 This is the Weaving the World Ops call for Wednesday, January 26th, 2022, although we're talking about pictures brain for a little bit. And Wendy, your comments in the plan were fabulous. And I'm actually sort of stuck trying to get through a couple of them to simplify things. And the one I just brought up, it's pricing. And I'll just bring up the screen that I had created for pricing. And the idea that I had was, let's do differential and this $1,000 is a marker from way back when when I first put this page up. I think I've been talked well off the $1,000 price point. But the question is, what is the right price point? But I was trying to make a point that if you want to work openly and we can post this call openly, there's a steep discount. Like it goes down to something like 100 bucks. But if you want privacy, then it's like a thousand bucks. And then there's kind of a matrix, which basically says if you want in person and private, that's a talk to my speaking agency and we can set something up. Or I can do a workshop for you. But this could be presented as a two by two. But there's kind of no reason to get this complicated at this point. And I think simpler is better than I should just have a price and then offer discounts individually. And the question then is, what is the reasonable price? And what I thought was, so here I say 60 minutes, some prep on my part. A 60 minute zoom and then I do a five minute video summary, which I send people after work and that's the work product, that's the deliverable. I'm also thinking that 90 minute zoom might be better because 90 minutes seems to be my collaboration and thinking unit of time. I'm just thinking in terms of, I'm mostly thinking in terms of for many calls at about 45 minutes. We start to actually sort of click and hum and get into things. And at the 60 minute mark, things are kind of great. And then at 90 minutes, we're starting to lose energy and Peter out and it's a good time to wrap. So if I make things 60 minutes, it's too short. But if I make it 90 minutes, then the price has to go up some because it's a little more time, etc., etc. And I'm trying to value price, not price against like doctors time or lawyers time, although I know that's exactly the comparison that ones have been happening here. So all thoughts welcome. Your audience was going to be my question. I'm interested in anybody who wants to amplify their ideas. Anybody who wants to, I mean, the concept of pictures brain is you've got an idea and you're open. If I may, instead of, instead of generic audience, how about specific personas? In which case I'd go back to my. What's it called value canvas where I basically created like seven different personas. It wasn't specifically for pictures brain, but it was really close by. So let's go. Let me just find that and bring it back up or even maybe a way to get this even faster is who were the 10 people you would reach out to first or who are the right? What are the bucket of people because their mindset based on price, like what they'd be coming to you for would very much determine what sort of price point they're willing to tolerate in their mind, you know, if they're coming to you for something business, they can, the price can go much higher than if somebody's just like, oh, I feel like playing around with this for my personal ring. You know, well, for sure, for sure. No, and I'm aiming for business audiences who have budget and who are working with pretty big ideas. I'm aiming for people who got a startup idea concept. They want to perfect an internal corporate project that they want to run. And I've seen hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of such things. So so very comfortable in that space. And not, I mean, I'm interested in but but and would do as favor or a deep discount personal brainstorming sort of things. That'd be great, but that's not the intended market here at all. Pete, you were going to say something. Well, I kind of second Monday's thing, you know, like a name and a name and characteristics, even if they're made up. I think the other thing underneath that is what's your cost or, you know, what are you willing to work for and what are you not willing to work for? Sure. So my cost, I'm trying to keep the work product as thin as possible because I know that if I have a stack of reports to write, they won't get written easily or well or quickly. But if I have a if I can, if we record the call, I'm totally fine, improv live, extemporaneously on my feet, generating stuff. And then I know that I will like turn for a little bit and come up with a couple of other things to say, which I've been doing in the story threading. So I know that I will have enough meat to give them a five to 10 minute. I'll say it'll be a five minute video. It'll be a 10 minute video of commentary that goes through stuff. And then probably a list of bookmarks into my brain and into the world. That'll also come with that. That work product is easy for me to generate all by myself. So what I'm trying to do is it's so what? What's the minimum you would charge a business for that? I've been doing that for free for years. So zero. OK, that's I'm trying to answer. But that's the right answer. That's a totally unsustainable. It sounds like 90 minutes of work time or something like that. It's sort of like, yeah, it's sort of like that. Well, it's more than two hours. If I make it a 90 minute, if I make it a 90 minute call, which is my temptation, although that eats a lot more my time as well. Then there's prep time, which is at least a half hour, maybe an hour. Then there's then there's recording and producing