I don't even think I can top that introduction. So, can everybody hear me? It's good. OK, so this talk is Backbone Discuss, a post-mortem. Basically, I just want to talk about a project we did last year in which we converted the Discuss application to use Backbone. And not just that, we did a complete client-side re-architecture. So I'm going to talk about that and explain what Discuss is and why we did it and all that.  But technically speaking, in the dictionary, it's an analysis or discussion of an event. After it's over, I just want to get that out of the way for people who are upset about it. So just a little bit about me. Earlier this year, I released a book with my co-author Anton Kovalev, he's a JavaScript guy. I don't have a guy thing, so I'm just Ben. But we put out this book. And it's about building third-party widgets, writing JavaScript code that goes on other people's websites, how to make it not break and stuff like that. It's a pretty good book. You should check out the Amazon reviews because they're very insightful and they may convince you to purchase the book.  Rekha Murphy was a speaker last year, I understand. So just based on 45 pages, I think that's pretty good. She recanted everything 60 pages in. So I'm not here really too much to talk about the book, although definitely some of the stuff is related. So I work at Discuss. And that's Discuss, like discussion, not discus. I'd say it's about a 50-50 split that people say one or the other. And once you hear Discuss, you're like, oh, that makes sense, why didn't I think about it? Don't worry about it, now you know. So what we do is we do a conversation platform, embedded, commenting thing. We're all over the web. A lot of big sites, a lot of small sites. Lately, I'm more into about some of the non-traditional uses of Discuss that really get me excited. We're actually on the Redis documentation. So this is just a page. It's the expire command. And there's a legitimate conversation taking place at the bottom about how to use the command and people participating. And I think that's pretty cool. So how Discuss actually gets on your page, if you don't know, it's a third-party script. You put this snippet, kind of like a Google Analytics snippet that everybody's seen. You put it on your web page. You sign up on our website. And you get comments on your website. So just quick recap. We're on a lot of big sites as well. I showed the Redis documentation. But we also do comments for CNN, Wired, IGN, Rolling Stone, NPR. It's a big list. Also the Ruby on Rails blog, Ruby.dot.org, stuff like that, a lot of personal blogs, et cetera. Just some obligatory fancy stats. We do about a million uniques a month right now. That's like Google's measure of unique, which would put us in like the top 10 sites overall if we were just at destination sites. That's kind of crazy. We get almost a million comments a day. But that's just comments. We also have a lot of other events that are taking place. There's votes. There's favoriting things and sharing things. There's a lot of stuff that's happening. And we also have a real-time service that's new. And it was part of what we built in the last year. And on any normal day, we get about three million active connections. And then my last stat is that there's 16 of us that are building this, which I think is pretty cool. Apparently, 18 today. I got an email because we hired a bunch of people. And then lastly, I just thought this was neat because I'm here. Discuss was a YCO 7 company. At the time, it was in Cambridge. So probably just a couple of blocks from here. I actually only just learned that a couple of months ago, so it's kind of neat. All right, so that's like Discuss Today. That's kind of what we're doing today. But I want to bring you back in the time machine. We're going to set the time machine back one year. That's the most interesting time you would go to if you had a time machine. So our two years, year and a half. So in 2011 Discuss, it's kind of a little different. We're trying to do this software as a service thing. SAS, not SASS. We could be both, I don't know. And it was the kind of thing like you went to our website, we had a free service. But you could go to the website and there'd be that familiar like choose a plan. $20 a month, $50 a month, $100 a month. And depending on what you got, you got access to different stuff. Analytics, a beaming thing, a template editor. And also the application is really customizable. Like anybody could just write CSS, target some stuff, make it look different. It was like your comments. And that worked really well. And we were getting really big, really fast. And a lot of people were using us. And they were pretty happy. But things started kind of like snowballing, getting out of control for us. For starters, when everybody can customize Discuss, it starts to look different everywhere. And then people don't really know what Discuss is anymore. It could be as simple as just taking off our branding or just completely eliminating a feature or whatever. People, depending on the community, went to something like, I hate Discuss because in some cases they just completely modify how it worked. And then somebody else would be like, I love it. It was kind of irritating. It was difficult for us to introduce new features because people were taking parts out and doing whatever. So if we want to introduce a new feature, we couldn't always depend on what was there. We kind of worked around this idea that people were just kind of taking stuff out. And we do a lot of ifs and buts. Really frustrating. It was brittle, it was buggy, and we had some security and privacy issues. So I'll just cover those a little bit more. So just to give you an idea of how customization-wise what Discuss looked like, here's a screenshot from the MLB comments that you've discussed. You notice the word Discuss doesn't appear anywhere. That's just one example. This is people.com, I think. I think it's supposed to say power about Discuss in the corner, but it's like a broken image link. So nobody knows. And it looks completely different there. And then this is AV Club. They've taken some stuff away in the header, and it's different as well. Kind of annoying. So I just gave you an idea of how it looked differently. So I'm talking about introducing new stuff. We were rendering elements. We were rendering comments on the DOM. We call them publishers, because I guess when we got started, a lot of people used Discuss are like web publishers, like CNNs and stuff. So it's just like our internal talk, a publisher, website person, use CSS to hide stuff. And even if they couldn't target stuff with CSS, even if we were getting super clever with CSS, they could always just remove it with JavaScript. So you can do stuff to play this game. But it's on your DOM, you can traverse it, you can do whatever you want with it. It's really hard to stop people to do that. So just to give you an idea, we got these CSS nuclear arms races, where we really over-specified things with we'd use important tags everywhere. We'd use double ID selectors, because nobody uses double IDs. So and then somebody would be like, fine, well, now we're going to use triple IDs. And then it was just getting really silly. And that's how easy it was to just take stuff up. And obviously, some of the stuff we wanted people to customize, but then we kind of had this global stuff that we didn't want anybody to change. We wanted the login thing to look the same everywhere. So you knew how to log out or how to log in. That's the stuff that people would change. It was really irritating. So lastly, I'm sorry if this is a lot of setup. I just want everyone to understand what we're working with. I feel like there's a crazy story. We're running a lot of code on the host page, on the publisher page. A lot of people have messy JavaScript environments. People talk about how our code base has all these globals, it's gross, it's legacy. We have to deal with that at times like everybody's website. And it's really hard to predict what people are doing. You often find yourself debugging cnn.com or whatever. And you'd find plug-ins or whatever. It might not even be them. It may be that they had another third-party script.  So this is a true-to-life example of something that we encountered where somebody decided to override a rate of prototype and push. I don't know what purpose they were serving. They actually removed functionality. Because even though this works, like it's just pushing on top of the array, the actual array prototype and push takes multiple arguments. So you could push one, two, three, four, five values. So we had some code that did that, and it broke. And that would just be the kind of thing we'd need to do debugging. I would cry. And so now this is the last thing. We also have privacy issues. And this is the thing that I don't think a lot of people understood. And we didn't understand for a while. But if you think about it, it's all about having this like global identity, and you go to different websites, and you can sign in and post. But for us to do that for you to see like, oh, I'm logged in here, and I'm over here, and I can post somewhere, we're putting information about you on the DOM. We're not sharing private information, but it's enough to identify you. Like it could be your name, it could be whatever. And if you think about it, we're kind of sharing that as you browse the web. So to give you an idea, here's like the old discuss, and here's me logged in. And I'm just kind of highlighted with my terrible Photoshop skills. Like places where you can kind of gleam information about the visitor. So for example, I've written this post, and although you can't see post below it, it's highlighted in red. So I think that's not even something we did. I think that's like a tool that a publisher did. But they could say, oh, this person is highlighted in red. Well, now I know the author has been vinegar, or whoever's visiting this page, it's red. Who's the author it's been? They could conceivably start collecting that information. It's kind of scary stuff. Horror story. So I guess at the end of 2011, we had this idea, we're kind of getting tired of all this. It was very miserable, and this is not cool. So we had an idea, which was, what did we discuss? And we put everything in an iframe, just entirely. We used iframes before. I know a lot of things about iframes. But we didn't use them like everything. We used them sparingly in places that really needed to be secure. Like the post box itself would be an iframe, because we didn't want people to hijack the post box and write comments on your behalf and stuff like that. But now we're talking about taking everything. So that's effectively what the project was. So this diagram might explain what we were going for. So just take everything and put it in an iframe. So why would we do that? And that's really because of the same origin policy, which is stuff on different origins, can't access each other, that iframes as well. So we put this iframe, it's on discuss.com, parent page can't mess with it. It can't find, you know, glean any details about it. They can't inspect it. We're running in our own code environment completely. Never have to deal with, you know, messy parent JavaScript environments. And I didn't really talk about cross-site scripting, but in the hypothetical, you know, what's the word I'm looking for, let's say that there was a cross-site scripting vulnerability in our application, OK? Worst case, we could put that all over the web. We could put it on everybody's web page. And that's super bad. In the iframe case, at least it scoped our iframe. And it's just us that's affected. I prefer that, you know, like that's just a million times better. And I'd like to think that nobody has cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, but the reality is that almost everybody does. I think there was a Google Finance one the other day.  