06:09 - Q1: Do you group your products / services into one big site to pool traffic, or do you think its better to build them as their own brands?

17:39 - Q2: As a freelancer, a designer has a portfolio. As a programmer, do you think your blog / user group and conference speaking says enough? Or, do you need to have Open Source to help backup your work? Obviously, it depends if the person hiring knows what GitHub is or not. I'm thinking about screencasts to add more visible portfolio items since it’s not easy to show code by itself. Thoughts?

27:29 - Q3: If you are preparing to go freelance, you're wanting to show you're an expert and build clientele. You have some good long-term customers for the existing business. How do you recommend getting a testimonial from them that you could use while at the current business, and when you go freelancing, without compromising the business relationships? Do you try to steer clear of any links to old work, or just direct them to LinkedIn so that it’s obviously linked to you and avoids complication?

35:20 - Q4: My thought is, if you do blogs, create screencasts, and are active on GitHub, etc., it would put you in the top 10% [of developers] right there though, right? Most developers are “dark matter developers”: you can't see or hear them, but they're still there.

42:53 - Q5: Should you import your old blog posts from old websites to new ones? 

51:43 - Q6: What about Content Marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) with having so many sparse sites? Versus pooling?

59:07 - Referrals

Picks

Pebble Time Kickstarter (Jonathan)
If This Then That (IFTTT) (Jonathan)
Naomi Dunford: On Learning and Keeping Stuff (Eric)
Emails That Win You Clients by Robert Williams (Reuven)
80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More by Perry Marshall (Chuck)
Miracles and Massacres: True and Untold Stories of the Making of America by Glenn Beck (Chuck)

 

Alright, we’re live which means there’s a time delay for the people in the chat, you lucky people. So we put some tweets out and then I also did ask for questions on email.

Do you want to just talk about what we’ve got going on these days and see if people have questions eventually?

That’s cool.

Sure.

So Reuven, you were talking before we got the call started about this situation you’re in with John Bryce as far as leaving them.

[Chuckles] Great story about John Bryce. My cousin worked [inaudible 01:50] years and years ago, because I said to him, “What kind of Israeli company–,” and it is an Israeli company, it’s called John Bryce. And the story is that when they first started, they were doing technical writing and at that point no one believed that an Israeli company could actually be good at high–tech. So they purposely chose a very non-Jewish, non-Israeli name, because if it’s foreign then it must be good right? [Chuckles] That [inaudible 02:16] stuck with the name.

31] clients to make, and they’re extremely flexible. They give me basically a 100% carte blanche in terms of schedule, in terms of [inaudible 02:38], everything. As long as the customers are happy, they’re happy.

58], you cannot find out what it costs online, and you cannot sign up for it online. You must call your sales people and negotiate a price with them and then pay the purchase order with credit card.

This is just [inaudible 03:12] frustrating just from the [inaudible 03:15] provider side.

30] I want to put all the pieces in place.” So at this point, I now have between one and three weeks every month between now and October for doing training for mostly Cisco but also through their [inaudible 03:41] like Apple and ScanDisk and VMware, both in Israel and in China.

44] that I want to leave them. Now, the thing is they keep asking me for new courses. The thing is I’m planning that in the coming week or two to [inaudible 03:54] my website and re–brand as the person you want to come to for training. So it’s very obvious I do it. I set up – I think Eric [inaudible 04:01] in our previous podcast YouCanBook.Me, which I set up so that people – if they want to book courses, I’ll just say, “These are the days I have available; choose from that.” I’m going to be re–launching my book as well. And I’m going to be sending an email to all of the people who participated in my courses over the last three or four years saying, “Here’s a coupon for my book and just so you know, I’m still doing courses but I’m doing it on my own.” I think the combination will be – a good book combination would be A, good for the sales of the book, and B, for reminding them and I’m remarking to them that I’m available for this sort of training.

There are a lot of piece of the puzzle that have to go on here. And the fact that John Bryce – the 900 pound gorilla – in the Israeli training market means that I hope companies won’t be scared to go with me, worried that it will tick off one of the big training suppliers. I don’t think that will happen but that’s definitely a possibility. That’s been a big thing and the whole book re–launching, re–branding thing has been fun over the last week or two and will continue to be fun. I am actually very excited too.

Yeah, that’s great, super exciting.

Yep.

I’m shocked that you have the email addresses.

Oh, well [inaudible 05:06]. So the way it works is I do all of my own materials which surprise the John Bryce people. I give a course once a day or their offices [inaudible 05:15] and in front of John Bryce representative, I said to everyone, “My policy is to email you PDFs of the slides for each day that were in class.” And the representatives said, “Wait, you can’t do that. You don’t have the rights to that.” I said, “I do; I wrote the material.” They said, “Really? That’s impressive.” So basically my role is everyone who – for everyone who wants the PDFs emails [inaudible 05:40] within the day. What do you know, I have their email addresses. I can get them on LinkedIn. So now I have probably a good several hundred people from Israeli high-tech industry from a few companies who I know are interested in the topics I teach.

Wow, that’s lucky.

Yes, I mean it was probably two or three years ago that I finally realized, “I should be collecting these email addresses.” There’s no way I was [inaudible 06:02] through to the others.

Here we go, we got a – or I guess several questions already, which is good. One of you guys want to read them?

Sure, I’ll read it. Do you group your products and services into one big site to pull traffic or do you think it’s better to build them as their own brands?

I could take that. I absolutely think it’s better to break them up, if they don’t create a product ladder for you. If they are essentially unrelated or they don’t appeal to the same potential buyer, I would definitely break them up. Because if you don’t do that, then you’re going to dilute your positioning for – on the big site.

I’m in the process of doing this actually because my main business is mobile strategy consulting and lately I’ve been doing coaching and mentoring for dev firms – web development firms. I had those all on the same site, but it was super awkward because you put it in the nav and some director of mobile user experience from CBS comes to my page, like I finally get someone really big on my page and then, “Oh, what’s this mentoring, what’s this ment–.” They climb in there and it's completely – it’s sales pages that aren’t directed to them and it’s just no way to handle it.

So I’m breaking those stuff; I took them out of my nav – the coaching stuff out of my navigation. I started a new domain, working on a website, probably launch it in March. That is specifically directed to that business and that makes both businesses much more clean. It allows you to send out segmented emails and even different tweets. If you’re driving traffic to this site, you want the person who clicks on the link to land on the site and be like, “Yes, this is exactly what I was looking for.” And not like, “Wait a second, what does this guy do?” [Chuckles] So I feel really strongly that if the products don’t appeal to the identical buyer, then you should split them out across different landing pages or different sites at least.

I’m willing to believe that but I’m curious. Yes, having it all together on the same site might dilute your brand, but it’s still you. If I’m looking for Jonathan Stark, you’re doing these different things. Does it then – is it weird [inaudible 08:15] mobile consultant? Am I looking for the Jonathan Stark the – if you’re mentoring or coaching? How are people then supposed to find you easily, given that you’ve now become this split personality online as you were.

