like, hey, we did this big TV commercial and how come that didn't change or that didn't increase our conversion rate? It's really important that in anything in marketing that you're thinking about where, which level of the funnel are we looking to influence and what types of KPIs are the measurements of that, right? This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of KPIs, but for instance, for a B2B business looking at your MQ, how are you converting leads into MQLs or SQLs? What does that look like? That's at the consideration phase. We've got people interested. We need to figure out how we shepherd them through the funnel so we can convert them. Or you see an example at the bottom from Slack which is around how are we retaining and holding on to or increasing our long-term value of existing customers. So everything you do should be asking yourself and your whole learning plan. What level of the funnel are we looking to influence and what would be metrics that would be indicative of that? All right, that's all I'm sharing for today. I'd love to hear questions. I know I just threw a lot at you. What's on your mind? Feel free to unmute, raise your hand up, or put your question in the chat. There you go. This one from Mark. Can you discuss got some best practices related to B2B refer a friend-type programs? Yeah, you know, it's interesting with refer a friend programs. You'll learn as we go through these that I will give you my street aboveboard scoop all the time. I have not had great success with transactional refer a friend programs. I think there, you know, there is a, it's not so you shouldn't look at it because it's very category specific and the way you architect it I think is, you know, it's always smart to give people an incentive to refer and all. I will say that while the transactional piece is less interesting to me, I think that if you go back to my point a minute ago about using your existing customers as the face of the brand, I do think that's incredibly powerful. Right. And so I love seeing when companies are putting testimonials or like quotes and case studies from their customers into sales materials or onto a website or into a nurture email. For instance, if you're a B2B business. So, you know, look, there's this whole sort of precept in marketing that I imagine you guys would agree with this. Nobody likes feeling like they're being advertised to. Right. Like whenever a company is talking at you, there's a little bit of this discount factor of like, well, I don't know if I should trust them, especially if it's not a well known brand. Right. I don't know these people. I don't like, you know, I don't know if I should put my trust in them. And the more that they're able to see, hey, real people who have real problems like mine are using this, the more it breaks down those walls. So, you know, I think like interesting approaches to take are when you have your B2B business, you know, build some case studies, build some like some video testimonials or let your customer write a blog post, et cetera, et cetera, include those in emails, include that in social media, build it into your promotional materials. I think that can be really powerful. Refer a friend, you know, I think it's always smart to play with some sort of incentive that gets people. You want to take down the hurdle from for trial. Right. So, the best advice I could give on that is figure out a low stakes way to get person A to get person B to just try something. And if the product is sticky and they like it, then they're likely to retain it. I don't know, Mark, if I totally, I might have cheated on your question a little bit, but feel free to ask a follow-up if you like. What else? Uh-huh. Great. Yep. Meddling. Feel free to unmute, yeah. Kia ora, Robbie. Thanks for that, Scott. Really useful. We were just discussing a little bit as you were talking, I guess the balance between these agile methodologies you talked about of kind of testing and learning and how you balance that with or I guess incorporate kind of long-term brand building alongside kind of that shorter term sales generation and funnel. Yeah. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, I love that question. Thank you. Yeah, I think that it's important not so just to reframe it. I think it's important for everyone to hear that. I want to make sure I'm framing this the right way. I think your question is what we've got. Imagine part of what's on your mind is we've got this, you know, pressing priority to drive customer acquisition and demand and prove out that model. And at the same time, we know we need to build a brand over time. Right. I would say for starting point, it's really important not to look at those two goals as mutually exclusive. Right. I think what, so let me give you a tangible example. I think when you are part of how you will solve your acquisition funnel or, you know, solve the challenge of making it efficient is, as we discussed, run a lot of experiments, you know, you run a few Facebook ads, you try a landing page on your site, you try different sales materials, whatever else, which is really important. And it's interesting to me how often this gets overlooked is that insight, that is a real-time laboratory on your customers and on your value proposition. And all those insights you can feed back into other parts of your marketing engine and your product roadmap and everything else. And it is, even in small teams, it's really fascinating to me how often that learning gets siloed. Right. So if you carry that forward, you know, so I mentioned you should start with, we're going to tie together a couple of things here. I mentioned you should start with building out that kind of experimentation flywheel. I also mentioned that you should try to get a crack at your brand positioning and messaging. Now, remember with your positioning, you don't have to sign it in blood, guys, right? Like the idea is like this is the playbook and we can talk some, and we're going to do, I'm happy to talk a little more on that today. We have another session in that in a few weeks. That's a very participatory exercise of stakeholders. You try to agree on a, like, here's the core playbook we're going to use for now. And at the same time, you're getting real-time learning, like testing those what's in that positioning or testing different ads, different messages. And ultimately you'll hit a point where you'll say, you know what, we've learned enough that we need to refresh our brand position, right? Our customers evolved, our customer needs have evolved. That's fine. That's fine, right? And so the more you get those two ends of the spectrum working symbiotically, the better. Now, you will still likely come to a point where you're, you're a, you've got to cross this calcium of like, hey, we've got this, this marketing machine that works really efficiently on driving demand. And we need to start, sorry, in converting demand and we need to start experimenting with how we, we add more top of a funnel awareness. And that gets a little more complicated. But again, that doesn't have to jump to nationally, you know, multi-million dollar TV campaign. You can play with different tests and like, you know, a particular market or you experiment with running an ad on YouTube.  So I'm happy to elaborate on all this, but hopefully that gives you a high level answer to your question. Yeah, thank you for that. I see a question. Yeah. Sorry. Good. Okay. And then I see a question from Bart here. Examples that get companies away from it? Yeah. So that's a nice trend. Thanks for that. I'm just going to read that one out for the recording, Scott, actually. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. Yeah, because I kind of have the chat in the recording it. So the question from Bart was more examples that get companies away from the mid-funnel because a lot of the people aren't looking for a rich relationship between that and other areas? You would have caught on to things and었다, and we had several reports about it. And they said you really have to practice flirtation in terms of加油 balance and building the organic flywheel. Yeah. So a few areas that I think are at a high level, here's some buckets of areas to explore. And then we can decide where we want to click down. There's the whole kind of world of communications, y Lan defenders is puen i qutien ka wuma. Y land amendment y spelai there devau, ka verme assistant agon think t тутant gade watangua. Haban shil за hankalo y kaartido. Erganaam received y diami Gad episura, pernredin ersola esy-si, moa zionu hankol lobo, akà maen rapi gade ca t this a bole neighant tanon. Oo m黎 dioodi i syodu. moko ? Maka perepiaw tawadu maithat ti maithat ca nā, a koi mabukatai tawadu p CrowdTrace, maithat ti maithat ti maithat wahan-bayai. A tawadu pa maithat ti maithat te maithat te maithat ti maithat i maithat ti maithat atau. Amoan, mokin, maithat ti maithat i mabukat ngunوا, your company not just to tech and investor press but to trade verticals and lifestyle and everything else. We can talk there. I do think there is a place for testing your way into brand advertising that is admittedly always a little scary. We can talk about that. I really like the idea of doing it on a targeted like an incubate, a couple test markets where you don't have to spend as much money and play with it. There's also this world of events and conferences. I think it's a little, it's important not to go too overboard on that but I mean particularly for folks in the B2B businesses, knowing where your customers are and finding way to engage them in a very authentic way is interesting. I'm less enthusiastic in the early stages of the company about paying a bunch of money to slap your logo somewhere.  I'll tell you a story when I had taken a CMO role with a company that was looking at sponsoring a one of these bike transit city bike kind of things where we could get our logo on every bike that people would check out and use in the city and it was kind of cool. But ultimately what I landed on was they don't really know who we are. Is this really the best bang for our buck in educating people about us and it didn't feel like it was. It's the same reason like if for those in the States like if you're going to spend money in a Super Bowl ad you better damn be really confident that it's going to serve your strategy and your objective and unless you're you know like if Anheuser-Busch or Coca-Cola everybody knows then you got to figure out how that ad is going to educate. Anyway those are just some high-level themes part and we can certainly drill down into more of this. What else? Can you ask from anyone? Maybe go into depth on some of those questions then if you want to Scott. What's useful to everybody? Which one was the? Yeah let me think. You know look one thing we haven't talked about that I know is just a practical reality of being an entrepreneur is there's always this tension between you know spending money and marketing and the existential reality of funding right and you know I'm always a little weary of you know over rotating on vanity fundraising optics like just doing things that look good but don't have any substance around them and yet I will say in the work I do now advising a lot of companies when they're going through this existential process of like hey we got to prove out our model but we also got to make sure we're around in a year. A lot of times what's helpful is to fast forward to whenever you think you need what's the next big milestone whether it's a product launch or yeah we want to go raise a series A or a seed round in a year whatever else. What kind of story do we need to tell to credibly show that we're on our way and then you kind of back solve for for what you need to do to get there because I do think there's a risk that if you don't have that kind of I'm not talking about like a five-year goal I'm talking about like a 12 to 18 24-month goal you end up just taking little incremental steps in marketing that aren't really going to get you to the story you need to tell and um frequently you know as you guys see this a lot like it's series B to be honest where the criteria get a lot stricter for funding a company and the reality is you know the best possible position to be in is to say hey listen we've proven out the unit economics of how to market this business we haven't done it at scale yet but we can take additional funding and put it into a well oiled machine and so you know I would and I calibrated this with friends in the VC community I you know I would always rather see a company with the story that basically says you know we know how to acquire and retain customers we just haven't done it at scale yet I'd rather see that than to say we've been operating at scale but our unit economics are so so and it's still not proven out right so I would really think about what's the the narrow cast approach to testing and and building out your marketing machine and then the the following enough that we haven't really discussed I had this we talked about this briefly in the funnel slide but we should talk for a minute or just about the idea to keep in mind that depending on your business model um it's not just an acquisition game right like retaining existing customers becomes incredibly important because that's part of your the story you tell in your unit on your end and unit economics you don't want to be in a situation where you're saying hey we know how to acquire a bunch of customers for cheap but then they've gone in three six months right um so I would think holistically about that and keep in mind back to this point about the organic flywheel that the more you're retaining people the more your top of the funnel will organically happen because you'll have a lot of happy customers who are retaining and they're more likely to share and talk about and that's incredibly important I should have added a piece to that funnel slide about advocacy right like retention leads to lower lower acquisition costs for acquiring new customers I think people tend to underestimate how important that is to your end and unit economics sorry you got me on my on my high horse here Rosalie I see you got a question um Scott I'd love to get your thoughts about how we how can an organisation sharpen its value proposition because often in the very early stages they're not always absolutely clear about their point of competitive differentiation and it needs to evolve or if there's a new market they may have to educate that market as well before they can particularly if they're disrupting I'd love to just get your thoughts on how how do you approach that yeah that's a really good question is it gets back to it kind of brings us full circle Rosalie to the point about under about customer insights and segmentation and so let's let's elaborate on that for a minute um um first of all I so there's this there's this notion I learned back in my uh package goods days of when you're anytime you're you're launching a new product whether it's a new company you know our new line of business or even just a line extension of an existing product you go into it asking well what's the ACB the accepted customer belief and this is what this is meant to do it's it's supposed to help you define like this is not talking about us or what we do it's who's the customer and what do they care about what's their pain point right um it and it's you know in marketing language we say well what door are we going in right like we're trying to think of a good example like um there's so in the in the US so how many of you familiar with REI they they are retailer of outdoor products right so they um have this core below this understanding that their customers are people who are passionate about the outdoors they really care about getting outside right and so they ultimately came up with this idea to say look we're going to take this really unconventional step of closing our stores on Black Friday which you know is the biggest day of retail sales of the year by far in the States right and they say we're going to close on Black Friday and we're going to use that as a chance to reinforce to our customers that we want them to get outside and enjoy a tapest day instead of shopping and go outdoors and say that because they could not have and it was it was like remarkably beneficial for their business for a number of reasons they could not have arrived at that decision without first understanding what their customer cares about right so so that's one um but Rosalie there's there's the other point I really want to drive home that I think is a um people can be tempted to go in the other direction as oftentimes in the early stage of a company you know no one starts a company to say hey I want to be a niche player for a small group of people and just build a small really you know niche business that never gets really big right all of us start companies because we have dreams of world domination right and we have dreams of ubiquity like everyone will use our product or our service