So we embarked on the grand rewrite, as Joel Spolsky has called it, except not quite, because we just did the client-side. Client-side codes is all JavaScript, basically, and like templates and that kind of stuff. We still had an API. So we had an API, it was pretty decent. We built on top of that. We didn't rebuild really very much server stuff. And we made a decision that we were only going to do IE8NUP, which was a little contentious going back to 2011, because IE7 was still used a fair bit by our customers. But the reason we did is that IE8NUP has a very critical feature for working with iframes. Window.postMessage, that's the method that you use to communicate between iframes in a safe way. There are tons of hacks to go back with older browsers. But now that we're in 2013, there's really no point in talking about them. So it was just like a bit of a problem here, which is we were selling this product, and one of the big sales was that you could customize it. It was your thing. So as product engineers, we're like, here's what we're going to do. Here's the new version. It's totally awesome. We're going to fix all this stuff. And then you talk to the business people, and they're like, what? So it wasn't enough to just refactor it. We couldn't just refactor it. So we actually, we were going to take stuff away. We felt that to make it compelling, to make people want to switch, we also had to add new stuff. So we did a brand new UI. We had designers crank out a new user interface. We built a real-time system. We were going to bring real-time comments to everybody for free, was the idea. And you saw my, if you remember the quote from earlier, we do a lot of concurrent connections. That's what started here. So choosing a framework. Spoiler alert. I won't spoil it. So now that we have our own iframe, we're like, OK, we control this thing from top to bottom for the first time, which was very exciting. And we wanted to use a framework. We just thought that we needed something. We're not good programmers. So, but a lot of the stuff that's out there isn't necessarily fit what we're trying to do. Discuss is an iframe. There's no address bar, there's no permalinks, there's no, do we really need a router? Not really. When you refresh the parent page, the parent page doesn't remember the state of all the iframes and restores them to some URL. That doesn't happen. Discuss is loaded repeatedly. A lot of single page or a lot of backbone apps, ember apps, you open them up and they kind of hang out there and you browse around and they stay. With us, you see Discuss everywhere.  You may even load it multiple times on one page. And the last thing is that it's actually kind of short-lived. Unless you're the kind of person who browsers with 200 tabs open, I know those types of people, usually you don't keep Discuss open that often or that long. So we really felt like backbone. We looked at ember a lot, this is the end of 2011. We looked at ember a lot and we looked at backbone and we thought that backbone would fit much better. We weren't 100% sure what it was going to look like in the end, but we just thought the lightness, there's a lot of arguments that are made about backbone doesn't do too much and that's good. And for us it was very, very good because we didn't have that much. The extensibility was important because we had some legacy stuff that we're bringing, some old libraries and maybe even some newer and non-traditional libraries that we thought backbone would do a better job at. Just looking at the code, looking at how everything fit together, it looked good. And lastly, file size. I'm not a file size guy. I don't think size matters that much. But I think that we have a different application in which you go to a website and discuss, get served, and a lot. I think that we have a higher obligation than other websites to try and be as tight as we can. And maybe we're not the best, but we try. So we felt that file size was a goal. We really wanted this to be the leanest thing that you could do. To that point, we decided not to use jQuery with this. We decided to go, jQuery was too mainstream for us. So we decided to try Ender, which is like a collection of microlibraries. People aren't going to like this, but it's a little defunct right now. But at the time, it felt like really up and coming. And it felt like it fit our needs very well. Like it came in at maybe a fifth of the size of jQuery. Probably did 70% or 80%. We thought that was enough. And technically, Backbone supports it. These will be one line of code in which it just looks for Ender. And that's in Backbone today. Doesn't mean it works, but it will at least be initialized to use it. So and then just finally, we did less in Bootstrap. So that may also be surprising. If you look at Discuss Today, it is actually Bootstrap. Probably about 25% of it, or even less. It's really the foundational stuff. But we built off of that as well. So stuff happened. We built all this in about six months. Probably the first month was prototyping. And then we did four to five months, which I think is pretty fast. I don't know. So we did this beta in May. And then we just released it in June. For some reason, we called it Discuss 2012. And there's a kind of a funny story behind that, which is that internally, we called it Discuss Next. And you may or may not be aware, but Next is a very popular project name for companies. There was SoundCloud Next. And then Basecamp Next came out. And all of a sudden, calling your thing Next didn't sound very, very sexy. And we ran out of ideas. And 2012 happened. I'm sure it was smarter than that, but that's just a little backstory. And now I'll regale you with this video we made when it came out. So a little bit what it's like. I'll turn on this music. It's got like this. It's got like this, you know, aptly kind of like music thing going on in the back. You'd never believe that it works this good, but it kind of does. Anywho, oh man, didn't like videos very much. So we did it. That's basically what the video is trying to say. We actually built something. And it works out pretty good. Now, what you see today is basically that project. And it's just been iterated on in the foundations of what we built then are just still cranking along. So now that I've got that very incredibly long intro done, oh my god, it's been 25 minutes. OK, so now that I've got that gone, I just want to talk about sort of technical hurdles we ran into and solutions, stuff we do with Backbone that I think are a little interesting and maybe a little different. So first off, just want to talk a little bit about iFrames. How did that work out? It kind of solved everything that we thought it would set it to do, so that's pretty good. It adds some pain points, though. Working with iFrames is a little finicky. Talk a little bit about that. But actually, we also got some bonus stuff of iFrames that we didn't even plan for, which is really surprising. I'll talk about that really quickly at the end. So what is painful about working with iFrames does an embedded application. Basically, inside the iFrame, just as the parent page can't access you, you can't access the parent page. So you don't know what's going on in the world around you. You don't know what events are happening on the outside. You don't know if the viewport is changing, if you want to know where the viewport is, because you wanted to furlode some stuff. You don't know if the URL is changing, if there's push state happening, your document fragment, stuff like that. But we do a post message. And the way that basically the application works is we have code running on the parent page. Very little, I would say about 5%. And all that's doing is really relaying information about the parent page into the iFrame. So it kind of looks like this. So just to really understand, why is this a problem? Let's say that this is droidlife.com. And let's say that I open up this menu. And now I want to close the menu by clicking away because that's how applications just work. If I click somewhere else, I want to close the menu. We don't know, unless we track events on the parent document and send that down, we don't know. The iFrame has no idea if you click outside the iFrame. So an early version of this is you just can never close this. So that's the kind of stuff we would do. So just if you're curious, just to show you how we did this is on the parent document, we have some code. We'll have an event listener. We're looking for the click event. When it happens, we'll just send a message using post message to the iFrame and say, hey, click event happened. This is probably the absolute simplest thing we do with this. And this is of course not the actual code. It's just kind of a simplified teaching kind of one. The last parameter to post message, I don't know if any has anybody who's used post message here. Just said a curiosity. OK, 20%. Check it out on MDN. It's pretty simple. You take a window reference. You call post message. You give it a message. It can be a string. It can be JSON and newer browsers. And then the last parameter is just like a target origin. And that's so that the browser will only send the message to a domain that you expect. That's just a little security thing because people can be quirky and you may think that you have a reference to a window but somebody can redirect it somewhere else that you don't like anymore. So on the other side, now we're inside the iFrame. We've got to know this click event is happening. There's an onMessage event. So we just listen to the onMessage event and we're getting these messages down that we're sending. And if the clicked event happens, we do something. If the scroll event happens, we do something. If the hash change event happens, we do something. This is just a really simplified version of that. So this is kind of like, it's not very nice. And we decided to throw some backbone on it. So we really like backbone. We like the API. We like the event-driven stuff. And people have been talking about the events mix-in. We put that event mix-in on everything. So we put it on our messaging wrapper as well. So that we can do the lifecycle events and everything