Good morning everybody. It's so nice to be here. Can everybody hear me okay? So the first time I'm doing a talk with headphones on, so I'm just going to take some time to warm up. So yeah, I'm Shreemati. So before we get started on the topic, I wanted to find out if anybody here has heard of GravDBs. How many of you show off hands? Okay, pretty much half the room I think. And how many of you have used one? I mean, how many of you have used one in production? Used one in production successfully? Okay, there's one hand, two, okay. Awesome. Nice to have you here. So the goal today is to walk through the process of selecting graph databases and using one and the things to keep in mind while doing that, some of my learnings. So quickly about me. So I have been doing software development for 12, 13 years now. I've stopped counting after a point of time. So I have spent my time building scalable back-end systems, high performance websites, mobile apps, such and such. And I work for a company called Sahit Software Solutions. I've been with this consulting firm for the last five years. And the good thing is you get to work on different problems. That's the good thing about being in consulting, different problems, tough problems. So most recently I've been working on big data platforms, that is building data pipelines to take data science models to production, which is PySpark, a lot of PySpark, Airflow and things like that. But today in this talk, I wanted to talk about a couple of projects where I've used GravDBs to store information in a graph model, use graph queries to navigate through highly connected data sets. And my plan is to share some of my learnings here. So quickly about what we're going to talk about is what is a graph DB and why should you care. When to use one. That is the key question that I want to spend some time on and share some of my understandings in this space. And we'll get into a type of graph model called Property Graphs, one of the most popular OLTP graph databases out there. And we'll talk about Apache TinkerPop, an open source initiative that has been around for seven to eight years now to standardize graph databases and have a standardized query language for graph databases. And we look into what it takes to query a graph, to traverse a graph to get results out. So first of all, this will be a basic talk. I have 30 minutes. This is a large topic.  My six-year-old is here today. Thank you, Paikan, for the childcare support. Just wanted to say that. So in line with that, I'd like to keep this talk simple so that there is takeaways for people and there's more interactions as well. So happy to talk more after the talk as well. So no talk on graph databases can start without mentioning graph theory. So graph theory was one of the first problems in the graph space, a geospatial problem. The problem itself is the most popular maths problem called Seven Bridges of Kienigsberg. So Kienigsberg is a city in, I mean, it's now in Russia. And back in the 1700s, there was a math problem here to understand. So the city itself is connected, divided by a river, the Pregel River. And there are seven bridges connecting the city. And the problem was to devise a way to walk through the city that would cross each of the bridges only once. And this led Leonhard Euler to solve this problem. He came up with a negative resolution that this cannot be solved, but what this gave rise to is the foundations of graph theory. He was able to model this problem as a set of vertices and, you know, edges and try to understand how to traverse to this path only once. So what is a graph? So graph is nothing but a tuple of two elements, sets of vertices, sets of edges. Your edges are the relationships between vertices. It helps you understand relationships within data. So quickly let's look at the databases landscape out there. So there are different data models out there. We've all been, you know, familiar with the relational DB. It's one of the most popular databases out there. 90% of the web runs on relational DB. But there are problems, there are challenges scaling to, you know, like if the data runs in the order of terabytes and petabytes, there is problem when it comes to scaling. And this gave rise to the no-sequel moment where there are lots of solutions that have evolved which cater to every specific need. For instance, what you're seeing here is the databases landscape. The complexity of the data, the most simple data to the most complex representation of data. But complex it means, you know, highly interconnected relationships. That's your graphs, that's what we're going to be talking about today.  Everything is atomic.  And then we have the tabular databases, which is your white column stores, which help you store a little bit more than the key value in a flexible way. But once again, no connectedness between, you know, multiple elements. Then we have the document DBs, where your mom goes and things where some connectedness in the data can be brought about within an atomic document. But across documents, we can have joints, but it's not as powerful. And there is no concept of referential integrity, such and such. And here we come to graphs. So relational databases, one other thing that we have to keep in mind is how things get difficult when you have relationships across four tables, five tables. We've all been there. We've written those joins and had performance problems, tuned them. So we look at how graph changes this as we go along. So quickly, this is a picture from DB engines. And this is something that I've been following for the last few years. And this trend in graph DBs has been soaring ever since 2013. Primarily because, so prior to that, it was primarily in the academia space where people were trying to understand how to exploit graphs. But very recently, enterprises have started looking at it, have started to understand how some problems will do better to solve using graphs. And I just thought I'd share that. Quickly, a real example on how we use graphs every day. So this is a Google search, a snippet produced by Google search for the album Imagine. So what we get is immediately a list of data points about Imagine. So we get the artist, we get the date this album was released, we get the studio information, we get the producers and the genres. So this is contextual to the music industry. So similarly, you search for a movie, you immediately see the context switching to producers, music directors, you know, such and such. So the context changes, the semantics changes. So such things are produced by what Google has something called the knowledge graph. So this is like one of the examples that we can try to immediately relate to the power of a graph and ability to, you know, spew out results. So it's a very dynamic structure, highly contextual. There is, you know, flexibility and scalability when it comes to running such queries. So why graphs? So graphs typically make sense. If I had to summarize where to use graphs, the one line answer would be where your connections and data and relationships are, you know, of extreme value. So some of the popular applications are like we saw in the previous slide, knowledge graphs. Knowledge graphs are a loaded term. So it started out as a semantic understanding of a particular domain, but now it has navigated to trying to do things like, you know, data is kept in silos in different enterprises. To give you an example, if you have a retail store experience, I mean there's in-store experience, there's the online experience. So there's customer in two places, there's data in silos. There's a system powering that, there's a system powering this. So now how do you unify these journeys, the customer journeys? Graphs have been a part of trying to understand how to unify these journeys, get the context together. These problems are referred to as customer 360 problems. Enterprises are looking at it like that. And network monitoring is another thing. Where is the point of failure in a network? There are different components that make a system. So if one system goes down, what is the impact on the network? Where are the failure points? Where are the places where, you know, we used, if we had to model this using the relational stuff, then you can think recursive CTs to get to what is the problems, what are the problem points. Whereas in a graph, it's a few lines of code to get this out. We'll see a little bit in the slides to come. And then recommendation systems is one popular application. But this is something that everybody thought graphs was going to be a game changer when it comes to recommendations. If somebody likes something, then what is the chance of another person liking that? But it doesn't scale really well. If you have a small dataset, recommendation systems using a graph is going to work. But if it's a large database, then you can try to, you know, look at ML pipelines to get your recommendation systems out there. Then the other thing is social networks. I think I don't need to really even talk about it. So who follows who, that relationships are, can be, those answers can be got from a graph. And another thing is the identity access management systems. So who has permissions on a particular folder? If you want to manage these permissions with a group or a particular user, you want to get these rules in place. Graph seems to be a good solution to solve some of these problems in an easy way. So everything is a graph, right? Everything that we see around us, any data models, anything is related. So can we solve everything using a graph? Is that the answer? Short answer is no one tool can solve everything. We can see that with the advent of this concept of microservices. You look at every problem in its siloed space and try to choose the right technology for the problem. I have a few examples. So let's try to walk through some small use cases to drive home this point. So imagine the problem, the questions that you're trying to answer from your data model. It was something like, get me everybody who is attending this conference. Find me everyone with the name John. Find me everyone who lives in Chennai. If you had queries like this, what would be the, you know, in the databases landscape, what can we choose? Ideally for such a thing, you're relational or, you know, a good search engine is good enough. You don't really need a graph to answer any of these questions. Whereas imagine if you're looking at related data. What is the way to get introduced to somebody of, you know, influence? There's a score. Somebody has a high score you want to get introduced to them. What path do you take? How do person A and person B know each other? How is company X related to company Y? So these are things where a graph is a good, you know, a candidate for solving such questions. So one of the problems that I worked on was how is company X related to company Y? But so this was about, you know, putting a dashboard of the companies and trying to go into each company to understand what is the connections. But once again, going back to the, what technology to use for what problem. So for something like, you know, a dashboard, a paginated view, which would be to pull the entire database, where you would be traversing the entire database to pull, you know, a row of data or to search for something. So in that case, something like an elastic search is a better option. But to show a particular company if you want to get