and sending them the video afterward, which is at least a half hour. So we're talking sort of two and a half hours. We're talking like a three hour stretch of my time for each call. So so the way that's structured, and I think you've got essentially fixed fixed cost and then variable cost for the duration, right? So a 90 minute call is is cheaper for you or, you know, cheaper per minute than a 60 minute call and a two hour call is even cheaper still. Because, yeah, the fixed costs apply for each call. So so what's so we we got to three hours basically for a one hour call. For a 90 minute call. Yeah, if it's an hour call and it cuts back, it gets closer to two hours, but probably not done to us. And Mark and Michael, we're talking about pictures, brain. I'm trying to figure out a pricing plan that make that is simpler than what I've got on the website right now. And then what's your hourly rate? My well, my mid range one is a hundred dollars. Yeah, I don't generally do a lot of stuff for hours. I do speeches for a fee. I do days and I've done days for like two thousand dollars a day. You can divide back. You've got an hourly product here. Yeah, I know exactly. So I'm heading right into our land. So you said two thousand dollars a day? Yeah, divided by six or eight or so. Eight. That's what is that? Two fifty. Yeah. Yeah, something like two fifty. So just two fifty an hour sounds like a reasonable part of it is what we pay for when they don't know what this is. So that's a really bad answer. Yeah, that's true. At least that's not where to start, right? Yeah, where to start is I think Pete's I would agree with Pete's angle on this, right? Start with what you know, you've already been charging basically for your time. And then you may have a minimum like floor. Like if I'm getting paid twenty five bucks an hour, I can't do it, right? I'd rather do it for free and say it's a gift, you know. Right. Yes. So, you know, when you're so it's not what the market will bear. Like you have a cost basis, basically, you know, you should think of it that way. And if it's two hundred fifty dollars an hour, it's two hundred fifty dollars an hour. And if you can't sell any of that, then that means that the market won't bear your your product, right? There's a massive amount of the product. The marketing needs to be improved. Where you before you need, yeah. Yeah, like we're not, you know, it's not being presented in a way that people understand the value of what they're getting. Even better. It's a really good way to put it. Yeah. And that's why we go ahead. I was just going to add that I could imagine I mean, there's there's one thing if let's say two fifty an hour is, you know, what you've gotten and what you would like to get, but you haven't proven yourself in the market with this product, valuing it at two fifty and then offering like a free first session or, you know, a half price. So many Mac guarantee or or discount. Yeah, something that doesn't doesn't get rid of that. That stated value. And in fact, capitalized if somebody says, oh, you're giving me two hundred and fifty dollars worth of something, I'll try that. You know, it's it's it's putting your putting it's betting on yourself. I like I like the idea a lot of picking a picking a valuable price, if I can say that, and then offering discounts to start and say, hey, I'm doing 50 percent off for you or or whatever. And you shouldn't do that unless you really need to. And you should count the discount as marketing cost. And every discount you give, this is off your CFO a lot. Like a lot, a lot like, OK, so I just spent, you know, great. You had four sessions this week. You know, I just spent my CF, you know, as a CFO, I just spent twelve hundred bucks and you're telling me you came back with four hundred. What the, you know, so you have to be really careful with that in startup mode, right? If the CFO has got a bunch of stuff in the bank and she wants to spend, you know, a bunch on marketing, she's like, give it all away this week. I'm totally happy with that. Right. Or freemium models do exactly that. But but I, you know, shouldn't do that. Freemium is about scale, not about, right. And for those of us who are doing work that would do it anyway, whether we were getting paid or not, one mental exercise that I like to play with myself is imagine this totally takes over your life and the first thought about and feeling about that is, oh, great, because I love doing this. OK. So expand this out and say it's now taking time away from your family or it's now taking time away from other projects that have popped up along the way that all of a sudden are exciting and you want to do them and you have to do this instead because you made commitments to people, right? All of a sudden that feels unsustainable, too. And it are those moments where like, but I'm getting paid, right? Like this. But this, you know, and those are the moments that even when it's work that we love doing to me, it's it's the motivate. It's the extra motivator to do all the stuff we don't really like doing related to the business that that keeps us going. This is not one of those you're going to offer 10. And then if it goes, you know, you're going to start really making this into something that that's a that's a backbone for you for the long term, then it needs to be sustainable on all levels, including when it gets annoying. And that's where the money comes in, right? So that's another piece of this that's not just about the dollars on the bottom line, although that's also important. It's also about how it feels when it gets sticky and, you know, when you hit roadblocks