about what's happening on the parent page, just as you were like model changes or something. So if you want to write the easiest post-message wrapper in the world, this is what it looks like. We call this the messaging bus. Somebody talked about the messaging bus earlier. And all it is is an empty object with backbone, or extended with backbone events. And then on the onMessage event, we just trigger something on that object. That's it. Works surprisingly well. Obviously, we do a lot of some other stuff. But that's 80% of it right there. So now, if you have a view, here's like, let's pretend this is a user menu. It's a user menu I showed you earlier. When I initialize a view, I'm going to listen to the bus. So when I get that window click event, I'm going to close it. That's just how it works. It's just like if the model changed and your name changed, you're going to do something as well. So kind of neat, we get to keep working within the backbone ecosystem, even though we kind of have this weird embedded way of doing things. So one last bonus about iFrames is we get to use this feature called content security policy. How many people know about content security policy? Oh man. Like 2%. Content security policy is kind of like a bleeding edge feature. It's in Chrome and Firefox right now, but very recently in Firefox. And it basically lets you define headers with your resources on a document so that nobody can execute inline code. And that prevents attackers from injecting inline code, because it won't execute. So everybody can use it right now. And I recommend looking into it, because it's a huge, huge mitigator for across-excerpting attacks. The upside for us is that now that we're in an iFrame, we can just say, hey, the iFrame can't execute any inline code, so nobody can inject anything. So if you're using a modern browser, you're actually prevented from being affected by any cross-excerpting vulnerabilities. Super cool. I've been giving some talks about this over the last six months. And there's a talk there if you want to check it out just to learn about it. It's pretty neat. I think the number of sites that are using this is extremely low. It's like Twitter and Disgust and GitHub. And I'm not even joking. It's that short of list. I keep asking more people if they're using it, but nobody gets back to me. So the next thing that we deal with is a lot of instance wrangling. So we kind of have this uniqueness problem where we have a lot of different collections. And models appear multiple times. I feel like probably everybody deals with this. Some models, in our case, are fresher than others. And when we want to change one model that represents like the same database-backed object, we want it to update every other instance. So to give you a quick example, let's pretend that this is posts in the Disgust system. This is a collection of posts. I've got two posts. They're both written by me. So there's sort of like a sub-object here, which is author, and that's me. And I'm just complimenting my own article. So let's say that after I got that data, I decided to log in as me. But I've also, in the interim, since I made those posts, I decided to change my username. I want to be called Ben, Salt, and Vinegar. And so I request this session. And I get this newer data. But on the posts, I still have the old display name. They don't sync up. And that's kind of how backbone works out of the box right now. If you have the same database-backed object in multiple collections, they'll leave different instances. So why does that matter? Why would that even happen? Why would I get, when I fetch data that's me, why would it be mismatched with a post data that came earlier? There's plenty of reasons. A big reason for us is that most of the traffic that we get is people who are logged out of Disgust. And a lot of it is also stale and doesn't change. So a commenting thread from six months ago usually doesn't change very often. It's really heavily cached to the point where we even put entire commenting threads on a CDN. So what we'll do is if you change something about yourself and you visit an old thread and you just want to admire your old comment, we will augment that comment automatically with your freshest data. So that's sort of a way that we deal with this. There's a whole bunch of other benefits. You would just say memory if you have duplicate models and stuff like this. But this is something that's helpful for us. We wrote a backbone plugin called Unique Model. I think there's a bunch out there. What Unique Model does is you wrap it around a class and it wraps the constructor. So whenever that model is created, whether it's in a collection, whether you do it, it's always unique. So this is a quick example if we went back. I created one instance with my old name and I created a new instance with my second name. The two instances would be identical. And we assume that any object that comes later is actually the newest record. So it updates as that. So to extend on that, what if you have the same instance in a single document? What if you have the same instance across multiple windows? Wouldn't it be cool if you could synchronize data from one window to another? So it's just like carrying this forward. And this is affecting us because we're starting to do multiple live frames. Our application is spread around just multiple windows, multiple live frames. So we've been experimenting this and taking that backbone plugin, unique model, and putting it on session storage to synchronize data as they appear in different places. I'm not going to go too deep into it, but if you check out the repo, I had this demo in which to do MVC appears again. And I added, basically it includes this plugin. It adds two lines of code in which it just, it's literally just two lines of code. You can check out the repository. And then it does this, which is this is four windows up to do MVC. And every modification that happens in one window automatically gets spread to the other. At some point, I should go to the other window and show that it goes the other way. Am I going to do that? Nope. All right. Well, it does. Ha! Ha! We don't do this yet. This is really experimental for us. But we think of it really cool. So lastly, last thing I'm going to talk about is event proxies. Just another pattern that we use. We represent a session inside of discuss, like the state of a session using distinct classes. When you first, when we first load discuss, we assume that you're an anonymous user. And that is the session. It's the session of an anonymous user. When you log in, now you are a completely different user.   Why have different models? They each validate differently, depending on if you want to post as that user type. So there's some, you know, we can test them individually. So there's some benefit to that. So, but there's just a bit of a problem here, which is, let's go back to my user menu. And let's say that as I initialize this user menu, I'm going to listen to the session object. I'm going to say, hey, when you change, I'm just going to re-render the menu, right? The user, like, I was logged out, now I'm logged in. I got to render, re-render that user menu to reflect the fact that now there's a user there. But if the way that I log in is to just replace the session instance completely with a completely new object, my view is actually just like it's listening to a dangling reference that is no longer in the application, which is not good. So the way that we've done that is we use a proxy model that wraps a user. So the session is a model. You can bind to it. And it just kind of, it has, like, it contains a user. And any events that trigger on the user event will just get propagated to the session. So I bind to the session. I'm like, hey, if the session, if the user name changes, the display name changes, re-render, it doesn't matter if the logged in state becomes a completely different user. It will totally work. I never have to do crazy cleanup or whatever. So that's been helpful for us. And again, this is pseudo code. Maybe I wrote it and it totally works. I'll try that out later. So I'll probably spin off the stuff that we actually use. I'll spin it off into a guest or something because I'm seeing a lot of nodding heads. That seems cool. So today, this is now, like, just over a year later, this version has been out for a year. Obviously, I highlighted some security concerns and private security concerns.  The good news is that we basically deprecated that version. And we're phasing it out today. Over 99%, it's probably 99.9% of discusses using this newer, secure version. And we hope that soon, that will be 100. And even though we had all these crazy fears about, like, no one would want to use discuss if they couldn't customize it as you know. And you can customize it a little bit just not to the degree that you could for. You just can't target whatever and change it. We've still managed to grow a colossal amount. I think 50% when you're doing billions of pay views is pretty big. And just to show you what that actually progression looked like, when we rolled to that in May, looked kind of like this. So blue is the new discuss or discuss from 12. And red is the old one. I think the number, this is not a present, I borrowed this from somebody else's presentation, but I think the number upon the left is like daily total events. Stuff that is happening or stuff that we're logging. So you can just kind of see how that's what it started. And by the time we get to the end, we've actually grown significantly, completely with the new version. So I think that's pretty cool. And then lastly, like I said, we're still iterating on that. We're still evolving it. We're trying to use more and more new stuff. Mocha sign on, I saw a lot of that today. We use that too. So that's pretty cool. We use handlebars and we've been developing a ground build process and stuff. And my last thing is that we actually got rid of Ender and switched to jQuery. And that literally happened like in the last couple of weeks, or I just finished the last couple of weeks. That could probably be an entirely new talk or an entirely different talk. But if anybody's curious, Ender just didn't really work out very well for us. I think, I remember the summer of the micro library. Does anybody remember the summer of the micro library? And although I think I had really good ideals, it's hard, you just can't, I would bet on jQuery. It's just basically, you can't, a lot of people have tried to say like, I can build the 80% library of jQuery. And it's really, really hard. There's a reason why jQuery is where it is today. With Ender, we were patching just a ton of stuff. We used an AJAX library. Oh, this AJAX library doesn't support cores. Okay, we got it implemented. The DOM API was just randomly broken, inconsistent in a bunch of places that people didn't think about, stuff like that. And we would spend a lot of time debugging Ender and not writing code, and that really depressed us. So that's what ultimately facilitated the change. So, am I like super over, by the way, to the start? 