What is up, everybody? Welcome back to the channel. In this video, you guys, I'm gonna simply walk you through lead capture, bottom line. How do we run a Facebook ad to a landing page, okay? This right here, you guys, is really, all there is to it, man. For majority of you guys that are watching this video, you guys are in some type of business where a lead or a scheduled appointment or a sell is what you're looking to do, right? How do we run Facebook ads to make one of those three things happen? Lead capture or to get someone to schedule an appointment or to even make a sell, right? Those three things, you guys, that's really what it all comes down to. People that are running Facebook ads are really ultimately trying to achieve that goal. But here's the problem. After speaking to thousands, literally, man, there's no exaggeration on this. After speaking to literally thousands of local small business owners, okay? I've been doing this since 2016, focused on one niche, social media marketing, Facebook advertising, and then realized that the same strategy applies to every business.  You're looking to run Facebook ads. You're looking to capture leads. You're looking to make sells. It's the same strategy. It comes out of the same ad. And so after speaking to thousands of agents, real estate agents, real estate brokers, local business owner, whatever. After speaking to so many, there's two main things that I hear, okay? Two main things. And you guys, I'm telling you, man, I'm giving you game right here. I'm saving you so much time on having to figure this stuff out yourself. After speaking to so many of these people, there's really two main answers that I would always get back. When I asked the question, have you ran Facebook ads? Or do you know how to run Facebook ads? There's only two answers that I've heard literally thousands of times. And one answer would be, yeah, David, I ran an ad, but it really didn't get me anything. It didn't really net me what I thought I was gonna get, which was a lead.  So answer number one, I would always get, yeah, David, but it just didn't work. I didn't see any leads come in. I don't know what I did wrong. I don't know what happened. That's always answer number one. And then answer number two is they'll say, yeah, David, I boosted a post. I spent 15 bucks and ran one back in January.  And they ran it for four days back in January.   I'm telling you, man, thousands and thousands of times I've heard this, those same two answers, man. And so here's the deal. I'm gonna walk you through the basics. I'm gonna really show you what it takes to capture a lead using a landing page. This is what you have to do. If you're not doing this, you're not gonna capture a lead, bottom line. And so what I've always experienced and what I've seen is that when you come into the ads manager and you click that green button, create, and the way you get to the ads manager is come to your page, click on create, come down to add, and that will take you back over here to the ads manager, okay? This is where everyone gets it wrong. Nine out of 10 times, this right here is where people get it wrong. They'll have a video. Let's say, for example, they're promoting their business with some type of video. The objective is to capture leads, right? But they'll come in here and they'll choose video views, which is obvious and seems logical, right if it's a damn video, video views. But video views is not going to allow you to achieve your goal. It's not gonna capture leads. That's not a lead capture ad. It's a video view ad. So you're literally paying Facebook to run it and get thousands of people to view it based on your budget obviously, right? Thousands of people to view it. That's exactly what that is. It's not lead capture. A lot of people will do engagement and they'll post it, they'll run an ad and they'll do it under engagement. And all engagement is engagement.  And I always tell people, I'm like, dude, I don't really like that. I don't really care for that because I don't wanna have to micromanage my comments. I don't wanna have to be glued to my phone all damn day replying to comments. Like I need to automate this. I need to systemize this. I need that person to click, go to a page, enter their information, receive an email.  Like I don't wanna be lifting a finger, right? And so engagement is lifting a finger more than I want to. And it's micromanaging the activity that's going on with that specific ad. That is engagement. People like it, people comment, people share it. You're glued to your phone, trying to reply to comments coming in and trying to turn these people into leads. Like I think it's a joke. Traffic is when you're driving people to your landing page, but at the same time, that landing page better be top notch because if I'm not convinced, the moment you land on that page or the moment I land on that page, then I'm gone. You're literally paying for traffic to a page and that's it, very vague, right? Very, very vague. But the traffic consideration, that's also good. It is good in the sense where you wanna at least warm up your pixel. You wanna at least get Facebook to know who your audience is. So if you're targeting a specific audience and you're running under traffic and people are actually clicking and getting to your page, but for whatever reason they're not opting in, at least Facebook is learning what types of people are landing there. So you can then build up that pixel and even create custom audiences of people who are landing there. They may not have opted in, but at least they landed there. And so it at least allows you to build an audience, build a custom audience around people that are landing there. So therefore you can start retargeting them again. So traffic would be good to build the audience and retarget in the future, to collect data of interested people that have not opted in, that you can build an audience around and continue to retarget. But again, that's not really gonna achieve our goal. It's not gonna get us right now what we want, which is a lead, right? An opt-in, a purchase, whatever it may be, that's not really gonna happen with traffic either. Brand awareness, not gonna happen. Reach, not gonna happen. So messages, if you wanna do messages and set up something like ManyChat, that's a whole nother freaking ballgame. Like ManyChat is really confusing to me. Some of you guys are freaking nerds at it and really good at it, right? But ManyChat is super, me personally is confusing.  So that's why I never, I hate receiving message ads. Message ads, I hate.  So maybe that's just me. That's just me, that's why I don't run messages. Lead generation, that's when you don't have a landing page. So this video is gonna be based on running an actual ad to a landing page. That's what this whole video is about. That's not gonna happen with lead generation. Lead generation is when you don't have a landing page. So if you don't have a landing page and you wanna use Facebook's lead form, you can use lead generation. The only reason why I don't use lead generation, because then you gotta integrate Zapier and now you gotta pay for Zapier. You can use it free for so long, but then you gotta end up paying for it. Zapier is an integrated third party software that talks to Facebook. So when leads come in through this objective, Zapier then connects that lead or transfers that lead to your CRM. Therefore you don't have to physically do it. Because if you don't do something like Zapier, and let me pull it up for you so you guys can at least read about it and know about it. If you're gonna run lead generation, you definitely don't have to implement this or integrate this, I should say. Look at the pricing. So let's just go straight to pricing.  If you don't have a landing page, then what I'm saying is you're running lead generation, but then you're also paying for Zapier. So Zapier can take that lead automatically and import it into your CRM or your auto responder. So I just look at it where it's like, okay, if I'm gonna pay for Zapier, I might as well pay for a landing page software that comes with my email automation and my calendar. So it's like, that's why I use Cartra for everything. There's a 14 day trial in the description, profitwithCartra.online. I'd rather just pay for that because it comes with everything I'm gonna need, calendar, email automation and my landing pages. I'd rather pay for that than have to pay for Zapier just so I can run lead generation ads and have it automatically transferred over for me. Because if I don't use Zapier, if I don't use some system like this, look, starter, 20 bucks a month, right? It's like, dude, and that's per month billed annually. So right now, or look, dude, it's 25 bucks a month, dude, 24.99, for $99 a month, I use Cartra. So it's like, dude, that's why this Zapier, it's a joke to me. And that's for lead generation. So if you don't use Zapier, then you have to physically download that lead. So when you run lead generation, lead that do come in. And lead generation is a simple forms. Let's see if we can actually find one.  You guys seen it a million times. I'm sure you clicked on different ads. I don't wanna waste too much time on this part. Let's see if I could just find one. Here goes John, he's taking me to a landing page. For sure, he's not using lead generation. But let's see if I can find a random ad that takes me to, that's download. Yeah, it's taking me to, see nine out of 10 ads you guys are taking me to a landing page, okay? Nine out of 10. But you do have that one out of 10 that's running lead generation. And yeah, see, take me to a landing page. You do find that one out of 10 that's running lead generation and using a simple form. So let's see if this guy is. So landing page, everyone's taking me to a landing page. So let's see if I can King Kong this guy, taking me to a landing page. But you guys know what I'm talking about, right?  That's a Facebook form. That's a lead generation. But again, if you're not using Zapier, let's try to click on one more. Yeah, landing page. So if you're not using Zapier, a third party integration software like that, then when you collect that lead, that person clicks on the ad, a lead form pops up, that information is put in, that lead is then in your inbox. It's in your Facebook page, I should say.  Let's go to the Facebook business page real quick. You'll see that lead over here in your business page, okay? So if we click on more, let's see if I'm pretty sure it's under publishing tools. Yeah, right here. So lead ad forms. You'll see that lead over here. So if I'm not using Zapier, then I have to micromanage this part. Then I have to come in here, download that lead and put it into my CRM. And you better have some type of CRM. If you're running ads and capturing leads, you better have some email automation on the back end to nurture that list. Bottom line, without that, you don't even run an ad. Like that's what I'm saying. I use Cartra for the landing pages, for the email auto responder and for my calendar and for many other things like my membership course and all that stuff. But it's mainly landing page email auto responder and your calendar, right? Because again, if it's not for Cartra, you're gonna have to use three different softwares to do all those three different things. So with this again, I'm gonna have to download that lead and then upload it to my CRM, right? And with my CRM, with most of the CRMs out there, email auto responders, you're spending about a hundred bucks a month just for that.  