and when you, right? It's still motivating. So that's for you to kind of feel into, right? Like there's there's it helps me figure out the floor. Like, yeah, if it if I hit the not fun parts, I'm not going to do it for less than this, right? And then this would and then where it feels like gravy to like, I can't believe I'm getting paid this much to do something that I love. That's there's a sweet spot in there, and that's what you're shooting for. And if you've already been charging, I think it makes sense to to go. I mean, we're kind of leaning if it's 250, then you're leaning towards 750. I think for what you're offering that that that vibe makes sense to me. I don't know how they feel, but I think that's all the right lines. I think I also need to explain that the work before and after and so forth, that is that it isn't one hour's work, in which case people do the mental math of I don't pay my psychiatrist 750 an hour, why would I do this? So I can I can do that. And go ahead. Yeah, I think I told you about this in early conversation, but for the benefit of the others and building on what Wendy was just saying, I'm doing almost all of my work now pro bono of my own initiatives. So I was invited to to make a visioning project for Wales by the OECD, and I thought, well, that's pretty good. I love to do a visioning project for Wales. I used to live there for two years. And Wales is similar to Ireland, where I have my second house. But yeah, just as Wendy, you were saying, yeah, but commitments and deadlines and meetings and meetings and deadlines. And do I really want to do this? So I put a really high price on it and they accepted that price. So well, I'm doing it now. And I well, we're just starting it off. So it's enjoyable enough. But because I said to myself, well, if they really want me to do it, I'll earn this amount of money and it'll help pay for lots of long vacations or whatever that that was an important thing. So I just thought that's a practical example of what Wendy was just saying. Makes great sense. I wanted to add to the cost thing. When I'm doing engineering projects, I cost out the project and say, OK, it's, you know, the engineering cost of this is 2K. And then my heuristic for a business is to add 30 or 40 percent to that. So literally, it's another eight hundred dollars in kind of overhead, billing, marketing, you know, customer contact time. That's not engineering time and all that kind of stuff. And also and also for the way you, I think, go about code projects. You also have documentation and archival and whatever else kind of baked in as well. I would have I would have put that into the engineering cost. Oh, OK. Another structure. I don't know if this works. In this in this case. But the other thing is I ended up. Like for for decent sized engineering projects, you know, 10 K projects or something like that, first hour, first, first 40 minutes is kind of free. Let's talk about your problem and stuff like that. And then I can make a decision the next 20 next next five or 10 minutes is talking about, OK, I'll write your proposal for and the proposal is going to cost you five hundred dollars or a thousand dollars. And it's essentially a project plan. And, you know, the architectural, you know, thoughts and stuff like that. You can have that and then and then we can go from there. And it's probably going to cost ten thousand dollars. Or if it's a five thousand dollar project, I'm sorry. I can't afford to do that project because it's just too small for me. Or if you don't like, you know, if you don't want to spend the ten thousand dollars, you can take that five hundred or a thousand dollar plan and chop it around and get kids to do it or, you know, whatever, somebody cheap or whatever. So there's an engagement phase and an execution phase that that work differently. And I think that still kind of applies. I think you don't want to be selling one one offs, right? What you would really rather do is have somebody who engages you for five sessions or something like that. And then there's another, you know, that's another cost difference kind of thing. But then you also at in steady state, you probably want to be having 30 percent one offs and 70 percent, you know, continuing things. And, you know, and the people that say, well, I only want to buy. You know, to it's like, OK, I can fit you in under my, you know, 30 percent of my capacity, but I can't fit you in, you know, in general, necessarily. I mean, it would be great to have retainers doing this as well. So yes, and sell some hours. Go ahead, Michael. I was going to say, I mean, it is what you really want, not people who pay you for five sessions, but people who sign you to do like two sessions a week for a year, you know. Like you're there. Consiliary. Yeah, yeah. And and, you know, you get feedback from them, you know, kind of like kind of like we all do, you know, our two hours, Tuesday and Wednesday morning for. For what? Wait, sorry. And I think about I think about retainers for me because I have a retail mindset is breakage. A lot of times a retainer, you make a you don't have to pick. You don't have to charge quite as much for a retainer because they're not going to end up using all of it every month, kind of. Right. Wendy, hold on one second. I have to reset my Wi-Fi because it keeps acting junky. So and I haven't gotten my Wi-Fi hotspot yet. So let me make sure I don't fall off. It'd be fun to go back in time, like 30 years and explain what that meant. Yeah, exactly. Well, it's funny. In finding all my boxes of crap, I just sent the message off to a guy here in Portland named Rick