its relationships, a graph is the better use. So this was one thing where in real life we chose graph to even do the dashboard and we saw pain points and we had to backtrack to put in a different technology for that purpose. Something like aggregation. How many people are here? What is the average number of attendees? Things like that. IDBMS. We don't even need to think about graph when it comes to aggregation queries. But if you were trying to do something around pattern matching, whose profile is similar to whose? If you're trying to do such kind of, relationships look up, or is the user, you know, the same as Johannes, if you're trying to do these fussy searches, then the answer now pivots to, it's either a graph or a search. I mean, it totally depends on your context. So if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That is something that happens with graph DBs. So hence this exercise of trying to, you know, showcase that it's important to think about the problem and what is the need for the problem and try to solve for it. So quickly, now moving back to graph databases, so what does the scene look like? So there are two main graph data models. There's one property graphs, which we will look into detail in the upcoming slides. And that is what is being standardized by this community called Apache Tinker Pop. It is, and we have on the other spectrum, we have the RDF graphs. RDF graphs are, they stand for resource description framework. It is a W3C standard for data exchange. The exchange model, you know, for sharing data and the data itself is stored as a graph. So RDFs are more popular in academia and trying to, you know, come up with semantic web. These kind of cases seem to focus on RDF. Whereas the OLTP cases, scenarios seem to look at property graphs. And from a query language perspective, the standardization, there is the Gremlin traversal API, which is used to, which is what we'll be looking into detail today. And there is ParkUL, which is a, you know, helps you write queries to do pattern matching for the RDF graphs. It is typically time finds its use in data mining and finding if a pattern particularly exists and things like that. So delving into property graphs, what we see here is a property graph connecting people and software that they have created. Fictional data, so don't look too much into that. But what we see here is a directed, there is directions between one edge to another. There is multiple attributes. So for instance, you see on person one, you see multiple attributes associated with that person. There is the name as well as the edge. And we see that there is an idea associated with every node as well as the edge. And there is a label to every node. So there's a label called person, which identifies person nodes. There is label for each of the edges. There is the created edge as well as the nodes edge. So quickly, so we saw a set of nodes, vertices, each of them have a unique ID. They have a label. They have a set of outgoing edges, incoming edges, and they can have multiple attributes, property elements with it. Similarly, edges can also have properties. And there is so much more to it. There are multi properties. There's meta properties that you can have against properties to facilitate different queries that you might have and modeling purposes. So quickly now talking about, so what we see here is the Apache TinkerPop stack. So it is an open source, vendor agnostic graph computing framework that defines the structure of the property graph. So it helps databases. There are different commercial databases out there. The most popular one is Neo4j. Then AWS Neptune has been around for the last one year, which is TinkerPop compliant, which means the database is there. It is TinkerPop compliant. So you can write Gremlin queries to access the database. So Gremlin itself is a DSL for traversing your graphs. And it is an expressive language to define these traversals. And it has different bindings and different languages. The one that in the Python space, we have Gremlin Python, which helps you write using Python, your Gremlin queries, which get translated to groovy on the Gremlin server and then get routed to the database server itself. This is the flow of how the queries work. So you have your dot notation for function chaining and you have the typical, you know, formats with which we write Python code even for these queries. Just to understand how it looks. So this is nothing but Python code, where we have the handler to the graph, which is your G. And you can just, it's very readable. Add a vertex called with the label person. You can put properties to it, where there's an ID property that you have to give. And then I'm trying to give the fact that there is the name is Sri and from Chennai. So now we can try to add another node called conference and try to say, you know, I can India as the properties. And once you have these two, you can try to put an edge and say, you know, what qualify that edge with a label called attends and also have attributes at that particular edge. You know, this can, you know, really open up ways to store this data. But one, one learning though is this, getting this data model right is very hard. You will get it wrong if you're going to, you know, embark on this journey the very first time. It's not going to be immediately apparent. It's going to take trials and errors to get to the right thing for the problem that you're looking at. So the traversal itself, how does that work? So there's a simple query for the data that we just saw earlier. So we want to know who are all the people, the names of people that a person called Marco knows. So Marco is node one. So Gremlin first starts at node one and it has to now traverse two outgoing edges with the label knows. So this is where the provider can parallel process. I mean, you can try to have true traverses going out. There are two knows edges. So Gremlin goes that way and tries to get the name Josh and this way to get the name Wada. So this is how the traversal typically works in the Gremlin space. So and I wanted to also try to show how much more the queries can be. So imagine this is like your typical recommendation system. So what has user A liked and who helps us like those things? What have they liked that user A hasn't already liked? You're typical trying to show recommendations. So if you had to look at this particular example that we're seeing and we wanted to say, so what has Marco created? Let's get all his collaborators. What have they created that Marco didn't create? You know, something like that. There's a parallel in trying to understand this with the recommended systems. So how these queries would go are, so let's get to the outgoing edges of Marco, try to aggregate all of his collections and post this you can try to get the incoming edges, outgoing from Marco, but incoming. The others that also created the same software, then try to go to what else did they create that Marco hasn't created. Such queries are possible. I mean, you can try to get down to that level of query. And there's much more. I've kept it very simple today, but to feel free to go take a look. There's good guides out there. And this is like the slide doesn't look so good, but this is a recursive CTE that I wrote back in, I think 2012. So it's very simple. So you give me all the employees. Imagine you had the employee and their supervisor, two-dimensional, two columns. So you wanted to find every employee and their supervisor and the hierarchy level. So such a thing on the graph, it starts to start looking like that. And the whole query itself becomes simpler. So it becomes three lines of code rather than this whole blurb of how we used to do it in the relational world. Just thought and quickly. So summarizing. So graphs are a natural fit to complex domains where relationships are important, where they help you, you know, find and traverse through relationship and help you get to answers. And one important thing is the query time is proportional to the amount of graph that you have to traverse. If you're traversing the entire graph, you're doing something wrong. But if you're traversing a small set, it will be a very powerful query compared to your other data models. But what are the bads? It is a really large, you know, rapidly evolving core system. A lot of attention is paid to this space. So there's a lot of open source work done in this space. If anybody's interested, it's Hacktoberfest. We have a lot of repos in this space. And there's a complete lack of documentation as well. So it is a, you know, very important time for communities to come together to understand how to make that better and, you know, write better code, which is what I think this community does mostly well. So... And one thing I wanted to talk about as well is it's new for new people to understand what is a good use case, where does it fit, and then how to do it correctly. There is gotchas out there, so you might have to play a little bit before you try to identify this for a production use case. So if you like the illustrations, these are where the credits are from. So I'd like to take any questions at this point of time that you might have. Hi. So my question is that the graph that you had for an example, it looked like that the questions that, I mean, it is more suited to questions like, does A know B? But let us say I have an application where I'm interested in also asking more meta questions like how many persons are there or how many persons above the height of X are there. So that I feel that, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, that is more suited to our RDBMS setting. Just asking that sort of a question. So, or even if it is not, my question is that if there are questions that my application may require, that the core is solvable through graphs and the others are not. So is it better to have two systems or is graph databases optimized for asking RDBMS questions as well? The short answer is it depends. But to get into a little more detail, so polyglot systems are what, I mean, how we are trying to design systems these days. So trying to divide and conquer seems to give better answers rather than trying to put all owners on one database to scale for you. So it depends on the problem and where it suits well and how you see outcomes. I know it's a bit hazy, but yeah. Thank you. Hi. Really nice talk. I enjoyed it. Thank you. So my question is, there is problems in graph space like the traveling salesman which are little MP hard kind of queries. So how do you protect against such a query or do you have any mechanisms in place to look at the query and say, no, this is an MP hard query and we're not going to run it? That's a very interesting question. So yeah. There are ways to monitor query times, which is something you do as part of profiling. You can try to get profiling indicators in to understand long running queries. But I haven't really faced, I mean, something like the traveling salesman problem. But yes, profiling is one answer to understand how much time a query takes and how much of the graph traversal happens. If you're going to traverse the entire graph, that's going to be a costly query and you're not really going to gain much out of, you know, using this model. Okay. Yeah. Second query is to the organizer. Where can I find the... It is on the website. Put up the slides on the website. Hi, my name is Shankar. So given that you were