So Jonathan, I'm going to do it here. I'm with Liz Trotter. This is Smart Business Moves. Liz, how are you? Hey y'all. Hey Tom, well, since we are five minutes late today, I bet you know. Shush. Okay. Still getting back in the groove. I mean, my goodness, the last three weeks has been kind of like a whirlwind. Yeah, well, more so for you. Well, actually, I guess not more so for you than me. I was going to say more so for you than me because you just did MCA live too. Right, but you gave up two full weeks. You gave up foundations 2.0 and I was kind of on the sidelines with that. Yeah. So we are finally starting to get, I'm starting to get my feet back under me a little bit here. It was kind of tough for a while though. I was like, and actually I'm lying. There are people out there right now that heard me say that. They were like, what is she talking about? She still hasn't gotten back to me with that thing I need. So yeah, sorry for those of you that haven't gotten you your thing yet. It's coming, I swear. I swear. So are we going to have a guest today? Tom, what's up with that? We're efforting. We're efforting. The topic today is digital marketing and we got a pitch hitter coming in. Matt's gonna be joining us here like any minute. I just saw him pop up. Okay, so I have a really pressing question that everybody wants to know. Inquiring minds. Is it pitch hitter or pinch hitter? Like in a pitch. P-R-N-C-H. Yeah, yeah, and so they're like get filling in in a pitch. Yeah. That makes more sense. People say pitch all the time. I thought you just said pitch. I probably did. Okay. Okay. Does it mean that's what you meant? No, it doesn't mean it's right. So I see Matt's kind of coming. He had shoulder surgery, you said, Tom? He did on Monday, actually. He had a pickleball accident. Oh, goodness. You know, it's a high kind of sport. Well, is he doing okay? I mean, it's only Wednesday. Oh, yeah, we were in a meeting yesterday and he was a little drugged up. He was entertaining, actually.  Well, I hope he's on his little pain meds again today. As always, we're recording this. So we might have some good stuff here to use in the future. Well, I'm hoping that whoever is editing these podcasts knows to edit out the first, like 32 minutes of this one. Because it's not looking good so far. Worst of both? Well, maybe we should say why we are... Let me just hit add and see. Hey, Matt, can you hear us? I can. Let's see if I can get one of my... Oh, I got a microphone to work here, or a camera to work. Austin. All right. So where you been today? I've just been in my bedroom just recovering from shoulder surgery. I got this little pain pump thing going and... Oh, is that what that is? Yes, it keeps half my body numb, basically. So soon as the medicine runs out on this, then we'll be having a different conversation, I think. This thing, if they offer you one of these things, if you ever have surgery, take it home with you. I don't know what it costs. It does not matter, it does not matter. Don't really care, huh? I don't, because I've had orthoscopic surgery before, and it was much worse than this. Like this was tolerable. I was the next day, I was feeling pretty good. Wow, very nice. So it is the next day, it was yesterday. Wait, no, no. I'm two days out from surgery now. That's the men's talking now. Yesterday was the first day out. I was sharing with Liz that you were in a meeting with us yesterday, and you were lightly medicated. Let's just, let's go ahead. Yeah, my wife is calling me to take more. She's like, go take another one. I like that stuff. Well, Tom, I don't think you really want to get into conversations about how people sound when they're lightly inebriated. No, no. It's like, no, no, I don't. We'll move on from that top. Cast right on by there. I'm pinching in for somebody. What are we talking about today? I guess I'll do my best. Growing your cleaning business, using digital marketing. It's kind of a sighting time. I guess there's a lot of things that are changing in marketing and just technology as a whole. And we might be able to get into AI a little bit. I mean, we can. I had some really cool conversations around this stuff today. So Vlad Stanka is the developer for my website. And we were just talking about how to pass UTM codes from our websites, so to Made Central, to our production management and sales software. I feel really bad that we're not even one minute in and I already have to stop you, Matt. No clue what UTM comes in. I'm gonna explain it here. I'm gonna explain it. So it's just a unique identifier for your marketing sources. And Made Central allows you to capture that on your lead forms. And so we're actually gonna be able to set up our website that all traffic, we can identify where it came from and then pass that directly into Made Central through those codes. We were talking about chatbots today with AI and building tools to teach chatbots about our businesses. Vlad and I were talking about that. There's a whole lot of crazy things going on right now that are gonna make our businesses, you know, I think... You know, the impact, I mean, we've seen how technology has impacted the industry over the last couple of years. A lot of things have changed. I mean, we're just getting started, right? I think so. I mean, just the data component has been big. You know, our companies are running our management processes on more solid foundations of KPIs that matter. I think that was one of the first things that kind of started to happen. And that led us to be able to make bigger investments in our business because we could create predictable outcomes of what's gonna happen. If I put a quarter in, am I gonna get a dollar out or am I gonna get $2 out of that investment? You know, you've talked about predictable outcomes quite a bit, Tom, in terms of what the stock market expects from businesses and how they treat them when they don't create those predictable outcomes. And you know, we had a meeting today. This isn't exactly marketing, but I think it's really cool. We've been working really hard. It made central in terms of cleaning up and normalizing all of the support articles that we have. And there's over 600 of them. And there are chatbots, basically, that will once we're getting close where we can actually run all of that through an AI tool. So rather than asking a question in support and getting a half a dozen articles, you know, presented to you, it will actually take all the information in all of those articles and give you a more specific answer the way that chat GPT does. So like a conversational answer or instead of just links, that's interesting. That's, I think, you know, five years ago, I built a chatbot where you could go through and it would present them like tree branches, like pick it, you know, it was like pick a path, basically. But that's a far cry to what we've gotten to at this point where it's in conversational language versus those kind of like tree branch chatbots that we're kind of used to. So you were talking about your discussion with Vlad and how basically lead source attribution and other pieces of data could be passed. And basically, I guess it's embedded in the URL that's in all of the browsers. So how are you using that? And so made central, we're gonna basically, it's not a form that's custom to made central, we're building a custom form, but we can post what's called posting data to made central or we can put it in the URL and made central can read certain things in the URL when you're creating leads. What it really all comes down to is when somebody, when I'm spending, you know, I'll be forthright. I think we spend about $3,800 a week on AdWords and we're spending that much money on AdWords every week. I wanna see that in made central as well and not just look at it in analytics and other tools. I wanna bring it into my main production software. It's never gonna be 100% accurate because people will see your ads and they'll go do other stuff and then come back 30 days later.  Most marketing systems are only allowing cookies for like 30 days. It used to be you could track somebody for six months and now most marketing companies are like 30 days, you gotta figure it out in 30 days. So what you're talking about, I guess the fancy term for that is attribution. Yeah, so why do I care?  And I think just having a better understanding of what courses are creating value and what it costs to acquire a customer from each channel and really how much you can afford to spend on that. One of the lessons I kind of learned from you two in Foundations was the idea of you can spend gross profits, not net profits to acquire customers because once you've basically hit your break-even point, you can spend whatever your gross profits is, you could spend that on acquiring a customer. You wouldn't wanna spend all of it, but the companies that can spend more will grow faster and understanding that relationship of, if you're getting a customer that's worth $6,000 over the lifetime of a customer, you might not wanna spend the $3,000 in gross profits to acquire them, but you sure as that can spend $250, you know, I hear people get really scared about spending $100 on acquiring a customer. You know, you can spend more than you think if you have the data that tells you you're keeping your customers for a certain period of time and they have a historical value, but even that's not even 100% accurate because a lot of your customer churn happens in the first 90 days. And so even tracking that is becoming really important like by source and by how quickly they're churning by source, by, you know, a lot of different metrics that we're starting to capture and made central and create reporting around that. We're not quite there yet, are we? We're close, we're close. A lot of the marketing obviously is digital marketing and a bigger and bigger part of the digital marketing is paid marketing.  