Yeah, I know. It’s weird because it’s new for me. I’ve always been – I’ve never had the split personality online. I’ve always been all about one thing in my mind but lately that thing that I’ve been all along has – I’m looking back on it and thinking, “That was pretty soft; that was pretty vague.” Now that I’m really tightening it down to appeal to specific expensive problems to a particular target market, there’s two ways to look at it. One is that I do get the majority of my traffic is a Google search for my name. So apparently my reputation is big enough that people are coming to me. What they’re coming to me for is up in the air.

It could be a couple of different things. So I’m actually considering my homepage to be like, “Are you a – running a web firm, looking for coaching? Are you an enterprise looking for strategy – mobile strategy work? Or are you a web developer looking for training or mobile web development?” Then have those pivot them off one direction or another. Not sure what I’m going to do about that; it’s a good question. What I’m really tempted to do is just leave the Jonathan Stark name for what I’m already known for which is mobile strategy, web – that kind of stuff.

Then start the new thing without my name even, just start it almost as an experiment, as a brand new business. Do it more entrepreneurly where I’m not binding myself to my personal identity to that brand and just let it not matter. Just be like, when people come to that site, and put that I was behind it but not make it prominent. Just be like, “Look, these problems can be solved, and we can solve them for you.” So it stands on its own.

Yeah, it seems like it makes sense especially in the sense that if people are looking for you, that’s one thing, but in a lot of cases, your website is some kind of social proof on you being able to do a thing. So people are going to be looking for the thing and not you. That’s where these other sites come in is because then they have the focus on whatever it is they’re looking for as opposed to whatever it is that you do or think you do.

Yeah, that’s my bet. My bet is basically that more people know what they’re problem is called then know my name and that I’m associated with that problem. So yes, a lot of people search for my name but what they’re really looking for is a solution to a problem. So if they’re also searching for that problem, the goal is to make those two different brands, if you will, pop-up in the search results, and then searches for my name will be less important.

Yeah. The other thing is Google will play a different game if all of the pages on your website are all focused around the same thing.

I think so too, yeah.

I think they give you more credit for that, they did the same thing on YouTube. You’re more likely to get recognized or have your videos related to other similar videos if they can figure out what your channel’s about.

That makes sense.

It’s the main authority; if they know your site’s all about mobile stuff, they’re more likely to weight you better in mobile searches versus if your site’s about five different things. Google just thinks it's Wikipedia which is just a bunch of things. You might not get that extra boost.

Yeah, right now I can tell I have a problem because if I look at my index of my blog, it’s all over the map. It’s posts about smart watches, posts about fire phone, and posts about pigeonholing yourself as a freelancers to drive more business. You know, there's like ditching hourly, there's all kinds – it’s just all over the map. Looking down it, you'd be like, “This dude’s totally schizophrenic.”

Of course everybody is interested in lots of things and has opinions about lots of things so it makes sense for me to blog there. It's my name, but from a sales standpoint, it just doesn’t work for me.

Yeah, I mean [inaudible 12:10] given often on the show. It seems to be what the most successful consultants say which is focus on something. The narrower you get, the better, and so as [inaudible 12:23] part of this re–branding, redoing my website and everything, I’m going to be, not to say taking off, but reduce – very greatly reducing the amount that I say that I do, say development or project for people and much more on the training thing. At the same time, I don’t want to remove it completely, but I can’t imagine [inaudible 12:43] different site. So [inaudible 12:46], buyer potential clients [inaudible 12:50] for that.

The way I’ve been handling it – maybe this will be helpful to you is that I will – I took all the nonmobile strategy stuff out of my site navigation and there’s no – if you go to the home page, there is no way to link in to any of that stuff. What I do is I just – in social media, I drive people to those landing pages.

So you can’t just come to my site and browse around and find out that I also do coaching. Instead, I will do a mailing list or do a tweet that drive specific people say, “Hey, are you a dev shop? Do you own a dev shop? You should check this out.” It drives them right to that page and if they navigate away from it, there’s no way back. It’s awkward but that’s the way I’ve been handling it.

On a similar vein then, I have devchat.tv which is about programming, and I have the different podcasts on there. And I’d like to be blogging about programming stuff. Should I put that blog under devchat.tv, something like devchat.tv/blog? Or should I separate it out as a personal brand.

In my opinion, it all depends on relevance to the audience you’re attracting. So if the blog posts all hang together as interesting to the people that are attracted to that site or that hub, then I suppose it makes sense. As long as it hangs together, but if it’s stuff that – if you go to the site and I’m only interested in one of the ten posts then that's a little bit less; that maybe should be split out.

It depends on the topics, really. Certain topics are going to appeal to everybody, like business type stuff is going to appeal to everybody, but if you did a deep post on media.js or some subtle thing about active record, tons of people aren’t going to care about that. Maybe you can handle that with tagging.

You’d be surprised actually. I wrote – I guess it was back in the summer – a whole series on a Rails in PostgreSQL. Okay that’s going to be interesting to be; I think that stuff might be interesting to other people. Those are consistently – those articles, the top hits on my blog, unless something blows on social media. There’s clearly a need for certain very niche topics.

08] so I’m good for training; it fits into the whole portfolio training that I do, but it's surprising sometimes to see how these interesting things to you, can actually be interesting to a steady stream of other people.

It is interesting but if it doesn’t tie into your main content then it’s not helpful.

Fair enough [chuckles].

The number one page on my site is – do you guys even know about the Jonathan’s Card thing, that Starbucks card?

I found it online, the last week [inaudible 15:37]. This is wild, tell me.

I don’t want to highjack the questions here; it looks like we’re getting more questions but it’s relevant.

In 2011, I got a Starbucks gift card and, long story short, I took the picture of the barcode on the back and posted it online so anybody could use it. I set up a Twitter feed and a Facebook page for it. It was called Jonathan’s card. People could just go into Starbucks and show a picture of the card to the barcode scanner and it would pay for their coffee.

It totally blew up, it was in mainstream media internationally. It was in CNN; I was interviewed live on MSNBC. It was a pretty big deal. It’s still by far the most traffic page on my site but it does absolutely nothing for me in the business sense.

The second most traffic page on my site, I randomly posted the user agent string for window’s phone 7.5 web browser. It’s like the second most busy page on my site has very little to do with my business.

So maybe I could somehow – I mean, I could look at that and say, “Jeez, maybe I should go back to that stuff,” so I’m not trying to capitalize on that traffic I’m getting.

But yours sounds like it’s closely related, so it doesn’t seem like a bad thing, but it’s easy to have a really popular page that has little to do of interest with your target market. Because ultimately your site’s not just up there for fun, you’re trying to get conversions of some kind – sign for my email list, buy my eBook, buy my book, get my video course. It’s not just there for fun. It's like, is it working for or against your conversions?

Every so often someone who calls me for PostgreSQL – I don’t know, my guess is that it’s contributing, but if it’s a direct contributor is a bit more tenuous.

It doesn’t sound too far field. That seems like a good one. I’m just saying that it could be – you could have ones that are huge traffic generators that do nothing for you.

[Inaudible 17:30] That’s right. It’s easy to be provocative online and get lots of people, hate mail and so forth. That doesn’t really help.