Terosi, saying I hit my old Apple 2 Plus. How do I how do I help it find its way into into a young person who loves technologies, hands so that they can like take it apart, see what these machines are like, and, you know, boot it back up to the fall through to monitor level, learn about like hex and how, you know, how that works like like it'd be cool. That's that's a piece of how I figured out how all this stuff works. And then he sent me back three nice responses. So I sent some chaser mails and then I have a I actually have a kind of dead in front of me. I labeled that years ago a time capsule and it has a Sony Magic Link. It has my old palm computer handheld, the early handhelds. It has several multiple laptops, somewhere in there's a Mac classic with the names inside the case. They're like the first, first, first round of Mac, none of which are worth much of anything, but they're all sentimental to me. So I was like, what do I do with these things? And unfortunately, a friend in Belgium started an Apple Chapel. He bought an old little church in a town near Kent, which is where he works. And he outfitted it. I can share pictures with the whole thing inside is full of gear, including almost every version of every Apple product. And it's really cool. And then he replaced the little rose window that was over the front door. He replaced with an Atari logo, the one that goes like that. So it's it's really cute. Yeah, Pete, you would you would love going in. His name is Peter Hinson and you would love having a conversation with him as well. Sorry for the long detour, Wendy. Yeah, I'm sorry, because my my comments like to totally back on the retaining thing, which is bring us back then. Yeah, so my question was it's kind of a question and kind of a comment is, you know, in this in this arena and kind of used to doing pricing points where you could actually lay out up front, hey, you get a discount if you buy a set of five, you get a discount, right? If you're doing a monthly and so to figure it maybe tops two different ways that you could be on retainer, right? Either a set of 10 or a monthly thing or however that makes sense. And then I was thinking about, however, in this sphere of kind of sharing sharing as like offering your your expertise as a service, does it make sense to maybe bring people in in that one conversation? And then at the end of that one conversation, talk about retainer or is it better to present it up front as an option and basically talk about it up front? Would you like one? Would you like 10? You know, so you could do it either way. And I'm just curious what other people think is like, do you get to the end of the first one and then talk about, hey, I'll give you a discount if this was valuable to you and you want to keep going? I mean, you could do it both. Actually, you could present it on the website so people understand that there are options and you could also talk about it at the end if they've only purchased one. I'm just wondering if people feel like the website part is a turn off. Up front, it in at the end of the first session, it would it would seem like a like a cheesy upsell, I think. So upfront money back guarantee. So what I want to do, this is this ties into a different conversation, which is the current plan is to use Calendly and Square and a couple of other little things to basically prepay. And then and I'll put this this pros, I think, is already on the site, which is like sorry for insisting on prepay, but the moment I need to have a receivables department and start pursuing people for payment and all that kind of stuff, the cost of getting paid goes way the hell up. So for me, I wouldn't explain things. Well, for me, like prepay with a generous refund policy is all you need to say. But like you're so here's how it's going to go. You're going to fill out this tiny form where you just state your statement. That gives me a chance to filter. Oops, I know nothing at all about this and won't be good at this. So let's not do it or refine or let's go. And then I send you a link for pick a moment on my calendar and prepay. And you get to prepay and I have a generous, generous refunds policy. And that that's sort of all I intend to say. But that's that's the waltz I'm thinking through. So OK, let me let me just. Although I have to say, there's there's a lot of friction in there. In terms of people not wanting to prepay. No, the so too many dance steps. Yeah, anytime I'm going to buy something, if I can't just fricking buy it, then, you know, it's like, OK, I have to come back later when I have time to figure out whether or not I can make it through the dance, right? It could be if you're a first timer, please fill out this form. And then anytime you're in the calendar, I don't think you need or want the checked up where it's like, let me let me check if I'm OK for that. That should just be a refund thing. So you should say, you know, Jerry, Jerry McCalsky, pick my brain. Five hundred dollars, you know, a sign up here, like pick a time here, right? And then if if they say, OK, I've, you know, here's my here's my one or two set in summer and you go, that's not for me. Just just give me a refund right then. They should buy it and then you should refund it. You shouldn't talk about like you shouldn't put the pressure on them. Hey, let's see if you can buy this and it's going to take me 24 hours to figure out whether or not I can get back to you. And it's like, no, just let them buy it. Huh, anybody else have feelings about this? My feeling is first, my feeling is, oh, man, if I have to start processing lots of refunds because people tried and it