Like after you cross 2,000 leads on that, for example, you gotta start paying. So that's why this right here, I don't really do lead generation at all. But again, you'll find a few people that do do it. And so at the end of the day, you guys, it's all about conversions, man. You have to get a landing page software and start running conversions, okay? So a landing page software allows me to just build simple landing pages. Here's a landing page, for example, I'm gonna show you an example with this and how we set it all up. Here's the opt-in page, okay? So here's what it is. Let me just get down to the details. We're running conversions. So 9.99999% of the time at a 10, you're running conversions. If you're looking to capture lead, make a sell, schedule appointments, you're running conversions, okay? But here's what has to be set up first. The ultimate goal when it comes to your page, when it comes to a simple opt-in, you have the landing page and then when they opt-in and put in their information and click on download now, then they're taken to the thank you page, right? This is what we call the thank you page, the confirmation page. This is the second page. Here's what's super important. So if you guys are taking notes, here's all you need to know. Conversions is the one we're gonna go with, right? But we have to set up a custom conversion before we do it, okay? So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna come up here to the dots, we're gonna click on events manager, and we're gonna set up a custom conversion around the thank you page, okay?  You would tell me to capture a lead. And what you would also think that it's all about getting people to this page, your landing page, which it is, right? That's the goal, right? To get people to the landing page so they can then opt-in, right? That's the goal. When it comes to conversions, Facebook wants to know your ultimate goal. What is your ultimate goal? Your ultimate goal is to capture a lead, right? Therefore, our ultimate goal is to get people here. The goal is to get them to the landing page. The ultimate goal is to get them here because anybody who lands here filled out the form is my ultimate goal. So how do I get people here, right? That's what Facebook wants to know. And so Facebook wants you to set up a custom conversion. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab the link, I'm gonna grab the URL right here. And you don't need the HTTPS, you could just grab the backend part but grab the whole thing, okay? We're gonna copy that and then we're gonna come over here to the events manager and we're gonna click, we clicked on the three lines, we clicked on events manager and then make sure you're in the right account right here where it says open, hit that drop down, make sure you're in the right account. And what we're gonna set up is a custom conversion, okay? This has to be set up first. So you click on custom conversions, you come over here to the blue button, you click on the blue button right there and we're gonna let Facebook know, hey, this is the page that we're looking to get people to, okay? So what we're gonna click on is we're gonna click on hit the drop down, we can go with contains and we're gonna simply paste in that URL, okay? And we're gonna go all website traffic, no page view event detected, you'll need to add page view event to your pixel. Okay, yeah, so the pixel isn't set up on this one. This is a brand new account that I just set up.  In fact, stay to the end of this video, you'll see a video come up at the end on how to install your pixel. That needs to be done first, okay? The pixel, install your pixel. I forgot that this is a new page, this is a new account and the pixel is not on this page. So, okay, so install the pixel first and then once you do that, then you paste in that URL right there and then right here I can name it, I can name it, I can go with, let's go with buyer leads, okay, bottom line because that's what it is, buyer leads. And then in the category, I'm gonna go with lead and there's different options. So based on what you're trying to do, what you wanna do is you wanna create a custom conversion around these few things. Add to cart, custom conversion, even initiate checkout. Initiate checkout could be a custom conversion, lead custom conversion and purchase custom conversion. Okay, those are in an even schedule. You can even build a custom conversion around schedule as well and that's pretty much it. But for sure, lead and purchase. So with the purchase, for example, I go to your webpage, I put in my credit card information, I click purchase. That next page that you take me to, that thank you page, that confirmation page, that's what you're putting right here, okay? So you're taking that URL, you're pasting it in right there and that could be an actual, the category would be purchase. So now, okay, and then you can add the value if it's a purchase or again, in this case, I'm gonna leave it under lead.  Once you click create, okay? Once you click create, now you have a custom conversion and that would show right here, okay? That's gonna show right here, you'll see that new custom conversion and again, it's all based around this thank you page URL, okay? Here's what you do next. Then now that we have our custom conversion setup, now we can run a conversion ad, okay? Here's what we're gonna do. We come back to the ads manager, we click on the green button. Yeah, I should have set up the pixel on this page but again, that's not what I wanted to do. So stay to the end, you'll see that video on how to install your pixel. So now I'm back in the dashboard, right? Click on the green one, then I can come over here, hit conversions. Now it's time to capture leads, you guys. Now it's time to capture leads using my landing page and if you're in real estate or if you're looking to hire people or if you're in credit, make sure that you choose one of these categories because if you're a real estate agent and you're not checking this box, your ad will get rejected, okay? Or if you're in employment or credit, your ad will get rejected. So housing, let's say for example, we're a real estate agent, we're looking to capture leads, we got conversions. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna hit continue. And in the ad set, this is where we tell Facebook, hey, I'm looking to drive people to this conversion. I'm looking to optimize for conversion. Here's the page I'm looking to drop, take them to. So we come over here and then boom, right when I hit that dropdown, I would see the conversion that I just set up, okay? So whether it's purchase, whether it's lead, these are all in here by default until I activate one of them. But it would be, let's say for example, it's the lead one. I just set up a custom conversion. I set it up under lead, that's what I would go with. So I would choose that lead and then I would just come down and finish setting up the ad. Very, very basic, you guys, very, very simple, but I'm telling you, if you're not going with the right objective from the beginning, that's what's throwing off your lead capture. That's why you're not capturing leads. Either you're not building custom conversions and you're not choosing conversions to even begin with. That's the number one thing that I see with local business owners and small business owners is I already know they're trying to capture lead, but the moment I bring them over here to the green button and say, hey, what objective did you go with? They went with video views. They went with engagement. They probably went with lead generation and that's what I'm saying, man. If you're going with lead generation and you don't have a landing page, okay, great. You better have an email automation, an email auto responder set up on the backend because as these leads come in, yes, you're gonna physically upload them to your CRM but it's that CRM, it's that email list that you better be building because you're paying for the lead up front. You better maximize it and try to squeeze the most you can by nurturing the list, okay? People are coming to your page. They're giving you their name and email. You better hit that name and email on the backend and that's your email auto responder, okay? So if you're not sending out emails, if you're not nurturing that list, if you're not building a relationship of people that are actually opting in, none of this stuff's gonna matter. None of this stuff's gonna matter. That's why again, lead generation, you better be micromanaging it or you better have some type of third party software like Zapier. To transfer that lead automated without you having to lift a finger but the best of the best, you guys, the best marketers out there, 10 out of 10 of them are running conversion ads to a landing page, okay? So that right there, you guys is how you do it. Conversions, custom conversion and then driving it to a landing page and building everything around the thank you page URL. Okay, and remember, you don't need to put in the HTTPS. It's just that backend part of the URL. That's what the custom conversion is based on, okay? So hopefully that helped you guys. And again, I use Cartra for everything. For the landing pages, I can build as many landing pages as I need to for the actual email auto responder. So I use that for my email automation, for my calendar and here's the thing, man. Don't estimate the power of email marketing because in that email, just like in your ad, in your ad, as you're running a Facebook ad and Instagram ad, a YouTube ad, there's always a call to action, right? There's a call to action, click, learn more, click, download now, click, freaking whatever. That call to action button, that's the call to action in your ad, especially if you're doing video, even if you're doing image, even if you're running image ads, there's a call to action in your texts, right?  But as that person clicks the button and they come over to your landing page and they enter their name and email, now they're on your email list. And again, that's our email auto responder. In those emails that start to go out, okay? There better be a call to action. And so with my call to action is always my calendar. So there's always the ability to schedule an appointment because that's what I've been doing, right? Building an agency, closing clients, onboarding clients, social media marketing services for clients. So as I'm capturing leads, my emails are going out, building the relationship, building the rapport, keeping my name top of mind, and emailing, right? Emailing on a weekly basis, that list, right? But in those emails, the call to action is to get them to click and schedule an appointment. So those would be that are real estate agents. If you're running an ad for a listing, if you're running an ad for an open house, if you're running an ad for any buyer or seller, right?  They're not even gonna wanna talk to you right away, especially if they don't even know you, especially if you're running ads to a cold market and you're not even building custom audiences and you're not even retargeting. These people don't know you at all. So the ROI is not gonna always come on the front end. The front end is getting that opt-in. The ROI is not always gonna come there. Your ROI is gonna come from the back end when you're nurturing that list.  Like when's the last time you put your phone number into an opt-in form from a person that you never even freaking saw before? Like you're not giving up your phone number at all. So these texts automated platforms, they seem cool, but it's not effective at all. Email remains King Kong and it's only because people are willing to give up their damn email for things that they're interested in right away. Like they'll give up their email all damn day to stuff that they're interested in, right? So it's the email automation, it's that back end where you're either gonna get people to buy your products or you're gonna get people to schedule appointments. That's really what it comes down to, is that email automation. So your email automation better be on point and I use Cartra for everything, for my landing pages, my email automation, my calendar. There's always a link in my emails to get people to my calendar to schedule an appointment.  That's how you run Facebook ads to a landing page. Again, build the custom conversion around the thank you page and continue to drive traffic to this page in hopes of getting people to this one, all right? So hopefully that made sense to you guys. Conversions is where it's at and I'll see you guys on the next video over now.