And the more you know about the lifetime value that you're gonna get out of a lead that comes in through that marketing source, the more accurately you can bid and you don't wanna spend more than what you can have a negative return on your investment if you spend too much. But if you know what your lifetime value is, you can bid more than what your competitors have the stomach to bid and get a lot more leads. And I think I see the bigger companies doing that. I see the companies that are doing this well, that's one of their strategies, the ones that are growing the fastest. Yeah, I think that's fair to say.  I've been watching other industries in particular, HVAC. They seem to be a couple years ahead of us in terms of adoption of some of this stuff. Plumbing companies are starting, they're a little bit behind the HVAC and the electricians. But you kind of see some other home services and the amount of ad spend that's going to AdWords and other things versus, I'm not saying SEO doesn't work, it's just not gonna bring you enough business to grow at a rate that you could, that you could achieve a chance. And there's print mediums that I think, direct mail still works, if done well. You can bring digital into that with QR codes now. People do QR codes now. I remember when QR codes were introduced, a dozen years ago, we were all like, what do I do with this thing? This is, and then COVID, we all figured it out. And the iPhone made it easier when you could just point your camera at it and you didn't have to get a separate app and all that. So that's, so you can actually have a unique link for your marketing channels for print medium and other mediums as well and embed those UTMs, those tracking codes, like I described, and those tracking codes can be passed in to other software systems you use. So you're tracking, even in good old-fashioned print medium, you're still using digital tools to make sure you're getting a return on your investment. We were just talking about that today in one of the circles. Somebody is using EDDM and a lot's been a lot, sending out, I feel like this can't be the true number, but I'm pretty sure he said 4,000 a day. 22 cents a piece. He's paying less than that because of the bull. He prints them himself and he's getting great return. When you say printing himself, I mean, that's costing him something. Yeah, but it's pretty cheap. He showed us the printer. I'm sorry if I'm blowing you out of the water here, dude. The printer he uses is like a $1,200 printer. He gets whatever the fancy ink is and the good paper stock. He has a great source for the cheap card stock and yeah, his numbers were... All that stuff's a lot more affordable than it used to be. I bought a... Think about 4,000 a day, though. Yeah. Some human being is feeding those things through that $1,200 printer at some rug. It must be a week. I can't believe that it was 4,000 a day. But it would be $720 a day, roughly. That's not out of the question for some of these larger companies. I mean, my marketing budget is in the 30s now. It's not quite, you know, I have no single channel with that kind of spend, but my AdWords is close to that. So it's possible if he's proven that channel and he's over $2.5 million a year, it's possible. So printing it on like four up card stock that maybe is perforated and they're kind of ripping it apart, but... Nope, eight and a half by 11. Okay. Yeah, no printing anything just... They need to take some... The EDM is really... The postage is really inexpensive on it. And I'll tell you, I bought a printer from my office. It's a... Not for that kind of printer, but to make posters and things like that for communicating with my staff. Because I was sick of spending $40 or $50 a poster to print because we do a lot of contests and fun stuff. And it was like 800 bucks. And I figured it wouldn't take long to get a return on that in terms of doing creative things, doing large format prints and things like that. So we could do 24 by 36 inch, or really as long as we want, it's a roll printer. We could do banners I guess if we wanted to. It's a plotter. Yeah, plotter basically. And the cost of it was $7.99. And that kind of printer a few years ago would be $5,000. So some of this technology and marketing is coming down where you could do some of this in-house. I mean, someone was asking us last week about the badge printers that Tom and I have in our offices. And those are a little pricey, but they last 10 or 15 years. And you could print out digital badges, but you could also use them for marketing pieces in terms of creating gift cards for your customers with unique codes on them and mailing those out. We do a lot of kind of hand marketing too. Like it's not all digital. So like when a customer cancels us, we hand write them a letter and thank them for their business and send a little card with that. We set a ticket to call them in 30 days and we manually, the digital part is that it comes up on our dashboard and tells us to call them, but a human being has to do that. And we're seeing a great return on investment on that. I mean, that's bringing us 10, 12 new, 12 return customers every month. We're bringing back a quarter of our lost customers. So we're close to 900 customers right now. And so we're going to lose some and we just need to put forth that effort to kind of get them back. And that's kind of manual, but the tracking part of it's digital. We're doing some digital parts of that with KEEP too and automating some of the touch points in terms of emails and text messages and things like that. But I still think your phone is a great weapon for forgetting all the people. It seems like it's even more now. People are just so nervous about the phone. They don't wanna pick up the phone. I don't know if that works against us in some ways though when we're trying to call people, but when I get a call and I don't recognize it, I don't pick it up. Do y'all? On my mobile, never. Yeah, I don't know. That's all I get, so no. So one way that we've kind of prefaced that is, is that we have the same number. We set it up that the number that we text from and made central is the number we do outbound sales with. So every single time that we're reaching out to a customer via phone, we've already interacted with them via text message. And if they've replied to it and Twilio is sending out what company we are, it's showing up in their caller ID because of the interaction. So you can do some things to do that. Let's start a question. Do you wanna go through a formula, Tom, for her? Sure. Or the other thing, sometimes we will text them before calling and saying, hey, this is Tom from my cleaning company and we wanna, I'm gonna be calling you in a minute to talk about an awesome offer. So how do you calculate lifetime value? We can, let's do a deep dive on that. First thing you wanna know is what we would call a court. What are the court KPIs? Is what is your monthly recurring churn rate for customers or monthly churn rate for recurring customers? And just to keep it simple, the way you do that is you count the number of recurring homes that you lose in a month and you divide it by the total number of homes that you have. For example, if you, over the course of a month, if you lose five recurring homes and if you have 100 recurring homes on the average over that month, you would take five divided by 100 and that would give you 5%. So 5% is kind of like an industry average. The main central average is like 4%. Interest is a whole, I think it's closer to five. So once you know, and that's an important number. Every house cleaning business should be tracking that know what your churn rate is and when it starts going up, you're having quality problems or something's happening in the economy, something's happening where you're losing more business than normal and you wanna take some action to drive that number back down. That's a red number in the main central world meaning that you wanna make that number go lower. So once you know what your churn rate is on a monthly basis for recurring homes, if you take that number and divide it into one, in this example, if I take one and divide it by 5% or .05, that gives me 20. 20 is the number of months on the average that a recurring customer is gonna be with you. So if you take your monthly churn rate and divide it into one, that gives you the average number of months a recurring customer is gonna be with you. So if I know that 20 months in this example is how long on the average a recurring customer is gonna be with me, the question is, well, how many times do I clean that home in a month on average? Say the average is two. So that would be 40 cleanings on the average and say the average bill rate for your company is $150, that would be $6,000 in revenue over the average lifetime of a customer. But that's really not value, that's revenue because you've got costs associated with that. You've got what they call cost of goods sold or variable costs. And that gets into a metric, another key, a core KPI, which is payroll to revenue. And that's a red number, you wanna keep that low, but let's just say your payroll to revenue is 50%, which means for every dollar you bring in, 50 cents of it is going to cover the cost of the people who cleaned it and the other 50 cents goes to you to cover fixed costs and eventually profit. So if it's 50%, then you would take 50% of the $6,000, giving you $3,000, that's really gross profit on average you would get from a recurring customer. And you could argue that would be the average lifetime value of a recurring customer in that example. And I have a, well, I have it somewhere. I was gonna say I have a spreadsheet that we could share and kind of go through, but maybe we don't have time for that on today, but there's a group. Oh, we've got plenty of