didn't stick, that's going to be a problem. We won't get there. Yeah, probably not. I wanted it at the beginning. When I first started designing this, I was like, you know, click here to pick a moment on the calendar, click here to pay. And I was like, I need a step before this to figure out if there's even a session here for us. That's why I created the small form. Go ahead. It's important to have that stuff, but it's really important not to put it before checking out. Any barrier? Yeah, I mean, I like I like where Pete is going. I think and I think maybe it could the stickiness that you're feeling, Jerry, that as a consumer, I could see to could be answered, I think in the website, if you preface where your areas of expertise are, or if we get good at giving a couple of examples of the types of topics, which you did, I think we could do more. I think it could, you know, because I definitely didn't even get the impression having read it. Like you were you were saying startups and things like that. So you put in a couple of good questions, but we could expand that to really help people. So I think we could do more of that. And if you were finding that people are coming and then disappointed by not getting what they need, that's a sign that we need to put better marketing out, not necessarily a sign that you need more checks, you know, more checks balances. So that's one way this definitely one way to go for sure. Yeah. And I would say depend on your, you know, your credentials as stated in the site, the way, you know, Wendy and Peter saying and the network of people who are going to find out about this to bring you, you know, you're not going to get pictures, Bane, like I need to know how to repair my 57 Chevy. You know, what do you mean? You don't have anything in there about that. You know, from some stranger, it's probably not going to happen. Well, you're walking. I want to keep saying it again, but I'm not going to. The other thing is if you get an eyeball request, you might say, you know, oh, my gosh, I've really wanted to learn about 57 Chevys, you know, you write back to the person, you say, hey, tell you what, you've entered an area where I'm not an expert. I'm willing to give you a big discount and and still plow through it. I'm good at picking up on the fly. We're going to be doing something where I'm a little bit out of my. Is that OK with you? Otherwise, I can give you a total refund. Another thing is you give them a refund, you know, if you end up in the situation where you certainly wouldn't pick them, it's a 57 Chevy. You have no care or need to know about 57 Chevys. You write them back and say, you know, I've refunded you two hundred and your your five hundred dollars. And as a, you know, as a thank you, I'm sorry, let's do a 30 30 minute session on, you know, on pick one of the five topics. I'm, you know, I can expound on and, you know, I'd be happy to, like, give you a the comp, right? Offer something. I have to. The other other thing is if you end up with random people who like a question. How to, you know, I have a burning question about the architecture of decentralized web applications, you know, and I need you to help me with this Python problem. That's a place where you would write back to the person and say, I don't have anything for you. I'm going to refund your money and maybe give you a spiff. But I think maybe you want to talk to my friend Pete or my friend Stacy or Wendy or Michael or Hank. And they'll give you a 30 percent offensive family discount because you've come in through, you know, a weird place. And and just by the way, we all know that the 57 Chevy was the first year that they had differentials so that the wheels would track separately so that you can tell from the evidence at the scene. Indeed, that the kids are innocent. The youths, the youths, the youths are innocent. Yeah, your honor. Well, why maybe I missed the beginning of the conversation, but why do you want to get people to pay in advance and then go through this this process of having to make refunds? Refunds partly because I I do not want to be pursuing people for payment like like zero desire. It's costly. It's difficult. And I'm terrible at it. But does that happen a lot? I've never. I mean, he doesn't want to he doesn't want to generate invoices. He doesn't want to he doesn't want to deal with billing. Right. Once it done, I don't I don't want to have a step after that says, thank you so much for the session. Here's your invoice. You pay with it. Please pay with a net 30 or net 15 or whatever and then have them not pay and then pursue. There's that is that is to me like the death of my business model. OK, Alas, which which is a kind of way I've never had that in all of my working life that people never paid. So but OK, I can you have been a fortunate man. I guess I've had a non payment, I think, once I've had I've had an on tracking by me, which turned into non payment because it was like I that just fell off the back of my brain. So yeah, I haven't I have a new phrase if we were professional. Michael, was it in a real business? Well, you know, in a real business, you offer invoicing not because it's convenient for you, but because it's convenient for the customer and then you accept a certain amount of breakage. This is another breakage situation, right? And I was like, so then the CFO goes great. You're saying lots of invoices, 10 percent of them didn't didn't pay. We'll send the you know, we'll sell those to collections or whatever. It's, you know, I that's that's a thing where you make it easy for the customer and you accept some, you know, some amount of loss on