exciting. Wow, what an entrance. Hello everybody. The topic for the next 30 minutes is community and growth. And I have Holly with me from Kabam, co-founder of Kabam, Gustav, partner at Y Combinator and previously growth at Airbnb, and Donna, now running growth for Greta IO and previously also at TicTail. I thought we would start off, because the topic is really big, growth and community. So maybe start off with what is the difference between growth and community? Or is there a difference? What would you say, Gustav? So I think that the way I view growth, so working at growth at Airbnb for a long time, it's an acceleration that when company gets a certain stage, a lot of things you can do to make the product and the users grow much faster. In the early days of a product, that happens very manually. At Y Combinator, the first advice we give to every company is to go and talk to users, basically spend time with them in person or talk to them on Skype or anything you can do to just get this very intimate communication with them. And it's more than just like surveys. Specifically, the advice we gave is basically when you start off, you can start by just emailing every single new user you have from your own account. So they get a feeling that they can talk to you. How you build a community in your early days, I think community can mean many different things. In the very early days, it just basically means for us or for a new founder, is to do things that don't scale and spend time with users that you can do because you only have a few thousand of them. At some point, you get to a stage when those things won't scale. Literally, you have to scale, but those things don't scale anymore. And that's where a team like a growth team comes into picture. At Airbnb, I was there from, I think we had maybe half a million and a million users, and when I left, it was over a hundred million users. We didn't really measure users, but just give you an idea of when things are at scale, and you have to do things very differently. So at scale, basically, engineering and data science are two very, very important levers on how you grow things. So you basically can't, it's very, very hard to grow to a very massive scale by going out and meeting and talking to every one of the users. You have to find another way to reach them, and that's through technology, marketing, other growth tactics. Great. Difference between community and growth, or are they the same thing? No, I would totally agree with Gustav, but it's also a very different thing when it's like, you're starting off and it's your thousand first users and how you work them, and it's like, as Gustav says, really important when you're in the beginning of doing things that don't scale and trying to find out later on, like, okay, was it here that we could actually take on and now scale it in a different way, and that growth has more to do with product, and then I would say that community is more about communications and how you do traditional marketing. I think for community and growth, I think it's really dependent on the types of businesses that you have, so I only say that because ours is a gaming company. You can kind of think of it as we have players and we have customers, well, everybody's a player, but if you pay money or a customer, and not everybody joins in the community, but for us, particularly in our games, it's almost like a feature or a draw and sometimes it's the actual thing that gets people longer retention and longer engagement, but you absolutely can be a user, a player, or a customer and not be involved in the community at all. So, in some ways, community and growth do impact one another, that's for sure, but they can also be if you're just looking at different things segmented a little bit differently. Exactly, yeah. So, you've all mentioned a little bit like metrics here and especially what it is that you are measuring on the different side of both community and growth. I think one of our goals today is to get as many hands-on, concrete advice as to the entrepreneurs sitting in the audience, so maybe referring to the industries you've been working in, what were the things that you measured on those sites? Yeah, so some of the things that we measure in terms of, so in our games, the way it kind of works is you could join what we call an alliance, and as an alliance, you could go do quests together, you could achieve objectives, so some of the things we would definitely look at because if you were in an alliance, that impacted your retention, and we started caring a lot about these people called regulars, and regulars were people who would log into the game for seven days a week, and we said, if you were a regular, then that meant your contribution to monetization was so much higher, it impacted our LTV so much bigger. So what we started looking at is what makes somebody come back every day over several years, and we've had that in our games for some people, and we found out like it was some people who got involved in the community in terms of the alliances because they wanted to do something together, or at some point, you know, in some ways you run out of spending things on yourself, it's like going to a bar, and there's only so much you can drink as one person, but if you go with a friend, you know, you could go buy something for somebody else as well, so definitely I think for us, measuring how many people were in an alliance, how long they were in an alliance, even one of the more important things, and we'll probably get into a layer is how do you scale the community, so you're not, as what we talked about, like the first 100,000, 5,000 are incredibly important, very hand led, but at some point you kind of have to scale it. Some very tactical advice I would give a new startup is to try to figure out what's the product value that your product is giving users. It's really important to figure that out. Like a representation of a sign up is not really that, it's usually something very specific. In the case of Airbnb, it would be a booking, or travel, I'm literally traveling on Airbnb, and once you figure out what that value is, you want to figure out how often people do it, so we can start measuring retention on how many people are doing this on a repetitive basis, if no one is doing it again, then it probably isn't like a good value, because people aren't doing it again, so if you figure out the product value first, you measure that, and you figure out basically how often are people doing this, and you have some ideal time, the time window that people are supposed to do this, those are the most important things to measure in the early days. If those metrics are good, basically you have a lot of people coming back and doing the things that you want them to do on a regular basis, then you should invest in top of the following growth, get more people to come in and try that for the first time, so Airbnb was in my opinion, and I think most of our users are like a pretty awesome service, so people came in and they booked, and they had a great experience, and our focus on the growth team for a very long portion of the time was basically first time bookers, so people coming in and booking for the first time, and that's, there's many, many metrics in between there, but that was the metric that we focused on. For most startups, I think it's important to figure out what's the one metric that is the representation of the value and representation of new value being created on the platform, and just drive that metric. There's many, many things you can do to do that, and metrics might, could be kind of a technical term to some people, but it's just a representation of users are doing on the site, or on the product, it's just a representation, it is more than just numbers. Yeah, I totally agree, and one thing that I've never done before, but I find really interesting working with DevTools, is the fact that you like metrics with, that is accomplished to like product value, and one thing that we find at Greta that is really valuable is that we actually educate our users in performance, so we can actually see that when users use us and get figures in performance in Asia, for example, which is interesting to some, then they learn more and they feel like, oh, now I'm going to go next, and then you can like reveal different parts of our dashboard, and when they feel like, oh, this value is really important to us, we can actually customize it, and I think that one thing that's really interesting is how driving product value through driving insight for the, like educating the user, that has really been something that I've been looking at, like for the last year at Greta, that I have not been looking at when I've been working in e-commerce, but it's really important when it comes to like developer tools, because then they get more engaged, when they feel like, okay, I'm actually learning something, and then I'm going to put this higher up in my priorities at my work. Yeah, super interesting, when I worked at Slush, we actually used the percentage of international attendees, and I think that's actually maybe a very value-driven metric to follow as well for growth, so we got a question from the audience here, that was actually something that we were thinking about covering regarding online and offline communities and that growth. I think we have an interesting combination here to cover that topic as well. The question is, is the only way to start an online community by starting with offline events, are there any other approaches? In the gaming, we mentioned they would be online first, right? Yeah, so in the gaming world, what's really unique about us is our whole community is built online, because we started with original IP, even if I were to have an event, nobody would really care, and so it was really hard to kind of, like, it just didn't make as much sense. It made much more sense for us to go into online communities, people of some type of interest, and go tell them, so in some ways like an equivalent unscalable kind of way to grow the online community. The one thing that I realized that it's, in general, I