saying that, no, it's going to be a bit difficult to write queries with Gremlin. It's not going to be as easy as probably SQL, right? There's a curve, yeah. So what are the best practices in terms of profiling, basically? What do you give as an advice? What do I give as an advice is... Specific tools or specific techniques, so that we can speed up writing graph queries. And also, since it is used in large-scale scenarios typically these days. I think profiling takes, you know, significance. Correct. So AWS Neptune is one thing that I used where they do give ability to understand how much time a query takes and what's the amount of graph that it traverses. So you can try to turn on these profiling metrics to understand the parameters. So the graph databases by itself have the profiling... Some do. Some you have to... You can try to interject annotations and to understand how much time it takes. But apart from that, optimizing Gremlin, there is a lot of ways. The documentation is currently weak. So one thing that has helped me is take a look at the source code to understand how the traverse even behaves. And try to understand what is the best lambda steps to use. There are different steps. There are the basic lambda steps and then there are derived steps. So there is optimization there about how to run the most costly queries on top and then try to come to the smaller ones. So how we come across profilers with visualization because graph D is typically visualized. Correct. I have had visualizers that help you in the development mode when you can understand how many vertices and things like that. But from a profiling standpoint, no... Okay. Thank you. Hi. So this talk was very good. It really intrigued me. So my question is, if you see there are typical two types of databases, OLTP and OLAP databases. So where do you like to fit graph databases in between them? Yeah, that's a good question. So the community itself is working towards it in both spaces. So what I showed today, the property graphs are the OLTP real time queries. There are OLAP and data mining type of queries which use spark processors underneath to divide and conquer. There's a large data set out there and the traversal takes time. So there is effort put in that space as well. I think the words that I can think of are giraffe processors, spark processors to try to accrue the results for such cases. So yeah, but the queries that I found were not like the examples that I just saw. So there were more or less like not the primary database that you cannot use graph databases as the primary databases. Like you would have to definitely put in some kind of RDBMS in front of it and then extract all the data to a graph database and then run the queries. For a production scale system, high scale system, that's pretty much what I think is the way to go. You use graphs for where the relationships matters and you have these. You want to try to decipher a pattern. You want to try to get to specific relationships and work with that. Their graph suits best. But if it's a small scale system, you can try to use graph as well. So it depends on the scale of the system. So how do you define a schema and how do you? Because graph is a very evolving right. It can grow as big as you want and it can shrink as. How do you define and data governance like you should not let the graph grow that big. You just add the nodes, but you do not let the relationships grow.  That's a good question. So what I have typically seen is it does lend itself to a very flexible schema. Each node can have any number. But you can try to get your schema constraints in the client layer and try to have your typically how we try to have JSON schemas to define what is the incoming object. What can it hold? From limiting the number of relationship perspective is something that you have to put it in the custom layer and try to put the safety checks. I haven't seen it in that side right till now. This is the last question guys. Hi Shree. This is Sandhya. We were talking about the recommendation systems. So one question there is say we have, you know about the different e-commerce websites which have a lot of products. This is really high. Along with that the user even data also will come in from the websites also. When you say somebody bought this bought this one also. So when some things like that come in your data space is actually increasing for the events also and for the products also. When you define relationships which will be dependent on different different cases like say how it's created, knows those kind of relationships when your search space is actually increasing will you have aggregation layer on top and actually try to rank a particular product or a user on top of all those data that you have curated for a particular time or something to reduce so that the recommendation system is actually giving you faster results. Correct. So I did mention this earlier that using a graph for a recommendation system you are better of having an ML pipeline that's one way. Correct. Or the OLAP queries that he mentioned which is it can work offline this batch processing and try to do these aggregations that's like a summarizer layer. You have like a data pipeline trying to do this on your weekly data or daily data. And try to accrue these aggregated numbers and then use graphs to pull out your high level aspects. I think that's one way to. Thank you.


Your business needs a business model. It's your recipe to make profit. Traditional business models view your firm as coordinating a set of activities related to the delivery of value to customers. Economics for Business utilizes the principles of Austrian economics. We'll explain what that is elsewhere. And establishes the very different idea that value is created by customers and that firms are facilitating agents, organized by the customers. They're not delivery agents. This changes everything, opening up new business model design imperatives. We call it the Austrian business model because it's based on Austrian economics. But since the word Austrian has ambiguous connotations for many people, let's use the term value-centric business model. There are four major parts of the value-centric business model. The first is understanding what value is and then defining it for your target customer group. In our model, value is an experience that the customer enjoys, a feeling that they evaluate as valuable. We call it subjective value. It's hard to measure. You can't put a number on it or measure it in a survey. And it's not always easy to understand. Why does one customer feel that the experience of a Tesla Model S is valuable? And another swears the Porsche Panamera is preferable. As an entrepreneur, you need to develop a detailed, in-depth understanding of the subjective value preferences of your target customers as a first step. You must be able to design a new value proposition for them and have a good sense of how they will learn about the value that you can facilitate for them. This is an understanding phase for you. Once you have this understanding, you can design for value. The customer will be the one who assesses whether or not you have done so. You'll start with a value hypothesis and complete the stage when you've assembled the best set of resources from which the customer can experience the value that you propose. The customer has input all the way through the design phase and you're in the mode of listening, responding, personalizing and co-designing with the customer, the final assembly. You accept the role that the customer is the organizer of the process. The validation of the business model lies in exchange. The customer buys what you are selling, demonstrates willingness to pay a price that's higher than the cost you have chosen, assesses the experience after the event as valuable and at least as valuable as you promised and he or she anticipated. The customer demonstrates a commitment to buy again. Repeat, subscribe, upgrade, add features, give you high ratings, recommend and share, exhibit pride in his or her association with you. You make a margin, which you can reinvest in your business or take as profit. The customer remains in control, determining the price they will pay, the value they experience and the assessment and consequences of that experience. You observe the exchange and you try to understand. The fourth stage is continuous and recursive. The customer is always changing, the market's always changing, competition is continuously trying to improve on what you are offering. Our model is dynamic, never static. It's continuous response to continuous feedback properly interpreted. If you don't enhance your value proposition, it will erode. Practice value dynamics. In the first phase of the model, subjective value understanding, there are nine sub-stages. One, your starting point is that value, the thing you are trying to create or conjure up or facilitate is a feeling inside the customer's mind. Therefore, it's subjective. You don't determine what it is, your customer does. It's personal to them and their individual context and your role is observer and interpreter. Two, therefore you start with people. For whom are you facilitating this feeling of value? What is their personal value scale? What's more important to them? What's less important? What can you observe that sheds light on this question? What behaviors do they exhibit that will help you understand them and their values? You need to develop a value insight. Three, any value you propose to a customer cannot be evaluated as a singularity in their mind. They're involved in a value system. Let's say you propose a value from food. That might be embedded in a value system of personal health and nutrition or a value system of family. Those value systems have a highest value, such as achieving the very best life for the family. Be a systems thinker and be sure to identify the highest value your customers are striving for. Four, next it is imperative to identify as closely as possible their feelings about their current value experience. This is where your empathy is exercised. You must understand and empathize with the ends the customer is pursuing, the means they currently choose to achieve those ends and their subjective assessment of how well their choice of means aligns with their chosen end. You'll find a means end chain tool on economics for business to help you here. Five, if the customer has the experience that the means they've chosen are not achieving the ends they're aiming for, we call that dissatisfaction. Customer dissatisfaction is your unlimited entrepreneurial resource, it's everywhere. Because customers always want things to be better than they are now. They may not be able to articulate exactly how, but there are plenty of ways for you to discover the nature of customer dissatisfaction. There are tools on economics for business to help you. Six, once you can identify dissatisfaction, you're in a position to define your value insight. What is the new and better value customers want and what is their motivation to change their behavior? Abandoning their current means or solution and moving to yours. How important is it to them relative to what? What's the scale? Seven, now you are ready to compose a value proposition. It's a promise of an improved feeling of value with the support of a credible approach to delivering that feeling of value at a price that's aligned, i.e. the customer feels