and and I love that and I'm not saying that that's the wrong ambition but I also think that the trick to getting there is to starting really narrow first and so the just back to the accepted belief it's not the same for everybody right and so part of what you need to do is build out you know a couple or three different segments or personas and really understand they have very different needs right and I would not be afraid to go I should have mentioned this when we're starting to experiment I would not be afraid to go really deep into one first it doesn't take away your option to go to others later right but the reality is the the discipline you'll build in going deep into one audience building out a marketing engine for them is one you can then reapply later right I mean it's basically if you look at what like Facebook at first was just for Harvard students right and then they learned some of how to apply that and they took it to Stanford and eventually it virally took off but I would not be afraid to go deep early on and then use those insights to help force you to build the and does that answer your question thank you yes nice good we've got time for one more question um if anyone has got one or wants to dig deeper on any one of those points beyond um beyond press releases in your general PR what what are the PR tactics that you see as kind of modern and relevant yeah I think it's really important like any good PR strategy should have multiple prongs to it I think the the temptation that startups sometimes fall prey to is that you focus your PR entirely on the the the people who watch startups right which is like tech press and influencers uh tech press and investor press etc etc and I I do look I do think that's important it's not to say you you shouldn't do that but that's a part of a broader whole and so generally I would think in buckets around there's that stream there's also the um like where is our customer that can be oftentimes like within the verticals that you are there are very focused vertical press whether it's bloggers or influencers or magazine you know publications that are focused and and very narrow niches and I would I would go after those and then I also think it's important depending on your business to look at consumer and lifestyle like there are ways to get even if you're a b2b business frankly because more often than not you're still it's a b2b to there's some sort of consumer at the end of it think about um where are these people going for general like trends and lifestyle and from like here on the stage like people magazine or good housekeeping whatever where they're not going to do an in-depth review on your product but if you can get your product into a cultural conversation I think that's smart as well as you know I would say to more just so much of this has moved to social and influencers I'm not a huge fan of a lot of paid influencer engagements I think those feel very inauthentic but there are ways through sampling products like to people who like the right folks who all showcase it on instagram and talk about it I think it's really important I I've always my view as uh when I was a CMO was always that I left a good portion of our budget for just sampling product I felt like the more people can interact with our product or our service offering and learn about it the higher the likelihood that they'll evangelize it like we can't get out of the gate if no one's actually using it it's true I've got one of but stalls under my fate right now that's right that's right and so you know yeah in that case like how do you get everyone who's using one today like shoot a photo on instagram and talk about it and and you know that then it starts to feel like a community no one likes taking in consumer businesses no one likes to feel like there's something exciting happening in the culture and I'm missing out right so the more you perpetuate the sense of like gosh I'll everyone's like on top of everyone's all over this I gotta I gotta go check it out right and the truth is a lot of that a lot of bb products get adopted bottoms up that way too like Slack was a perfect example right like hey that seems that seems cool everyone I know is using it at work and then they were smart because they created a really easy bottoms up way to you know buy a cheap little license for a three-person team which worked overtime good well if there's no last question I know I said last one before but that was a nice quick answer I'm going to pop Scott's email address in the channel there for you let me get I'm actually gonna put my um put your work on that's fine I'd say use my I'll put my work on in there um but otherwise what I want to do is share my screen I'm just going to show you the rest of the sessions that we've got coming up as well so make sure that you sign up for those so we've just had the building your MVP and then we're gonna on the 27th of May we've got the brain positioning and then on the 30th of June we've got the building a marketing team and 19th of August customer acquisition so make sure you sign up for for those and then we also have a whole bunch of others that are up there as well um but yeah because I would just add oh sorry Michelle go ahead go ahead I was just going to say it everyone first of all thank you guys for joining thank you to Michelle for for organizing I I did want to just um and I'll sincerity say that we've we've come up with this idea of this series to be helpful for you guys so if you have any feedback on how we can make this format work great or you know what kind of content or what anything I love to hear any any observations yeah feel free to you know email Michelle and me or you know whatever works like we really we're not doing this for vanity we want it to be useful so um please keep us posted on that okay yeah so if there are any particular questions prior as well perhaps um of those other sessions coming up that you want Scott to delve into feel free to email those through as well good well great well thank you Scott and thank you everyone for showing up have a wonderful day thank you it was great seeing all of you


I heard that the world is coming to an end this year, so I guess all our problems are over. Notice how easy it is when the world's coming to an end. You can forget about long-term planning, party on. Of course, all of our worlds do come to an end, and sometimes unpredictably. So it's kind of important from time to time to imagine what you would do if you were going to die today for sure. Who would you call? What grudges would you drop? What would you say to your parents, your friends, anybody who's had an influence on your life? And then my advice would be to go ahead and say some of that even though you don't think you're going to die. There's no point in waiting.  So don't put things off forever. We all have a shelf life. Unfortunately, we're thermodynamically unstable, and that means we're doomed, although hopefully not too quickly, but eventually we are doomed. But for now, let's imagine we're going to live long enough to take the final, get a grave, that type of thing. And so it would be a good idea to plan for that. And with that in mind, let's get on with things. Let's talk about equilibrium constants. We'll pick up where I left off. We'll put the problem up again. And we were actually trying to figure out if we knew the equilibrium constant for the synthesis of ammonia at room temperature based on the tables. Could we figure out what the yield would be at some higher temperature where we have to run the reaction? And the answer is we can do that for sure, but we have to make some approximations unless we make some measurements. But here's what we had. We had delta G of formation of ammonia is minus 16.6 kilojoules per mole. Negative. What would you say if somebody came to you and said, hey, I found something interesting in the table. Here's a molecule that has a positive delta G of formation. Most of them are negative, but there are a few in the table. I'll give you an example. Hydrazine. N2H4. Methylhydrazine, I think, is used in rocket fuel sometimes. If you were given that information, what would you say? Since the molecule exists, anybody got any ideas? I'll tell you what I would say. Number one, although hydrazine has nitrogen and hydrogen, like ammonia, I can't make hydrazine and high yield from nitrogen and hydrogen because it has a positive delta G, so it has a tiny K. I could probably make a little bit of it, but not much. Second, hydrazine must be kinetically