personally think it's very hard to convert offline into online, so for us, we also, and this probably is, we'll talk about more later, but we grew a lot through paid acquisition, so what that was is we paid for traffic to come online, and that really was how we ended up growing, taking, not growing, but really scaling our communities, well not our communities, but our games and our users, and when you do do paid acquisition, you have to be, and I'm pretty sure Gustav has a lot of stories around this, you have to be very careful about knowing kind of what we call your unit metrics, or basically your LTV, which is your lifetime value of your customer, because otherwise you can waste a lot of money trying to figure it out, so you have to have already kind of knowing a little bit of the revenue of your customer, so that I think is incredibly important when you're thinking about paid acquisition, I also think very much, it really is a business model thing in the sense of for games, I, how I make money is the players are going to pay me, so I need to provide enough value for that player, I don't care about ads, I don't care about anything else, but if I was Facebook, I wouldn't care as much about, I probably wouldn't do as much paid acquisition, I'd be like free, free, free, please tell other people, here's you know how you're going to grow in terms of some virality, send some invites to some friends, or you can beta some things, so that's really kind of how some, how we did some of the online communities, and how we grew for, for us just purely online, and what's been really interesting for us is many of our online communities have turned into offline events, so I think I was telling you guys earlier, we've had people who like have met and married through our games, I actually met somebody who like, somebody from Kansas, and somebody from Holland who met and married in our Hobbit game, so and sometimes they'll do like, bowling events together with their alliance, or camping and such, so ours has gone the other way, long-winded answer to that. No, no, no, great. Online and offline, so I think, I don't think it really, I think offline is a good way to meet your customers in the early days, but I don't think it's a way to grow really big, and I think with offline events, like community events, that's one specific thing, but you can have offline products, but if you think of something like Uber or something like Lyft or Airbnb, they are growing either through word of mouth, but they're also growing massively online, like basically the way a lot of these companies are acquiring, they're both the riders and the drivers or the host and the guest is online in many ways, so travel specifically is very, very tied to Google, most of us don't travel very often, so when we think of travel we go to Google and we type something in, and that's why some of the largest travel companies in the world, besides Airbnb, like booking in a comm and TripAdvisor, like getting all the traffic from Google, so I think offline events is not a way to grow, but I think it's a great way to meet your first customers and that's how I would start, like I would really, if you want to meet the customers, no matter what you do, you should find a way to meet them on a regular basis in person. We spoke about the kind of word of mouth example earlier as well, and growing a community and growth overall through that, with the travel bag example, right? Yes, yeah. Do you want to tell more about that? Yeah, sure. I have a really great example, so I used to work in New York last year, so I bought a bag called Away, they're a startup, I think they're like two years old, and my bag broke a little, little bit, and I emailed them and I said like, I can't find my receipt, but my inner lining broke, and I covered by the lifetime warranty, I'm based in Sweden, but I bought it in New York, and I was like, I'm not going to get this back, and then they emailed me like three, five hours later and said, what's your address? Here is your, we will send you a new bag from New York immediately, this should not have happened, and then I got the bag from New York seven days later, and during that time I could actually follow the bag with the UPS and they had done it so nicely, and at that time I went from like being angry, because this bag had been with me for a year and it already broke, and to being like, this is the best bag I've ever had, and they also, at that time, which is when it comes to referral, people like, oh 10% discount here and there, but they did the timing so well, I have not, not gotten a discount code before, but now when I was like very pleased, they were like, share this with your friends, spread the words, here's $20 off, and I think within like eight days I've told this to more than a hundred people, this is like, this is a really good growth method, I think, like focusing on your customers. I think what's so cool about that method is like, usually afterwards, I just get a survey, like how did you like this, or how did you feel, and sometimes I can't even remember how I felt or whatnot, it's very in the moment, but this one you could clearly tell how they felt by their action, that's one thing I noticed like with consumer, people will say anything, but it's more important what they do, and I thought that that was such a clever thing that they did, because they can measure like exactly how far this code wins, which is pretty cool, you might think they're top refer. Yeah, and I mean, I wasn't like talking about community and growth, and that I wasn't engaged before, but now I'm like, this is the best bag ever, everyone should buy it, and I'm also considering buying more, I was not thinking that before. Don't I sharing the code to everybody? Yeah, what's the code? You'll get it all sent out. How did you do growth through word of mouth, and maybe also customer service at Airbnb? Yeah, so one tactical advice to startups is that if you're trying to figure out what to do for growth, is you can just start asking your users how they first heard about the product. Now there's two ways to do that, one is to look at the Google Analytics traffic sources, I'll give you some insights, they won't give you all of it, so you can literally have a survey at sign up or at landing that will ask you the most common reasons why you heard about the product. That just gives you a start, it'll start giving you ideas. If you have a great product, it's very likely, like in Airbnb's case, that a lot of users will hear about you from word of mouth, so they'll hear about you from friends. Word of mouth is a strong driver, it's hard to accelerate it because it often happened in a very natural way, so you could try to figure out and be like, how does it happen? So we did that Airbnb, people generally talk about Airbnb when they talk about travel, you talk about travel when you're about to travel somewhere, you're telling you where I'm going, when you came back, I show you all the photos and like I tell you where I went, and then when one of my friends are traveling, I tell you, oh you should try Airbnb, that's awesome. Those are some of the times that people do that. For other services you might be a lot more often, so let's say you try Uber and Lyft, well that's going to be every week, so they have a lot more chances to tell people about the product, so the cycle time of using something is directly impacting the word of mouth, but yeah, I would just start by just asking people, that will give you an idea of how like it is to happen. Word of mouth can happen like I'll tell Holly about Airbnb, but it's not always that you go straight to Airbnb, you might go to Google or the App Store, so a lot of traffic that you see on online sources might just be a result of word of mouth, like very often if you have branded traffic, the number one source is going to be someone telling you about that product. I think for gaming it's a little bit unique because it's not like, you know, travel is like an event that happens all the time, but it's like gaming is a little bit more like taste, because it's entertainment, right? So even, don't get me wrong, people will recommend the game, but you want to be super targeted, and that's probably in general, like I love Scandal, the TV show, and there's probably, I probably wouldn't recommend it to you, but I don't know, maybe you like those kind of shows, like drama soapy, soapy dramas, right? Yeah, so I was like, oh, okay, if you love that, if you love Grace of Nataville, then you would love this. So what's really kind of fascinating about games, the moment looks very different because it's based off of interest, or entertainment in general, it's not just games, but entertainment. And then what happens with word of mouth is it looks a little bit different, so instead of recommendations, it'll be reviews, can be a really big deal, particularly like in the traditional console gaming world, like Metacritic was really big, movie reviews like A Rotten Tomatoes, but now kind of in a different way for us, like, our game Marvel Contest of Champions, what we think about is word of mouth is like, let's go to Comic-Con, let's get it into the hands of the fans, and let's have them tell their other fans, because the best thing about fans is, A, they're short for fanatical, so they're very excited, and then they know other fans, because that's who they want to kind of get together on kind of some of this interest space. So I think word of mouth looks a little different in something that's more on the entertainment side, but still extremely important in this age. Cool. So we have a few more minutes left, and I think one question that a lot of startups and founders here probably would like to listen to more is how do you build a growth team, and where does it sit in the organization, when do you recruit, when do you overall start building a community and the growth, but maybe specifically first, how does that team look like? It should be in growth. In product. In product. Yeah, I really think it should be in product, because it should affect how the, that's obviously it's people that are engaged in