time, Matt. We gotta kill, we gotta kill some time here. Of course, stop it. No, we wanna bring useful information for the next half hour. Let's, let me present something really quick and I'll share this screen because I think this is a, this is an example where you're kind of bringing it all together and I've got some tabs open that I'm not making this easy for myself though. So here we go, I found it. So this is growth model based on made central, but I will freely admit that I've made some changes to it a little bit to make it kind of customized the way that I use it. So Tom talked about the bill rate per cleaning. That's definitely really important. And then the cleanings per month per home, mine is lower than two. So, you know, we have more monthlies and things like that. And then the attrition rate, I haven't set it five. We're really not that high. So I'm just assuming like worst case scenario here we're closer to four, but you know, let's, you know, I'm playing with worst case scenario. So if I scroll down on that a little bit, I guess I need to go over to that screen and actually work with it. If I scroll down here on it, it kind of calculates in this spreadsheet that my average lifetime value is 6,105. Now that's at the starting point. If I actually put in what our actual turn is, which is about 4.2, still not where I want it, but it should recalculate that. And then you can see that it goes up quite a bit. And so companies that manage this really well, I have a peer, an industry peer that's at like 1.5%, maybe 1%. And he manages this really well. And so his lifetime value is $20,000. He can spend whatever he wants on marketing to get a customer. I mean, he can, I don't know that if he were really growing aggressively, that he could do that and maintain that turn rate, but you know, he would need to monitor that. And I wouldn't suggest spending 10,000 to gain a customer, but you can see that the value changes with how well you manage your turn and a few other metrics, especially the two other that actually have the most on it is the bill rate for cleaning and then how many cleanings per month. So getting more high frequency cleaning obviously helps this as well. So, and not, you know, not that we totally, we don't wanna take, not wanna take monthlies, but they certainly drive that number down. And they also probably also, you know, this also model is including another number that Tom didn't include, which is also our skip rate, which is atrociously high. That's also driving this number down. So if this was lower like 10% instead of 15, my value of my customer would also increase. So I'm including a few other numbers that Tom didn't mention, but the general idea is the same. You can model this out and really see, you know, what the lifetime value is of your customers and really kind of see where your profitability would be to serve and to gain those customers. So I'm in a unique position right now where with what we're spending, we need to make $250,000 just to break even. But you know, I need to know that, right? Cause we're, you know, we're doing about 290 a month. We don't have a lot of, we don't have a lot of room to spare on that.  Will that channel pay for itself? And you know, where will that be? So this is a tool we use in Made Central. We, we went through this last week when we did the Made Central Live event. If you go back to the other tab, I'm thinking where it says lifetime value. I'm guessing we're talking about gross revenue as opposed to gross profit. This is gross revenue, thank you. So we should probably, you know, make some tweaks to that spreadsheet and call that. Yeah, if you change the payroll to revenue in that spreadsheet, it wouldn't change that particular number. I don't think it would not. It's not tied to that. And this, that is not. So, and I don't even have mine. I don't, I have mine set up as cogs anyway, which includes my credit card processing includes all of my cost of goods sold, payroll taxes and a few other things. So I've, I've, I basically made a couple of tweaks to this to kind of make it more relevant to my company because I have that data. Instead of putting it down here in the operating costs I put it here at the cogs. So Alyssa, thank you for asking the question. That was a softball makes us, it gives us an opportunity to talk about Made Central. Excited to see that you're going to, I'll be going live next week. And, you know, these are some of the fun tools that you can play with. So congratulations, welcome aboard. Yeah, definitely recommend coming to an MCA live. The next one is in August.  I'll tell you the truth. My company was right around like $1.8 million when I, the first time I went to MCA live and then I was inspired by a lot of people, what they were doing. We've doubled our run rate through some of the things we've learned at MCA live. Like some of the tactics that I've learned from Aja in terms of scheduling and feeling more comfortable, like selling to a very full schedule with some of her tactics that she's taught my company and that we now kind of build into the software. That was big. I mean, there were so many little lessons over the last year. Rate adjustments to underpriced homes. Yeah, rate adjustments to underpriced homes, but it's, you feel more confident about spending the money on marketing when you really got your business styled in and you know, to a pretty clear degree what's gonna happen, you know, with some of these metrics and I get it as you get bigger, like it's easier to smooth some of this data out. But in general, the principles hold true no matter how big you are. Tom, did we set that date?  No, we know the week. We do the week in August. The week in August. So people can go ahead and block that out, but... I think it's the week of the 20th, right? Yeah, the 21st is a Monday. So it's the week of the 21st of August. And as with a lot of weeks, there's five weekdays in that week. And there's gonna be some type of activity going on at the Made Central slash Castle Keepers headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina. We're doing an MCA live event. We're doing an ARC-C regional meeting. And Liz, you're doing a program. What's the title of your program? I'm doing employee life cycle. Oh, yeah, that's an awesome program. I know that you've done that a few times. And that is well received. Yep, so that's gonna be a good week. I need to make sure and talk with Erin because we never decided if we wanted her to do the front end or the back. Yeah. That's what we're trying to figure out. We'll get to that. You know, that's a good talking about ARC-SI. There's a couple of things coming up too where you can kinda, you're welcome to visit my business and then there's another Made Central user who's also part of the CBF community, cleaning business fundamentals, if I'm getting that right. She's part of that community. And so that is gonna be what? April 27th, Friday, April 27th, the ARC-SI event. 28th. What's that? Friday, April 28th. Friday, April 28th. And then the 27th, we're hosting a, we're calling it a discovery day. Although we're getting pretty close to sold out on that, we've only got two or three more seats. So if you wanted to kind of have a little bit more deep dive into what we're doing at Better Life Mades, instead of just a tour on Friday, you'd probably wanna register for that. We'll drop some links, I'm sure, before this is up. But... That's a good idea, Matt. We can do that. Yep. Yep, we wanna probably put those in the chat somewhere. I can't type, so you guys are gonna be... I'm on it. I'm on it. I'm gonna, I'm working through other people for the next six weeks. I shared before you got on that you suffered from a pickleball accident. Yeah, yeah, well, it's a long, it's a long-term injury that I just aggravated for like the last time that I was sick of putting up with it.  Well, I've been doing that for a long time, but it's never like, it's never like just like as simple as that. It is a excruciating event every single time that that happens.  So, mine was pretty much just worn down. So, I got a little bit of a rebuild. I'm gonna, I'm rebooted for the next 20 years. I'm gonna stick to, I'm gonna stick to swimming and, you know, I don't wanna say cycling because it's funny, we were, right when I injured the shoulder, I had a friend of mine. He works for Made Central too. He was my training partner for an Ironman and we were on bikes. We didn't even tell the story. He'd seen me crash a bike at about 30 miles an hour. So, somehow I managed to come out of that without much more than some scratches. But, you know, I'm gonna probably take it easy on some of the stuff because I wanna actually be able to function into my 80s and not be too beat up. So, I'm gonna start taking it easy a little bit.  