stable like a human being. Hydrazine must be doomed eventually to fall apart, at least into hydrogen and nitrogen because it's unstable with respect to the elements it was made from. So it's going to fall downhill eventually. And anything like that, usually you want to handle extremely carefully. Those are a lot of things like explosives. They have a big delta G and then, boom, when they detonate, you get them going to products with a lot of energy. But ammonia doesn't have that problem, and we had figured out that the balanced reaction for one mole of ammonia, because delta G refers to one mole of ammonia, is one-half molecular nitrogen plus three-halves molecular hydrogen gives one mole of ammonia. If I double a reaction, I double delta G. That's very important. When delta G of formation is listed, it's per mole. If I make two moles of ammonia, delta G is twice as big, just like two kilograms of ammonia is twice the mass of one kilogram of ammonia. Delta G behaves that way. And we have a formation, excuse me, an equation that relates K to delta G, and there it is, and so we just put in the numbers and we make sure we have the right units. And we get K is E to the plus 6.5963, and that's about 730. That's favorable. That means we're going to get mostly ammonia. Now at the other temperatures, we need to make some assumptions. First, we have to make the assumption because we don't know the heat capacities of the products or reactants that delta H and delta S don't depend themselves too much on temperature. The entropy is different than the enthalpy because there's no entropy of formation. The entropy is referenced to absolute zero temperature, and any kind of molecule or atom at finite temperature has some disorder. It's moving, it's tumbling around, energy is distributed in the molecule in different ways. And the entropy says the energy is going to randomize to the maximum extent possible because that's simply the most likely thing that's going to happen. If we use our equation for the state function of delta G, delta G equals delta H minus t delta S, and the relationship between log of K and delta G, we can set this up at two different temperatures and then find the value of log K for the second temperature if we know the value of log K at the first temperature, and that's how we have to do it. So here we go. For each temperature, I'm going to write log and I'm going to put in parentheses the temperature I'm calling it just to keep track. So log of K at temperature t1 is equal to minus delta G standard at temperature t1 over RT1 and then I'm going to put in delta H and delta S. And I'm going to do the same thing for temperature t2 except I'm going to put in t2. And then, since this is equal to this and this is equal to this, then log K t1 minus log K t2 is equal to the right-hand side here minus the other right-hand side. And I've written that all out here.  And now we have to make an assumption. The assumption we make is that delta H and delta S themselves don't depend much on temperature. So whereas we know that's not quite true but we're going to assume it's true because we don't know the heat capacities. If we assume delta H at t1 is equal to delta H at t2 and we'll just call that delta H and the same for delta S then conveniently because this delta S and this delta S are the same this term goes away. And so we have the natural log of K at temperature t1 minus natural log K at temperature t2 is now equal to minus delta H over R times 1 over t1 minus 1 over t2. This, not surprisingly is very, very similar to the Clausius-Clapeyron equation. The only difference is that we had the vapor pressure. Well, it turns out that if I have an equilibrium between a pure liquid and a vapor pressure at some pressure the equilibrium constant is just the vapor pressure. So this is Clausius-Clapeyron equations just a special case of this more powerful equation. And then because I'm subtracting the logs I can tidy this up and say the natural log of K at temperature t1 divided by K at temperature t2 the natural log of that whole thing is equal to this. And therefore what I need to know from the delta G at one temperature so I can get log K is I need to know delta H for the reaction at some temperature and if I assume it doesn't depend on temperature then 298 will do. So I look that up and I recall that delta H of formation for ammonia for one mole is minus 46,300. It's exothermic joules per mole. So I put that in. Log of K at temperature t1 divided by K at t2 minus 46,300 over r in joules 1 over 298 minus 1 over 598 I put the 0.15 but I didn't want to have this drop over a line because it makes it hard to read that didn't fit and I don't want to make it tiny because it's hard to read. But when I did the calculation I put 298.15 and I find that log of K at temperature t1 divided by K at t2 is equal to plus 9.367 and t1 was 298 because I'm keeping things in order. While we know what K at temperature t1 is so K at temperature t1 divided by K at temperature t2 the exponential function of the log is just the thing and the exponential function of this plus 9 is e to the plus 9.367 and if I solve that using K of t1 is 730 I get K of t2 is equal to 730 times e to the minus 9.367 and so I get a measly 6.24 times 10 to the minus 2 so you can see that my yield went from wildly favorable like 730 to 6% per K by cranking the temperature up that's how a lot of things work and that's why in part cranking the temperature up on the planet just a little bit can shift the equilibrium concentrations of things like a giant teeter totter with unimaginable consequences or we can imagine them but we wouldn't want to live through them necessarily it's not just that it'll be hotter it'll be totally different too and sometimes you don't know all the equilibria going on in the ocean and so you get surprised okay at the highest temperature it's less favorable so if we go up to 798 that's where they run it remember about 500 Celsius then we find with delta H minus 46,300 joules per mole we do the same thing and now we find that log K at T1 divided by K at T2 is equal to plus 11.7 and the bad thing is that it's an exponential function and so now when I multiply by 30 by e to the minus 11.7 I get less than a percent I get 6.05 times 10 to the minus 3 I'll just remark here that the assumption that we've made that delta H and delta S themselves don't change much with temperature is not going to be accurate when you change the temperature hundreds and hundreds of degrees or a thousand degrees that's too far off for that assumption to be any good but if you change a reaction from 25 Celsius to 35 Celsius that's probably going to be a very good assumption and sometimes if you're in the lab and you're optimizing a reaction if you just heat it or just cool it a little bit more use a different solvent that has a higher boiling point that plugs it you suddenly get much higher yield because of this exponential function you can go from 50% to 99% pretty pretty readily and that's just much, much more useful than if you have a reaction that does that kind of thing okay some observations the equilibrium constant depends on the exponential function of the free energy therefore small differences in free energy lead to large changes in the equilibrium constant that's why for a lot of reactions if I see that delta G is some big number of kilojoules from all a negative I can just pretty much assume 100% yield because of this exponential function and likewise temperature because it's in the denominator of the exponential shift the equilibrium greatly as we saw in the last problem now let's try to shift the equilibrium back in our favor we were carrying this out at pressure of one atmosphere and we weren't really asking how much ammonia we got versus how much hydrogen we started with hydrogen's the most expensive reagent in the synthesis nitrogen's pretty much free so we'll do it with respect to the hydrogen but first let's just look at this shifting let's just take a hypothetical reaction A is in equilibrium with B but A and B have different free energies the question is what should the difference in free energy be to get 90% yield of B what should it be to get 99% yield and what should it be to get 99.9% yield which would be essentially considered quantitative and it turns out here it works in our favor so let's assume we run the reaction at 298 and let's just take delta G of this reaction A goes to B plug in 298 and figure out what we need well we want to get 90% of B at equilibrium and that means