it. And and it's a cost-reducing business. It's not. But I think that's also a scale issue. And when you're one person company, there should be little or no expectation you're going to do that. Well, the I think I think your solution is entirely reasonable. Yeah. Different, you know, and then and then it's we don't have to have this session. But it's also, I think, reasonable to to offer invoicing. And even as a one person business in the in the case of in the, you know, one percent case, it's like, OK, great, I didn't get one invoice. But I got these other ones that that were I was able to close a bunch that I wouldn't have closed if they didn't have that payment option. Right. Right. So I would add on the invoicing front having like been a one person shop freelancer as a consultant and experienced, you know, things where I didn't get paid partially because I didn't get after people who didn't pay me, which I bet is part of your experience that, you know, taking responsibility for like not being on top of that is is easier, I don't know, it's OK. OK, I made the choice not to pursue that. And so I didn't get paid. It costs me money, but the whole process was easier for everybody involved. And and I could be better about that. I'll work on that and make it easier for people to pay me after the fact. But also because you're coming out of, you know, trust, the idea of starting off with I don't trust you as opposed to I do trust you is a big statement of who you are. And and I think that's worth making. It's sort of not I don't trust you. It's I'm trying to I'm trying to lubricate that I'm trying to design a process that's modern and super fast and efficient for everybody. But their experiences, it's their experience of you saying, we'll go ahead and you'll pay later. However, streamline you make that paying later is I trust you. They're experiencing this trust. Yeah, I agree with Michael. That's that's what it says to me. But but even on another level, don't you and your clients need invoices for tax purposes? Their payment through square is basically a receipt and it will describe the services rendered and that should work for tax purposes. But how about you? I'm going to be collecting same thing. It's like it's like I'm selling service. It's like I'm selling plumbing by the hour. So. Oh, OK. Yeah. Stacy. Yeah, as a big online consumer, I don't see any problem with prepaying. I prepay for everything I buy. Anything I order on Amazon, I'm prepaying if I, you know, whatever I want through through the computer, I prepay. But you probably if you're spending five hundred eight hundred bucks, how would you feel about spending five hundred eight hundred bucks on something that's got zero reviews? Well, for one, he's what I'm hearing is that while hearing there's a money back guarantee. That's what I've heard you say a couple of times. And they're trusting me on the generous refund policy language that that actually is a generous refund policy. That's an act of faith on their part. Which I'm happy to like live up to. That's easy. Also, Stacy, I would I would distinguish most of what we buy online is product ordering. But, you know, if you're ordering a service, I could ship them a little figurine. I could ship them a little bobblehead of me. Then it's a product. If I if I were going to Wendy, like that, if I were going like for what do you call it, like a health session over the computer, I have to prepay. I'm just trying to say that if I enter this business as a hey, now I'll send it. Well, thanks. Thanks. We're done with our session. Now I'm going to go process and make a video for you. And then I'm going to send you an invoice and then I'm going to wait some amount of time for your payables to process it. That that that is a is a huge tail of labor that I'm terrible at hate and want to avoid it at not all costs because I don't want it to cost the business. And if and if the hump of prepaying is too large, then I picked the wrong model, but I'm trying to not get in that that space whatsoever. That that is that is horrible work for me that I that that I could offload. I could hire a bookkeeper to do, but not really interested in doing that. And then go ahead, Wendy. Yeah, I was just going to say, I think this comes down to and I think Stacy kind of provides a great comparison point to think of it this way is that, you know, people are willing to spend money on things. They know what they're buying. Right. So that comes back to the marketing. If they know what they're buying. I don't, you know, then, then it's, then it doesn't really matter so much whether I'm paying before after because I will get what I'm expecting to get. Right. So if, but, but it's a point to know it's like a red flag to know. Right. If you're not getting enough volume and you want more volume maybe moving to invoices. It's a good idea. Right. It's just one of those sticky things for some people that may turn them away and you'll never know that you're turning them away. So if you write to just, I think it's, I think it's a fair point. Agreed. And the question started with Pete saying, Hey, you have too many steps up front. You shouldn't ask it and you shouldn't ask in the beginning if what you know what's your question and do a little bit of triage you should just let people pay there if the pre payment method is the one we're going to go with. Makes sense. Let me go back to an earlier question just for a second. I just want to interject one. The subject. Is there a distinction to be made between your, you know, between invoicing and bookkeeping and whatever, and square payment at the beginning of session and