30? So just final thoughts. I'm very big on iFriends. If you're doing embedded applications, obviously I highlighted a lot of reasons why you should explore that. I also think, this is a little controversial, but there are other applications out there that worked today in the way that we used to work. And I think people should be critical of that because they have a lot of issues, privacy issues, security issues, et cetera, that I think are kind of concerning. That's all. I'm not saying that we're awesome or anything, but I would like to see everybody move to the model of iFriends. iFriends are not scary. They shouldn't be this ridiculous thing that everybody is like, ooh, that's gross. They're actually pretty awesome, and they let us do a lot of cool things, so. That's all I got. Clap. Clap! So I'm gonna do the shameless plug, which is that we're hiring really badly. I'd love for some backbone people to join me and discuss some work on backbone and reach a lot of people and stuff like that. Any questions for Ben? If there weren't any, if you weren't showing any private data and there were no privacy concerns, which is not the case for you, would you still prefer iFriends just because of the CSS conflict problems and sort of the namespace problems? Well, there's still a security problem there, right? Even if you're not showing private data, you're probably showing some sort of user-generated data, or at least a lot of people are. If you're not, then don't mind. I do know that there are like, there are widget people out there who are building stuff without iFrames because iFrames are slow and they are inputting user data directly into DOM. I think that's a problem as well. But the CSS angle or whatever? I mean, I say that, but you're right. It really matters on what you're trying to do. If you are not, if you don't have user data and you don't have session kind of data, I think it's really fine. At that point, it's just how much do you wanna suffer in terms of being, you know, possible to be manipulated by another party? Does that make sense? Okay, cool. I was just wondering, mostly, just very roughly, what sort of size is the, you know, the payload when you load a disk is, like, your application? I'm trying to think off the top of my head. Discuss, very much. I think that the initial script that runs on the host page, I was looking at this the other day, is 12 kilobytes, so that's what runs on the host page. Just 12 kilobytes. And I don't mean the application in the script. Yeah, I'm getting there. I need answers. Yeah, I don't know how to research the jQuery. I know that we knew that this would be like, this would be 20 more kilobytes. Can you handle that?  Probably, like, I think approach it, like everything, everything is probably approaching 300, I think. So my follow-up question to that is, you said that on a single page, you might get multiple embeds. Yeah. Do you have any way to avoid each of those embeds, including 300 kilobytes of download? I mean, well, the one upside is that you'd be requesting the exact same asset and the browser won't be downloaded, right? I mean, it's still a lot of code. We actually- We're gonna have to be parsed three or four part times. Yeah, there would be the possibility of that. I feel like you could imagine, like, if we downloaded the code as an XHR bundle and then we passed it to an empty iframe and executed it there. That would be really cool. The thing is, that could be okay.  Almost never see that. So it's not really something we think about too much, but it was a thought. And we do open, like, we do a profile model now.  That's actually a full screen iframe, which is a really cool effect that I'd love, I would love to talk on another time. You can't tell that it's an iframe, but it just overlays the whole thing. It's really neat. And that could be something. One thing that we try to do is, because of this privacy thing, we don't transfer anything on the parent page, anything even remotely private. No user data, no anything. So if we wanna transfer data from one thing to another, it's through session storage, or we just request, again. I don't know, that's sort of a, kind of an answer. Anything else for Ben? He said breathing into the microphone. Nothing? All right. All right, cool. Thank you.


So we're here in Thessaloniki at the Nanotechnology Conference, and hi, so who are you? Hi, I'm Fazilet Vardarsukan, professor of bioengineering. I'm currently director of a research center hosted by Sabancı University. The name is Sabancı University Nanotechnology Research Center, SUNUM, is the acronym. And we are very happy to be participating in this exciting event, Nanotechnology. This is my second time. I'm actually an invited speaker in Women in Nanotechnology's workshop that's being held today. At SUNUM, we do nanotechnology research, as the name implies, in four different thematic dimensions. Health, energy, food, water and agriculture, and defense in aerospace. So all of these sectors, the cross-section of these sectors with nanotechnology, nanomaterials, nanostructures, is within our interest. So how would you characterize the nanotechnology industry, the status it is, compared to the hype or in the past or in the future? How's it going to be in the future? Is it just growing? I think it is growing. It's a hidden actor because a lot of sectors are actually using nanotechnology without really realizing they're utilizing the benefits. And every day we see some new research and the tendency is the trend, is that it is going to be a generic technology of the next decade. There is a lot of potential at nano level in improving the materials. And improving materials will be the leader in improving energy efficiency, improving environmental concerns and so on. So there is a big potential. That's also a big concern in Turkey, right? Yeah. And the EU is talking a lot about doing green technology. Sustainability is a worldwide problem, so Turkey cannot be excluded. So that is one of our focus areas. But hidden in the term sustainability is improving energy usage, the efficiency of processes and so on. So that all goes through improving the materials we use. So is there a big traction with the students signing up for this field? Yes, there is a big demand in students. There's also a large interest in the research in academia. We have recently announced some vacancies for researchers and I was really surprised by the number of applicants from all over the world to our research center. All over the world? Yeah. Everybody wants to come to Istanbul to work? There were many, many applicants. There were something like 600 applicants for eight positions. So I was really very pleasantly surprised. And how many students total are in this group? We have 17 full-time researchers and 24 part-time researchers. And together with the post-doctorals and doctoral students, I think the total ends up to be about 100. So would you say that your university in Istanbul and Turkey is strong in this field? Sabanji University is very strong in this field. Nanotechnology is one of its thematic priorities. And the center was established in the year 2010 with a very large investment from Sabanji Foundation with an incredible farsightedness. And then it was co-financed by the Ministry of Development. And it was in 2017 it was selected to be one of the national infrastructures, research infrastructures. It is one of the four in the country. So it's a very prestigious center with a lot of hope. Our strategy is actually producing research results that create socio-economic added value. So in technology readiness levels four and six, that is what we are targeting. What is four and six? From the proof of concept in the lab should have been completed. So we take it from there and develop it to the prototype development stage so that industry can pick it up from there and further develop it to a marketable product. So did you say 2010? Yeah. So would you say you see results? Yeah. Or is it a lot of research that goes around among academics in different countries? Or does it actually go out and real people see the results? There are two spin-off companies. At the moment it may not be too much, but at least we are on the right track. We have 70 art patents and 130 projects. Some of them have been completed, some of them are currently going on. So it is a highly active center. We are now concentrating on pre-competitive research, creating a virtual platform with companies and academia. The name of the platform is Nanosys, Nanotechnological Systems. Currently we have 28 partners in this. And we are developing this nano cluster, this virtual cluster with different research pillars and sub-projects under it. It is a new program funded by the Turkish Research Council to VITAC. And we are very hopeful that it will cause a paradigm change with respect to academic and industrial partnerships. So we are here at the Nanotechnological Conference in Thessaloniki. Are you announcing partnerships happening here with the... Yes. We have a long-term collaboration with Nanonet. We actually held a workshop together in Istanbul last year. And as a result of this collaboration, we will be signing a Memorandum of Understanding, a joint partnership agreement tomorrow with Nanonet and Aristotle University. So it will be the beginning of a more closer collaboration with the two clusters or two institutions. Because all the universities working in nanotechnology in the world, it is good if they each can kind of like help each other out and not all working exactly the same thing, but trying to complement each other, right? Exactly, because resources are limited, are finite. So there are a number of infrastructures in our labs. There are some other equipment in other parts of the world. If we collaborate, we don't have to duplicate the infrastructures. And also the same is true for human resources and expertise. So if we can join forces, create synergies, two plus two will add up to five. And that's what we're aiming at. And not just participating conferences, but also sending researchers around from one place to the other? Yeah, exchange programs and also doing collaborative work together in either in EU projects or otherwise funded projects. We are also aiming for contracted research. So we've been doing some B2B meetings in this conference as well with companies. And we would like to provide our access to our facilities for collaborative work. Is there always stronger and stronger collaboration with the EU? Not just Greece, but... Well, Turkey is a part of the Horizon 2020 program. So we have access to EU funds. And we have some ongoing projects in Aeronet, in Marie Curie and in other programs, in flagship programs. But of course there's always space for developing it further. And what do you think about this conference here? That's a very exciting conference. A lot of parallel events were overwhelmed by the complexity of the program. But it is a good opportunity to see colleagues from different parts of the world and also meeting some companies.