Yeah, exactly.

Alright, next question. As a freelancer, a designer has a portfolio; but as a programmer, do you think your blog/user group and conference speaking says enough? Or do you need to have and Open Source to help backup your work? Obviously, it depends if the person hiring knows what GitHub is or not. I’m thinking about screencasts to add more visible portfolio items since it’s not easy to show code by itself. Thoughts?

I have thoughts. What are your guy’s thoughts?

That’s a great question. Go ahead.

So when I was first going freelance, I was running a video series called Teach Me To Code, which was screencasts on how to build stuff. The most popular video series, which incidentally I didn’t record, it was the person who ran teach me to code before me did that video series but I got the credit for it when it came down to people calling and asking about it.

That was how to build a Twitter clone in Rails and it really paid off. What happened was, I was making the videos and the other videos, the Twitter clone videos – they were all aimed at programmers. The way that it worked out was that people who weren’t programmers who would do a Google search for Twitter clone or Twitter clone in Rails, and they would find the videos and they would watch like an hour and a half’s worth of building a Twitter clone in Rails. They will decide, “Oh, this guy knows what he’s doing,” and then they would hire me.

So you can do that. Another thing that I’m looking at right now is I’m looking at splitting off part of my consulting website to specifically treat Spree because I seem to be getting requests – lots of them – for Spree. So what I’m looking at doing is actually putting up a website that is all about Spree. So obviously then, if I want to do video content, I could do video content on how to use Spree because that directly targets my customers. Or how to set up an eCommerce store with Rails or how to set it up quickly – things like that, and how to add this feature into Spree.

Eventually, it’ll get to the point where they don’t want to do it themselves; they want to hire somebody who actually knows how the system works. So I can definitely see that as well as far as video and stuff goes. I found that the way that video visually demonstrates to somebody who doesn’t know about code, it really works out nicely. They take one look, they can see that you’re doing something and then you show them the result. They can see that that’s the result they want and you’re capable of delivering it.

So it’s definitely a viable medium. I don’t know if it is the media that you need to use or not, but it’s definitely a good idea.

Yeah, I second that motion big time. I think screencasts are great ways for coders to demonstrate their expertise. The tricky thing for the video is it’s a little tougher to link into and it’s a little tougher to scan. It’s not as shareable in that way. Obviously you can share videos easily, but if they’re an hour and a half long, and I’m watching it, and I want to share minute 35 with someone, you can do it on YouTube but it’s not the most obvious thing in the world.

I’ve had a lot of success in my screencasts on my own and through O’Reilly. That’s the way I like to consume that kind of information, personally. To specifically go to the freelancer’s question, I think having open source stuff in GitHub is really important. Let me put it this way, I’m often in the position to hire developers either full time or part time, and I don't care where they went to school – I couldn’t care less where they went to school but if they contributed to Linux, or they contribute to anything, that I want to know.

And I’ll go look at their commits. To me that is far more interesting and far more telling than, “I graduated from Brown with a CS degree.”

I think that’s true but I think GitHub is for the more technical audience. So the Jonathan Starks out there who are going to be hiring developers or are making a referral, it makes a lot of sense. For the layperson that just needs a social network built, they don’t necessarily have what it takes to go look at your stuff on GitHub and know if it’s any good. So the screencasts help with that.

I think it just depends on which audience you want to target, and whether or not you can tell them to just look at your code.

Yeah, totally fair. I completely agree with that. GitHub is probably more of a beneficial place to have your portfolio, if you will, if you are selling yourself one way or another to a CIO or a CTO or a development manager who’s going to have some experience with that kind of stuff. But yeah, if you’re trying to sell your services to a dentist, that’s totally worthless. They just want to know about results – what results can you provide me and how much do you cost, basically.

Yeah, but there’s one thing that you missed is your stuff could be open source but it could also be you open source a service. So there’s a web app you built and it's like, “Hey, use this web app to help figure out dentistry cost.” You can show the code for it so a dentist can come in and use it and say, “This is useful.” At the bottom it says, “Developed by X,Y,Z.”

Oh, there you go.

That’s useful, or if a CTO of a dentist conglomerate or whatever you call it, they can come in and see, “This is developed by someone,” click through and find out, “Look the code is actually here. Hey, this developer knows what he’s doing. Let’s hire him that way.”

That’s a lot of the stuff that I had with Redmine was, I had around a hundred open source projects on GitHub but it was useful to me because I would get clients and I would get them because they were already using a dozen of my plug-ins. So like, “Hey, he’s written basically everything custom we have in here. It’s going to be a good idea to hire him for this customer that we want.” Virtually the fact that it was open source but it was open source as in it was useful not in that the code was shared.

Gotcha, I totally agree. That’s been my experience as well where people who created JCrew plugins or Rails Jam, I’ve contacted the developer directly and said, “Hey, can I hire you for a block of hours. Give me a price for doing some custom development,” or even helping me integrate these multiple things that are not playing well together. So yeah, definitely plus one there.

I think screencasts depends on the person. Personally, I don’t like them. I won’t watch most of them – it's just the amount of time invested for it. I know a couple of my clients don’t care less, too. It might just be the type of market you’re going after, the type of clients you want.

If you do, do screencasts or anything like that I would try to have another medium. Have screencasts and a transcript or screencast in your code. Don’t put all of your eggs into like, “I’m going to put everything on YouTube as screencasts,” like have variety there, and that also give you a chance to link two different things.

The tricky thing is screencasts show that you know how to code but – we’re talking about earlier – most clients don’t care that you know how to code, they care that you’re going to get them results. I think if you can do an interview, a video, audio or even just text, case study or something of the past client about, “Before we did this project, my business made one million. After we did this project my business made ten million.” That’s going to be worth a hundred screencasts about putting together some code.

Yeah, totally agree there. I would even extend that to say that the question starts off with as a freelancer designer has a portfolio which I presumed to mean something on Dribble or a bunch of pretty pictures of websites they built. I would argue that designers should be doing case studies and it’s less about how pretty the interface is and more about how you doubled somebody’s revenue by changing the label on a button because you’re a UX expert.

Completely agree with case studies. It's not that easy to get case studies down though; it’s a lot easier to do screencasts. Your point is well taken.

Yeah, I think that it’s part of it is every developer know to link to GitHub and has some text about projects they’ve worked on, but having – sitting down with your client doing a case study, or building an app that’s useful to your clients that’s free, that’s a bit above and beyond. That sets you out and make you look different than your competition.

So when it comes back it’s like, “What do you want to do? What do you have time to do, what do you have the ability to do, too?” Because you have dreams to doing all these stuff and building a big empire around it but you don’t have the capability; its not going to work.

Right. So in terms of time and availability, I actually have very few contributions to open source. I use GitHub with my clients but I’ve just been so busy with these [inaudible 26:12] consulting and teaching, kids, PhD and [inaudible 26:15] that some of my portfolio on GitHub [inaudible 26:18]. Maybe that’s something I have to change but I don’t think it’s going to be changing the coming month at least because I have so many other things going on.