Yeah, hopefully not. Yeah. I think some of this repetitive injury is from swimming too. So, I'll do some breaststroke and let a less overhand. So, yeah, it's, pickleball was the last aggravator. I was diving for a ball on a hard core. I don't know what I was thinking as I did this move, but I'm like, this was a good decision to go after a ball. I should have just let that ball pass. You know, competitive people, it's hard to reel it in sometimes. And that was a mistake that was very painful. Well, you know, back to AI, this is a weird way around AI, but I read, I read, oh, I can't remember which one of the magazines, Fortune, or one of those, how they're expecting that AI as the more that people use it, the more injuries that they're going to see in people. And the reasoning there was that people are doing a lot of things artificially and they're training their brains that they are much more capable than they are. And they're, they have this idea that they can do a lot more things than they can. That's an interesting take. I could see that. I could see it too. And you saying that just reminded me of it. I was like, oh, maybe that's a version of that then. That might just dive and not be heard. Hopefully we don't have to decide, we can like, you know, do surgery on ourselves and like watch an AI video on how to do it or something like that. But yeah, that's interesting. I think AI, we can circle back to it all day. I mean, I'm really intrigued by the chatbot functionality and the way we can serve our customers with it. I'm gonna, like I said, I'm gonna start feeding a lot of my company's documentation into a chatbot that's gonna be an internal resource for my people initially to train it. Like so when a customer asks a question, like what cleaning solution do you use? It's gonna give them, they'll put that in the chatbot internally in Slack initially and it'll give them an answer. And then once we feel confident that it's pretty well-trained and that it's not, you know, being malicious or doing anything that we don't want it to do, then we will turn it over into a publicly-facing chatbot. I'm a little concerned to do that before some good amount of internal testing though.   It's hard to explain, but there have been a few instances of it doing some things that are less than intended consequences. So I want to make sure that before we put it out on our website publicly, that we've got all that dialed in and we're confident that some of those bugs have been worked out, but it is, it's still kind of stupid. Like it's really smart technology, but it's like a child and it just knows what it's been told. And so if somebody taught it something evil or wrong, it would, you know, put that into its... Yeah, so I don't think that's intentional, but I think that people have proven that it can be a little bit less than ideal sometimes. Have you read anything about that, Tom, of any kind of unintended consequences?  Sometimes it gets a little bit argumentative and confrontational, you know, there's a, there's some refinement that, and there's different engines too. I remember reading some things about Bard, which is the Google, the Alphabet AI tool. And actually Microsoft kind of ran into this too, when they were implementing chat to GBT inside of Bing that they were basically being rude to people that were trying to use it. They had to quickly make some adjustments. Yeah, I think that, again, it's not quite 100%, but there's a few tools. So Bard is one, Pascal is another. You're gonna start being able to layer them together here pretty soon with, you know, feeding different engines with different models. I've been playing around with chat to GBT, basically it's about five cents per thousand words that you teach it. So you can teach it about your business, you can teach it about your tone of voice, about your culture, how you talk to people. You're gonna train it to do things your way and like the way that you would want responses to be the tone of voice, the, you know, the level of professionalism. So it's gonna take some training, I think, before it's fully ready to turn loose. But it's gonna change the way that we do business. It's gonna change how we interact with our customers, how we interact with our team members, that's how marketing works. Yeah, I'm thinking a lot of us that aren't selling online now, because we're afraid we won't be able to give someone the right answers or things like that. A chat bot that's been trained on our business and our policies and procedures. That is, that's gonna be closing more deals for us at 24-7, I don't say this to like say that we're right and we're getting, somehow we're getting the online sales right though, because over 35%, almost 40% of our sales are online at this point. And some of those that are counted as online they might have called our office, but made Central sends them a quote that still digital that they, maybe they talk to someone in our office, but then the quote is digital, they click on the link and it opens up a website and they finish the booking later. So that's being counted in that number too. So I'd have to kind of back those out if we wanted to get a true kind of like first touch attribution that they only got a lead quote and then the sale from the system with no human interaction. But it's more than, more than it was a year ago and it was certainly more than it was three years ago. It was probably 10% of our sales in 2019. Now it's very, I'm excited about some of the things we're doing internally, it made Central with, can I share a time about the new customer portal? Go ahead. We're building a customer portal that we're putting a lot of thought into it, humanizing it a lot more. It's gonna do a lot for marketing because any lead that interacts with your website now and made Central will have a customer portal. So you can actually send them an invite link to that portal. You're gonna eventually be able to have them book right from that portal, see their upcoming jobs, interact with that in ways that they haven't been able to prior to now in any one tool. You're gonna be able to place promo codes eventually into it but it's gonna be pretty wild what it can do. It's a lot more beyond that where it's really focusing on the human element, like putting your text forward in it, reminders with the text, pictures and bios and things like that. The ability of the app and to rate service internal to the app. So let's think about this though. This is a couple generations of the app away. So now I'm really talking about in the future here but think about this, if that app eventually becomes instead of a web browser, which the future holds that it will be a web, it will be a native app on a device, when you wanna push a promotion out to a customer, you'll push it out as a notification in the app. You've got the level of opening the app with email and text messaging now. The ability to stay with them right in their app is gonna be huge at the new marketing channel. So that's a couple years, that might be a couple years away Tom, I'm thinking kind of a little bit farther out there. But no, it's gonna be, you know, Search is going to be something different than plugging in a keyword and getting, you know, here's 10 cleaning companies in your area. You know, it's gonna be more customized and more of a direct answer rather than here's just a bunch of pages you can click on. And how we compete in that world is gonna be different. You know, SEO is still gonna be a thing but I believe it's gonna look different. I agree, I think so.  If there's any other questions we can dive in the last 10 minutes, but. Well, you know. I have one more thing that I'd like you to talk about, Matt. You do a really great job of re-marketing or retargeting or whatever. Is it called re-marketing? It's both, I've heard it called both retargeting and marketing. Okay, I know that I see you all over the place, right? I'll be on Facebook and I'll see an ad for Better Life Mates. Can you talk a little bit about that? I know a lot of people are interested in that. Yeah, so basically you're creating different audiences with your different marketing channels like Facebook, for instance. And one of the audiences we create is website visitors. Another audience we might create would be people that have watched one of our videos for at least 10 seconds. So we'll create different content for different things. We have some retargeting that target people very specifically that they filled out a lead form on our website, but they did not finish a booking. So then we'll try and send them like a more specific target, finish your booking. But the idea is that that is not dead. Like just the attribution windows are shorter. Everyone talks about like iOS killed that. No, iOS just shortened the amount of time that they're allowing cookies to be used for marketing purposes. It's 30 days now is typically the window. I'm still seeing the window. What's that? I'm still seeing that. Yeah, so if you go to my website, Facebook will still know if you're, even if you're on an iOS device that you were there. So that's kind of scary. And I do think the devices are listening to us. Like I was talking about something very like a tractor or something like that with somebody that was, he's in my EO group and he owns like a farm as a side thing. I'm like, how would I get tractor ads basically?  And I started seeing tractor ads. I'm like, yeah, they're definitely listening to us. I mean, it's the trade-off that we have for all this technology is that it is used to market. And it's, you know, it's good and bad, I suppose. I mean, as marketers, we're able to get really granular and really retarget people that have shown interest in what we have. The other thing is you can do is beyond that 30 days, you can have retargeting lists that go on forever, like your email lists or your past customers, all of those can be uploaded into your marketing channels and you should be retargeting them forever because they've already spent money with you. A lot of them have already spent money with you if they were a past customer. I think Olu talks quite a bit about this, about what he's doing with outbound, just, you know, dialing for dollars, but it's the same principle with digital.  