we have 10% of A and so 0.9 over 0.1 is 9 that's K K is 9 and therefore if we take the natural log of if we solve this excuse we take the natural log and solve this for delta G we get delta G for the reaction should be minus RT log K K is 9 we put in R in joules we put in 298.15 Kelvin and we put in the log of 9 and we find that we only need minus 5.45 kilojoules per mole which is hardly anything for 99% yield the only difference now is we have 99% of B at equilibrium and that means we have 1% of A left over so 0.99 over 0.01 is 99 the log of 99 is fortunately by the way logs work they never get that big even if the numbers are big this case is minus RT log 99 it only goes to minus 11.39 kilojoules per mole so it's not it's just twice and for 99.9 B at equilibrium is 0.999 A at equilibrium is 0.001 so K is 999 but again log 999 doesn't get that big and when I multiply it by minus RT I get negative 17.12 kilojoules per mole for typical reactions that you're likely to pencil out that involve burning a hydrocarbon and getting CO2 and H2O delta G for that reaction is going to be huge and negative and so we can pretty much consider that there's nothing left if in fact the materials pure what's usually left when you burn tons and tons of stuff is the small impurities that aren't written in your chemical equation sulfur mercury, cadmium other things that don't burn uranium, thorium radon other things and all those come out if you burn coal and if you want to burn it cleanly then you have to figure out what you're going to do with all those things for the longest time we didn't care we let all the mercury and the fly ash flow into the ocean and that's why fish may have higher mercury content now I think fish always have some mercury content but I don't think we helped that much okay now let's go back to the harbor process and let's try to squeeze the product we're forced to heat it up we're forced to heat it up so we know K is small but we aren't forced to run at atmospheric pressure and because there's more moles of gas in the reactants than there are on the products I made a comment without saying why we could put pressure on it and force the reactants to go over to products now we're going to do a calculation to show how that actually works let's take our same reaction and let's figure out what the equilibrium constant Kp is in terms of partial pressure the reason I'm using Kp is because all these are gases that's the natural thing to use and even though these are non-integer stoichiometric coefficients when I write the equilibrium constant I always raise the concentration to the stoichiometric power if it's one half then it's the square root of the concentration if it's three halves it's the concentration of the three halves and so forth it's whatever the actual number is and of course non-integer powers don't scare us anymore because we are not going to ever try to solve the equation analytically we're just going to guess the answer and we're so good at guessing by this point that we're going to get it right so let's have a look this looks a little bit messy but we'll go through it step by step by step the definition of Kp is it's products partial pressure of products divided by the standard pressure because Kp has no units divided by the partial pressure of hydrogen divided by the standard pressure raised to the three halves power because it had a three halves in the chemical equation multiplied by the partial pressure of nitrogen divided by the standard and raised to the one half power and then I can use Dalton's law Dalton's law says the partial pressure of an ideal gas is equal to the mole fraction times the total pressure and here I'm using P to be the total pressure therefore if I look on the diagram and it says P is 300 atmospheres then that's the P I'm going to put in there for the total pressure and likewise I can do the same thing here mole fraction of hydrogen times the total pressure and the mole fraction of nitrogen times the total pressure raised to the powers and then I'm going to pull out the mole fractions and separate out the mole fraction part from the P part now I've got this leading term which is all the mole fractions that I'm going to call the yield and then I've got all these pressure terms which I don't care so much about but it seems like the wind's blowing from behind because pressure to the three halves times pressure to the one half I add the X bonus that's just pressure squared P over P naught squared on the bottom P over P naught on the top if I simplify that I end up with P naught over P now we can sort of see how it works when we change the pressure Kp doesn't change because Kp is related to delta G standard and delta G standard is at the standard pressure of one atmosphere therefore when I change the pressure Kp doesn't change when I change the temperature Kp does change both things can change things but here's the thing if Kp doesn't change let's suppose we've got our miserable yield of 0.6% here for K and now I crank this guy up this guy was one before but I crank P up to some huge number like 300 so this is now one over 300 well that means with the X's has to get bigger because P made this term here get smaller and the only way this guy can get bigger is if the mole fraction of ammonia increases like crazy but that's what I just said is that because I've got more gases as reactants if I squeeze down on it I'm going to make much more products these guys will go down and this guy will go up and the harder I push on it the higher yield I get why don't I just push on it to 10,000 atmospheres then the answer is that costs too much money because if I want to squeeze that hard I've got to make a chemical plant where all the pipes are that thick so they can take that pressure and that costs me a ton of money and therefore it's more economical for me to recycle the reactants that I can't quite get into products bleed off the ammonia by condensing it and cooling it and then just go around again at the same pressure that's going to be more economical than trying to run one reaction and get it to go all the way that's just economics of designing a plant economics are important because if the fertilizer costs 10 times as much because I'm doing something in a crazy way then I can't afford to eat okay so let's actually do this calculation this is going to be very long unfortunately so I hope you can follow it but we'll do it step by step by step here's the problem what pressure would it take at 598 the intermediate temperature to boost the yield of ammonia compared to the residual hydrogen by 100 times compared to whatever yield we got at atmospheric pressure so problem 54 we calculated k but we didn't calculate the equilibrium concentrations and we have to assume that the reaction reaches equilibrium in a real chemical process and people don't really care if it reaches equilibrium they just care if they get a pretty good yield of product especially if they're going to recycle the reactants and let's assume that we start with a 1 to 3 nitrogen to hydrogen ratio the stoichiometric ratio for ammonia that'll just simplify our calculations but of course again when you're running a plant you may not actually try to game the system a little bit by putting in much more concentration of something that's a cheaper reagent to drive the equilibrium to the right so you may actually use much more nitrogen than hydrogen as you go to try to convert all the hydrogen over to ammonia I don't actually know how they do it in practice okay the ratio of the mole fractions of ammonia to hydrogen would be at 1 atmosphere that's going to take us a little bit of calculation and then next let's increase whatever this ratio turns out to be by a factor of 100 and then figure out what p naught over p should be p naught's 1 atmosphere so that'll tell us what p should be in atmosphere talking to a chemical engineer we may convert it to psi so they know that they may have things in terms of pounds per square inch because that's how a lot of things are quoted we have to proceed step by step we use the partial pressures then Dalton's law and to convert to mole fractions and we have to be careful to include the powers of three half and one half and I've just rewritten that here so that we can see it again we have k at 598 we got that from before and after everything drops out we have the mole fraction of ammonia in the numerator and in the denominator we have the mole fraction of nitrogen to the one half power and the mole fraction of hydrogen to the three