trying to affect that, that's in product, and you should make sure that you have like a product manager, and that you have developers, and that you have designers, specifically so you can be able to do like quick changes and be like autonomous. I think that's really important for a growth team to be really tied to product. Yeah, I agree with you. I would just start by the first people on the team should be people that can actually build it. So you need a science engineer, like you said. You need someone who pay attention to data and metrics, and that can be either those people, or they can be a product manager, or you can be a data scientist or analyst. And from there you can probably get going, like that's enough to get started. As you grow bigger, the most important leverage is going to come from engineering data science. So you need a lot of those people involved, and they're going to be very important for it. You also need design and use of research, because they will give you the ideas of where to run experiments. You can't, it's very hard to, well, looking at data to come up with ideas of what, like looking at experiments to come up with new experiments, it's usually not enough. You're going to have to do user studies and talk to you directly about the specific things you're trying to change to get ideas for what you're doing. And then the other thing about building a growth team is you want to have some specific unique way that they're accountable. So give them a metric and say, this is the thing you're driving, let's say first time bookings, that's the thing that we were driving, and you are measured on the incremental, incrementality and like the incremental value you're providing to the product of first time bookings or whatever new metrics that you're driving. One thing I have seen not working is giving that metric to the entire company, saying everyone's responsible for growth. That basically doesn't work. Like it works if you kind of like have had really awesome growth team that have kind of evangelized that to the entire company, and then maybe your Facebook at then at that point it might work, but if you're just starting off that won't work. So you have to put a specific team and a specific individual in charge of specific metrics. That's how you get started. I think we're different in gaming. I think in some ways it's a little different. So before we moved into gaming we did fan communities on Facebook and we were very much an ad revenue generated company. So at that point and we were smaller, we were about 30 people and everybody could think about growth because that's all we cared about. And if we got good growth then that meant like we could bring in the ad dollars, but when we moved to gaming it was it was a bit different. I'm a huge fan of what both of you are saying in terms of like it first needs to be in some ways I want growth-minded product people, growth-minded engineers. I need them to care about thinking about it from almost a business perspective. Oftentimes we would sit there and say, okay, you know, the kind of like I guess analytic we'd care about is growth and what are the things inside of this that's the lowest level of effort with the highest amount of impact. And then we would kind of prioritize from there. And sometimes that's not always your focus because it's growth, retention, engagement, monetization. It's always like a balance between these but because it's on growth you could really be highly strategic around how do you measure that and that's like or not measure that but how do you prioritize that and then that's in the early days because you're like doing these experiments back and forth. But as you do get larger it does become and you're kind of for us as a game and even as a business I'll say for any business the ultimate kind of metric you're measured by is money revenue unless you're a non-profit or what not like that thing it has to sustain itself somehow. So for us as we grew larger even if it was when we were just one game it did become more important for somebody just to focus on what we call user acquisition. So with that person like there was our head of marketing I guess you call marketing her entire job was to figure out how to spend smartly like she just we just gave her a water cash and we're like I need you to deploy this as great as like as well as possible I was like wow your job is just to spend which is phenomenal. And so then it's hard though that's hard. Yeah. Oh it is not easy at all. Yeah exactly it's funny how I thought like oh give me a water and some ways you can say my job is just to buy a lot of stuff and I'm like that's an easy job but it's not it's not easy and that's why we started having kind of a team focused on just that because we needed like a lot of specialization on just kind of some of these user acquisitions but things like they definitely needed to talk together things within the product of like how do I send kind of thinking about those moments of how do I ask them to send something to their friends how do I ask them to accept a trip how do I ask them to really send get an alliance gift or any new kind of player you bring in what do you get what kind of tokens that really does need to live kind of with the product because ultimately all that stuff impacts what they we call the LTV which is the unit economic of revenue per customer in our games exactly yeah but also when it comes to paid acquisition one thing that I've really noticed is that you do it too early and then you spend too much money and then it's like oh this is not working but we've spent like a hundred thousand dollars on this so like you need it's really really hard meaning that you need to do all those small things first to figure out okay where and when how are we going to start working with paid acquisition because it's really hard and what part of it that we're going to start working with because otherwise you can spend so much money it's easy to spend all that money and get nothing out of it it's super tempting to to get on the ad platforms and start acquiring users but if you're not if you're not making enough revenue to cover the cost then you really haven't learned much because like that's not going to use be useful learning because you are not going to be able to spend more money because you won't make the money back so it just like you will learn you'll learn how to acquire users that you can pay for basically yeah as the last question I I figured it would be interesting to hear I'm not sure if this is like a swear word for for growth but the the amazing growth hack doesn't have to be of your own company but one one kind of inspiring growth story that you've you would like to share today as a as a wrap up for for this session okay so for us we found I'm going to take an example from our fan communities because it was on Facebook and so we had these fan communities that were broken up by TV shows so you could be like I love Grey's Anatomy or I love Scandal you could put like quotes on there and then you could be a part of all these other TV fans the best growth hack that we had was basically we would once we said hey now you've downloaded immediately there was an invite but there were all these friends here that were like oh these are your friends that love Grey's Anatomy and once like you know that the intent is high and you're not going to spam your friend because they want like oh you like Scandal too or you like this too it was it just didn't feel that way now you're making a recommendation a wanted recommendation so that's the thing hacks kind of sometimes is kind of a word that feels a little dirty because it doesn't care about the interests and alignment but that's the thing is it's not a hack when you align the interests together right at that right time I think so I don't like the term growth hack but I would say the most important hack at Airbnb was actually building the process of experimentation because that meant we got so many different experiments that turned out to be really positive but we couldn't predict them in advance so I would rather have companies take that hack than to actually take any of the specific ideas that we came up with as a process of that but if there'd be one thing that I would say if you have a website don't log people out it's just very simple just don't do that I put people if you have something sensitive let's say payments just put a login while there but then do like Amazon and Airbnb just don't log people out it'll be very beneficial it's true I can never remember my passwords anymore yeah I get so frustrated it's like what happened there's no I think we're running out of time sorry last quick story just everyone get to share that I'm also not a fan of hacks but I think that this is more a strategy than it is like growth hack I really really like Slack's adaptive pricing model I think that that's really interesting and it's really strategic because what they do also is they don't leave you they don't give you money back when you have users that are inactive they give you credit meaning no money needs to leave them and I think that building that kind of customer trust is really good for attention and I think that that's one thing we'll see much more about in the future coming up in like startups how do you actually do pricing and not just here's a monthly cost being like this is the product value you're paying for the value and feeling that trust with the product is really important super cool thanks everyone this was amazing good discussion it's getting way warm here close to the fire so time to get out to the cold thank you thank you thank you everyone thank you so much thank you