You just need to not forget about you and maybe at the right moment, at the right day, they'll see that. And those are so inexpensive. It's fractions of a penny just to get, you know, a view. So typically like the cost per thousand views for that kind of advertising is maybe a five bucks. It's, you know, for retargeting, it's very inexpensive. So in the five minutes or so that we have left, let's go ahead and talk a little bit about some of the events that we have coming up at the end of the month. And we're gonna share a screen. Those links. And the first thing we have coming up, and this is gonna be Thursday, April 27th, is a discovery day. This is gonna be at your office, Matt. Yeah. This one is gonna be a little bit smaller group, where we're gonna kind of do some case studies on how we've used Made Central to really have some explosive growth. And I don't know, maybe it's not explosive growth, but we're growing 40% a year for the last three years. It's repeatable and it's, you know, much more I'd have to really be committed to spending. Most cleaning companies would be excited to have that. Okay. You know, so we're gonna dive into that. We're gonna look at some of the things that we're doing. Look at, you know, Made Central, but also processes, management, you know, management tools that we're using and some modeling to let us feel confident that the choices we're making are effective. So that's gonna be a deep dive and I think that'll be really effective. It's gonna be especially effective though for someone that's not quite on Made Central because we're gonna talk about a little bit, you know, it'll be probably a little bit geared towards somebody that's exploring Made Central and that's not quite convinced that they're ready for it or it's the right tool for them. So we're looking at a picture here of some very large monitors you have on your wall. Yeah, it's hard to see scale there, but that's 14 feet from end to end of monitors. Oh, wow, those are two 85-inch monitors kind of inspired from the dispatch boards of Tom's office where we've got different views up of job scheduling views, team monitors, sales KPIs. The one with all the employee pictures is not in Made Central. That is another tool called Vibe, which is free. You can create whiteboards and we've used Vibe to kind of create our employee whiteboard, but yeah, mostly. And then we also sometimes have the weather up here and a few other things that are kind of going on. This is sales KPI report. So even since then we're closer to 900 on the customer account. So from when this picture was taken till now and we've driven our cost of goods sold or payroll to revenue, below 39, we're at 38. So I see some improvements we've made even since then. Yeah. And that's just a mock picture from the test environment but kind of shows you can create a lot of density with Made Central with the mapping tools. That's really been big for us with, you know, I know you guys had Debbie on last week and I will say, you know, the solo model allowed us to create a lot more route density than we were able to complete with teams and really increase our productivity and efficiency. And we've raised our average to about 390 per employee per day of what we're building. So again, we're going to talk about all that in St. Louis and we've got a couple of comments to talk about. If you want to know what about Made Central this is that Thursday afternoon from one to five and it's free, it's free to attend but we ask for a $100 deposit because we don't want people signing up and not coming but if you show up we'll give you your $100 back. That's how that works. So if you're serious about going go ahead and sign up make your $100 deposit and we'll give you your $100 when we see you and that's Thursday which brings us into Friday which is the regional event. Yeah. And where is this being held Matt? So there'll be tours in the morning for up to 50 companies. So I will say it's getting down to the wire of how many companies can do the tours. So if you want to come I think there's less than a few spots left. So they're going to split the tours into two groups and do tours of my office and then Stacey Weiland of Green Angel is also going to be touring her office. She's got also a very successful business. She's on Made Central. She's growing fast and she's literally across the street from me. We're like competitors and like we're separated by a four lane road. She's on one side, I'm on the other. So will we be really like walking out the front door of your office, going across the street and going in the front door of her office? We're gonna have somebody with a stop sign walking you guys across the street at the crosswalk. Yeah, it's that close. That's awesome. Crazy, it is crazy. So the cost of this event I guess is $149 if you're an ARC-C member and $299 if you aren't. So if you're on an ARC-C member, first thing you wanna do is sign up, I'm a common member and then attend this at a meaningful discount. And there'll be education from 12 to five, I believe, and then there's gonna be a happy hour from five to seven and I'm sure people will socialize and stick around. And then there's one last event that Sharon Tinberg is hosting at our office too which is gonna be a training day where you can dive into the details of how Sharon uses her technology and her training system to create repeatable systems. So that one should be really useful as well for a lot of companies, for wherever they're at in their business. There's a lot of value in terms of the amount of cost to good soul, the amount of direct labor you can save by embracing some of the techniques that she teaches. So if you're kind of wondering, do we have an opportunity to improve our cleaning procedures to improve our productivity and lower our payroll to revenue? This would be worth attending and it's nine to three on Saturday and registration is open for that as well. And if you're an ARC-C member, it's only $49. Yeah, I see that to be like kind of like a little sleeper deal kind of it's, I mean, even if you don't embrace all the ideas that someone has to share, if you can get one little nugget, $49 is... Oh my gosh, so amazing. Go ahead and drop the link. I've already dropped the link to the main central discovery going on Thursday. I'll drop the link to the regional event on Friday and I will drop the link to Sharon's training event on Saturday. And with that, we're at the top of the hour. We made it, we got through. Matt, thank you.  You've already... Yeah, yeah, I'm up in the neck here. It's almost, it's down to the last, it's got a little countdown of how much is left. There's just enough to get me to the morning and then I gotta take this thing out and see how I really feel. So that's the scary part. Don't worry, you'll be fine, Matt, you're tough. Yeah, I've done, I've had a little bit of orthopedics before. I'm gonna, hopefully this is the last one for a while. I need to pick sports that are easier on my body. Tom and I have been talking about that. We need to make sure we last a long time and run in marathons and do an Iron Man. That was stuff for when we were a little younger and baby. Oh, you turn me on to a book in terms of, how to be active when you're a hundred. Yeah. You know what the first thing is? Live to be a hundred. Ah, ah, funny, Tom. No, it is, but then there's a lot of other things too. All right, but I have one on one I gotta get to. Okay, well, Matt, thanks so much for stepping in. We'll see you guys next Wednesday, five o'clock Eastern. Bye-bye. Bye.


Okay, so I think we're just gonna get started. Hello everyone, hi to Madrid, hi to Atlanta, and to Portugal, and hello everybody and welcome to our Hyperledger in-depth webinar. This is the last webinar of the year and we're glad to have you here. Today we will have a presentation from Andrew, who's the Chief Technology Officer at Validation Cloud about how performance note infrastructure drives enterprise blockchain adoption and allows for Hyperledger based on deployment. Now, before we start, we do have some housekeeping. So first of all, I would like to emphasize that everybody is welcome in our Hyperledger global community and we are committed to creating a safe and welcoming environment for everybody. So please follow our code of conduct when interacting with each other on this webinar and also in the community more broadly. You can find our code of conduct in our wiki on our website. First, all of the Hyperledger Foundation webinars are held under the Linux Foundation Antitrust Policy. So, and you can find this antitrust policy on our website and on our wiki as well. This webinar is being recorded as well as live streamed on LinkedIn Live and YouTube and you can always find the recording along with the slides in our webinar library. So you can always revisit that if you missed a certain part of it. Now, we encourage you to be as active as possible and get the most out of it because the more active we are, the more the better experience for everybody. So please use your raise the hand button to get unmuted and to speak up and do feel free to ask questions. You can use the Q&A box or also the chat box. So we will get to the questions either at the middle of presentation or at the end. So feel free to just pose your questions over there. Now, without further ado, I would like to introduce again, Andrew McFarley, the CTO of the Validation Cloud. And Andrew, over to you. Awesome. Great to see you, Tomasson. Thank you everybody for joining today. I really appreciate your time and glad that the community came out to support and watch the content today. Let me just open up my slides. Tomasson, can you see that all right? Yes, that looks okay. Thank you. Awesome. So my presentation today is about empowering enterprise blockchain adoption. As Tomasson mentioned, my name is Andrew McFarland and I'm the CTO and one of the co-founders of Validation Cloud. My background, just to start so you know a little bit about me, I noticed in the chat some Toronto's, I'm also based in Toronto, Canada, although our company is quite global, folks in the US, Europe and across the world. My background is in computer engineering by training. I've spent some time in telecom working on content distribution networks for video streaming applications. I spent some time at Deloitte and cybersecurity, mostly working with financial institutions on application and network security. And then made my way into Web 3 about six years ago now, started investing in the