half's power and then we have this term left over p standard over p if we have the same number of moles of gas on both sides it's pretty easy to see that the powers of p here are going to be the same on the top and bottom and in that case if you have the same number of moles of gas on both sides squeezing it won't do anything much because it won't change it and so therefore you don't squeeze it under those conditions we're lucky that we're taking more moles of gas when we make ammonia because that gives us a lever to push on and let's, for the sake of argument start with one half times some number it turns out it won't matter what it is but I'll call it n-naught let's start with one half n-naught moles of nitrogen we have three times as much hydrogen therefore we have three halves n-naught moles of hydrogen initially before we actually conduct the reaction so we have no NH3 this is our initial condition the number of moles of nitrogen starting out is three halves n-naught the number of moles of hydrogen is one half n-naught and the number of moles of ammonia and now we let a fraction alpha of the reactants react and for some reason which I don't actually know myself whenever chemists deal with gases the fraction that reacts is alpha and whenever they deal with solutions the molarity that reacts is X but anyway it doesn't matter what you call it it's an unknown and we're going to try to solve for the fraction alpha that gives products based on the value of K and a very, very messy equation which would intimidate everybody if they thought they had to solve it exactly because it could be potentially quite different to quite difficult to solve now this fraction alpha is a number we're going to try to get it has no units and it's between zero and one if alpha is one then all of it reacts to ammonia that's 100% yield if alpha is zero that's what we started with here and that's what I've written whenever I set up an equation like this I always put in alpha or X or whatever it is the range it can be because I want to know where I should guess in chemistry all these things are positive numbers and they aren't imaginary numbers or anything else funny and that helps you a lot if you have to guess in two dimensions it gets very, very much harder to do you may need a computer to do that and I see that it all works out it makes sense when alpha is equal there's no reactants left over it's all products when alpha is zero there's no products it's all reactants and I see that they're going away in the right way and that's because I put the three halves and the one half here and not some crazy thing here trying to multiply that by three halves which is a very, very confusing and bad strategy but let's figure out the partial pressure or let's figure out the mole fraction so we can get the partial pressure to figure out the mole fraction we have to add up the total number of moles of reactants and products we now know if a fraction alpha reacts how many moles of nitrogen, hydrogen and ammonia we've got now let's add them up so we add up the number of moles of nitrogen plus the number of moles of hydrogen plus the number of moles of ammonia the three halves and the one half add up to two the one minus alpha was in both of these guys so I get two times quantity one minus alpha times n naught and this guy here was alpha times n naught and if I expand this out I get two minus two alpha plus alpha so I get two minus alpha times n naught that's the total number of moles when alpha is zero there's two moles because there's three half moles of hydrogen and one half mole of nitrogen when alpha is one there's one mole because there's one mole of ammonia so again I check put in zero and one and I make sure it makes sense that I haven't done some sort of logical error in setting it up and then I've got this equation here for the total number of moles the mole fraction is just the number of moles of each of these guys divided by the total number of moles and I just very patiently work it out I don't try to shortcut it and for the mole fraction of nitrogen I get three halves times one minus alpha times n naught divided by two minus alpha times n naught and you see n naught goes away it doesn't matter we're talking mole fractions so it has to go away and therefore the mole fraction of nitrogen is three halves times one minus alpha divided by two minus alpha and I don't sweat about that any further at this point and just leave it like that then I move on to hydrogen sorry I'll fix this this was meant to be hydrogen because hydrogen has the three halves I'll fix this before I post these slides this is meant to be the mole fraction of hydrogen not nitrogen and likewise this one is also backwards but fortunately it won't matter since they're multiplied by each other so I think the rest of the calculation is okay and for hydrogen we should have a three halves instead of a one half but it's basically the same thing we get a number and we get one minus alpha divided by two minus alpha and then the mole fraction of ammonia is again the number of moles of ammonia divided by the total and both of them depend on how far the reaction goes the top part is alpha n naught the bottom part is two minus alpha times n naught so now I have alpha over two minus alpha and the thing I want to emphasize is that this is a very simple reaction and yet I could potentially have alpha to the fifth power here to solve and that's why I don't advise trying to solve things analytically there is a formula for a quadratic for the roots AX squared plus BX plus C there's a formula there's a formula for a cubic it's pretty big there's a formula for a quartic AX to the fourth plus BX cubed plus CX squared plus DA okay that formula is 28 pages long says here are the four roots X1 equals ABC raised all these power and then amazingly for a quintic equation it was shown quite a long time ago that there is no formula for a general quintic equation it's not that we can't figure it out it's that it doesn't exist in terms of raising things to a power multiplying things adding, subtracting and dividing and those are the weapons we have in arithmetic the fact that it suddenly at five becomes different is very mysterious to a mathematician and fascinating and as you go beyond five none of them have formulas that you can write down but you can always guess the answer for the one you want the funny roots that are negative and imaginary we just want the positive real number that's the pressure or mole fraction of the gas so we don't have to be intimidated by that and I'll just remark here mole fractions don't depend on n-naught of course so if your mole fraction depends on n-naught you did something wrong I usually put n-naught in because I like to see it go away but a shortcut is to just say n-naught's one and leave it out it's a little risky because if you make an arithmetic mistake you won't catch it okay now let's substitute in those horrible things for the mole fractions and we get this my goodness gigantic equation at the start of the quarter this would have been so intimidating imagine if I had given you this with no explanation and said solve it for alpha you'd be gone for two weeks and when you came back you'd be looking terrible you wouldn't have any coffee in your apartment either but now this is a breeze because you know alpha's between 0 and 1 and you're going to guess the answer and I'll show you how we guess the answer fairly quickly doesn't matter how intimidating it is because they're all the same we don't care if we can write down the exact solution now the first thing here is that when you've got fractions within fractions they are extremely confusing and prone to error you have to be very careful if I write three four line, same size five I don't know whether I mean three-fifths three-fourths divided by five or three divided by four-fifths and unlike multiplication division is not associative I have to know the order that I'm doing the operations and therefore you have to get used to writing great big lines here and then tiny ones here to indicate which is done first and I like to put these things in braces to say look do this first before you do it and I do not keep these things in here for very long, I write it down and then the fastest thing I do is try to get rid of it and the way I get rid of it is never by dividing because division is prone to error for the reasons I just said I get rid of it by multiplying like crazy by stuff until I clear out all the junk out of the stable there so I have to find