28] even doing development work isn’t necessarily a – it’s not a killer, but it helps demonstrate some other way through some other media. So I have done webinars, I have done a lot of writing, I have done a lot of blogging; and I would say the combination of these things tends to [inaudible 26:44]. It seems to have convinced people, or enough people at least for my purposes to come and work with me.

I wouldn’t be surprised if part of that is also – at least to some degree and I need to dial this more – is what Eric is saying which is not just technical ability but also ability to communicate first of all. To be – technically, since it's either in terms of your ability to technical solution to a bigger problem.

yeah, thinking about it, the webinars and screencasts I’ve done have been all about attracting web developers to training. So I would think that it would be a pretty useful thing for you because it is probably going to be watched by actual developers who then, say, to the boss, “Hey, can we get this guy in for training because he knows what he’s talking about.”

Alright, should we hit the next one?

Sure.

If you are preparing to go freelance, you’re wanting to show you’re an expert and build clientele.

You have some good long-term customers for the existing business; how do you recommend getting a testimonial from them that you could use while at the current business, and when you go freelance without compromising business relationships? Do you try and steer clear of any links to old work, or just direct them to LinkedIn so that it’s obviously linked to you and avoid complication?

I think what they’re asking is if you’re getting ready to go freelance, you’ve worked with customers for your current employer, how do you get testimonials from them so that you can go out and build clientele with some social proof?

Obviously a Reuven question [chuckles].

First and foremost, I’ve discovered even a few years ago, I asked a number of my clients for testimonials. It turns out that many large companies at least, have strict policies – or at least it’s what people told me – strict policies of non-endorsing. So I asked the vice heads in training at Cisco in Israel, “Hey, you keep on inviting me back. Can I get a testimonial?” They said, “Oh no, we’re not allowed to do that. I asked a couple of them and they’re, “No, no we’re not allowed to do that.”

52] go independent. So it might be seen, to some degree, as a stab in the back. As opposed to me as I’ve been a freelancer before I [inaudible 28:58] someone else. So I think it’s a little – I’m trying to justify myself by saying it’s a little easier to deal with.

15] working with us. He did such a fantastic job.” Endorsements in LinkedIn are pretty reasonable regular thing to do. Then when you go independent, you might be able to roll that into or turn that into recommendations for you, personally. That might smooth the transition a little bit.

41] get angry. And – or, you need to talk to them, and whether you decide to initiate that or they will come at you with pitchforks and torches is sort of up to your relationship with them. It’s a conversation you should have and I would argue that you should probably initiate it rather than them coming after you and being angry.

There’s another facet to it. It’s not just trying to steal the clients, it could be the client of your previous employer have a bit of a [inaudible 30:06] relationship, but they enjoyed working with you.

So maybe you can – actually getting on LinkedIn is a good thing. I’ve had clients do that. Maybe you can get the actual client to say, “Hey, we enjoyed working with Joe while he worked at Acme Development Company. He’s a great developer, very thoughtful, easy to communicate with.” So it’s a testimonial not about working with your freelancing business but it’s a testimony about you personally and your work ethics. That might be a good way to get some of the benefit without actually stepping on people’s toes or burning bridges.

The thing is, the client is going to want to know, “Is this business that you’re running a good thing? Am I going to be safe giving you my money?” They also want to know like, “Are you going to be able to get the job done?” And a personal testimonial can happen on that site. It’s kind of like you do resumes and references. There’s references of people you worked with but also personal like character references.

Yeah, well another thing I want to point out is there are a couple of different levels to this. One is I’m going to go out and do what the company I currently work for does. In which case, Eric’s advice is pretty good. I would just be straight up with your employer. If their head is going to explode when you're going and you say, “I’m going out on my own and I’m going to do what you do.” Then sure, you may have to temper that.

But I found that mostly employers that I worked for, they liked me, they liked the work I did, I wasn’t going to go out and freelance in what they were doing. I was going to go out and freelance in what I do, which is write code. So for the most part they were just like, “Okay, this is just another job transition.” Instead of going and working at company A, he’s going to go work for company himself.

So in that case – and it really does, it depends on the kind of company, it depends on the management, it depends on whether they have their heads screwed on straight. But if they are reasonable people, just go ahead and tell them what you’re doing and then make sure that they’re okay with you asking their customers for feedback, or for referrals or references that you can use when you start things out. If they have a reason for it, they’ll tell you, “No, you can’t and here’s why.” If they don’t have a problem with it, then they’ll tell you that. Just be respectful.

Some of these companies are run by people that really just don’t understand how the world works and understand that there’s always some level of reciprocity. They’re going to hear you say, “I’m leaving and I want to tell all the customers.” Then they’re going to have a problem with that. Be that you’re either going to steal them or that they’ll leave the company because you’re the person that they dealt with and been happy with.

So as much as you can, just couch it in terms of, “Hey look, I’d really appreciate it getting this help.” If you can’t do it, find out what the terms are. Figure out whether or not you want to burn the bridges and then maybe approach them after you leave. Just make sure that everything is on the up-and-up so that you don’t cause yourself any problems and cause them any problems if you can help it.

Don’t be sneaky.

Yeah.

It's a short life and it’s a small world. And being sneaky is not going to make it look good.

It will come back around.

Yeah, you will regret it. As much as you need that case study or testimonial on your website, it’s not worth being sneaky. Just be straight up with people. Have the uncomfortable conversation.

I’ve gone through this transition myself. I left a firm and took some clients with me and we worked out a financial arrangement that made everybody happy. Then after I’ve been doing work for those client’s firm, the six months on my own, then get a testimonial. When that project finally ends say, “Hey, could you give me a referral, could you give me testimonials.” It’s totally normal then because you’ve been working with them solo for a while.

Yeah, but if they are going to leave and find you even if you don’t tell them anything, just be straight up, “Look, I’m not going to advertise to your customers but I’m letting you know that this is where I’m going and if they approach me then–”

That’s a good one.

[Inaudible 33:59] Gavin, I believe it is, say you’re not stealing, you’re just using their positive feedbacks. I really don't think there’s an issue, if you did a good job, getting positive feedback or recommendations from someone for the work that you did [inaudible34:12] what firm you’re at. Even though you're a little bit of a [inaudible 34:18] in there, I don't think that is necessarily bad because that can serve everyone's purposes.

The issue is is that some people are going to hear, “I’m leaving and I’m going to steal customers.”

The other thing is there are cities, states, countries, where you might have signed a contract saying you won’t do that. I know you act like it’s all over the map in terms [inaudible 34:40] I guess. In terms of what is acceptable, and what is not, but if you signed a contract saying you won’t take customers, you should honor that because the last thing that you need is not only to be seen as sneaky but also then to be dealing with court and legal fees, and lawsuits and whatnot, and just threaten them [inaudible 34:56].

Yeah, in the US it’s a non-compete.

Yeah, but if you said you weren’t going to take customers, then don’t take customers [chuckles]. Forget the court and everything, just be a straight up, honest person. Because the other thing is it will kill your reputation. If the company you worked for before doesn’t trust you, why should your clients? Just be honest.

Well said.