How's it going everybody?  There's just something really fun about getting Rhyme Style and Syriacs in the same call and going after a really tough raid boss. Of course in each of those raid boss videos we've always just been doing it for the thrill of the hunt, but this is actually a very special occasion as a company has finally seen the talent, the sheer skill that we possess in hunting down these targets and they wanted to reach out and sponsor three videos from us, so of course we had to say yes and it only makes sense that that game is Hunt Showdown. If you aren't familiar with Hunt Showdown, let me just run over the really quick basics of the game. Basically it has a pretty unique PvE and PvP crossover. The PvE obviously is that we, me, Rhyme and Deon will spawn in as a group together and we will have to track down clues in order to find unique bosses like the new one they just added Scrapbeak, that one was just added this year, but there's other bosses in the game that we cannot town as well. Those are our targets. The PvP element of the game comes down to the fact that we're not the only hunters looking for these targets. In fact there are a lot of other groups. Some would argue that these groups also have a collective higher IQ than our group, but I would dismiss that. So when you combine the threat of the other hunters on the map hunting you down while you're also trying to hunt them down, while you're both trying to hunt monsters down, you get a pretty chaotic match. It's definitely not easy, that's for sure. In fact we actually played a few games which I thought was going to be the main video, but then my cat turned off my computer corrupting all of the video files, except for these few highlight clips from Rhyme. And by highlights I mean I died a bunch. It was not a good look, bruh.  If you hold Rb you can see light into our right, is that them? Oh I see them. Yeah, they might get clapped. They're gonna get clapped. What is going everywhere are they? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got you, I got you. Just kidding, I can't. If you guessed it, yeah. Man, these guys are pretty good at the game. No, no, the, the, the assassins way far. Oh, seriously, because we have some, we have some stuff that we just haven't even tried yet.  Why would you do that when you can live life on the edge? This is pretty shallow. Live my life like Larry? Looking for it. Hey, how about we avoid this guy since we haven't avoided anything. Tia, come here. Tia, come here. Tia, come here. Come here. Dotto disconnect. Look at him. Why did you stay there? Look at me like that. But really other than the last video there's never been a better time to play than now because they're adding a ton of new maps. That new boss, like I said Scrap Beak, and there's also the Winter Solstice event which allows you to unlock unique weapon skins in the game for completing normal tasks, for beating the bosses and other hunters. But really the way I like to get my points is by going under trees and just rummaging through the presence. That's really how I've been getting most of my points in between the shooting and the killing of monsters and stuff like that. But really you can go about it however you want. But with that said, I don't want to keep you from the video any longer because I just want to go in there with the boys and get this job done effectively. I am not about to embarrass myself in front of Hunt Showdown. Thank you again for sponsoring this video. I really do appreciate it.  And of course, if you want to play the game, you can also get it for pretty cheap through my link down below in the description and the pinned comment.  All right, so here we are. We're going into our first game is what I wish I could say, but my cat turned off the game in the middle of our second game, which they won. My cat, U2, Mila Smith and Clarice Axelson, we were doing pretty good.  Just know that you guys missed out on the greatest video of all time, but this one's going to be equally as great. This one's going to be a tribute to the greatest video that never was. Hey, look, guys, I already see our first enemy. Do you see our target? I'm about to body this guy.  Dino, I was going to body that guy. Why are you shooting so loud? Bro, I got to say like, bring up your characters. There is per. Don't shoot me.  I didn't like that. Why you push him down like that? Dino and I both have wins under our belt. I shouldn't have a win under mine, but my cat, dude, on screen now. Hold on, guys. There's a clue over there. Blue Skadoo. We can too. I'm going to get the clue. I'm going to get the clue. I bet I'll get it first. I bet I'll get it first. Where is it? I was going to die first in this video or you're going to have to cat disconnect the game. I think he's guarding the clue. Yeah. Nice try, buddy. Why? Why do we have to go up against so many armored guys? Yeah. Are you just looking at him? What are you going to do about it? Hey, the next clue is pretty close. Are you afraid? We are making a lot of noise. Dino, we're running like veterans. It's like, it's like, you know how to play the game. I'm like, I was going to say, I was going to say, we all are running like veterans. Look at us hunting down clues. Hey, don't worry. You can earn your stripes in this game. That's what I'm hoping, dude. You know what? You guys have a win under your belt. And admittedly, my cat really took that reward away from me. So I'm just going to earn it this game by getting this clue.  Hold on. Let me put my dukes up. Come here. I'm going to knock this out. One blow. Pokey pig. Got him. I'm going to get this guy. Oh, my bad. I didn't more than knock him out.  You laid him out, bro.  Maybe we could have respected him a little more. Watching my slinky. Watching my slinky. You're hot.  Oh, there's a big guy. I'm going to run another. Wait, the slug got you. Guys, why don't we do this? Oh, I found the boss. Oh, you found it? Did I find the boss? Did I find the boss? Yeah, you have found the layer of the spider. Is that me? Is it talking about me? Because I'm not seeing a spider. Giant spider. Giant spider. Help. Giant spider. Where to go? Oh, yeah. I can speak a language. Hey, spider. Yeah, you don't like that, did you? Oh, he stabbed me. Don't go. Help. Oh, God. Yeah. Oh, it bit me. I'm poisoned and I'm burning. This is not my day. This is not my day. I guess you could say I'm on fire. I'm not going to miss a shot. Bro, you hit me on fire. Where did me heal up? I shot the spider once and it scattered away. We won't miss. Have you ever watched a basketball game? The spider is back on fire. It's good for you guys. Good luck, Dino. Dino, we're out of here. Help. Rhyme, get out of there. I'm shooting for you. Don't hit me. Oh, he got my leg. My leg. I'm going to lie. We kind of going through it.   Seen the spider in like 20 minutes. He's still on fire.  He's up there with you. Get him up there. I'm coming up. Yeah, he better be careful up here with me. Oh, he's down here again. Don't bite me. Don't bite me.  Let's just finish him. He's spitting. Help me. Help me. He's going to take me out. He's going to take me out. Help me. Help me. Help me. I got the locus inside. We're good. He's dead. He's dead. He's dead. All right. The spider is vanishing. Hold down the fort, everybody. Hold down the fort. Hold on. Look, we got- Where am I putting this bear trap? I have one of the doors. Definitely one of the doors. Do you guys have Neosporin? All right. Don't walk out this door again. I'm setting the bear trap right at the door. Wait, hold on. So, are we like about to speed run this because we accidentally stumbled- Yeah, I think so. We might actually get a huge win. We need our- What's in here? Do you guys hear- Do you guys hear something screaming? No, it's part of the vanishing. No, there's definitely zombies right outside of here. All right. So, if we get- When we pick it up, we're going to the escape pod that's a little further away from us just so they don't immediately know where we're going. Yeah. Oh, look at this spider, man. All right. Hey, hey, hey, Dotto. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I must ask you a question. Dotto, he's doing it. It's a problem. That was my joke. It was on the previous recording and you know it. I had a lot of funny bits, a lot of funny jokes, in fact. I'm going to watch this open door. If this spider has all this fur on it, hey, we're Dotto dumbass at. I'm watching the door, dude. I'm watching the door. Literally, they're going to get stuck. And if they're going to come from anyone, they're going to go get to that bear trap. We should be good because they're probably going to go for their clue. Nah, dude, I think these guys are going to get greedy. Listen, Dotto, Dotto, listen, hear me out. Put yourself in their shoes. If somebody already started banishing the boss five minutes into the game, you're going to think they're super good. You're not going to run up on them. That's a good point. So they probably think they're just amazing at the game. I'm actually diamond ranking this game. So if they pull up on us, they're going to get got. You're not diamond ranking speech. All right. Do you guys have an escape plan ready? Do you guys want to go up into the writer?  Look, Mr. Zero wins. Look, how about you? Dotto, can you come over here and help us banish? Yeah. How about you follow the role in the lead of the two people who have some dubs under their belts, bro? God. Dino, what are we going to do? Oh, Lee. All right. Yeah. All right. Come on. Hold on. Hold on. We should. All right. Let's get the bounty. Do this tactically, bro. They're here. They're here. They're here. They're here. Well, we thought that they're here, but they weren't. Are you sure? No, no, no. They're here. I see them. They're definitely here. All right. Out of the out of the top floor, top floor, top floor. Get the bounty top floor through the door on the left. They're going to land on my door on the left, bro. Go, go, go, go through the door on the left. I don't even want to see these guys. Why, bro? Bro. Dang, bro. You didn't got to punch Margaret like that. They are running after us, dude. Let's fight them. Let's fight them. No, dude. What? We got the bounty. I'm taking my sweet time. The thing is, we're going to have to fight them anyways, because when we get to the extraction, we have 30 seconds. No, they won't. They won't think we're going for it. Oh, run, run, run, run. Oh, run, run, run, run. He got, he got a cartouge laid out. Bro, don't get between me and my bounty, dude. Just run for it, dude. Don't just run for it. You got to watch your back every once in a while, rookie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody watch it. Somebody watch my rookie back. And, you know, for now on, just calm down. I'm watching your back. I'm watching Donald's back. Just calm down, Luke. Darshall needs a win, dude. Darshall needs a big win. I'm watching Donald's back. I'm watching Donald's back. You're watching the, you're watching the Rook's back. Why are you bleeding? Why are you alerting all the crows? You did. Because I'm scared. Yeah, and you did. What he said. Do you know why you're bleeding? I'm scared. No, I already bled. I think I stepped in a bear trap or something. Okay, that's fine. That's a little underreaction. Oh yeah, that's fine. That's fine.  