space. That led to running infrastructure to participate in different emerging networks and started to see the limitation of certain protocols due to the infrastructure that was effectively acting as a middleware between the users and those networks. And because of that limitation of scalability, there was a lack of particular use cases being able to come to life. Many of the ones that, you know, people who are around Web 3 were particularly excited about faster DeFi applications, financial infrastructure, energy, logistics, and next generation gaming, which I'll get into later in the presentation. And so we decided to found validation cloud in order to solve some of those scalability problems and really address the needs for enterprise grade infrastructure across Web 3. And so we purpose built the company to be Web 3 enterprise infrastructure. And this comes not only from the technical designs of our platform, which I'll get into, but also in the construction of our team. So not only experts from the Web 3 world to have context for interacting with networks and how to build on them from companies like Crypto.com, from Binance, and from other large Web 3 companies, but also you can see along the bottom here a number of large Web 2 traditional enterprise companies that have brought their experience into the company for working directly with institutions, companies like Workday, Uber, Citadel, so a wide range of applications and Web 2 experience. Today I'll walk you through a few things I really wanna introduce you to the company at Validation Cloud. We're a new member of the Hyperledger ecosystem and so really wanna present ourselves, get a chance for everyone to get familiar with our services and how our platform comes together for enterprises. That includes staking, node API, and data that you'll see, but I'll dive deeper into staking and node API and how that really helps power enterprises feeling comfortable interacting with our infrastructure. And then finally end on some enterprise use cases where having more performant node infrastructure is particularly important and some of the applications that we see and get inbound interest for infrastructure. So to start a little bit more about the company here, so we primarily today engage Web 3 ecosystems and their underlying applications. Our partners have market caps in excess of 30 billion in aggregate and work very closely with a number of the top public chains as well as on private infrastructure. And again, we're happy to be a new entrant into the Hyperledger ecosystem where we can hopefully bring some of our operating experience and technical experience to help unlock certain use cases for participants. Our platform has three core pillars, staking, node API, and data. And really this is meant to be an end-to-end suite for enterprises to on the left side of that spectrum, power and bootstrap, very secure and scalable consensus, node API to unlock interactions with those underlying networks that have been deployed, whether we spoke private deployments or on top of public networks and implementations and then data to index and provide a queryable engine for access to historical data on those networks. Before I dive in more specifically on the products, I just wanna highlight two important facets that we're particularly proud of as a company. One is we've been ranked number one for performance in terms of API response speed by compare nodes. I'll get into more of this later, but it effectively shows that across North America, Europe and Asia, we ranked number one for the fastest average API response speed and I'll get into more why that matters, particularly for scalable use cases. And in line with being enterprise infrastructure, we take security and compliance very seriously and so we're also stuck to compliant as a platform across those product lines that I shared on the last slide. Okay, so first I wanna dive into our staking, enterprise staking platform, which provides secure scale for institutions. And so some of the product features that you can find on our platform are completely self-service non-custodial platforms.  There's a few key components here on the left side that I mentioned that are particularly important for institutional token holders. The first is the non-custodial nature of the platform making it completely staking as a service or validator as a service if required. And so you can keep your tokens in custody and simply interact with the network directly through our service. And that I'll walk you through in the next couple of slides here, how that's possible and some of the technical innovations that we've made. On demand, so you can go directly on our platform and we'll spin up dedicated environments for the provision validators on our staking platform completely isolated on a per customer basis that interacts. You can do this through the UI as well as API, key provisioning.  Everything's done on chain in terms of commission. So there's no back office accounting for actually settling payment for the service. Everything's done on chain, full reporting. And you also get the benefit of extra features for enterprises like slashing insurance and the SOC2 nature of the platform. Before I dive in a little bit more technically in how it works. So right now our staking and validator platform is trusted by several hundred millions of delegated assets across ecosystems and is currently used by asset managers, foundations and custodians. And so if you're particular interested in bootstrapping a consensus on your network, if you're interested in support and managing assets whether that's through smart contracts or other means on top of a network or simply in how you interact as a custodian on top of different protocols, our platform can support and our team is happy to work with you on your particular use case. So some of the key technical innovations I'd like to go through now on this slide, particularly with respect to staking and how that non-custodial real-time provisioning in dedicated environments and smart contract awards split all works in tandem on our platform. So hopefully you can see my pointer here to walk you through, if not, I'll walk you through verbally as well. So if you're an asset manager or institutional token holder, you can show up on our platform with an existing account. Let's say with a custodian, as an example, Fireblocks. You can interact with our platform, as I mentioned through UI or API, and effectively what that UI or API has been built to do is help facilitate a transaction that's signed from your custodial wallet and pushes that transaction completely based off of your wallet interactions into public network in order to stake those assets. Once that's been accomplished, our platform automatically dedicates environments for that new wallet that was recognized on the platform. So everything is completely isolated. Once that happens, our backend deploys a few components, two of which are highlighted here, so that new dedicated environment, as I mentioned, with validators that interact with consensus on the network in order to generate rewards and validate transactions. The other key component that is deployed is a new smart contract for handling on-chain rewards commission. So everything is completely automated, completely transparent on-chain. So how that works is you've deployed from this custodial wallet, and this rewards contract has been deployed to automatically split rewards between our billing wallet and validation cloud, as well as right back to the wallet from which you stake. Now, to round out this flow, if you ever want to undeligate your assets that are associated with validation, you can simply go back to UI or API, again, sign a request directly from your custodial wallet. This will be pushed on-chain for verification, and those initial delegated assets will be returned directly to the custodial wallet from which you stake. And so it's a completely closed system where all the initial stake and rewards go back directly and can be managed from your custodial wallet and keep your assets safe and be in compliance with the mandates of operating from a custodian with your assets. So that's the flow for staking on our platform. There's a, you know, in summary, there's a particular number of innovations around making this non-custodial, making the real-time provisioning work both for the net new validators and dedicated environments, as well as the on-chain reward splitting, and then making sure it's a closed loop environment, bringing all rewards as well as initial stake back to your wallet. To go through the next section of our platform and some of the innovations that we've made, I'd like to highlight our enterprise node API where I'll go through some of the technical work and platform architecture as well as the use cases. And I think to set the stage a great analogy for platformers to think of us in node API as a cloud flare for web three. So cloud flare does a particularly great job in web two of if you have an application or a website and you wanna scale interactions with your web application, that you confront that with cloud flare to add a scalability to your web application. And similarly, if you have needs for high throughput in terms of interacting with applications, sending transactions, our platform is particularly well suited for those applications as a middleware between the end user and consensus and particularly good for global scale ecosystems to get a unified experience across the world for interaction with an underlying protocol. So I'll get into a few metrics here and then dive into the architecture and what interaction looks like for you as the end user. So mentioned at the beginning, the third party metrics from compare nodes in terms of the number one global node API performance, this gets more into the specifics in terms