square payment at end of session, or whenever you get to it in the next, you know, couple of weeks with somebody, you know, just feeling like feeling trusted. And, but it's, it's the same mechanic that it is up front. It's just behind. And, and that I mean I just went through a transaction, not really analogous but but just interesting where there was an online follow up component which it sounds like there is in your vision of this. Where, you know, I'm going to be getting, you're saying, like, I'm the client, I'm doing the session, and then I'm getting follow up video and maybe something written or something. I'm not going to get that if I stiff you. And, and I just had some, some artwork scan and printed, and I'm also, you know, getting the digital file. And the guy didn't ask me to pay up front. And I paid after, but I didn't really expect him to send me the digital file until I paid. And so that sort of great made it. You know, he trusted me. I trusted him. He got paid. I got my file. I'm introducing the idea that I could do the same simpler payment system just moved after that makes that makes some sense. I, I, and I realized that prepayment is a hump. I totally get that. And it could be that hey as soon as, as soon as you've paid I'll send you the my summary video could be a statement I'm sort of holding it for ransom but I don't really want to do that. I'm not sure anybody else have strong feelings is really interesting how very simple services I guess really complicated really quickly. Because these are all interesting decisions about trust about mechanics about time about all those things. What I hear clearly is the whole payment thing just really for you is really just takes a lot of the fun out of it. So, well, getting paid is like really fun. So that's good. And getting, I mean, I mean delay delaying doing the invoicing stuff. So to me that that provides the answer for the short term, and it's really just acknowledging that it's going to be a stick may be a sticking point to try to do that over as much as possible up front and see how it goes. So I will say that I've evolved a little bit as a human in that I find joy in sending invoices and writing up invoices and I've gotten pretty good at not letting those lack I used to be terrible at that. The part I hate now is remembering that something didn't like like my I don't keep those open loops. I don't have the bookkeepers like Tableau in my head where I remember and I don't check on the books that often that I can tell that there's two payments I need to actually go ping, and I'm terrible at sending them a note that says hey you didn't pay, and then figuring out what to do like like that tail end of it I can't stand. I'm okay generating an invoice and sending it off to the person that that's not a ton of work, especially if it's a, if it's the same invoice over and over again copied send done, but I'd love to avoid that step that I was going to add a wrinkle here to which is like should I accept each as payment I think the answer is yes, or other or other cryptocurrencies I don't know, but it would be it would be really interesting if I accepted semi fungible cryptocurrencies as payment because there's a lot of crypto wealth sloshing around and people don't know what to spend it on, I'd love them to spend it on me and if I can convert that into usd at some point. That's actually really interesting and I know that that's back end effort on my part to do wallets and exchanges and pay gas fees maybe, but that's interesting it's not that's not out of the question for me. Yeah, actually, at least two things that the crypto thing done except crypto. Really, none, not easy to coin not any any any crypto billionaire who wants to hire services can pay you in fiat no problem. Okay, I feel like I'm tapping into more money that doesn't know where to go in some weird way. If you want if you want to tap into that, maybe you do. You want to figure out some weird NFT thing or your own token or something like that, literally. Oh, okay. So do that. But don't just say, you know, I accept the east and and poke that and so on and just don't do that. And a thing that that totally exists and blows my mind still when I think about it. I have a kid who lives overseas and sometimes she gets payments from from me so we had to figure out how to do that and it was a big pain in the arse. But finally, there's a great service called transfer wise formally transfer wise now wise it works great. They have this amazing thing where for essentially free. They'll give you or they'll let you set up a bank account number in any number of dozens of countries. And then you can say I accept and I do personally I do I accept GBP in the UK I accept a UD in Australia. Here's the swift code here's the you know whatever code that you need and not in that country and it just works. It's an Estonian company. So, it's amazing to be able to say around the world, you know, hey, you know you live in Estonia, I can accept payment there, you know just just here's the here's the bank code. And it just blew me away it's super cool just works. And that means just setting up a transfer wise account and accepting payments there, right and going into their their dashboard and saying hey I want to open up, you know bank account number in Australia, and there's no and there's no and there's no standing fees for each country or anything like that. There's, you know transfer wise fees are really low. You do end up. You end up incurring costs of pulling the money out. So when I take money out in USD. It, you know, it incurs kind of a standard fee which is the same as a credit