that they will get more value than any alternative use of the dollars they're gonna use for the purchase price. Eight, two more elements you need to know. One is what the economists call opportunity cost. If customers take your value proposition, what are they giving up? It could be a competitors alternative solution or it could be the chance to save and not buy or it could be to ignore your proposition and do nothing. Be empathically aware of the customer's opportunity cost. Nine, and be aware that the customer has a value learning process. First, they assess whether there is any potential value in your proposition at all. Then they mentally calculate the relative value to other uses of their dollars. Then they decide whether to buy or not. Then they experience the value and then they assess it after the event and compare it with their expectations. We have tools for you throughout this learning process. Having designed the value proposition, the next stage of the model is to assemble the resources that will enable you and your firm to present that value proposition to the customer in the form of a purchasable good or service. One, start with the hypothesis of what experience you can facilitate for the customer that will motivate them to change their behavior. You'll derive it from the value insight you created in the design phase. There are several tools on the E4B platform for insights generation. Two, then think through the learning process the customer will go through before making the change. There's a full suite of value learning tools. Essentially your proposition must be sufficient for the customer to anticipate some value, to assess that value as higher than some alternative, to become willing to make an exchange of dollars with you, to activate the experience and assess it after the fact is better or worse than or the same as anticipated. Make sure you think this process through from end to end and make it viable. Three, if you're confident of your hypothesis, begin the design process, features, attributes and delivery system. Keep a singular focus on the customer experience. Four, the next stage is to assemble and orchestrate the resources to bring the features, attributes and delivery system to the market. Is that a firm or a partnership or an alliance or a supply chain? How do you want to deliver? Five, you'll need capital because it takes time to progress from design to production and implementation. Who will finance this capital gap? At what cost to you? What is the best form of capital for your project? Our E4B platform will help you. Six, once assembly is complete, work your way back from the customer experience. How is the experience delivered? What is the interface? How does the customer feel at the point of delivery? Are your operations optimally designed for this delivery? Is your organization 100% aligned with customer experience delivery? Where is it deficient? How can you fix that deficiency? Seven, now you are ready to design and implement communications, which are an integral part of the product or service you're delivering, not an add-on. Eight, how will you facilitate the customer experience? Promotion, sampling, each step of the learning process. Nine, once you enter the market with the offering, value goes wild. It becomes subjective again. You don't control it. So make sure you put in place the tools to observe it in the wild. Access the customer's context. What are they thinking? Don't presuppose, just collect data. Can you be there? Can someone you trust be there? Can a bot be there? Make sure you're there to collect the data. Phase three in the Austrian business model is the ultimate market test. Does the customer perceive sufficient value in your proposition to make the exchange, paying dollars that they could utilize in many alternative ways, in order to secure the experience you're promising? One, the customer's willingness to pay is a core element of subjectivity. The value decision is entirely theirs. They're weighing a complex algorithm of perceived and predicted benefit against the cost of the experience, which includes both the dollar price and all other costs, transaction costs, that's any difficulty in making the exchange, and opportunity cost. What else could they have done with the money, time, and effort required to exchange with you? Make sure you know the algorithm and the variables that each customer is weighing. Two, how do you do that? The economic term is price discovery. You don't set the price, you learn it from your customer. That requires a lot of experimentation with offer bundles in real life situations, not simulations. Make sure your offer bundles test variables of communication. Often your value proposition is enhanced by more and better information rather than discounts, coupons, and price variables. Three, plug your price discovery data into your revenue model to make sure the margins and cash flows you can generate conform to your financial goals. Don't run lean for lean's sake, but do make sure you understand how the price the customer is willing to pay interacts with the costs you have chosen to generate sustainable margin. Four, costs are not forced upon entrepreneurial businesses. Entrepreneurs choose costs once they know the customer's willingness to pay. Choose costs wisely, but don't sacrifice the features that made the customer willing to pay in the first place. Five, margins are emergent from willingness to pay minus the cost you choose. Don't set unrealistic margins in advance, but do know the margin level required at the velocity and volume of sales you can generate that's sufficient to provide adequate cash flow for your business. Six, cash flow is a critical variable. You hear about startups burning cash, but that's a false horizon based on receiving liquidity from venture capitalists and making a bet about how much of it can be invested now to obtain the attributes to attract more investors in the future. That's a bad business model. Much better is the model that recognizes the capital gap at the beginning of the business process, i.e. production takes time, and accelerates the attainment of cash flow break-even through revenue-generating sales once the proposition gets to market. Seven, use accounting subjectively. Yes, there are rules to follow, but accounting is a means to an end. Be sure of what you're trying to attain and then organize your accounting to generate the data you need to review and follow to attain your goal. Is it low taxes or high cash flows or a high rate of reinvestment or high margin? Know your goal and make sure accounting serves it. Once the value exchange processes are in place and humming, entrepreneurs enter the fourth stage of the value-centric business model, which we call value agility. This stage focuses on maintaining dynamics. The marketplace is continuously changing and sending you new data, whether that's about competitors or customers changing preferences. The entrepreneur responds with agility. One, make sure that feedback loops are in place from current and prospective customers. How will you collect the data? How do you know it's accurate? How do you make it so your organization can respond? This is relationship management.  Whatever value experience you've designed will erode over time. The customer's expectations may be raised or there may be rearranged by competitive offers or new and better experiences may emerge in other ways. Use a 360-degree monitor of the customer's experience and always be thinking in terms of improvement and enhancement. Never stop. Three, the customer's experience is reflective of their preferences. If their preferences change, they will rate your offering and deliver the experience differently. Keep a fresh model of customer preferences. Four, although value is subjective, it can still be enhanced in the customer's own mind by new facilitating innovations on your part. Keep generating and trying ideas to ensure that your offered value is growing faster and the customer's experienced value is eroding. And five, always maintain some innovations in your portfolio that are truly new to the world and not enhancements of what already exists. These new to the world concepts can only be imagined ideas at this stage. But isn't that where you started? Keep your portfolio of new to the world ideas topped up and maintain sufficient funds to begin testing and learning. So there you have it. The value-centric business model. Customer reflective through four phases and 32 stages. Of course, it's not linear. In fact, quite the opposite. It's recursive and self-correcting. A new piece of data at any one stage may cause you to return to an earlier stage to reset some variables or to change the decision that was made with old information. That's exactly the attitude to have. A business model is responsive to changing data from the marketplace every day, not something set in stone forever. The value-centric business model powers the E4B platform and our aim is to provide you with all the tools you need to make your own unique version of this model effective in meeting your goals.


What the heck is a storyboard full of woodworkers Paul Carlson here a small workshop guy Welcome to my small one-car garage workshop in beautiful Santa Cruz, California So here's a perfect example Let's suppose I want to have double tenons that are going to go through a board that's that thick and stick out On the other side and get all rounded off so I want to cut this my board is a three and a half wide and I want it to be one half on the two outsides and three quarters in the middle and seven eighths what you want to do is take your storyboard which is square on all sides and Mark it off really really carefully now.   So here's my storyboard all laid out. I just get this nice and firmly on there I've traced this down the sides so that Also, I want to know my reference side So I mark a reference side and a reference side so wherever I am I do the same thing Just in case there's any little variability And then I with that all laid out is a perfect custom ruler for what I want for that job I just make those marks and Then use whatever I'm going to use to you know carry those down On the workpiece that allows you to Do that over and over if you try to measure it over and over. I can guarantee you You'll mess up somewhere in a big project All right, here's another example. This one happens to be a somewhat larger storyboard This is a real live cabinet. It's going to be a router table cabinet and I'm going to have a multitude of drawers and so I have have the plans that I've created and sketch up and Built the carcass and now maybe I got something off on the carcass And so the real world is different from the intended plans so I Mark off a storyboard according to the plans and then I can put that in the real world Case carcass or cabinet carcass and see if things are going to work out. So in this case I wanted to have this to be 11 and three eighths and then one 16th and then three quarters and then four and a quarter and then one 16th and three quarters four to quarter one sixteen three quarters so forth So what am I going to take a? Measuring tape or something and try to mark that off on the inside of this cabinet So that I know where to put my runners and things This cabinet is going to be built with pleats instead of poles drawer poles And the answer is no that I you know if I had to do that here and here and here and there and there I'm going to screw it up. Plus. It's hard to do a measuring tape. So take your time sit down Use your measuring tape here get everything perfect devil check it Then you can hold it up to your workpiece and you can say you know what that's going to be perfect That top drawer is barely going to be below that face frame. And so that is all going to work now I can mark off with my Storyboard where I'm going to put things The other thing I would do in a cabinet like this Is I would cut a piece that goes all the way back that is this You know this 11 and 3 8 so that I know when I set stuff on top of there and Drill that cleat and put it in there. It's not going to be up or down or somewhere because That would make the drawer not clear and not work so Anyway, that is a storyboard. It's a customized ruler Perfect for whatever job you're working on Small workshop guy. I hope and you enjoy the series of what the heck is videos Would be doing a lot more of them Stay safe in your workshop and always remember You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf


Physically to me like Shandong guys and girls really I've always had really strong set jaws The jaw lines might come from chewing Daniel knows his history and he has just proposed a crazy theory Northern Chinese food isn't nearly as popular as southern Chinese food is in America yet But we think it has a lot of potential we grew up mostly with our father's culture Which is primarily from Hong Kong and Shanghai, but over the years we got to understand our mother Shandong roots back then It wasn't as common to have parents from the south and north because you know They're far apart traditionally speak different dialects and different food So today we're with our Bayesian connect diesel to explore the most popular dishes from different regions of northern China We are here starting the first leg of our northern Chinese excursion Of course, we've got the ancient one diesel originally from China I was I was born in China and came to the States when I was nine So basically you've been kind of our Chinese Tour guide our first section covering northern food because there are four main styles of Northern Chinese cuisine Dongbei food in the north north is more influenced by Russian food and in the far north east is more influenced by Korean food Right here. We got the khao yang pie lamb is very fatty You want a fattier meat to keep you through the winter the reason why we're putting this in the inner Mongolian category Is that they do eat a lot of lamb ribs, but possibly it's probably flavored a little different spicy lamb ribs It's kicking the flavor spicy oily really a taste of cilantro. Oh, this is good. This is one of the best ones I have for me. I think it's I don't know doesn't quite hit the spot for me. It's like a two-and-a-half out of five Man's from Beijing has high standards. I'm moving on to our next don't be dish We've got the young rotwan an actual like don't be they probably wouldn't marinate it this much This is one of those dishes that I feel like is eating all over at least the top half of China I think the young rotwan originated out of the north or west. Yeah, which is like Xinjiang Lan Zhou more of like a result of the Silk Road, right? That's right. Yeah So the lamb that you get from Mongolia might taste game here. It's game here Yeah, I mean that makes complete sense to be honest and if you cleaned off the skewer I like it. I recommend people go get the lamb skewers moving on to our third don't be dish This is a much happier sausage. It's a Harbin Hong Chang Harbin sausage Texture is mushy but the flavors not bad that aftertaste is really the pro here Almost more than the first taste you get when you hit your tongue. There's a smoky aftertaste. It's garlicky It's smoky. Oh usually it goes good with this is you make a dipping sauce out of like me under With garlic, I'm giving it a four out of five to me This is so far out of the three dishes compared to what I've had in China This is the most authentic one that looks like a crazy mess, but it's actually a Digu Jia right So what is this bone structure of the chicken, right? So after you've like sort of filleted the meat off They take the leftover bones and they serve right into another dish Okay, this had a lot more of a soy sauce marinade and spiciness to it This is definitely something you eat when you're drinking like I'm terrible with eating things off the bone to be honest here. Jobing is a general Chinese dish like in the north especially it almost looks like extra fried This might be the only multiple layered meat dish that I've seen period jingdong meat pie This is definitely higher quality in terms of the way they spice the meat the meat quality itself It's pretty simple a lot of like Onion and pork it's layered in between so you get different textures Christmas on the outside you kind of get a chewiness on the inside. I agree. I think it's also interesting if you look at the This is a takeout version Just take out version. There's not a lot of juices Sloshing around the bottom. I give it a 4.5. I was a fan of that jingdong roll. What about this right here? That to me looks like a time when he's so driving with a lot of people use this as a carb to accompany their meal Yeah, I think just order this dish like towards the end of your meal in the north growing up You didn't necessarily eat rice every meal. Yeah, we have more dough base or there was a noodle or like a dumpling And those noodles are specifically wheat-based. Yeah, what was your guys's favorite for me? I'm still going with the cow yang pie for me It's definitely a close one between the jigoo jaw the fried cumin chicken bones and the jingdong roe bag So for me, I think this this jingdong meat pie definitely was a surprise We are moving on down more to the inland zone. How do you describe this zone Tianjin Beijing? I think it's wobbly on to the next one. So here we have our Shandong spread But we have two different types of Shandong food We have inland Shandong here with the kuangmenji and this is very interesting because this is a chain games, right? Kuangmenji This is a spicy one. You guys look up the cooking process of the kuangmenji They actually have to they cook the chicken twice. Do you like the spicy version or the non-spicy version? I should like the non-spicy version better. The thing that throws me off the most Is that this is a rice dish and it's supposed to be from Shandong Oh Okay, the first time I saw huangmenji in China it was in this like really grimy place That I think I left a bad taste in my mouth. What do you think about how it ends? It's like coming to America. It surprised me. When I walked into the store I was like this doesn't feel like a huangmenji meat bun that I've seen If I walked into huangmenji meat bun for the first time it was that store I probably will have a different reception still a 4.5 Moving on to some general Shandong food Let's go with the Shandong beef roll. Adding the beef in was a little bit more Yeah, I think the beef is maybe a more remodern take but the idea of a juanbing is a very Shandong thing I mean, especially there's the Tianmianjiang in the middle, which is a very Shandong thing Shandong beef roll This one is more Tianmianjiang, which is a little bit saltier The heart of the dough is so key to this dish And I recall actually eating these when I was younger, like as well as my mom's side of the family What they would normally do is so just take giant stalks of green onion They'll just wrap it in this in this bean Daniel, you are the only person I know that ate this growing up. So there that is history. You've got the Jiotai Hez This place's dough is so chewy. You can tell this is a Shandong restaurant. This is like thick dough skin It's almost like represents the thick skin of Shandong people You can't say it's tastier than the more fried versions But there's something about it that's more homemade. Moving on, you guys, we got the uh, this is a Rousen Xian, I believe. So it's got shrimp, pork, and uh, leek Oh, I can definitely recommend that one. Yo, so much. It's such a great balance between the seafood, the pork, the leek This is the pork and fennel dumpling. Pickly, radish, dill flavoring between the pork and leek already Those are my favorite ingredients for a dumpling and then you just add on fresh shrimp That is like one of the best dumplings I've had in a long time All right, you guys, they say Shandong people pop these like peanuts Oh Wrapping up our Shandong quick excursion, we have the Zhajiang Mian. This should be your favorite This is one of my favorite dishes in the world. My mom made it growing up a very dark Bean sauce. I just love how the cucumbers and the grains will kind of balance it out Daniel, do you have a favorite style of Zhajiang Mian because I know there's so many different regional variations of it Almost like pizza. Yeah, I'm I'm more a fan of Beijing Just like mom's All right, you guys We have done a zigzag. We went all the way from Harbin To Liaoning Shenyang all the way down to Jinan Then we shot to Yantai and then we're back up to Tianjin. So here we have a fresh Jian Bing Tianjin Beijing style street wraps. There was something extra on this They put fermented tofu usually what I've had with it, but but it's like bean paste and some chili But the fermented tofu That's way better as a substitute. That is a good Jian Bing. This is in my top Three Jian Bing's I've had all time probably of all time and this guy used to live in China of a regular plain Jian Bing That was the best one I've ever had in my life to end off this crazy food tour with the mahua I've not had actually Fresh fried mahua. Do they dip it in something? They let it soak in something? No, they'll just eat it This is it. This is it. Oh, all right. It's crispy, but actually this is still pretty light I know it sounds crispy and it seems like it'd be a very bready But it's not the case actually actually more flavor than I thought today We explored many different facets of northern food think about northern food Everything's very home style get together with your family and you share It like this kind of very family oriented meal the other interesting thing that's Different with northern food versus southern food is like Southerners food is like this delicacy Whereas in the north food is like a tool for survival when we were looking at the the Shandong Jian Bing early I was like you could probably just have that Jian Bing for your meal is the possibility for northern food to penetrate I guess like the western palate because I know for me The one thing about southern food even though a lot of people eat it It's that it's been heavily americanized to make sure it fits like the western palate I think a good example is like she has famous foods in new york.  This is more bready and doughy americans like strong flavors They like barbecue sauce the north probably does chinese barbecue sauces The most like tangy and the most like strong, you know, there's also that age old adage, right?  That would not happen with northern chinese food though. No, yeah, that is true There is so much dough in northern chinese food. You will not be hungry for a while Thank you so much for joining us on this journey We kind of wanted to sit down with our chinese connect friend daniels out Please let us know in the comment section below number one Have you ever had northern chinese food and number two another provincial cuisine that we need to explore You guys are into chinese food I hope you guys like that video a lot because you know We just like talking about chinese food and until next time we out. Peace So you're doing a lamb a lamb bone commercial You gotta hold this up young voucher