of relative throughput based on the latencies measured by compare nodes as benchmarked on their site to some other commonly used node API providers. And you can see in this depiction that whether you're in North America, whether you're in Europe or whether you're in Asia, you're getting a unified advantage and a similar operating experience in terms of your interaction for your application, no matter where you are on the planet. And that was particularly what our platform on the node API was designed to do. So why is a performant node infrastructure important? I mentioned a few reasons, but just to highlight them here. So quite frequently, web three networks or particularly private implementations deal with different business partners, different worldwide users. And it's important, especially in performance systems not to advantage or disadvantage folks based off of the location from which they're interacting. And so giving that unified experience brings a parody of interaction across the board. Cost efficiencies for your enterprises and for your ecosystem as a whole. So quite often when you factor in not only the actual cost of operation and the technical know-how to implement and maintain node infrastructure, but the human cost of maintenance upgrades and enhancements over time can cost ecosystems an aggregate of over $10 million and on a per enterprise basis, often individually into the several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year alone to manage that infrastructure. So having that be offered as a managed service is particularly well suited to streamline your operations and enhance your time to go to market for your application. And then finally enterprise grade scale. So our platform has the advantages of economies of scale of operating it across different networks. And so a tremendous amount of operating knowledge, but also particularly strong innovations that we've made that support enterprise grade quality across the board. So that includes that high throughput 24 seven uptime and infrastructure compliance like SOC2, but also resilience to the infrastructure. The ability to have redundancy baked in is particularly well suited for a variety of use cases. What I would like to highlight on the right here is as I mentioned at the beginning, we're a new entrant into the Hyperledger ecosystem. So you can see some of the additional networks around the hoop there that we support in terms of public networks, but we're also very excited to play a deeper role in the Hyperledger ecosystem and support our different applications using our middleware and perform an infrastructure in order to make those next gen applications come to life. And so if you're interested in building and you are looking forward to needing more performance in your application, we'd love to dig in with you and see if there's a mechanism for how our platform can make your network or your application scale. To go in more technically here in terms of what does this global architecture look like and how do you interact with it from the standpoint of a user in networks? So our global architecture spans the globe which is in part why it's particularly advantage North America, Europe, Asia, across the world, the ability to interact in about 20 milliseconds with infrastructure from wherever you are on the planet and how you interact with it as user is you simply generate an API key on our platform on demand that gives you access to this entire global network of those deployed across the globe. It is first priority is to tap you in and resolve to the closest point of presence in our global network in order to interact. And then each of these regions is linked through private network in order to speed up propagation of those transactions across the globe and come to transactions broadcast and becoming aware across the network as quickly as possible. What that URL in your application automatically does is it also detects if there is any local issues with any of the infrastructure. If at all, if that happens, it automatically reroutes your transaction to the next closest point of presence. And again, trans propagates those transactions across the globe or fast finality across our set of infrastructure. And so based baked into this architecture, it prioritizes speed, but doubles the speed but doubles as a resilience mechanism so that with a single URL and API key, you are tapped in to the full worldwide scope of our operating infrastructure. One more point that I'll make is this also supports high throughput as well because you are getting the advantages of a tremendous amount of parallel processing across the nodes that are deployed. How a user interacts with that network and I'll make the point that network can be bespoke. So if there is a private network and you're launching a new network and you'd like this particular architecture to bootstrap your ecosystem's ability to interact with it, then this opportunity to work directly with us to make that supportable and ease of onboard and streamline your user base into that ecosystem and to drive interactions and to build new applications. How the user experience looks here is you can generate your API key in seconds. So you simply go on our platform, select the node API option in our UI. You'll be prompted to create an endpoint. When you do that, you can name your endpoint, particularly helpful for segmenting environments, whether that's for your test environment and production or different use cases for your application and select network, select whether that's a mainnet or testnet for the ecosystem in which you want to interact. Simply click confirm and then you're off and away and can make calls directly against that global set of infrastructure. Our model is particularly well suited for scale. It was AWS inspired pricing model. So for builders out there and enterprises, a payment model that's particularly familiar and maps well to a wide range of applications. So we have a free tier. So if you're an enterprise and you're looking to trial our platform in the procurement process, it's particularly well suited there. You get 50 million compute units for free per month no credit card required to get started. So very seamless in order to trial the platform. And for those of you that are not familiar, compute units are basically a weight associated with an API request type, basically mapping the resource intensive nature of that request to a value to better standardized requests and bill for them across different types of requests and different networks.  So this is unlimited compute units. So you can scale completely based off of your needs and you only pay for what you use. So it's a pay as you go model and you also get economies of scale. So similar to AWS with their pricing thresholds as you use more you pay a lower marginal unit cost for what you consume.  So you pay a lower cost per compute unit the more requests that you push through the infrastructure. And so you're not penalized for higher throughput and scalability. You're actually rewarded with economies of scale on the platform here. So who are you and who are some of the folks that are interacting with our node API platform today? So we're trusted by enterprises. So whether you're a blue chip enterprise, a web two company looking to get into and leverage a DLT solution particularly well suited for the scale resilience and compliance that you're used to seeing in the web two world that you can do on top of node API platform applications. So if you have a target ecosystem in mind and you'd like to scale your throughput whether that's through higher requests per second or particularly well suited there if you'd like to launch a private network let's say an L1 network that's unique for your use case we can help you bootstrap the network one on the consensus side but also deploy this global scale network so that you have an effective way for builders to connect into that ecosystem in a seamless, efficient and scalable manner. And then more use case specific but traders or financial services use cases if there's particular need to scale interactions with an application let's say example of high frequency trading where global scale advantages and latency it particularly makes a difference. This is where our notes can help you out with those interactions. So that's the overview of our staking and node API platform methods of interacting with it the value that they add to particular use cases and user profiles across web three. Now I'd like to get into a little bit more specifics on industry verticals where we've seen interest of the platform and how the performant node infrastructure is particularly well suited for those high level verticals. So first tier I would like to highlight financial infrastructure so where we've seen our middleware solution particularly well suited is first for high throughput DeFi protocols. So if you have the need to offer let's say particularly let's say efficient financial services products, lending protocols, synthetic assets, things of that nature tokenized assets and you are curating an ecosystem to interact with those protocols for settlement that often leads to particularly high throughput of requests that need to be pushed through infrastructure in order to interact with the protocol and have sort of cascading events that are triggered based on those interactions. And so that's a particularly well high throughput case for our node API. Here's second, there are highly high-frequency trading and market makers. So let's say those protocols above have been deployed and then there's a need to basically have interactions to make the lead to depth of markets or lead to arbitrage or opportunities for participation. Also again, there's an opportunity and the need for low latency interactions in order to be able to not only identify let's say