Personal finance, presentation, warranties. Time to get financially fit practicing personal finance. Warranties, what are they? Written guarantee from manufacturer or distributor specifying the conditions under which the product can be returned, replaced, or repaired. So when making a purchase, we would like to know especially when making large purchases under what condition the product can be returned, replaced, or repaired. We would also like to know under what conditions the product is likely not able to be returned, replaced, or repaired. Likely the conditions not listed out in the warranty. We can break the warranty into two broad categories, express warranties, and implied warranties. The express warranties are those warranties that are usually written types of warranties which can either be the full warranty or a limited warranty. When we're thinking about an implied warranty, that's kind of the warranty that goes along basically with the purchase, so that would be the warranty of title and the warranty of merchantability, merchantability. Express warranty, an express warranty is an agreement by a seller to provide repairs or a replacement for a faulty product, component, or service within a specified time period after it was purchased. Buyers rely on these promises or guarantees and sometimes purchase items because of them. So obviously these could add to the value of a product, give us a better feeling of security. They become more and more valuable as we're buying larger products, larger products that are gonna have an impact to us for more periods into the future. Likely we're going to be using them and therefore they are more of an investment to us. When we're talking about smaller products in terms of dollar amount, as well as how long we might be using those products, these warranties might not be as valuable because the added cost that the company might put into place in order to have the warranties might not warrant the added value that they're gonna be providing if the dollar amount of the product itself is below a certain threshold. So that's kind of the factors that we wanna be taking into consideration when we're thinking about if we have the option, for example, to take on a warranty or be doing a business with a company that provides a warranty possibly versus someone that does not and there possibly could be a price differential that will be implied there as well. So a warranty is an assurance that an item will live up to the promises of the seller. So when the seller is giving a warranty in part, they're basically giving you the assurance, which is good. That's what we would like to see from the purchaser side of things. We would like to see, hey, they're backing up, they're supporting their product. Hopefully I don't have to basically cash in the warranty, hopefully I don't have to get the repair that's gonna be needed. Hopefully I don't have a default of product. So that's one of the reasons that the warranty is going to be put in place. If you have to purchase the warranty over and above the purchase price that starts to make you feel like that might not simply be confidence in the product but might be another basically revenue stream or revenue source. And it gives me a little bit more skepticism about the purchasing process of the added warranty. And obviously we have another decision to make with that added purchase of the warranty as to you, whether it's worthwhile to have that added level of protection versus the cost that you're gonna be purchasing for the warranty. Under the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act passed by Congress in 1975, a company that provides a written express warranty is subject to federal guidelines and must comply with the act. Which could be a good thing considering we're talking about a promise that's made at one point in time that's gonna have an impact possibly into the future. And that's a good thing that might be subject to regulation. The act provides consumer protections in the case that a company does not adhere to its written warranty. An express warranty can be worded in many different ways. It may say something like, quote, we guarantee all furniture against defects and construction for one year when a structural defect is brought to our attention we will repair or replace it. So we're making these products up to a certain standard. You can kind of give a general visualization of this. And if you see that you have a product that's not put up to the general standard, there's a defect in it. That's what the warranty says or looks like it is compliant to here or addressing. So most express warranties come from the manufacturer or are included in the seller's contract. They can also be created by a simple statement on an advertisement or in a sign in a store. Details about a product or service that are outlined in an advertisement can set the precedent for an express warranty. Claims made in advertisements about the quality, functionality, lifespan and efficiency of a product can constitute an express warranty. If the product does not meet the standard set forth in the advertising or suffers a breakdown within a set timeframe, the customer may be entitled to free repair service or when possible, a full replacement. Not every claim a seller makes is enshrined in warranty law though, exaggerated statements that sometimes appear in advertising do not necessarily constitute express warranties. For example, if an automaker makes a claim that its car is, quote, the best in the world, end quote and the purchaser after several road trips disagrees with this statement, they are not necessarily eligible for a refund unless specifically stated. So obviously you got like hyperbole, you got some overstatement that is applied there and it's probably a kind of overstatement that we would assume to be overstatement and not basically an express warranty in those cases. So example, e-commerce companies typically include express warranties on the goods they sell in part because of the nature of how online shopping is conducted. So when you're talking about online shopping, the warranties can take another level of significance because you don't have the capacity to come physically look at the item as you can like in store shopping. So the customer cannot try on or physically examine merchandise they are about to purchase in that situation, how the product functions and looks when it is received can dramatically differ from what the customer envisioned while browsing online. So clearly you can represent the product in an online type of service and not show the quality of the items that are being placed in it or possibly even the size of the item, you can clearly distort those types of things within online shopping. So again, that kind of warranty process is gonna be more valuable or could be more valuable as we go forward with the online purchases. The inclusion of an express warranty gives them some sense of surity that issues with the purchase will be rectified in some manner. For example, if a consumer buys a business jacket online, but when it arrives, the item is the wrong size, wrong color or is missing buttons and express warranty might entitle the consumer to a refund or replacement. In such cases, the online seller is usually responsible for footing the bill for any additional shipping charges. So clearly when you're dealing with the online kind of situation, if they showed you one thing and they gave you something that's completely different then you would hope that it would be covered in the express warranty, then you have to deal with the process of the replacement process which will include added shipping costs and hopefully the seller is responsible generally for those and those instances. Auto sales, auto dealers tend to advertise express warranty terms for repairs on the vehicles they sell. So clearly when you're purchasing an automobile, then it would be nice if you get some kind of assurance on the repairs that might be put into place because that gives you more insurance on the purchasing process generally as well. This can include stipulations on mileage and length of ownership that limit the extent of that coverage. So typically when you're talking about the coverage of repairs, they're comfortable giving the coverage up to a particular mileage possibly or a particular number of years to give that added level of assurance and after that point in time, that's gonna be the limitation. After the vehicle is owned for a certain amount of time or driven beyond the mileage limit, the express warranty would no longer be applicable. Express warranty versus implied warranty. Express warranties are specific promises made by a seller to a buyer either or orally or in writing. So oftentimes you'll see those in writing but you could have an oral express promise where they're just telling you the promise and the absence of communicated guarantees and implied warranty may come into force. So the implied warranty is something that might not be more likely in writing but implied within the purchasing process. So implied warranties are unwritten guarantees that a product or service should work as expected. So clearly if you're purchasing something for a particular purchase purpose, then you would expect it to work for that particular purpose and you would also expect that the person that's selling you by the fact that they are selling you something title to it, meaning would mean that they actually owned it. They had the capacity to give the title to you. Those would be kind of assumptions that you would think would be implied just simply within the purchase process, for example. So for example, if you buy a set of headphones, you would expect them to function when you first use them unless you were told otherwise when you agreed to purchase them. So if you buy headphones, you would think the functionality clearly of the headphones is to work as headphones. If they don't work as headphones, you would think that there's been a violation of an implied warranty just in the terms of the purchase that has been made. The Uniform Commerce Code, the UCC makes reference to and quote implied warranty of merchantability, in quote, stating that any goods sold in a transaction must fit for the ordinary purses for which it is typically used. So, you know, the items have a T list. They have a purpose. They have a reason. And if they don't, if they can't be used for that particular reason, it's pretty clear that something's wrong. So correction, March 8th, 2022, a previous version of this article incorrectly. Extended Warranties. An extended warranty is basically an insurance contract. An extended warranty or service contract works like an insurance contract for the product you purchase and is typically sold by the retailer at the point of sale, although it's often possible to buy one afterward from a third party as well. So while the price of an extended warranty often seems like a bargain when compared with the steep price of repairs, it's important to realize that retailers and other providers offer warranties for a simple reason, they make money. So this is the warranty where you're looking at the extended warranty that you're purchasing separate from the purchase price. So when you're thinking about the purchase price of something, if there's a warranty, a guarantee that is involved within the purchase price, that usually gives you a sense of security that they're giving you confidence about the value of the product. But if you're buying an extended warranty over and above the purchase price, that often gives you the feeling that they're doing that basically to make money. That's another basically revenue source or revenue stream. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's not worth purchasing the extended contract, but it is something that, of course, we want to be taking into consideration. We wanna be thinking about whether or not the coverage that we are going to be getting is gonna be worth the added price that it's gonna cost us for the added price. That's gonna involve taking into consideration how valuable is the item? What's the dollar amount of the item that we're purchasing? What's the dollar amount of the purchases or the repairs? If there were repairs, what's the likelihood that the repairs will be taking place in the future? Somewhat of a complex kind of calculation to put together, but those are the general things that you wanna be putting together. And oftentimes, if you do a little bit of research online, many people have looked into different kind of extended warranties and done research on them. And you can usually find some pretty good resources saying whether or not the extended warranty in certain situations is a valid extended warranty or just basically a revenue stream by the seller of the product. So companies use probability metrics to calculate the likelihood that your new refrigerator, flat screen TV, or car will require repairs. This figure is weighed against how much those repairs would cost on average, needless to say the company offering the policy is looking to come out ahead. So clearly when they make these calculations with regards to the insurance policies, they're gonna do the calculation on there and try to determine how likely the cost is going to be. And they're gonna be making generally some profit margin, you would think, on the extended warranties. So extended warranties can be big money makers for retailers, according to data from the Allied Market Research, the global market for service contracts reached 120.8 billion in 2019 and is projected to hit 169.8 billion by 2027. Extended warranties continued, but do you need that insurance? So that's of course the question, should you be purchasing the extended warranty? What are you gonna do? You wanna be prepared by the way when you're purchasing something over a certain dollar amount for someone to be asking for the extended warranty, I would assume that if something is under a certain dollar amount that the default answer would be no, I don't want the extended warranty, I'll just buy another one in the event that I happen to be the unlucky person that purchased the defective item here, for example. But if you're buying anything over a certain dollar amount then it's more and more likely that an extended warranty might be an option to take a look at and that's when you want to be armed, you wanna be ready, you wanna have already done the research, especially if you're going in person to talk to someone that you know is a salesperson that's gonna go through and offer you an extended warranty and give you possibly a whole pitch on it and everything. So warranty providers know that in most cases you won't actually need the coverage they offer according to consumer reports, about 40% of new refrigerators will need repair within their first five years of use. That percentage is even smaller for other categories, it's 30% for dishwashers for example and 20% for closed dryers. So you're buying insurance against the idea or the possibility that you've got one of the products that are gonna need the coverage. So that doesn't mean the insurance is invalid because that's always why you buy basically insurance, you buy car insurance in case you get in a car accident or something like that, hoping that you don't get in the car accident but then the question is, is that coverage, that safeguarding of the risk worth the added price? So when there's a problem with those products the consumer organization says the price of an average repair is no more than the cost of the warranty. Certainly some shoppers experience usually pricing defects and end up happy that they bought extra coverage but they're the minority. So basically generally if you're talking about even a moderately priced item then the warranty oftentimes if you work it out isn't worth the price is often gonna be the calculation. So that's why experts often advise consumers to consider carefully whether a warranty is necessary before handing over their money. So clearly when you go in and buy something like a refrigerator or dishwash or something like that you probably wanna do the research upfront and be ready to confirmly and firmly say to the salesperson, no on the warranty if that's the conclusion that you have come to or at least be able to justify whatever decision you're making and just like anything if any salesperson's given you pressure about a warranty or anything else you're ready to just walk out at any point. You can always buy a refrigerator elsewhere if you're feeling so. Today's appliances are fairly reliable. Don DeClorico of HomeAdvisors.com told Consumer Report in 2018 quote the chance that your refrigerator or dishwasher actually needs repairs during the extended warranty period is pretty low. There may be expectations where we're paying for extended coverage makes sense. So there could be areas where it might make sense to do so for example smartphones tend to take a lot of abuse because they're carried virtually everywhere. So clearly the phones is another one where the warranty comes into play phones are gonna are something that are more likely to be subject to problems because they're gonna be carried around all the time. Clearly if you're looking into a warranty for the phone you wanna do research on that and you also wanna think about what kind of things are covered in the warranty? Like if you lose, if you dive into the ocean with your phone or that kind of thing is that covered? Cause it's kind of your fault on that one. But that's the likely thing that might short out the phone you would think. So some consumers may find that a service contract on their device provides a peace of mind and the majority of cases though you're likely better off putting a few hundred dollars into a savings account for future repairs or the purchase of a replacement. So in other words, do your own insurance kind of policy there and that's a good idea with any large purchase like a car even or appliances and so on. You wanna think, hey, I'm gonna need to replace these things every five or 10 years or something like that if they short out before that if I got unlucky with the purchase of it then I don't need to have it covered by someone else. What I wanna do is put my own money away because the odds are that I'll be better off that way anyways and if I happen to be an unlucky person I gotta buy a new fridge then I buy a new fridge or dishwasher or whatever. So one advantage of self-insuring is that unlike a warranty, your account won't expire. It's also a good idea to take four brands that have a reputation for quality. So typically you wanna buy those brands that have the warranty in the price in that they're typically, they might be higher brands because people depend on them rather than buying the extended warranty on a brand that is not as reliable if possible. So that helps minimize the risk that you'll need to have your purchase fixed for several years. Extended warranty continues, what's really covered. Many products come with a standard manufacturer's warranty free of charge. So typically if you purchase something you got like the manufacturer's warranty. This warranty is often good for the first year or first few years of the product's life. Extended warranties therefore often provide overlapping coverage that may end up being unnecessary. So the extended warranty if they're saying hey we're covering something that's already covered in the standard warranty then obviously you're not getting a real benefit on that overlapping timeframe. Even if the product you purchase has a shorter manufacturer warranty you may find that the service contract doesn't provide coverage you thought it does. So it's really annoying if you thought that you were covered under the warranty but then for whatever reason you're not covered under that thing. What, I couldn't get coverage cause I dived in the ocean with my phone. What kind of warranty is, service contracts contain a lot of fine print that consumers don't always have the time and or patience to read through before they sign. They often limit cause you're usually just pressured into doing it from the salesperson. They often limit what parts are covered or contain stipulations involving where you can have the item serviced. For example, independent stores may require you to bring the device or appliance somewhere local for service that may not help much if you move to another state. So extended warranties continued. What to look for?  It's important to know what it is that you're actually getting. Here are some questions to ask before signing on. So you wanna ask these questions if you're thinking about the extended warranty and you probably wanna think about them before you go in and get pressured with regards to the extended warranty. Is it likely to need repairs? So the thing I'm buying is it likely that it's gonna need repairs? Some electronically electronics rarely create problems during the first few years of use. So more and more stuff is getting reliable, hopefully more and more reliable. And if that's the case, you might not need it in the first few years, just on average. Researching dependability data from sources such as consumer reports can help you decide whether the risk is substantial enough to justify the cost of a service contract. What does the agreement cover? Consumers often are often surprised to find out that the components most likely to go bad aren't actually covered by the add-on warranty.  