No, don't, oh God, oh God, oh God. Oh, don't, don't shoot that guy. You burned me. You burned me. Oh, good, good job. Good job, Deon. Good job, Deon, good job. Guys, guys, I think somebody just shot me. What? You're fine, you're fine, you're fine, you're fine. Get to the extraction point and we'll hold it down. It's pretty close. I just heard a bullet go by my ear. Just lay him out, just lay him out real quick.  You'll get jumped. All right, keep running, keep running, keep running. We're almost there. It's a boat, I think. All right, hold out on the boat. Somebody, somebody hold the angle. Somebody hold that angle. I'm gonna hop on the boat, I'm gonna hop on the boat. All right, we're extracting. No, an armored zombie. Hold the angle, boys. Bro, we just speed ran this, bro. They're not even gonna come catch us. Oh, but this guy might. I got him, I got him, no worry. All right, hold that left angle, hold that left angle. We are veterans, we are veterans.  If we die right at the last 10 seconds, in the middle 10 seconds, it's happening. This is gonna be so bad. He can't catch me. I'm giving him the old razzle. We win, easy peasy. Imagine getting clapped. We did it, oh my God. The speed run. Easy.  Let's go. Easy, GG. Well played. That's how the teammates are good at the game. We're in a million. Let's go. We're out of rookie on your first win. I appreciate that. Let me watch my EXP bar go up. Banished the spider, killed the spider. Look at this EXP spider clean sweep. Fast bounty. Oh, I'm gonna be level 370. I didn't even kill that emulator. Give me the points. And level 16 grand slam. Oh, hopefully you guys enjoyed that video. If you did, definitely go down below and let us know and support the game. Thank you so much to Hunt Showdown for giving us the chance to play. I had a ton of fun. And yeah, other than that, the link to Rhyme and Dion's videos will also be in the description down there. And more details about Hunt in the description.  Yeah, I was like, wait, are you recording? All right, that's it. Bye.


Hi there and welcome to my channel. So today is the first of July here on the Saskatchewan Prairies and it is Canada's 153rd birthday. So happy birthday Canada. I want to take you on a tour today and show you how things are doing in my garden. So we are about 40 days into the growing season here on zone 3 Saskatchewan which is you know getting close to halfway. So there's a lot of good things happening in the garden. A few things aren't doing so good but you know I'll take you on a tour and show you everything that's going on. Also I want to do a little measuring with my corn. One of my followers Michael had commented when I was planting my corn this spring that there was the saying of the corn should be knee high by the 4th of July. I thought it would be kind of fun today. Being Canada's birthdays on the 1st of July we will do the measuring today and we'll check out the corn to see if it's knee high by the 1st of July. Oh and by the way Michael if you are watching this video you still owe me some pictures of your garden and I will leave my email address in the description box below if you or anybody else would like to share some pictures of your garden. Let me know what zone you're growing in and what you're growing and you know if you'd like I will share some pics on future videos on my channel. So I'm just going to finish up my coffee and then we'll take a walk through my garden. So it has been a very kind of weird weather kind of season here so far. We haven't really had a hot hot spell yet and the rain has kind of come in just small scattered showers. We've had a lot of really crazy storms in Saskatchewan, tornadoes, flash floods. So around here we've managed to you know get enough rain to keep everything green and lush. So that has been good. So this here is my lasagna garden bed with all my flowers. I got a lot of different pollinator type flowers coming along nicely. So my two redneck raised garden beds are really coming along good. Everything that I planted seems to be doing well. I got some peppers here. I got five kinds of peppers or four kinds I believe that are just all sweet peppers. And then I also am trying out the eggplants. So those are something that I have never grown. I don't even know if I've eaten an eggplant before.  And I think that's what that is here on this egg plant. And in the front of my beds here I got my nasturtiums and marigolds working here as companion plants. Helping to keep pests away the nasturtiums are starting to bloom. Got pretty flowers here. Tomatoes are looking great. I've done a bit of pruning on them. I've been trying to keep the bottoms clear of branches. Keep that airflow going. Removing suckers. So I had a bit of an emergency situation early June with late frost coming and I created some cozies for all these tomatoes using tomato cages and some large freezer bags that are made for turkeys. And they worked great making cozies over the tomatoes but the only thing was my one favorite tomato the Sun Gold Cherry for some reason suffered a lot of damaged even though I had it covered. But you know it's come back as you can see here.  It's got a lot of new growth coming. I've been just tying it up to the cage here to keep it going upwards and it seems to be doing great. So these ones in the middle are my determinant tomatoes. I got a couple dwarfs here. These are also yellow cherry tomatoes. And some companions that I have going with my tomatoes here is parsley and basil. And I believe I threw in some carrots here too that might be coming along. And in this bed we got lots of beans coming. Cucumbers are doing great. I've been putting onions amongst a lot of these in my containers kind of as a good companion that hopefully will help deter some pests from the cucumbers and the beans. The ones that I got closest to the trellising here are the pole beans. And then these ones here are bush beans. So hopefully they will start climbing up here catching on to the cage here and working their way up. And as far as the cucumbers here I'm hoping that they will start working their way towards this trellising here and I will try to train them to climb upwards. The majority of my onions that I planted that are the Walla Wallas and the Cabernets which are supposed to be the large balving onions. I planted in here maybe a little too thick but I can thin them out and use them throughout the summer. And I had these two baby romas which are indeterminate tomato variety that I had forgotten and I had started from seed so I just stuck them in the middle here and hopefully they will do well here in these containers. So this row here is my beets, carrots, and turnips. And one thing that I'm a little disappointed in is my carrots. So I had planted three different varieties of carrots here in my containers and for some reason they only seem to kind of germinate around the edges. I had used my pea straw as kind of an insulator mulch while they were germinating and I'm not sure if that kind of choked them out. I did try a second planting here and not having very good germination even on the second round so I don't really think it would be the seeds of those three different varieties but we will see. So it's not looking like I'm going to have a real great carrot harvest this year. This here is my row of lettuce, spinach, arugula, and kale. As you can see the leaf leafy lettuce is coming along good. I've been harvesting tons from here and then I've done some succession planting and got some a second batch of everything coming along. The first round of arugula here has started shooting out flowers and I will be waiting till these are ready and taking as many seeds as I can. I really like to try and grow arugula indoors in the winter so I will be collecting seeds from this hopefully in the next week or two. So you can see my potatoes under straw are coming really good in some areas and some spots. I have hardly any germination at all. This first couple rows were my red norlins. I'm not sure what the second two were. It was either a russet or a Yukon gold. I wish I would have made better notes of which ones I planted because obviously some strands do better than others under straw here. As you can see I got two rows where hardly anything has come up. This row here is doing good and I got another row where very little came up and then a bunch more here are doing all right. So I kind of fluffed up the straw to try to find the potatoes. They seemed to have sprouts on them but they were just sitting there doing nothing. So I'm just not sure if my straw was kind of smothering them or it was too compacted. But anyways we will keep watching over the summer and see if more work their way through. There's a corn in the background so we'll be heading over there to measure it up and see how it's doing. As you can see it's looking pretty good. Okay so we're just going to head to the back of my garden here. This is where we have our dwarf sour cherry trees growing and these are my container potatoes which are just growing like crazy. These are French fingerling potatoes that we planted mid-May. They were all planted under straw. These ones here in the bucket were planted in dirt. I don't know these they're super huge. I hope they're just not all tops and no bottoms. I haven't seen any signs yet of blooms coming yet. So we will keep an eye on them. I'm hoping that we're going to have a good harvest