arbitrage opportunities and execute against them in a rapid manner to bring stability to the underlying financial services protocol. That speed and interaction on node API allows that to happen in a particularly resilient and efficient manner. And then finally, Web3 Asset Interoperability. And so the ability for let's say new networks or existing networks where you've issued assets, our platform also hooks into a variety of ecosystems. So there's a great opportunity in order to build out your logic using our platform across ecosystem in a very efficient way versus going to multiple providers to connect into those different ecosystems. Secondarily here, we've seen inbound interest for energy and logistics sectors, particularly use cases, let's say around first tracking real-time energy generation. And so particularly in, let's say decentralized distributed areas for generation, there's an opportunity to track that production and create a record. And so those happening particularly quickly in high volume are particularly important to deal with scalable underlying infrastructure. We've seen the need for supporting global energy marketplaces based off of things like energy credits and other concepts. And then enabling traceability in the supply chain is particularly important. So a number of, again, globally distributed, highly frequent repetitive transactions works particularly well on our global scale deployment. And then last but not least, and this is definitely not an exhaustive list, but also we've seen a tremendous amount of interest and utilization with respect to next generation gaming. So for this use case, particularly networks and applications that are associated with gaming, there's a need for reaching, again, a common theme of worldwide gamer audiences. And so if you're launching a network or an application, let's say a Web3 game, and you want that to reach a user base in North America as well as Europe and maybe scale that into Asia over time, the network allows those interactions and having consistent user experiences from each of those geographic locations in terms of latency with the underlying Web3 network and allows gameplay to be augmented in a way that is sort of consistent with the increased speed and user experience. So you can have faster gameplay with these assets based off of faster settlement, greater and quicker recognition of these transactions being propagated across the globe. And the ability to, as I mentioned here, scale those in game transactions with asset ownership, which is very important for unlocking a different type of user experience and gaming experience where you actually have ownership of in-game items where you can unlock that value. So I appreciate your time today. As I mentioned, we're a new entrant in the Hyperledger ecosystem. I hope you got a sense of some of the technical innovations on the staking side, power and consensus, as well as the Node API, high performance, highly scalable, highly compliant, highly resilient, enterprise grade infrastructure for launching net new layer ones or helping scale your Web3 applications in terms of high throughput. We would love to get in touch with you, learn more about what you're trying to build and find ways that our platform can act as a great product suite for unlocking what you'd like to do and helping set the future of Web3 through you as a visionary builder. So you can get in touch with us directly. You can see the email at the top there, bdatvalidationcloud.io. You can follow us on xatvalidationcloud or you can use this giant QR code on the screen here to connect directly at validationcloud.io on our website. So thank you very much for your time. Really appreciate everybody joining today and taking time out of your day to learn more about Validation Cloud and we'd love to hear from you and help build together. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Andrew. We do have a question from Jeff here in the Q&A box. If you can see it. You said from Jeff. Yes, the Q&A, we have only one question over there. Maybe you can read it to me. I can pop it into the chat if you can see it. There's some reason I don't see the chat. Okay, do you see it in the chat? Which of these priorities for Validation Cloud launches where there are no, am I reading the correct one? Maybe I'll read it. That's right. Everybody's benefit. So the question is, hi, can you describe your order or nodes? How are transactions prioritized for Validation consensus on blockchains where there are no mining or staking rewards? So for us, historically we've worked primarily in ecosystems where there are rewards. That has been in our company's evolution a way of sort of unlocking our particular business model in providing the infrastructure. In terms of the prioritization and how this would work, where that doesn't exist, I'll say we can dig in and if there's a bespoke deployment needed, we can discuss, you know, this would probably matter specific to use cases. So I imagine for, let's say, financial services, transactions, there's a particular need to order in a specific way versus other industries where maybe the ordering of transactions is less critical to the functioning of the use case. So sort of we're happy to dig in with folks if they need this explored and map the logic here to the specific use case so things function correctly. So I don't have more specific answer, but I think it matters more specific to use case on this front. Okay, thank you, Andrew. Do we have any other questions? Oh, I see something's coming up. Oh, Jeff says, okay, thanks. Okay, great. Would anybody else like to ask a question? I can unmute you. No, okay, I think we are good for now. Andrew, maybe just one last question from my side before we wrap it up. I'm wondering, could you maybe talk a little bit about the use cases? You know, you told us how it can be used, but are you available to speak a little bit about the use cases that you are running now on the validation cloud? Yeah, so I highlighted those generically, but there are use cases in line. So you can think of our platform, I mentioned at the beginning, more of from a node API side, a middleware for a variety of use cases. So how that looks like in reality for us is the users on our platform are coming. I gave sort of a high level overview, but for each of those verticals, there are users in those verticals using our platform for that scalability across different networks. So those were real specific examples, specific names of clients I can't get into today. Of course. But that is how our platform is being used. So really it's for us, we like to work with folks where they need extra bespoke help for specific verticals, but with that said, our platform is made to be sort of a building block for visionaries across the spectrum that can use us to enhance their performance or to unlock the advantages that they need for their use case. Okay, great. Thanks a lot, Andrew. Do we have any other questions? Please feel free to raise your hand. Oh, thank you Alfonso. Alfonso says thank you. Okay. In that case, let us wrap this up. Would you like to add anything else, Andrew? Otherwise, we will just conclude and thank everybody for being here. For me, I just want to say thank you again. Thank you, you, Tomas, for hosting me today and appreciate everybody joining live or watching this asynchronously later. You know, very glad that I had a chance to introduce you to Validation Cloud. We're very happy to be a part of the Hyperledger ecosystem. It's early days, but we really would love to hear from you, hear your visions for what you'd like to build in the future, and hopefully there's a way that our platform can help you on that journey. So thank you very much, everybody. All right, thank you very much, Andrew, and thank you everybody for joining to this last webinar, and thank you, you know, for joining us through the whole year. It was pleasure having you here, and you're always welcome to reach out to us, to join our Discord, to join our special interest group, and we look forward to seeing you at the other events as well. And thank you to Andrew and we're free to reach out to Validation Cloud as well. Now, just before we conclude, I would like to also invite you to visit our event page. So great heavy thank you with us on the webinars this year, and we are happy to have you on our upcoming webinars later in 2024, and visit our events page for both webinars, as well as the in-person events. Don't also forget to visit our Meetup page. We do have some of the upcoming Meetups also this year, still, as well as the next year, and you can just follow this link to join the Meetups and learn more there. I would also like to invite you to view the research that we are doing here at Hyperledger, and over the last years, we published quite a couple of different papers, white papers, e-books. Some of the most recent ones includes the Supply Chain and Trade Finance e-book, which was created by the Supply Chain and Trade Finance Special Interest Group. It's a part of our community, as well as the updated CBDC e-book, and you can download both of them here by following this QR code or just following this link on the research. Do not forget to join our Discord. There's a lot of real-time interaction there. You can find out more about our projects, about our special interest groups, our working groups, original chapters, and much, much more. And you can also join it by following this link or through scanning this QR code. And for those of you interested in your organization's membership in Hyperledger Foundation, feel free to reach out to our membership, such as our valued member validation cloud here as well. Now for the last time, thank you for watching and happy holidays to everybody, and we hope to see you again next year as well. And all the best. Thank you, and goodbye.