Hey guys, Thundie here and with me in my hands is the brand new Sony Xperia One Mark 4 and as you can see it's got a 21 by 9 aspect ratio display Yes, you can play your games that way and we're going to be talking about gaming on this device So if you're joining us for the first time go ahead and hit that subscribe button because we like to play games on our smartphones So the Xperia One Mark 4 is the latest in the Sony Xperia line and yes This phone focuses a lot on the camera capabilities because it has some really interesting and unique cameras including of course a Periscopic or zoom lens actually Sony Lexa call it a zoom lens because it actually does a pretty good job now We're not going to talk much about the cameras going to talk about gaming here in this video But I will tell you that all cameras do record at 4k 120 so that is actually pretty cool and Impressive, but let's talk about the device for what we care about in gaming now It's got a snapdragon h-gen 1 processor 5,000 milliamp battery which is actually pretty good and then of course in terms of your display This is a 6.5 inch 21 by 9 that wider aspect ratio You can see gives you this much slimmer profile which surprisingly is just feels more comfortable to hold honestly I mean I wouldn't think that way, but it feels more comfortable to hold while you're gaming with this device Now you do have buttons on the top You do have your power button your volume rocker and of course you have a dedicated camera button This is where I wished Sony actually use this camera button because it has a two-chase camera button Which allows you to press halfway through to focus your images and all that kind of stuff So to me that would be great for a gaming trigger imagine playing Call of Duty Even if you just map this as your trigger This would be great and also even using the volume rocker here to actually go ahead and reload or at least Set a function now that brings me to the game enhancer. This is Sony's basically option of Customizing your gaming experience Improving that gaming experience and doing much more so you go to the game enhancer app You can go in and you can see the games you have in there You can look at each of those games and then you can also Look at your screenshots and things like that now while you're in your game session itself You can actually open up the game enhancer These either a floating bar one icon on the side that is floating on the screen So I do have the icon on the side and what it does is allows me to go into some quick settings I can go in and change the brightness I can also increase the performance and go to like performance mode instead of balance mode to use more Of my of course snapdragon hn1. I can multitask screen shot screen recording That's pretty good But the things I would like to see here are of course my FPS meter and as well as a way to map some of those Already useful buttons that they have in this device. So that's what it is in terms of Functionality, okay, so what about games and gaming on this device? So let's start off with Genshin in fact ha ha you thought I was gonna say Call of Duty mobile Well Genshin runs on this as you would expect Genshin is a game that honestly, we know very well that it's not well optimized. So we get between 38 to 40 When you play for longer periods of time about 20 minutes it drops down to about 36 to 38 That is something that I've been seeing so again That's kind of standard with what we get in with snapdragon hn1 with this But it does run smooth and also using that 120 hertz display You can see how smooth and fastest thing actually looks now going over to you know Call of Duty mobile this game runs at 60 frames per second locked in really smooth very nice And honestly again, I can't stress that I really liked the fact that look this has a much wider screen So I feel like everything is just more balanced on my display I can see more of what I'm looking at and even though the height isn't there There's just much more wider field of view, especially the game. I call it duty now PUBG mobile we ran it of course at the very two settings we usually check out first of course is Smooth extreme and that gave us a solid 60 frames per second the game ran well and Function pretty good gameplay was good. No problem Then we also went to ultra HD ultra and we got to the performance We'd expect for the snapdragon agent one with is 40 frames per second So that was actually good now We do have another new game here for you which you guys can see and honestly It did a fantastic job on that as well very smooth Fantastic gameplay and also I think this was actually just what I wanted to do in the new game for you guys To actually check out but everything's kind of expected So the one thing you guys want to know is what about temperatures? So while gaming on this device, and I'm actually just gonna measure it here on screen We're able to get about a hundred and eleven degrees, which is kind of standard Especially for a device that doesn't have any Clear-cut specific cooling that you know, Sony has mentioned now There's one way to actually change those temperatures from a hundred and eleven is the fact that Sony has some pretty unique battery technology this is This is something that allows you to actually game for long periods of time without using the battery and mind you That's a 5,000 milliamp battery here. So you can actually game for long periods of time So all it is is that once you're charging your device or you have your device plugged in the gate The device does not run off your battery power, but actually off your charging So it's not overheating You're not getting those thermal heats from the battery and it does a much better job Cooling and in that state I had seen temperatures of about between 97 to about a hundred and and Five depending on the game with Genshin It was close probably closer to a hundred and five So that is something I really like and especially for gamers who like to spend a longer period of time while gaming You're going to experience that there now in terms of audio. You've got of course dual speakers and How about you guys just take a listen to some of that audio doing gameplay pretty cool. So in all essence the Sony Xperia 1 mark 4 is a solid gaming device 4k 120 even though of course this game doesn't actually play at that But it looks really good run smooth audio is solid on this device But here's the kicker would you actually pick this for gaming or would you focus more on the camera capabilities? Because this is priced at $1,500 and this is of course because Sony is really pushing a lot of those camera capabilities And yes gaming is pretty strong What I would like to see from Sony in the future is more PlayStation integration into this device where I can actually Have the PlayStation app available I can also stream more for my PlayStation more connectivity to that because again that is a Sony product So I would love to see that there that it makes it more of a True Sony product not just a PlayStation from but again covers the camera and the gaming aspects together So if you guys have any questions or any comments, let me know or otherwise Don't forget to like share subscribe and I always enjoy your statement


My good friend Anthony Clark, co-founder of Activation Products and in this video we're going to be talking about what it takes to run a multi-million dollar brand. Anthony, I want to thank you so much for giving me time to talk to you in an interview. I've known you for just a little bit over a year and you've impressed me every single stage that I have had an interaction with you and hopefully you're going to enlighten us today on like the nitty gritty on what it really takes to run a lean mean business. Cool. I'm glad to be here Amir. Hey everyone. So yeah like Amir said we do run a multi-million dollar company here we manufacture on supplements and we sell them online direct to consumer for the most part. And before we continue what company is it? It's Activation Products, ActivationProducts.com. To run a company you gotta know a little bit everything like you got to wear all the hats I've worn all the hats whether I'm good at them or not and you may know this or not but you the idea is to train someone to take over that hat systematize it build an SOP and pass it off to them and that's easier said than done you read about it in all the books but actually do it it's challenging. We've had false starts we've hired the wrong people we've built the wrong processes and it requires the you as the owner to be very present and focused on your business. If you're not there if you think that you can just do a little bit and just let it coast it's not gonna work I've been guilty of that I've had the mentality of just letting someone else do it you know they say they're good at it they ace the job interview and great now I'm paying for it because I have to fire that person have to replace them I have to get back into the trenches and relearn that thing example sales I have to get back on the sales floor and relearn how to sell because I haven't done that for quite a few years. So you brought up something important though is before you expand your team is you actually dive in deep into the subject matter and you internalize and you actually know it. Yes. As opposed to just saying go do this you try to outsource everything. How can I tell someone to do it if I haven't done it and I have done that and I paid the price.   What would you say were the key the key factors to your success from going from zero to a million dollars. We had to have our products sorted out. You really got to know where if you're doing physical products which we are you have to have a stable product. Some people would say that's not the most important thing. Some of my trainers say get your marketing done first and you can do that you can sell a product before you even have it. But if you do that you got to be able to quickly follow up and provide that product. So it's product price placement. I've heard stuff like that piece. Yeah exactly like those are quite relevant. So when we it's a few years ago and I think we made our first million it was a marketing was a huge part of it learning how to write sales copy or hiring someone to do it finding an audience to sell it to the right price and just doing more of that. So the first thing was finding a great product that yeah yeah was quality grade product and be the people wanted. So what was type of procedures that you did to actually locate the product and be actually find the people that want to buy the product. Well to find the product we went to trade shows we found other people who had already found good products we you know white label them or we found a manufacturer and we brought a custom formulation say hey you know you've got a and this guy's got B. Let's put them together make C. And it's important that you have a high quality product. There's a lot of companies out there that sell junk and they can make millions and even billions and they could make maybe make more money than you and I ever could. Yeah but that's not why we're here exclusively making money is important it drives the company but at the core of it we're actually here to make people's lives better and if we're selling crap and low quality knickknacks we're not actually making people's lives better we're just lining our pockets so I want to line the pockets at the same time that I'm making someone else's life quality of life rise and that's really huge to us. That's really important but here because a lot of times we get sucked up in the honey moons of just like there's a saying in the startup world ship it they say just ship yeah ship ship ship regardless of the quality regardless of money love speed stuff like that exactly so there is there is some positivity to just ship it to kind of test up the MVP back in the day when you're dealing with the food grade type of supplement over here where people are actually eating it swallowing it putting on their skin quality over quantity is going to win long term long term. That's right. So once you figured out the product and you spent your time getting the best product in the world on top a quality you mentioned about sales. Why did you pick for example direct marketing or that type of sales channel over anything else.  