of potatoes here hopefully in the next month or so. Something that I'm very excited about here is my squashes. As you can see they are all taking off. They're starting to bloom. They've got lots of room here in this area to spread out on the ground and I'm just keeping an eye on the blooms here. So this is my spaghetti squash and I've been looking at the blooms here and most of them that you can see are the females because they got the fruit there under the bloom. There's lots of them coming along here that have bloomed but I haven't seen any male blooms yet which could be these ones here. They seem to be a little slow so I'm not sure if any of these females are actually going to grow if they're just going to shrivel up. So I'm going to keep an eye on it. I do hear and see lots of bees in my garden so hopefully they'll be able to come help pollinate these but yeah we've got to have some of those male flowers blooming here pretty soon to get this fruit going. The first round of peas are sending out lots of blooms now so we should be picking peas in no time here. Over on the other side of this cage I found a little grow box that I wasn't using so I have started a second round of peas in here. So these are my two cucumbers that I had started indoors early in the I guess late in the winter early spring. I was trying kind of some exotic chimes that I have never grown before. This is a cucumber melon and this is a lemon cucumber and as you can see we got some lemon cucumbers coming here. They're kind of ugly looking things but I think they would be really nice to make like an infused water with some lemon cucumbers. I think that would be really good and as far as the cucumber melons here they have tiny tiny little fruits. Try to find one here so I can show you up close but yeah there it's a very viney cucumber seems to be taking off and growing here so again hopefully the bees can come and help me out with pollination. See there there's one little tiny cucumber melon coming very anxious to see what they taste like. So also in this area I got a lot of other things growing in containers. I got a whole bunch of spring onions. These were all started using the winter sewing method in milk jugs. I just transferred them to this grow bag. I've been chopping and harvesting these quite a bit already. I got two beefsteak tomatoes that I started indoors very early and I've already taken some tomatoes off of them. This is a ground cherry. This is another thing that I have never planted or tasted before so I'm hoping that it produces some fruits that I can try out. My strawberry collection is doing great despite the fact though every time a strawberry is almost fully ripened and I'm ready to pick it. I come out here and some little varmint has already gotten to it. So I have pretty much lost every ripe strawberry so far to what I think was probably some little stripey gophers that are hanging out in my garden here. So I think I'm going to get some bird netting that I have and try to build some kind of a cover over top of these strawberries because I'd like to have some for myself. As you can see these strawberries are starting to shoot out runners which I'm just trying to leave here in the soil and I'm hoping that they catch and root into the ground because I do want to make this area you know strawberries that will come back every year. I have asparagus in here which apparently is a good companion with strawberries. So my goal is to try and get a few strawberries started and hopefully they will make it over the winter and come back next spring. Also in this area I got garlic planted and I'm just so sorry that I didn't plant way more. I'm not sure why. I think I was kind of late in the fall when I threw these in and I definitely could have planted way more. They have not started shooting out garlic scapes yet which is usually a sign that they're getting ready to be picked. Okay so it's time to check out the corn to see how high it is by the 1st of July. So this sweet corn I started from seed indoors first of all and then transplanted out to these three containers in early June and I invited a few members of the family out here today to measure up themselves against the corn to see how it's doing. Sadly my microphone was not turned on so I didn't capture any of the sound while we were checking out the corn but little Henderson here was the first one to stand up beside the corn. You can see it's probably even taller than he is right now. Then I got Brady up there to see how it measures up against her. She's probably got a little bit shorter legs than I do but definitely the corn is way past knee high for her as well. Then it was my turn to get up there on the bench and do a measurement. Again corn is looking great. The little bench that I had going there wasn't quite as sturdy as I thought it was and it started to break under my weight so I had to get off there before I hurt myself but it was a lot of fun measuring up each of our legs against the corn but then my husband came along and we got him up there as well. He's probably got the longest legs of all of us but definitely the corn is way past everybody's knees right now so corn is looking good and we're hoping that we can get a good harvest here in August. So that concludes the tour of my garden here as we reach the midway point of the gardening season of 2022. If you enjoyed this video I hope that you will give it a like, leave me a comment and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on any future videos coming to the channel. Happy gardening and thanks for watching.


Come on why?  Hey, welcome. Hey, welcome back to the show. Hey, glad to see you Glad to come up. Please follow us on Instagram Juicy lady forget about forget about So today we'll be reacting to one of the most impressive for A while yeah, I love past couple weeks. I love all the comments up. Why are you ignoring me? I've been asking you this for weeks Well, we're not ignoring it. We're not ignoring honest and for true I've seen this one requested a lot. It didn't have English Shubs, but our friend over on patreon Came in as the MVP once again. Oh, yeah, thank you to him and everybody else who supports us on patreon, please Continue to do so the link is down below But yeah, this is Honey, I'm gonna say Italian. Yeah, I think it's cahani cahani. Okay, so I said it right I just said it with an Italian. I I Yeah, I don't think when they have two ways I don't think they ever pronounce it as like a cahini cahini. I don't think so. It doesn't sound right desert Yeah, um, but yeah, no idea what it's about. It was just very requested for a couple weeks now I love going into these blind. Let's see what it is. I advise my husband is missing Vitya Bakchi Vita Bakchi Vitya V not a V Your husband's name Bachi My husband Please He used to talk to me like this everyday. What are you talking about? Talk to me! Maybe they did. Maybe it was a dream. Maybe he grabs her after he puts it. Makes you want to find out. Yeah, that's funny. It was a really good trailer. Obviously, I don't think they would give away an ending like that, right? Maybe they would. That'd be pretty weird. Weird? Why would you give away an ending like that? But it was, I mean, it made for a great trailer. Really good trailer. The pacing on that trailer was really good. It looks like it's going to be very character and dialogue driven. A pregnant woman's search for her missing husband takes her from London to Calcutta, but everyone she questions denies having ever met him. That's a great premise. Oh, wow. And I'm guessing she goes into some of the sexism. It's got to be from that first scene. Have we seen her in something? Is she the one? If we have, I'm not remembering her. She's not the one from... But you know who I did remember? Who? Noazid and Sidiki. Oh, yeah. I saw him and got all excited. It's like, dang, this just... Now it's happening. When we see American movie trailers with actors that we love and their face appears in the trailer, it immediately jacks up the excitement level to want to see it. So I went from, this looks really good to, wow, I got to see this, because he's in it with them. He was in... No, he was in this one. Sorry. Yeah, and he's in Gangster Whisperer. Yes, that's what it is. And I've just seen so many... When we reacted to that trailer, so many people saying, legend, legend, legend. Yeah, so the trailer was really cool. And she looked really good. Oh, yeah. And it was a really interesting premise, the fact that she's a female looking for a husband and she's pregnant. Yeah. And then, why is everyone... Even though she knows they went there. He went there, but they're all saying, no, so it's clearly some kind of conspiracy or he did something, he worked for somebody. Yeah, her being pregnant adds two levels to it of vulnerability for her. It adds, it raises her vulnerability level. And it also makes you question even more. It's one thing for him to be gone for his wife, but she's pregnant with his child. Who would disappear like that, unless something was wrong? So I'm guessing maybe he's a mob story, and that's why maybe she's getting pushed. Maybe. Because she's going and looking. Right, maybe he had a secret life he didn't want her to know about. So it's a sacrificial thing. Yeah, it definitely makes me want to see the film. Yeah, good trailer. So yeah, please let us know. I see why you've been requesting it for a while now. Yeah. Please let us know if it's worth watching. And I'm sure some of you will be like, nah, trash. We'll see. Because like with a Padmavad, it was like 99% were please watch, please watch, and all of the Amir Khan stuff. Yeah. Three idiots, PK, watch, watch, watch. Yeah, I mean Padmavad, people were actually, and some were saying don't watch it. I saw a couple. I think it's people that don't like dialogue and like... For beauty? Yeah. I don't know why you couldn't like that film, but we love the... I mean, if it has some great acting, I can watch that film for a long time. Long time. And this looks like it is character driven, dialogue driven, great trailer. Came out in 2012. Yeah. Yeah. Let us know. We might watch it.