Some companies also insert language that gets them off the hook if you modify the product in any way or don't perform routine maintenance. So they're gonna say, did you do ABC or D? No, well then we don't give you the warranty because you didn't do your maintenance. Taking a few minutes to read the details of the contract can save a lot of heartache later. So what's the process for making a claim? Depending on your contract, repair work might be handled by the manufacturer, the store, or third-party independent company. So if you've got a warranty, you're trying to get the warranty, you're trying to turn in the warranty, get the claim, then where do you go? Is it gonna be the manufacturer? Is it the store? Is it the third-party or an independent contractor that's gonna be helping you out with it? So you'll want to find out ahead of time, do you have to take it to the same place where it was purchased or is there a network or stores or repair shops where you can go? So in other words, you're probably gonna be wanting to contact the place you purchased it from and they'll direct you from there to determine where's the place you're gonna go to get the warranty serviced. So is there a deductible? Even if your repair is covered by a warranty, the work isn't necessarily free. Check the contract to see whether it requires a deductible or free for service work. You also want to find out if there are any associated expenses such as shipping costs that aren't covered. How reliable is the servicing company? A warranty is only as good as the company behind it. Most of the time, people buy service contracts from a retailer, but some companies cold-call consumers with offers for extended warranties. If you don't know the organization's reputation or feel nervous about offering your credit card information over the phone, it's better to steer clear. So third-party, you wanna be careful with the third-party warranties you would think. Extended warranties, the bottom line, although warranties may seem like a nice perk that companies extend to consumers, they are actually carefully calculated to be profitable for the companies that offer them before you agree to ensure your next big-ticket purchase against failure. Carefully consider the likelihood that the product will fail as well as how much it would cost you to repair or replace it. In many cases, your best course of action is to bet that your appliances and electronics will outlast the warranty.


What's going on guys and welcome to Facebook ads Friday week 28. So every single week on a Friday I will show you two proven tried and tested Shopify products. So for example the first product I'm going to be showing you this week is this pregnancy pillow by a company called baby bub. It's a single image ad which means it'll be super quick to get started with it's got 3.7 thousand reactions 1.5 thousand comments and over 400 shares. Before we jump into that though I just want to take a very quick second to mention why this series is so important and why you should subscribe to tune in every single week and get two proven products on a platter. When it comes to being successful in dropshipping at least from my own experience over the past six years the hardest thing hands down is finding that one golden product and the reason I say that then is because just very quickly when it comes to running a successful dropshipping business there is four components. Number one is your Shopify store which is pretty easy nowadays to put a decent store together. Given the templates and easy functionality of Shopify anyone with a bit of computer know how can get a pretty decent store together in a couple of days. The second component you need is of course a winning product. The third component is an effective ad campaign. If you have no experience in this area then you can get pretty decent ad creators from people who do it day in day out for a living for about one to two hundred dollars. And then number four you need an ad campaign which again given the tutorials on YouTube and the effectiveness of broad targeting in my opinion it's the creative that influences the results a lot more. So when it comes to putting together a successful business then you can pretty much outsource everything apart from that product selection and as cheesy as it sounds it really does only take one winning product to transform your life for the better. So with that being said make sure you hit that subscribe button every single Friday we will keep doing this series as long as you guys enjoy it and I'll give you two proven trial and tested winners. So back to the first product I want to show you guys it's from a company called Baby Bob they open up their creative straight away with a testimonial from a customer. This won't be a random testimonial either this will be a testimonial which addresses the pain points that people who would benefit from this product are having. They also finish off the text at the top with some social proof with some validation to show anybody who sees this ad that they can be trusted. So join 50,000 plus happy moms and get 40% off added some incentive there to make it in no brainer and then a clear call to action with a link. The actual creative itself as we can see is just a single image ad it's showing how the product is used and obviously who it's for some more social proof and reviews stars just to kind of reiterate that it is a trusted product and a trusted brand and of course the benefits of shopping with this company and buying this product so a 99 for risk free trial and non allergenic. Main advantage to running image ads is they're a lot cheaper the CPMs are a lot lower so basically what that means is that you can reach more people for less. I've already covered the engagements then 3.7 thousand 1.5 thousand comments and 400 shares so it goes without saying to get that level of engagement it must obviously be bringing them a constant stream of customers. However we want to back this up if you've watched this series you know by now that the proof is in the comments. You can build up engagements and that sort of thing super super cheaply but what you can't build up or pay people to do at least not this many people is to leave positive reviews about your product so this in itself is where the validation of verification comes from these tried and tested products. So for example this person has commented 13 weeks ago ignore the date so we'll show you the newest comments in a section so you can see this is still current and working right now. So love this pillow keeps me from rolling and super comfy so that would imply this person has bought the product. Karen here says my pillow order was just delivered today so there's another person who's bought this product. Lindsay says she's greatly enjoyed her baby bub so another person comment I just ordered I ordered but I really wanted the green so another person who's ordered and so I ordered this pillow for my sister another person I absolutely love this pillow another person this definitely helps me sleep better another person I got this pillow for Christmas another person I'm 30 weeks pregnant and this is the only way I can sleep another person 24 weeks pregnant and love this pillow another person another person another person you get the gist people are absolutely loving this product if we take a quick glimpse at the newest comments as well just to prove it 17 hours ago 10 hours 20 hours one day four days four days three days two days two days you get the point this is a proven tried and tested product is working right now let's jump on to the Shopify store then this is where the link takes you straight to the product page which is what I advise everybody do it's kind of like a middle of the road product it's not a cheap typical kind of Chinese type drop shipping products that many people have kind of like a bad impression of it's 41 pounds and it's also private label this is key I cannot stress this enough anybody who wants to be successful in the long run with drop shipping and is sick and tired of just pump and dumping products every three months trying to make them work if you private label your product so we can see here in the image the actual label itself says baby bub on and I believe in I'll show you the reviews in a second it actually says baby bub on the products as well so this is a product which they're sourcing most likely in bulk and using a 3PL to fulfill orders though or they may even be self-fulfilling over 50,000 orders then they claimed and only 100 reviews so that doesn't kind of marry up given my own experience with kind of order to review ratios but nonetheless a really effective product and a really nice looking product page as well so you've probably noticed they haven't gone for just a brilliant white background it's kind of like a creamy soft and cozy color which matches the type of products that they're selling obviously it's a cozy and comfortable product something you may have also noticed is they have the kind of soft pastily red add to cart button and they've also matched this up with the review stars and they've also matched this up with the tags on the images as well it's just little nice touches like that and which makes everything kind of tying another feature of this product page I really like is this kind of what's the way of pointing kind of like the pros or us versus the others us versus competition because I imagine that when somebody is looking for a products like this there's two or three they're probably considering but by having kind of like this is what our product does versus this is what our competitors does it's a really good of kind of like painting your products as the superior one to help tip them over the edge and commit to buying yours the section here is really nice it's really visually pleasing and rather than write out in boring text fast and track ship and they have some nice custom icons again in those kind of soft pastily type colors which is all in keeping with the theme and brand of the store so 99 comfort sleep trial which obviously cannot be