Alright, next question. I don’t know if it’s a comment or a question – we were talking about this before. My thought is if you do a blog, create screencasts, and active on GitHub, etc., it would put you in the top 10% right there though, right? Most developers are dark matter developers; you can’t see or hear them, but they’re still there – that’s a Scoff Hanselman reference is what he’s saying there.

Yeah so Scoff Hanselman says that most developers are dark matter developers. They work in a company, they don’t put themselves out there, and they don’t put any content out there. So if you’re putting content out there, you are definitely going to rise above the people who are not. Then it’s just a matter of how much competition there is versus how much demand there is.

Yeah, it’s a difference of having an expertise and being a recognized expert.

Yep.

So sharing your passion online early and often, however you do it, is going to be better off – you’d be better off than if you didn’t do that. There are probably a dozen, at least a dozen common ways to do that and we listed off half a dozen of them previously.

I love this idea of the dark matter developers. I was just talking to someone yesterday who was saying to me, “You know, it turns out that Python is everywhere. I can’t believe it.” He started asking me, “Where is it being used?” I told him that when I initially started dealing with training in Python, I was sure absolutely sure I was going to be dealing with 25-30 year olds, maybe a little younger, doing web application because I’m a web guy.

45]. I was completely unexposed to the fact that probably the most of the Python developers out there are working in big companies and doing [inaudible 36:53] also stuff that we don’t necessarily think of as glamorous but which is necessary, and lots of people have to do that. So your market might be inside for something. It might be inside one of those companies or those types of companies and try to get them to notice you. It’s not always obvious when you get that to happen, but if you put yourself out, and you’re always being mentioned, they will find you hopefully and then want to hire you in the best case.

Yeah, straight up content marketing.

Yeah, and it’s funny my wife was working at one company for at least 18 months and then found out that they’re actually using Redmine. They knew of me but they didn’t connect the dots that I was related to her in this and that. So there’s a lot of stuff that just goes on behind the scenes, but you can figure out what your competition’s doing content marketing wise or content wise.

See if there’s a way to get above them. I don’t think it matters if you’re in the top 10% or not, it’s are you above the people that potential clients are going to see. Are potential clients seeing these six companies who are the top 0.001% and they’re getting all of the work and anyone below those six, they’re not getting anything. I think that’s what matters more than you’re above 90% of the other people.

Do what your competition’s doing or do it in a way where you stand out above them.

Focus down on a vertical [inaudible 38:15] they’re not focused on. So a lot of companies are still very generalist focused right now, “We focus on Python,” or “We do Drupal.” If you niche that down to, “We do Drupal for dentists.” Or, that’s a terrible example because dentists probably [crosstalk 38:31] [chuckles]. You know what I mean, if you niche down to a vertical and say, “We solve these kind of expensive problems for dentists. We happen to use Drupal.” Then that’s going to get you up in the search results.

Yeah, the example that John Sonmez always uses is, let’s say that you need work done on in your garbage disposal in your kitchen. So you go and you look in the phonebook – I don’t know anyone who has a phonebook but anyway, you go look in the phonebook and you see ABC Plumbing; plumbing drains and clogs and garbage disposal fix-it-guy. Who are you going to call?

Yeah, I’m totally going to call garbage disposal fix-it-guy, even though he’s a plumber who probably does a million other things.

Right. He’s totally capable of unclogging your toilet too but your particular need is garbage disposal guy. So is he in the top ten of plumbers? Who cares. Is he in the top ten people who get called when their garbage disposals busted? You bet.

Here’s the interesting thing, if you specialize in garbage disposals, what’s going to happen is you’re going to get a lot of garbage disposal repair calls. You can start to optimize for garbage disposal repair with special tools, or few maybe things you create on your own, special expertise. You can become super familiar with every popular model of garbage disposal. Average generalist plumber can’t do that.

So if you’re doing all these garbage disposal work, you’re going to get better at it than anybody. You will actually become way better at it than anybody else possibly could and therefore you could even lower prices and still make more profit, then no one will ever touch you. No regular plumber will touch you for garbage disposal work.

Which reminds me, we need some garbage disposal work done. So if you know anybody

[chuckles].

I’ll just take a phonebook [chuckles].

Let me get that yellow pages [chuckles].

Another way you can also look at that is not just niche-ing what industry you serve in but what kind of content you create so maybe you want to do screencast, like that’s where your passion is. If you get better and keep working at it, you’re going to be the screencast guy for garbage disposal repair. Instead of focusing on [inaudible 40:33] screencasts and blogs, and a podcast, and I’m going to do all these other things. You don’t ever become an expert in one medium. You can also niche in that way too. That can make you stand out in another aspect.

That’s interesting, I never thought of that.

It actually reminds me I had to fix my washer a month or so ago because it was just not working. It turned out that the problem was that it was not draining properly because the socket got sucked into the drain hose, right? Go figure. I wound up tearing my whole washer apart and put them together.

I watched a couple of videos on YouTube. I kept looking at my wife and saying, “Maybe I should just hire somebody for this.” I tell you if that guy had been local and said, “Hey, if you’re in the Utah county area–,” You can bet that I probably would have just called him up and said, “Can you come and just do this? I can definitely see that you can rip the other washer apart and make it work.”

[Inaudible 41:30] I would call anyone, rather than trust myself to open my washing machine and watch YouTube videos. It would not end well in my case.

Well, I work on my cars too. It’s just a matter of I’ve hammered on enough things to where I can at least diagnose most problems and getting an idea of where to start looking. The rest of it, it’s just bolt and nuts and screws, and clamps and stuff. So you just figure out how it all works. At some point, it's like, okay, it’s going to be a four hour job that I just don’t want to do it.

I did actually fix my drier recently with a YouTube video. But I wouldn’t touch a washing machine.

I’m not handy at all.

I married into handy [chuckles]. My father-in-law’s really handy and whenever the car breaks down, he comes up and we work on it together.

Cool, wow. It’s from the seventies, I’m guessing?

No [chuckles].

You actually work on a modern car personally?

Uh-huh.

Damn, that’s impressive. Your Ruby chops probably come in handy.

Yeah, totally.

You get to reprogram the thing.

[Chuckles] Well if you’re getting an error code, it’ll tell you where the problem is.

There you go, blogging. Love it.

So I’m totally rethinking my blogging strategy now because I’m just getting back into blogging. In fact, here’s a question for you; I have teachmetocode.com which I haven’t migrated over but it’s all in the same vein as devchat.tv. Of course now, the content on there now is current. I think the last blog post was December of 2012, and the last video or podcast episode on there is older than that.

So I want it all on the same place just because it’s that’s where people go to get my content. I have a bunch of blog posts and things. Should I just import that over to devchat.tv or should I leave it where it is on the ugly WordPress that’s set up? Because I don’t want to maintain that system, too.

Is devchat.tv going to have a blog? Or articles?

So that’s the other end of things that I’m debating is to whether or not I want to put a blog on there. Because the content is diverse enough to where I don’t think the JavaScript folks are going to be interested in the Ruby blog posts. But at the same time, I’m not – I’m going to be building and selling products that focus on developers but–.

Web developers?