some way to clear things out especially denominators in the denominator I don't like those I'm going to focus on denominators in the denominator and I'm going to clear those guys out of there as fast as I can by multiplying by the appropriate thing and if the talk gets messy so be it so here let's clear out the two minus alpha squared and let's clear out the numbers and here's what we have originally I've just tidied it up a bit three halves to the three halves one half to the one half one minus alpha over two minus alpha to the three halves plus one half which is squared I see this thing down here I multiply the top and the bottom by two minus alpha squared to get rid of this guy I see these numbers here with fractions in them I don't like them I multiply the top and the bottom by two to the one half I just turn it upside down keep the power the top and the bottom by two thirds to the three halves that clears out this, this and that and finally I can simplify my result I get a lot of spinach on the front square it a two two thirds to the three halves power then I have the alpha I had here I had a two minus alpha here so when I multiply by two minus alpha squared I pick up a two minus alpha the other stuff is gone in the bottom I have one minus alpha quantity squared and then I have my p naught over p so it's not so bad but this is not so easy either my goal now is given a value of k p solve for alpha assuming that p is equal to p standard in other words solve for the mole fraction of ammonia versus hydrogen at one atmosphere pressure and 598.15 kelvin and I go straight to putting in the numbers 0.7698 is a square to two times two thirds to the three halves power k p at 598 was 0.0624 near enough p standard so that's one and now I have an equation with alpha in it and a target to hit that doesn't depend on alpha and that's the conditions for guessing and furthermore I have a range on alpha between 0 and 1 if I know nothing at all I can play a game of cut in half guess 0.5 if it's too big guess 0.25 and then subdivide that's called the bisection method you don't have to actually do it that way because there are faster ways to guess but let's look when alpha is 0 this whole side here is 0 so alpha equals 0 is too small when alpha is equal to 1 or near 1 this thing blows up to a huge number because 100% yield means k is infinity and k is nowhere near infinity k is small so I know alpha is going to be small and based on that guess I'm going to go ahead and guess some values of alpha and if I don't know anything I'm going to put in 0 I get 0 my target value is 0.0624 and I say that's too small now the question is what should I put in and one trick is if k is small put in k just try it you know a number 0.0624 it's pretty small put it in see what you get that's what I did put in 0.0624 and out popped 0.10588 I don't believe all those digits but I like to write them down just to see what they are my target is still 0.0624 now it's too big now I went up by 0 to 0.6 and the function went up from 0 to 0.1 therefore I'm going to guess something about half way in here and this is what I picked 0.31 about half and sure enough this is 0.05 aha now it's looking pretty good because now I can see how it's behaving I want 0.0624 now it's too small but now I can see about how much I need to bump this up to get this to go from 0.05 to 0.06 and it's about 0.04 so that's what I guessed and bingo I get 0.06549 little too big I want 0.624 but now I'm very close and I've got two estimates here and so I can zoom in pretty well and I guess 0.038 and I get 0.06202 just a wee bit small and now I have two estimates here I know it's between here and I know it's closer to this one and I guess 0.0382 and bingo to at least three digits it's on so I'm going to quit here and say look this is close enough the value of alpha that's between 0 and 1 and that's real that solves this equation is 0.0382 I think that's really 0.0382 2 is even closer so that's the value of alpha now we have to go back and figure out what the ratio of the mole fraction of ammonia hydrogen is but we have that because we have a value of alpha so we take the ratio of those two and if we simplify it the mole fraction of ammonia is alpha over 2 minus alpha the mole fraction of hydrogen this might be a mistake again I'll fix it sorry half it should be 3 halves times 1 minus alpha over 2 minus alpha and so instead of 2 I should have 2 thirds here 2 thirds alpha but let's just follow it through assuming we get this if I put in the value I got then the ratio of the product to the major expensive reactant is 0.07948 I got about 8% yield based on how much hydrogen I used now if I want to increase the yield this is actually with respect to nitrogen but it's worse with respect to hydrogen anyway to increase the ratio by 100 we just say well we want this number instead of to be 0.07 we want it to be 100 times bigger so this number the ratio should be 7.4 0.948 this will be another number when I fix it and if you solve that that's easy to solve for alpha that's about 0.8 and so I'll let you figure out if alpha is 0.8 and you know Kp and you know the formula for it it's simple to figure out what the pressure should be and you'll easily see that it'll be a couple of hundred atmospheres and that's exactly what they use and so that explains exactly how they're thinking sorry for the confusion between nitrogen and hydrogen and I guess I knew I was going to be confused because I said I personally find these Kp problems to be the ones that require the most care they're the easiest ones to get wrong they're the toughest ones to figure out because you end up with a lot of fractions the equations that we have to solve in the end if we've got a big reaction the equations are absolutely intimidating they have things to all kinds of powers yes how many don't copy down something wrong because that's not going to help you which slide? this one? this is just the equation to solve for alpha this part's okay because luckily the juxtaposition cancels out so this is the numerical equation to solve for alpha here but it doesn't matter how intimidating the equation is because you know alpha's between 0 and 1 so it's fairly easy to get it guessing is the most efficient way as long as you only have to obtain one answer if you have to obtain things versus a variable you're going to have to you don't want to be guessing over and over although if you don't change the pressure much your last guess is a pretty good estimate for the next guess so you can kind of creep along like a snake and you're close and then you just guess the next value and you watch the yield go up as you turn the pressure up so you know alpha's going to get bigger and you just guess a little bigger and you zoom in on it and then you can plot it if you've got a graphing calculator this is the thing to do is to graph it but don't graph it between 0 and 1 because usually at 1 it blows up to infinity and your graphing calculator just shows you nothing because it gets too big and it can't scale it to fit on the display therefore I usually graph it between 10% and 90% so it's not too big and if it's not in the range I need there then I zoom in here where I need it I graph it from that range and that gives me an estimate of what value of alpha will hit the target that I want to get for Kp so a graphing calculator can help speed things up a lot or if you have a spreadsheet obviously okay equilibrium is dynamic and that means that even though at equilibrium the concentrations don't change that does not mean that the reactions have stopped they have not stopped they are continuing to occur and what it means is that they're balancing out I've got two jugs of water and one reaction is pumping water into one side and one reaction is pumping water into the other side and they're cancelling out so that the level of water is staying fixed but if I look in detail it's chaos things are moving around all over the place all the time because the reactions can still occur and they do ammonia some of it goes backwards to make hydrogen and nitrogen and some nitrogen and hydrogen if I take any chemical reaction and look at it microscopically then it can certainly in principle run backwards because that can serve energy too there's no difference and to assume even though we'd like to to assume that an unlikely reaction running backwards a disfavored reaction never happens is too unlikely steps in and says no, no, no that's too unlikely the unlikely thing has to happen sometimes you have to get