It's really tough. You can do it and you can be huge but for us with our the resources we had at the time it wasn't a possibility and we've seen other companies that that we're selling is actually a honey company they're selling honey direct to consumer. We did the math like wow there's good margin way way better margins here. Yeah the volume is lower but you can make up for it and we've been working on ramping up the volume and we will do more like that offline. So what got you into direct marketing was it like Dan Kennedy or like I don't remember who would name it was it was really just observing another company that was doing it. Hey like that they're doing that they got sales pages that we met a guy who said have you heard of internet marketing. Here's a sales page. This is how you do it. This is a copywriter and wow. You know Michael Matheson talks about this kind of Gora. Oh yeah. You know Gora early to rise and in his book ready fire aim. He talks about stop reinventing the wheel. Stop thinking about I'm going to reinvent something and everyone's going to love me for it. There's people out there who've done this before you and they've done it very successful. So you know look at models that work out there and ask yourself how can we duplicate this model for a self in our own way in our own language and put our unique spin on it in our own way as opposed to OK let me just start something from scratch. So you saw a model you saw a company like the honey company and I go wow they're doing amazing sales from direct marketing. How can we use direct marketing for our own advantage. That's right. And it worked. How did you get into direct response marketing. We met a gentleman named Larry Ostrovsky and he runs the site called B well buzz dot com and he told us about it and he actually educated us that this thing existed and that you can sell stuff online. He got it hooked up with a shopping cart. He kick started the whole thing and then from there we just kept learning and investing like hundreds of thousands of dollars a year into coaches and training courses and going and meeting people to get better. We'll talk about this. You know we'll pull up on your products. We'll pretend it's a new product. It's kind of see oh by the way if you're looking at if you want like the best quality supplements go check out activation products dot com. I'm going to fill you with them. I make no money from them. I use them every single day and trust them. They're one of the best in the world. Let's just say this is a brand new product.  We spent the year. We've got the best product in the world. We just call this the black label. What are some simple steps for anybody out there to start in the direct marketing space? You have to know your product. So if you're going to write the copy yourself you obviously have to know the product very well. Studying Dan Kennedy and other copyright training. You can write your own sales copy or if you don't if you want to get up and running fast you can hire a copywriter to write your copy. He's going to interview you. He's going to look he's going to research your product. He's going to learn everything he can about it and he will have the experience to write a letter with the psychology to walk someone through the story of the product and eventually lead them to a call to action a buying decision and that would be the fastest way to do it because learning copy takes time. I spent time doing it and a few months of it like okay well this is really intense stuff. I learned a lot from it but I'm not going to be the guy writing copy in the company because I need to run the entire company and I know other business owners who they don't hire a lot of copywriters they do actually write their own stuff and teach their own if you're able to do it but that is what you doesn't matter who writes it you absolutely have to have copy written you have to have the emails written you have to have a sales page written and what's most important is not the upfront sale it's the backend sale so you make this the sale up front and you have to follow up with those people you have to nurture that client because you paid money to acquire that customer you pay your copywriter your developers your designers paying for traffic your Facebook ads whatever you had to pay to get them there and you spent all those thousands of dollars to finally get your customer and you sold them a twenty dollar digit or a forty dollar supplement whatever it is and now you've got to recoup that money you have to keep selling them more stuff. Jay Abraham talks about a loss leader for examples and I'm all making money in the front end it's about making money in the back end and usually on average if a customer spends fifty dollars with your product or in your business the likelihood they will spend another fifty dollars always times two whatever they spent yeah so fifty dollars equal that customer to use worth a hundred so you know for a fact that if you can if you're willing to spend eighty dollars to acquire a customer you're still making twenty dollar profit off that customer so let's say we got the sales page we hire a copywriter we spent ten thousand dollars on a beautiful copy writer and sales funnel how did you get the traffic to a website we've used affiliates for four or five years and we should have paid attention to other types of traffic a lot sooner but the affiliates are actually quite nice because they have a warm relationship with their audience you're going to get a much better response than with cold traffic and it actually work beautifully like we've driven millions of dollars of sales to the affiliates but what you need is you got to have someone to manage those relationships again it's another task you're going to have to hire someone someone who is a very good people person but they're also a good sales person they push hard so how do you get initially the first let's say five how do you get the first five affiliates on your team they said yes I'm gonna sell your product for us because my dad and I co-founded the company he travels a lot while I stayed at home and operated the company he would meet people at trade shows he would meet them at conventions that's one way okay you can just do flat out blogger outreach you can make a list of all the blogs that you can find in your niche and start out reaching to them and you know you really know how to do that more of a story though building your affiliate network I call the relationship network is focusing on relationships yes right you're not just saying here's my product it's the long play yeah because if you just hit them up with your product there you're not going to get anybody yeah I have to give before you get you have to make it to pause it before you make that's right withdraw even take as Adam Graham Adam Grant talks about so once you have these affiliates you mentioned something over here that's really important is having a manager for them yes so how key was a manager for your success when it came to running your business oh like when I was managing the affiliates you know things are like pittering along as soon as we got affiliate managers like three times sales the first month and just go up up up eventually she plateaued for you know other reasons but it was money well spent she made money for us immediately so you would say that your company's growth up to a million dollars would be direct response marketing plus affiliate marketing yes absolutely made a huge difference that was I mean I could go and pull the actual reports but I know roughly in my mind that was when it made a huge difference let me ask you this though if you had to rewind since you've been through it you've learned everything what do you have done anything differently from the get-go when it comes to direct response and affiliates direct response affiliates do more of it I think we get into other types of traffic we learn how to build funnels for cold traffic meaning scrap the affiliates Facebook Google paid media drops meaning somebody's going to email their list in for a cost per thousand so they have six thousand people and they charge $10 per thousand it's going to be $60 to drop mm-hmm you know and just do the math and anything else that's all cold traffic you and other ad networks display networks we would have gone into that it's harder to do that because you have to be much more tight with your sales copy and your psychology and you have to be willing to stomach the lower results up front and have your back-end return path yeah really strong so you know it's easy to just go the affiliate route and say I will get to that cold traffic stuff but we would have if we would have got to it faster with a scale faster we've seen other companies do that be really successful because they took the time to do the hard work to make a cold traffic funnel mm-hmm and paid off of them so let's summarize everything so for somebody starting off from the get-go invest your time in getting the best quality product possible don't skim on that become the best in the world number two understand copy writing understand the rep response marketing number three build relationships with key industry players yes and number four right away hire somebody to nurture the relationships so the system flows right that's what you need yeah awesome I love it you have any final words to say make it happen go make it happen guys all right if people want to find out more what you do where they can reach you they can reach us on activation products dot com they can check our product so they can reach out to us my name is Anthony Clark yeah that's it awesome guys go check out activation products calm Anthony's been a pleasure brother yeah alright man guys take care peace


figuratively versus literally. These two words are often confused. Let's break it down. The word figuratively is used to describe something metaphorically. For example, figuratively speaking I'm living on the edge due to my adventurous lifestyle. Literally on the other hand describe something that really happened. An example sentence would be, after falling in the water I literally smelled like fish. So remember figuratively describe something metaphorically and literally something that really happened. That's it for today. See you next time.