And iOS developers and freelancers incidentally because I have this show too.

That’s not a small niche.

That’s not a focus [chuckles]. [Crosstalk 44:03] You're not focused on three totally different things.

Exactly, so should I set up three different blogs or–?

You should make it easy to consume for the people who are going to care about the one that they care about. So maybe that’s tagging, maybe it’s different RSS feeds, maybe it’s different domains. It’s hard to say, but it’s all developer stuff, so at least it’s the same realm. But I think people are – like I wouldn’t – I’m at best a Ruby novice but I love JavaScript. I could care less about Ruby stuff; I don’t want that in my feed but I want to know everything about everything in JavaScript. New stuff in the dom, [inaudible 44:46], node – everything.

If you really want to start questioning things, maybe you should pick one.

Yeah.

The other thing is at least make it easier for people to self segment and pick one or the other.

Right. Yeah. The podcast I feel are little bit different because they’re all on their own feeds and that’s how people consume that stuff anyway.

Subscribe to just one topic.

Right. Maybe I should do the same thing for the blog.

[Crosstalk 45:10] To the podcast. They’re consumed in a different medium where it is segmented. One thing you can do – have you seen those planet sites before where it’s basically a website that aggregates a bunch of other contents? You can make one of those for yourself and aggregate it from devchat.tv and teachmetocode – all of the sites. So if someone cares about, “I want to follow what chuck does,” they can follow that site. But if it’s just a standard, “I want to learn about JavaScript stuff or I want to learn about freelancing,” that can be in their own domain, in their own little section. They’re not polluted by stuff but once people know you better, they can opt in for everything you have.

That is interesting because I can see a Chuck fan following that’s just like, “I want to know everything that’s going on in the world of Chuck.” I wouldn’t say don’t make that available, but you just have to make it easy for them to–.

Pick and choose the things that they care about.

Now you got me thinking about, maybe I should take my main site which is jonathanstark.com and that becomes jdogworld, and then I have a mobile strategy site, mobilestrategyconsulting.com, and push all that stuff over there and just spread it out. Then my namesake.com becomes the search result for my name, which makes sense.

That's [inaudible 46:27] chat. That’s what Michael Port did. His sites changes recently but he’s an author, he’s a business coach. I think he does public speaking now. He owns some software partnerships. So when you go to his site, it talks of all the different aspects of him like, “Oh, I’m interested in public speaking,” shoots you over to a different site. Still his stuff but it’s like isolated. So if you’re just looking for public speaking Michael Port, you’re on this own site for it, it's own calls for action.

A couple of years ago, I wanted to do that. I haven’t done completely my own personal site but that’s how I’m starting to group things. Have it separate and if someone cares about everything – the whole thing, they can find where that is.

I love that idea now that it’s come up. I’m definitely going to do that. It’s a tough migration to do but that’s obvious now that you say it.

Right, so it seems like also I should keep my blogging somewhat focused to whatever area I want to be the expert in.

It makes it easier for you to be the expert. If you’re trying to – a lot of this – I notice every time I change – over the years I’ve changed my pigeon hole step by step by step. Every time I do it, it completely changes the blog feeds I follow, the podcasts I listen to, the mailing list I sign up for, completely. Because there’s some much stuff out there, you can’t keep up with all of it. You have to pick something, you have to pick something that’s specific to your niche.

I have this really important conference coming up. I’m speaking at the Gold Standard Chain Restaurant Technology Conference, next month in Vegas. For the last six weeks, I have not read – 90% of the posts I’ve been reading and the mailing list I’ve been actually not deleting are related to chain restaurant technology. So I’m immersed in the language of it and the certain kinds of restaurants are scared of Foodler, other kinds of restaurants love Foodler.

All of these – you think that niche-ing down to a specific vertical would become boring, but it just opens up this whole world of insane, deep – it’s just deep instead of wide but it’s just as much information. And so you end up with this deep expertise on the subtleties of the industry which, as subtle as they may be, are incredibly important to the people in the industry.

From the outside it's just, “What’s the difference with drive-thru, take out – who cares?” There’s a giant difference, obviously but – I can’t imagine being an expert on iOS and web development. It’s impossible.

I’ve seen people that are experts at integrating a special type of web development into iOS. That’s all they do. They don’t make iOS apps, they don’t make a normal html apps, they just do the API technology. That’s their expertise and that’s plenty big enough for them.

[Crosstalk 49:12] Myself, I did Filemaker Web. I did Filemaker for years. Then I said, “I want to do web.” I became the Filemaker Web guy for two years. I would go up against anybody in the world at that time over the expertise on Filemaker Web. Everything about the server technology – couldn’t stump me.

That’s totally gone now but that is such a niche. It’s like a niche inside of a niche. It’s like a teeny weeny little thing, but since I was so into the industry, I was aware that it was important to enough people to keep me busy for two years.

Yeah, I guess the other question then becomes, let’s say that I decided to make my primary focus web development, do I drop the iOS podcast?

That’s up to you. Why are you doing the podcasts? Is it because you’re learning and having fun, or is it because you want to do conversions and bring you in work leads? [Crosstalk 50:02] Mobile development, [inaudible 50:05] a time, I kept thinking, “Yes, this will be fun to do,” but I cannot imagine a situation which I would classify myself as a professional mobile developer because there’s just way too much to learn for me to get into that.

Yeah, I mean in the truest sense, you should wake up, eat, shower and then focus completely on the one thing that you’re going to work on and do that for the rest of your life and be an expert in that. But in reality, we have too many varieties. I care about program but I care about business and running and writing. So if I have products or if I write about stuff that's not – like it’s co–tangental to my thing or completely unrelated, it might not actually benefit my business overall but it’s going to broaden my life and make it more interesting and more fulfilling.

Maybe you do have a personal catch–all blog that's like, “These are just random stuff I’m going to throw on here.” That’s for your true fans to read and learn about. The iOS podcast, maybe that goes on there. It’s like only the people who truly care about what you want or have an interest in this topic are going to care about it, but if it’s something you want to do, you do it.

Also the other thing is, how much it is going to cost to maintain it. If you see yourself getting into iOS as an expert in 12 months, and it takes you a couple of hours a week to put the effort in now, it might make sense to put on maintenance and just let it go until you can get deeper.

Yeah, my other podcast is completely a blurb blog. It has nothing to do with business, very tangentially related to business. It’s for me to explore ideas and have a conversation with a good friend. I’d be shock if it ever turned into any work. But I know that, so if it was taking up too much time during the week, it would have to be de-prioritized.

Right. Should we take this other question on here? What about content marketing and SEO with having so many sparse sites? Versus pooling?

One thing I’m going to say is whatever we say now is going to get dated. SEO pretty much means Google nowadays but there’s other stuff. It changes so much. It used to be having a dozen small sites was beneficial and they’re really focused. Now having a large site with whole different categories is better. It changes so fast.

I would consider SEO literally the last 10% of what you need to care about. Make the content, make an audience, do all that stuff. Then if you have time and you still need to optimize more, then I would start worrying about SEO and see what effects you have there.

That’s really true. The people who keep coming back are the people that you're going to sell to.