hit by lightning occasionally that happens and in fact if you look at how many lightning strikes there are on the planet all the time it's amazing that you haven't been hit yet but of course no matter the lottery don't seem to realize that their chance of winning the lottery is about a million times less than getting hit by lightning and yet they aren't worried about getting hit by lightning but they somehow think they're going to win the lottery humans have a bias for positive things if you give people bad news they say the first reaction is I don't think that's going to happen that's a natural human reaction if you give them good news and a chance they say I'm in I can win I can fantasize what I'm going to do with the money too but then when you enter and play you lose of course because they don't build those giant casinos by losing a ton of money and in fact it's interesting psychologically if you study people get addicted to gambling when you lose there's never any remark the machine doesn't say you lost you're going broke watch out it's just quiet and then when you win even a quarter and when you think back you only remember winning because those are the only memorable moments you talk to people who go to Las Vegas everybody won nobody says usually I got cleaned out first of all it makes you seem like a sucker nobody wants to actually broadcast that but second of all you may actually be misremembering because you actually remember the big deal when you win they have that psychology figured out that's how they make money let's talk quickly about homogeneous reactions it's a simple term you can think of milk they homogenize milk so that the cream doesn't separate out on the top and homogeneous means that it's all in one phase like all gases or a single solution if you've got a homogeneous equilibrium the reactions never go a hundred percent and the reason why they never go a hundred percent is that it turns out even if the products are wildly favorable it's always even more favorable to contaminate the products with a little bit of the reactants and the reason why is that when you contaminate the products with a little bit of reactants they get to mix and mixing is entropically favorable so rather than being a pure thing which has too low entropy the products will spontaneously give a little bit of reactants so they can mix with them because they're all in one phase and then that turns out to be the most favorable outcome sometimes of course there's hardly any reactants left if the reaction is very very favorable but in principle there's always a little on the other hand if you have heterogeneous equilibria so you have more than one phase like a solid turning into a liquid a phase transition or a gas reaction coming down on a solid surface then because there are two phases these reactions can go 100% and the big difference is that by the definition of phase phases don't mix and if there's no chance to mix then there's no penalty in making 100% of the product because you can't mix with the other guy anyway because he's a different phase than you are and therefore you can go 100% all phase all type one phase transitions are like this so for example if the temperature is above zero Celsius and the pressure is one atmosphere there is no ice none present at equilibrium it's all liquid water because ice to water is a heterogeneous reaction and if the temperature is below zero and the pressure is one atmosphere there is no liquid water present at equilibrium it's all ice same reason and likewise if we have the temperature at exactly zero we could have any amount of ice and water we can't say what the concentration is if we have the pressure exactly at the vapor pressure of water then the container will have a certain concentration of vapor but the amount of water in the bottom can be anything as long as it's enough that it doesn't all evaporate and if the pressure is higher than the vapor pressure that means that if I had the thing in a piston and the pressure is higher than the vapor pressure that the piston comes down right on the surface of the water it's one left it's 100% water once the pressure exceeds the vapor pressure as long as there's nothing else in there and if it's exactly the vapor pressure I have depends how far I pull it up I could have a lot of vapor and a little water and a little vapor and therefore heterogeneous equilibria we don't have this fraction alpha that goes to this and that it's usually all or nothing and we decide based on looking at the reaction which way will a reaction go well, this is pretty obvious if K is large we're going to get products if K is small we're going to stick with reactants and if K is 1 if delta G is 0 we present roughly equal amounts but not exactly equal because we could have three halves of hydrogen and one half of nitrogen for example and so they would be in a three to one ratio if I have a reaction like this one propane going back and forth to cyclo propane you don't need to know what these are right now but they're three carbon molecules and let's suppose KC is 1 for this well KC is the concentration of the products over the reactants at equilibrium and that's 1 then if I just multiply through by the concentration of one propane I come to the conclusion that the concentration of cyclo propane at equilibrium, whatever it is is equal to the concentration of one propane so it's 50-50 so K is near 1 you can think it's going to be a big mess a big mixture of things if K is huge that means delta G is big and negative it's going to be all products and if K is tiny it's going to be all reactants you aren't going to get much material okay let's do one more let's try to decide on an initial condition whether the reaction will go backwards or forwards from where we start because sometimes we have to figure out something somebody dumps something into a river by mistake and we have to figure out if it's going to precipitate or if it's going to dissolve and get in the ground water and what we can do to lock it down maybe so it doesn't get in the ground water we're going to clean it up and we'd like to know how much of whatever we're going to add we need to add because we don't want to add too much that usually costs money and sometimes if we add too much then a lot of it will be left over then we have to clean that up because it's not supposed to be there in the first place well we can decide which way it's going to shift fairly easy if K, if Q the quotient wherever you start is bigger than K that means you've got too many products and that means that if you start at this condition with too many products the reaction is actually going to go backwards so the reaction shifts to the left to the products excuse me to the reactants chemists always write reactants on the left if Q is smaller than K that means we haven't made enough products yet then the reaction will run forwards until it makes enough products so that Q comes up to the value of K and once the water lines are equal it's just going to sit there and if Q equals K nothing further happens that we can see in terms of measuring concentration they still run both ways but there's no net change still lots of chemistry occurring but no net change and let's do one example so at 1400 Kelvin Kc is 4.7 this is the first stage of the harbor process where you make you take methane and water those are two things you can get a hold of and you get carbon monoxide and hydrogen you get three moles of hydrogen and because you're making more moles of gas here you predict that this reaction is going to be favorable roughly speaking if you heat it because of the increased delta S and that's why you heat it up so you heat it up like crazy you're making this and if we know this value it's 4.7 and we start out with this concentration 0.035 molar H2O 0.05 molar methane 0.15 molar carbon monoxide and 0.2 molar H2 which direction is it going to run is it going to make us more of the hydrogen or are we going to lose our hydrogen well we just put in the reaction quotient and we have to put in the hydrogen cubed because there's a three and then we put in the numbers carbon monoxide 0.15 hydrogen 0.2 cubed 0.035 0.05 and we get Q is 0.69 ah ha but K is 4.7 so because Q is less than K we're going to make more hydrogen if we run this reaction we can start like this and sit there and we will get more hydrogen out than what we started with if Q were bigger than K then we would have too much of something there and then it would run backwards okay I think that's plenty for today