argued with that's a brilliant guarantee that offering non-allergenic which is important from products like this and of course fast and tracks shipping instead of just going simply into reviews it's like you're in good company which makes people feel more comfortable with buying this product because it implies that thousands if not hundreds of mums have already bought this product which they actually say themselves here so what I wanted to point out earlier but I couldn't find was if we open up some of the images if you can see that on the screen it kind of says the actual brand name actually says baby bub on the product which would lead me to think they are indeed getting this private labeled and the product the consumer receives is the one that matches the product images what I've seen people do before is for the product images they'll have a really nice product that's been labeled and has the logos on etc but then when you go in the reviews it's just your white labeled drop shipping product so 41 pounds they're selling this product for and you can buy it on aliexpress as you can see for just under 12 pounds delivered so give or take about 30 pounds of room in there so very good profit margins however more and more in this channel I want to get talking about private labeling products because at least from my own experience in the last two to three years this is where the better and bigger profits and more kind of like sustainable business model has definitely come from for me so so if you're buying one of these things you're looking at 11 pounds 50 delivered whereas if you're going to be buying quality quantities well this has a one piece moq this has a hundred pieces moq as soon as you start buying more than one of these things at time you can get that price all the way down so 41 pounds they're selling it for and these delivered probably including shipping is going to be in the ballpark region of about five or six pounds so you can see there's some great profit margins to be had with this product so that's it for product one then it's a company called baby bub dozens if not hundreds of really positive reviews in the comments section which can't be argued with some great engagements with 3.7 thousand reactions 1.5k comments 400 shares a super profitable product at 41 pounds even as a drop shipping product if you wanted to test this before committing to private label in it you can still make it work even the room of profit you have okay so moving on to product number two one I'm quite excited to show you about because this has been running for nearly three years now so it's a trial and tested and sustainable product as well this is not just a pump and a product this is a product which will sell consistently year on year and all throughout the year as well so it's from a company called mini mice um I highly recommend you actually take a few minutes after this video to go and check them out and take a look at just how they're running their business in terms of the content and the content they're putting out not just in their ads but the actual posts as well and have a good look around their Shopify store we'll have a brief look today I'll show you some of my favorite points but just kind of taking the way they're doing things because everything is super super slick and super professional so this is the ad we're going to be taking a look at today a couple of things to point out august 4th of 2020 is when it first was posted and in that time they've been able to drum up 16 000 reactions 5.4 thousand comments and 7.9 thousand shares and you may be thinking that's all very well and good but these guys have had a lot of money to invest and develop in this product which is 100 true however we can still learn a lot from them before we go any further though let's take a look at exactly what the product is exactly what the creative is add a little bit sound so it's actually one of the founders that's took the time to go out into the wild into a real public park by the looks of it um and get his tripod set up this looks like um his son behind him um on the product showing the product in its full glory how it's used um out on its real environment basically he's just talking through um exactly their whole story um people love to listen to stories if you have the confidence to get on camera and talk about your products even better and as you can see there's lots and lots of different clips of just about the products really how they developed it how they came about to develop all the different things they've kind of developed into the product to help it be safe and have all the kind of functions and features that any kind of modern day parents would want and what I want you guys to take from this is try and get as close to this level as possible now obviously can't do this overnight these guys have been in business for a long long time but what you can do instead of just recycling existing content online take month take six weeks to order some samples of this take around to friends and family film some content on an iphone teach yourself how to take good videos watch some tutorials on youtube about lighting that sort of thing and before you know it you can crop together all you need is 30 seconds of decent content and original content which is always always always favorable in social media platforms eyes as for the comment section then we're going to stick to newest because there's just so many comments so one day three day five days one week that's from two years ago but somebody replied a week ago hence why it's at the top here one week one week one week as we can see this is something that's still current and active even nearly three years later on down the line which would show to me that there's a constant demand for this product another reason why I wanted to feature it um this time of year is because here in the UK the weather is getting better it's getting warmer it's getting sunnier more and more parents are going to be leaving the house with their children more and more parents will be looking for a solution for when they get tired and instead of having to bring a buggy or a pram or a stroller if you're watching this in America you can have one of these things or perhaps it's for families that like to go camping that like to go hiking and they can't get a push chair up a mountain they can have and use one of these things so so there is a genuine kind of life case scenario where this is beneficial as for evidence so that people are buying this thing I mean the fact that it's been going for so long and has so many comments and shares should be enough however we can see this images here from people have bought it it is an absolute brilliant invention we love it by the far the best thing we've bought for transporting our kids they both love it Danielle we have one love it from two weeks ago absolutely no regrets buying it and again another picture of a happy parent using it with their child so if we jump onto their shop or store then I'll minimize myself out so you can see this store and it's full glory a super super customized store it's not one year typical Shopify layouts never mind one of the three themes that you use obviously all the imagery is original and custom they have this few in 3d option which is obviously really really cool and one of the biggest things about this business and it's another video topic I'm going to be doing in a couple of weeks because I've got next week's planned out is if you want to make yourself successful at dropshipping you need to make your business impossible almost to replicate the more difficult it is for somebody to replicate your business the more successful you will be and I'll approve that too in a couple of weeks time when that video comes out so make sure you subscribe so as we move down a super slick everything is in keeping with each other the theme the branding is just on point everything is very seamless and easy to function and use and consume all of the information about the product let's just head back onto the page and everything is kind of reiterated in terms of social proof with the content it's just imagery after imagery of people using the product demonstrating how it works pointing out the different features and functions of it just all in all a brilliant brilliant Shopify store and definitely one you should check out for your own research and inspiration so you've probably noticed the price by now 170 pounds unless I'm mistaken I haven't seen an option to split that into monthly payments which could be something which would help them increase their conversion rates it's definitely not a cheaper product so if we try and find something similar ish of now obviously this is unique and developed by themselves however there is a Chinese alternative we can get something that does the same job ish to the same extent ish delivered 15 days on time for about 80 pounds we'll take a look at this video just to show you how weird and wonderful this is when I first watched it I don't think I've ever seen a supplier video this strange but in a sense it kind of does all the things that you would want a video ad to do however like I said do not be using this as your ad creative invest in your own content and I actually like this because it has that kind of funny element to it which is no doubt going to get people talking about it on social media tagging their friends sharing it that sort of thing so it's definitely likely to drum up some attention so I think that's the path to go down order one of these things hopefully you know somebody who has a child will let you demonstrate how to use it and film some funny content and the sorts of adventures you can get up to and with your child using this if you jump onto Alibaba then we can see we can buy something again similar ish for about 10 to 15 dollars probably delivered more like 20 dollars but this obviously does carry an moq of 500 pieces so what you do in this case is you would drop ship it for a bit using a drop ship supplier validate and verify it works and reinvest your profits into using a bulk supplier like these guys okay so and with that being said that is a wrap on Facebook ads Friday for this week hope you guys stuck with me hope you guys enjoyed it hopefully I've given you some ideas and inspiration to kickstart your own dropship and journeys anything I can help you with just leave a comment down below I read every single one so I will get back to you thanks again for watching guys have a great weekend I'll see you on Monday