What's up everyone? It's your girl Kenzie here from Layton Sports Cards and I am ripping brand new release today 21 22 Paninium City and basketball hobby 12 box full case break number three random teams Here's a look at the random results again You can always find these at Layton Sports Cards comm underneath the results tab link is also in chat for you Here we go Good luck. Let's see what we can get here We've got Santiago Dama rookie Subbonus King's base and Malik Beasley T. Wolfs Out of 35 we got Clippers RPA of Jason Preston Clippers and Out of 50 warriors rookie auto rookie eruption Moses Moody No dubs Purple to 99 Santiago Dama rookie Grizzlies and magnitude purple Yanis onto the Kubo to 75 bucks This was what 140 spot Yeah, very reasonable for a full case break. Yeah, not bad Got Rudy Gopair jazz trimmer be the third pelicans rookie and Dennis Schroeder Rockets Got out of 149 Rockets rookie auto of Armani Brooks Armani Brooks And out of 149 Lakers a robber whorey We've had at least one of these every break so far You know Lakers three for three on Big Shot Bob orange the 50 Malcolm Brogdon Pacers and Zach Levine the 99 bowls I believe we've got personals for three twenty nine ninety nine a box Karen On our website are available for personals tonight. Everyone was Sam Dennis Schroeder Rockets Durknowitsky Mavs and Nicola Yolkitsch for the nuggets To 99 lightning strike of Monte Morris nuggets To 25 Rockets Jalen Green rookie auto Rockets George K having a nice night as well There you go green green 18 of 25 We'll mag this one for you and how about an electric blue edge SSP rookie for the next Quinn Grimes You'd go love these floods such a beautiful card Nick's on this one Unicee Nice one there. 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It's a 99 rookie Kate Cunningham pistons Nice and Isaiah Stewart's little beef stew as for his calls in the 99 All right last box here, then we'll do a quick recap Harrison Barnes Jonas Valencunus and a Scotty Barnes rookie base Raptors Cool one here spurs Avery Johnson On the purple galaxy We've got to 15 RPA on the green for the kings Nimaeus Keeda three colored patch on that there you go kings purple to 99 Andrew Wiggins for the Warriors and Short print hit Darius Garland for the calves Nice one there on the volcanics Short print. All right. Give me one second And we will do a recap here. All right. We had uh Keeda for the kings Avery Johnson spurs bones Highland nuggets Reggie Theos bowls Shangoon Rockets or conglue for the Hawks Clyde the glide Rockets a Cassie Russell Lakers Dennis Robman bowls gold cork max sixers We had a jersey rookie jersey Otto Christy warte for the Pacers night one. 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You have to do it more than once really you gotta keep your Rogan's been consistent That's why he got the hundred million dollar deal from Spotify. He damn sure did Shannons show up becoming a top interviewer because of this interview has went up past every interview With 40 some million, you know I'm using so like it's the second most viewed in under Joe Rogan But it Joe Rogan's gonna pass it. I mean he's gonna pass or because he's doing it fast. It's good. It's moving Does that set a staple for him, you know far as being a great interviewer in the field that he's dealing with now You have to do it more than once really you gotta keep your Rogan's been consistent That's why he got the hundred million dollar deal from Spotify. He damn sure did so, you know No, no not the Shannon. That's great But it you got to be consistent that dude again. Just do it once. Do you think you can do it again? Who knows man? I mean listen that that interview was lightning in a bottle And it's hard to capture lightning in a bottle consistently You know it depends on who you guess and cat was a great guest Again, I don't agree with it, but it's all about chemistry. Yeah, I Got to ask you about Also, Jason Whitlock Stephen a Smith you you see what's going on with them boys, man Yeah, like when you see this kind of this still the same goes back. It's the same thing color for color You know round for round like well, how do you feel about that?  Yeah, yeah, yeah, if you called a Sambo now You've been insulted. Yeah, that's what Uncle Tom is actually not a not a bad thing, but he's been Referred to as some sort of a Sambo So I don't know all the complete details about Steven anything. I don't even just came out Some people say he was coming behind Cat Williams and and Shannon Sharpe's interview to let him know, you know, like it's pressure over here At the end of the day, I just would like us to do better.  So what are you gonna do in 2024 to change the narrative anything I can, you know But I'm not as I'm not as powerfully based in Certain positions to make the kind of change that I would like to make So, you know my my my fit my platform or my mouthpiece can only do so much You know all the other changes that need to happen need to come with me being able to provide or you know Build some things so that's gonna take that's gonna take a little bit of time for me Because my hustle is a little bit different because I'm not I'm not ahead of the pack like a cat Williams or a Kevin Hart Like but it can happen. Well, that's the goal. I'm talking about on a dime. That's that's that's the goal You never know. Yeah, see and when you talking about stuff like that, you know, cuz I know Kevin Hart He talked about the fact that like cat Williams He's not really just helping the people around him to grow and so forth Do you think that is so detrimental?   We know how to dominate we we we life's hot sauce You know, if life is chicken we did Tabasco We know how to turn the volume up on everything And we we were some of the most imitated and copied and stolen from people on the planet So when you just look at the history of who we are where we've been what we've done Life wouldn't be without us. We got such a main ingredient to everything So I'm just going man if we could just get our heads right and utilize our powers and come together Avengers assemble It would be dangerous. What does it take? First of all, we got to change the mindset We got to change the mindset. We have such a Scrooge McDuck mind mind mind mind. I got mine You can get yours instead of going help me get mine. And if you help me get mine, I can help him get his yeah Yeah, I mean when you think about all these Black celebrities on Instagram Comedians actors, can you imagine if if we every time I got something popping you we it was like an automatic chain Oh, it was got something popping. I'm reposting Kevin Hart. Oh, Bill Bellamy got something popping I'm reposting cat Williams if everybody just took care of each other man It would be it would be it would be dangerous I know the funny thing about that what what I'm thinking is the fact that like because social media is a quick way of how to get out Information out to everybody on one time, right?  That's a mindset. Yeah. Yeah, some I said Like Kevin got Over 300 million followers. Yeah. Yeah on Instagram. Yeah Whether it's me or whoever let's say it was a desi banks if he reposted Desi banks performing here at this day at this time, it'll be sold out. How many people are gonna see that? Mm-hmm You know if we did that for each other. Wow. Oh my god impactful powerful. Oh my god But we don't know I What do you think I gotta get you out of here, but he did he how will he end up on this situation if you had to guess Say if you had to guess What would you see him at in another two years? You know here, you know how I put that like in two years. Why do you see he did it, you know? He should just come up. He's gonna be all right. I said in two years in two years You get on my podcast two years and if he don't if he ain't facing no criminal charges and don't get arrested or nothing like that He's still got the money. So he's gonna still do what he do.  Isn't he? Oh, no, he's still in jail. Yeah I thought he was released. He wasn't released. Where you hear that from? I think you tripping. Are you sure really? I can't it came out I was out But it'll go crazy. You know, you gotta follow you know, I seen you I seen you do a sketch on that Do you Can is not out what he was out. He would have been performing already Now he is not out That's why I was like he got money, but they threw the book at him and they is not letting him out I ain't playing with him either. Yeah, but he also was like really wild. Hmm. Yeah, you Did he P. Did he is being said to have with grown women, right?  Do you think everybody turn their backs on him and he will just know cuz he got money So money is the cure to everything For people that need to be cured. Yeah, we on boss talk one-on-one. Yeah, we gonna


Hi, I'm Operations Manager Tony Bazzardo from the Radio Replacement Project. I just want to provide you with a bit of an update on where the program is at at the moment. After an extensive consultation period and selection process, we selected on the TATE radios and we began to roll those out to Brigades in December of 2010. Since that time, we've had quite a lot of feedback from the Brigades and that's been very helpful for us in developing and improving the performance of the radio. The most interest that has been raised in most common areas of feedback that Brigades have provided has related to the low-audibility level of the radio, voice clarity within the radios, a watershedting capability and accidental activation of the press-to-talk button and also an inability to be able to communicate at times over short distances. This feedback has related to the portable radios only, not the mobiles. As a result of that feedback, we have conducted a lot of research with engineers from TATE radios and also within the radio replacement team and also with quite a number of health and safety representatives. We are commencing to install the software upgrades in the portable radios and later in the year we will have the new radio covers available which will overcome the watershedting capability issue. So it's important to remember, as I said, that the process we've been through will result in us having a much better performing radio than we have now even though the current radio is very satisfactory. G'day, my name is Rick Allen. I'm a Senior Station Officer here at Downey Nong Fibregate and I'm also the Health and Safety Representative. I've been involved in the trial of the TATE radios for the improvement and performance enhancements and today I'll just give you a little rundown of what we've been through. One of the issues which was raised was low audio performance of the radios. During the trials we tested the radios with the new software enhancement and the tests were conducted around pumps, BAs, water, branches and just different scenarios which we would experience operationally just to ensure that these improvements have been made and were acceptable to us. Another issue which was identified was RF performance over short distances. Although the radio replacement team couldn't replicate these issues during testing there have been some major enhancements to the radio to help eliminate these issues. One of the issues identified that we may have opened the channel inadvertently without knowing so now one of the improvements is the push-to-talk button when operated has an audible beep so when it's fitted in our turnout gear or we are using it we'll have an audible beep to know we have the channel open. It was reported during operations that the grill of the radio was holding water which caused the radio operation to be muffled. Incidentally the motor rollers also experienced this. One of the fixes was to blow air across the grill to remove the water. As you may be aware it may be hard to do operationally so the Tate engineers have actually engineered a new faceplate which we adapted to the unit. This faceplate was tested rigorously at set G during trials with the other HSRs in which we actually dunked the unit in water, applied it to a fog stream and actually stood under a water wall to saturate the unit. As a result of this trial we found that the radio performed exceptionally well. Finally I'd just like to finish with as one of the health and safety representatives involved in the trial enhancement project and along with the radio replacement team it's been a very positive experience. The team has listened to our concerns and I think as a group we are satisfied that we've delivered a superior package than what we originally had.