Yeah, those are the buyers. I totally agree with that. I think SEO is a very desktop, web concept. As mobile becomes more predominant, it’s more about social, it’s more about email lists. Its more about reaching out to individuals directly. Just smack them in the face with, “This is what I do.” “Damn, that’s exactly what I need.” That’s the reaction you’re trying to get from people.

Then your site becomes a secondary thing. This old model, the desktop model where everything was interesting in that rectangle on your desktop screen, the web browser. They would search, they would click on a link, they would go on, but there are so many other ways to discover things now than just search for a problem. That’s definitely still a big one but it’s not the only one at all. So there are tons of ways to reach out to people. Pushing into content that’s relevant is way more important than setting them to a giant cloud of loosely related information.

It’s everything. Everywhere you go on the internet is this loosely related cloud of information. The stuff that really clicks with people I think if the goal is conversions, if the goal is to get more business, then appealing really narrowly – you almost can’t over niche, you almost can't over focus.

Having just like – I reject the notion of this question which is that a focused site has to be sparse. If I’m reading the question properly, a focus site doesn’t have to be sparse. The focus site could be incredibly in depth. Pulling a bunch of crap together that’s loosely related, does not create more value for me as a reader. Just because there’s more stuff on there. However that will affect SEO to me is the last thing I think about.

Another thing I think about is there is – we’re talking about dark matter developers; you don’t see them. There’s dark matter business where their site might be one single html page. It’s not even WordPress; it’s just html but they’re million, billion dollar business. They might work online, they might be offline, they might communicate through email. But the size of your site doesn’t actually determine the quality.

56] business, his site just had a logo on it. There was like, “Hey, this page is coming soon.” It was like that for a year. There's are huge freelancing or agency sites with hundred and hundreds of pages and multiple posts per week.

There's are a lot of different ways you can work with it. That’s why I think if you’re finding enough customers or finding the audience and people you want to serve, that’s the number you should care about more than just actually traffic numbers.

Yeah, traffic [crosstalk 55:23].

Jonathan, I really like your [inaudible 55:27]. If someone comes to your website and they say – and they can say, “Wow, this is really what I’ve been looking for,” then that demonstrates focus [inaudible 55:40]. Then it’s a matter of, “Okay, [inaudible 55:40] those people to come to my site.” That’s the [crosstalk 55:43].

Right. As opposed to – and that’s never going to happen, someone says, “Oh, you’re interested in technology. I can take care of your technology. I need someone to do technology for me,” They might say that, but they’re not going to call you and hire you.

My litmus test is whether or not there’s a conference for the buyers you’re targeting. If there’s in person conference for Filemaker customers, then target Filemaker customers because you know where to find them. Go to the conference. Advertise in the magazines they buy, which are going to be advertised at the conference.

If you’re trying to pitch yourself to start ups that are going past ten million users, I don’t know where those people hang out. Where do those CEOs hang-out? Maybe there’s a place, maybe it’s Hacker News – I don't know, but I wouldn’t know where to find them. So if there’s no obvious place to find your buyer, then you might need to focus a little bit more tightly. The garbage disposal one’s a good example – I don’t know where I would – that would be really hard for me because how do I focus on people who need their garbage disposal repaired. That’s really tricky.

Yeah, but here’s one thing. This is based out of a company I worked for as an employee – there are multiple conferences in the US. There’s even a monthly or every other month magazine that comes up that is all about water purification. We’re not talking about big stuff, we’re talking people who would deliver the five gallon things to put in your kitchen. There’s ads in there for this purifier is point a twentieth percent better than the current one that’s why you should buy this.

There’s a huge underground industry – well it’s not underground but most people don’t see it.

That’s just water purification.

There are millions of them.

Yeah. I tried to focus on doing software development for email applications and help business improve their email – I cannot find them. There is no conference for that. You can even tell I have a hard time describing it now. I had to abandon that niche because I just cannot find any customers. I

know it’s a valuable problem, there are a lot of people with the pain, but if you can’t find them, it just doesn’t work.

Yeah, it’s like you could go into a company and they can say, they could be having this reporting solution that’s just like dog slow, it takes 20 minutes to run a report. The problem might be that their MySQL database is set up wrong. The owner of the company is not going to be searching MySQL optimization experts because he/she has not idea that that’s the source of the problem.

They’re going to searching for stuff like making reports faster or reports too slow. You’re never going to come to a SQL developer site with a search like that. There’s no conference for – the conference thing is not the only way to find the watering holes for potential clients but it’s a great one.

So if you just look at the list of conferences that – so you say, “I’ve had all these customers over time and what do you know, a few of them all used to go to this same conference whether it was CES, devcon.” And be like, “Okay, what kind of people are going there?” Then you’re still doing the exact same thing but you’re just flipping your marketing around in a way that is going to speak their language for the things that they are looking for.

We’ve talked about it in terms of search results but it’s not just that. No matter how they land on your site, if you’re speaking their language when they get there, it’s going to be incredibly powerful.

I’m not seeing any more questions. Do you guys have things that we can discuss that would help you guys before we wrap up?

I have a couple extra thoughts on referrals that came up earlier.

Yeah, go for it.

One is to ask for them, whether it's referrals or testimonials. When you have a client – the question earlier was about going from in house role to freelance. But if you’re just already freelance, there’s like a point in the project where everybody’s super happy, it’s close to yen, its finally finishing. You’re 90% done, maybe there’s 90% to go but everybody’s happy. Ask for it and say, “Hey, eferrals are a really big deal to me, testimonies are a really big deal. Can I get you to write a few words that I could put on my site.”

Yes, I have come across a thing where big companies, they will not do that. They just – I’ve never found a way around that. But if you’re not working with a big company, then go ahead and ask for them. Testimonials are great, referrals are even better.

Honestly, 90% of the time the way it happens with me is that somebody will email me something, “We are so stoked the way this is going. This is already showing a big impact on our bottom-line. We’re just so happy that we did this.” I’ll respond, “Wow, that’s so great to hear. I really love that. Would you mind if I quoted you on my website because that’s super great.” They’ll turn around and I’ve never had somebody say no. Every once in a while though edit it slightly.

The asking – it’s elementary and trivial. You’ve got to actually ask people – not necessarily if they email you such exciting stuff. I guess it was about a year or so [inaudible 1:00:40] two of my favorite clients and I asked them for referrals, I asked them for testimonials I could use on my site. I got [inaudible 1:00:49] that was the best week I had in a long time [chuckles]. Such nice things – no one says such nice things to me and all I had to do was ask. It was really amazing. Its surprisingly easy and very fulfilling.

Yeah, it feels awkward, but man.

One other thing to throw in on that is I’ve had a few clients where I asked them for a testimonial and they think that I want that one liner that I’m going to put on my website. I’ve had to go back to them and say, “Okay, let me rephrase this. Can I get a letter of recommendation that I can quote on my website that I can take excerpts out of.” Then I’m like, “Here’s the format, talk about what I did for you, talk about the problems I solved, talk about how you felt about it,” then you get golden content out of that.

Yeah, there’s a – I was just exposed, actually from one of my students to a book called the Brain Audit. Has anybody read this?

Nope.

Yeah, I see Eric looking at his shelf. There’s this series of five or six questions that you can ask that give you the most unbelievable testimonials. It’s just really natural testimonial responses. Yeah, the Brain Audit. Giving them a framework because I’ve been asked for testimonial on a lot of occasions and if it’s [inaudible 1:02:03] there you go. What was that.

The Referral Engine.

Maybe the same person, maybe the same author.

Probably yeah, is that the same author? I wish I could come up with the questions off the top of my head but they were excellent. I’ve been asked before to give testimonials and it’s like, “Oh man.” It’s the email that never leaves your inbox because you don’t know what to say.

But given a series of questions, it's so much easier. You really don’t know where to start, you don’t know how much they want, if they want long or they want a blurb or one liner. It can be a source of – I’ve been stressed out by people who I’m really close with asking me for testimonials and just not knowing what to say.

Sometimes I’ll email them back and be like, “What do you want me to say? I’ll say whatever you want, assuming its true. I don’t know how you want it phrased, how you’re going to use it, is this for LinkedIn. What the deal? Just write it for me and I’ll edit it.”

This framework of questions was super useful. It was five questions. It was things like, “What were your objections before hiring Jonathan or what would you tell someone who is considering hiring him.” It was like six questions like that that were very leading and open ended but enough focused that you could actually come up with an answer.

Another thing you can do is you can really frame it. Especially when you get a lot of testimonials, hearing you’re a great person is nice but it doesn’t actually help. If you know clients have objections around – let’s say you work remotely and you get a lot of objections around that and you’re tired of fighting that objection every sales conversation.

You can say, “Hey, can you give me a testimonial about how easy it was to work with me even though you’re halfway across the world from me?” And if you can get a testimonial on that you can use that counter objections in your next sales call.

Yes, that’s a great advice.

Yep, alright. Well, let’s go ahead and do some picks.

Jonathan, do you want to do some picks?

Yep, I’ve got a couple actually. One is the new Pebble Smartwatch was announced today. I’m extremely bullish on smart watches. I’ve had a couple of pebbles in the past, I love them, I program for them. They’re genius; they’re the only company that understands watch wearables in my opinion right now.

They launched a kickstarter campaign this morning. Within the first hour, they were over a million dollars.

Oh, wow.

Probably by now, I’m sure they’re at six million by now. It’s going to be a big deal so for developers, I would urge you to first of all buy one because they’re fabulous. You can get one for 99 bucks, the old version. Or you could get a new one. They’re wonderful to program for. I think it’s going to be the next wave after mobile [inaudible 01:04:38] for multi-device interaction between watches and phones. It’s going to be a big deal, so that’s definitely one Pebble Smartwatch.

The other one is IFTTT, released a new app today. Or three new apps actually called Do This – that's the one I really like, Do This. And what it is is a button that you can put on the homescreen of your phone to do one thing. So you can do something like you tap on the button and you have it linked up in the backend through ifttt.com which is like Yahoo Pipes. It's kind of like this–.

You can take input from one service like Twitter or LinkedIn, pump it to another service like email or Evernote. It’s like this event loop in the sky that waits for things to happen in one place then does something with the thing and send this to another place. It’s really – it's pretty cool. It hasn’t been super useful or practical in my opinion even though I think it’s really cool.

This new application is really interesting where you link up this button to an action that is cloud based. You could – for example, every day I have to give my dog, I got a diabetic dog. I have to give him two shots a day. It’s a nightmare remembering whether or not I did it. Because if you give him too many shots or not enough shots, it’s a problem.

Now I got this button on my homescreen, every time I press the button, it sends a timestamp into a Google spreadsheet or Google sheet that just tells me that I did it. If I leave the house, if I go to Starbucks to hang out I’d be like, “Did I give George his shot this morning?” I can look in the spreadsheet and be like, “Oh yep, there’s a timestamp from this morning.”

So there’s three apps. There’s the Do This app which basically you press the button that’s all you can do. Another one’s called Do Note, where you press the button and enter some text and then that can push to anywhere you want. So you can send it to – Gmail yourself, you could send it to Evernote, you could send it to Twitter, you could send it to Facebook status. There’s another one called Do Camera where the only thing you do is press the button, it takes a picture and it goes somewhere.

So everything’s pre–configured. You can only press one button, that’s the entire application. I think it’s so cool. It’s incredible cool. I think we’re seeing an unbundling of apps basically. Apps are breaking – functions from inside of apps are breaking outside of their walls and into these screen widgets and interactive notifications and things like Google Glass and the new Pebble; it’s really cool. So ifttt.com is where you go ifttt.com

Awesome. Eric, do you have some picks for us?

Yeah, there’s one from ittybiz, this is Naomi Dunford, and it’s called On Learning and Keeping Stuff. It’s a very short blog post. Well, not very short, it’s a short blog post. If you do any kind of learning on your own, reading. Anything like that where you learn stuff or educate yourself or train yourself, you really should read this and actually think about the activities you’re doing versus what you’re actually learning and doing. It’s a bit of a metathinker post. I’ll put it in the links.

Alright. Reuven, picks?

We’re going to have [inaudible 01:07:57] about another month or a month and a half. He’s doing this thing called Workshop or Lets Workshop which gives you link each day for potential leads [inaudible 01:08:08]. He’s been watching or looking at the emails that people send to his potential clients, basically cold calling emails. He came out with an eBook recently called Emails That Win You Clients at emailsthatwin.com.

08:23] for a long time, I read this book and I was like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe [chuckles] I made this mistake.” He was very generous and even offered to some people workshop. “We’ll show me that you’re taking the advice seriously.” [Inaudible 01:08:38] in this way. I’ve been doing this for a while and so I'm able – I'm more able to [inaudible 01:08:46] but it’s fascinating. I’m not convinced that it’s always true, it still is kind of weird that his style will actually [inaudible 01:08:55] way more over a cross section of evidence that I certainly have. When I give it a thought and see how it works if only for the [inaudible 01:09:04].

09:17] people. What are they looking for in terms of the email and [inaudible 01:09:20], which I’m aiming to get myself, they’re not interested in reading tons of text. It’s great that you can write a lot, it’s great that you can write fast – they don’t care. Anyway, definitely worth looking at.

Very cool. I’ve got a couple of picks. First one which is relevant to this discussion is 80/20 Marketing by Perry Marshall. I listen to it on Audible; I need to go back and listen to it again. It was just tremendous, just awesome. I want to talk through it with some folks, kind of like I want to talk through thinking [inaudible 1:09:53]. I might pull something together like a discussion group or something.

Book club.

The other book that I listen to recently – that I listen to right now that is really good is called Miracles and Massacres by Glenn Beck. I know Glenn Beck is a polarizing figure if you like or like specific radio talk show hosts. But these are just stories out of history and they are awesome. So really enjoying that. I think that’s all I got this week.

Thanks for coming guys, thanks for everyone in the chat room for coming and participating with us. Yeah, we’ll wrap things up. We’ll talk to everybody next week.