card for your, you know, whatever. That's, that's the soon but there's no monthly fee for opening a bank, you're just saying it opens a bank account and some of their country. It's actually not a bank account. Yeah, it's a fake bank account. Okay, and it's, and I don't know how it works but it just works. And then I've got I still got, I've got a GBP payment, you know, from last year or something like that it's still sitting in in my, my transfer wise balance you just, you know, here's the different currencies you have balances in. Are you, and you're sending money away through transfer wise for my kid, I send the money to transfer wise but, you know, sending invoice in, in the UK, you know, I, I'm, and they don't know they don't they don't care it just, you know, you know, and another weird thing is that it's, it's not in the US it's actually pretty, it's, it's clunky and weird, but it's not weird in many countries to just get a bank code and then, and then you know there's a national payment service that just works and it's not weird. It's, it's kind of standard. We used to have postal payment systems that everybody used right. So small thing we're running out of time I just wanted to share this is the value proposition canvas that I did a while ago this is what the value proposition canvas looks like. And then I made a list of the kinds of people who and this I know what I was pitching here was speeches and I've been talked down off of trying to do the speaking circuit because a the speaking circuit is kind of dead. Or that I can possibly do like like if I could be a hit speaker, I would, I would like love to do that. But so here I have CEOs VPs of marketing human resources personal development professional development designers or change agents, innovation champions boards of directors event producers. And the nice thing about the canvas is that it does the are you selling aspirin or vitamins question nicely. And so what I did was I went to each, each of the, each of the segments here and said, you know what are their pains what are their gains. And I very briefly wrote down you know CEOs are trying to motivate their company to change change their company's intent maybe don't know, invent some new businesses become more trustworthy maybe they're in a crust. And I can say stuff about all those. And here's sort of gains pains. You know how do how the hell do I differentiate myself from from all my competition, etc. And I did that for each of the numbered categories above. And I'll share a link to this presentation with everybody in case you just want to browse through it but this was my attempt to figure out how you know how to pitch myself but then I'm like okay so which one's the priority where do I go. And then on the site, what I put on the homepage the reason there's this long list that is long, and the reason they're sort of bulleted out is that each you're creating a motion picture a startup, a movement, a plan to stop comment from hitting the earth software, sci fi plot a viral meme. This is meant to elicit lots of different people might pick my brain for lots of different reasons and I'm really comfortable with that. Right that that's sort of what this list is entirely meant to signals like, hey, there's lots of different kinds of things you might come to me with, which I'd love to handle different ways. So that value canvas is awesome. And, and you should keep going. I want you to have a set of personas who are individuals with a name and a little bit of a backstory and why they're buying your product. So here's Audrey, she's a, she's a product manager at Google. She, she likes yoga and, and she used to like Peloton and she eats avocado toast, and here's why she's buying it. Literally, so this is what you do in product development, right but while you're doing product development, along with market development and all that stuff. So I want to see that, not for me but for you. And, you know, each of those, those big buckets you turn, it's useful to have them in big buckets. But you also need to think about doing sales and stuff, you know, okay, so I'm. So now it's not product managers is Audrey, how am I going to sell to Audrey. So, so personas and detailed descriptions of how you know what you're selling to them why they're buying it how they're paying for it. One of the really interesting things we learned in software, software product sales is, and this is this advice is probably five or 10 years out of 10 years out of date. I said, buying a thing like a wiki is, is something that you know if you put the price point at a it's 10k for 100 people in your company. That means that a man individual manager has to go get budget for it and it comes out of a budget. If the individual manager can put it on her credit card and the credit card company credit card limit for her is $800. So if I price it at $799, she's bought it, you know, today, rather than hoping to buy it through a purchase chain, you know, in three months. When I started Rex in 2010 I started with a working assumption that many people had a discretionary budget of about 10k so I priced at 9k turned out my turned out my assumption was out of date. Well, we had to work, we had to figure out other other sort of budgetary ways, but there was a time a decade or two ago when people had a discretionary budget and if you could come in under that they'd be like done, here we go. Yep. Let me try to remember one more thing. The other thing I want you to do is make a marketing plan. It's essentially kind of okay ours. So, figure out your, your target market and you've got a pretty good thing with the value thing. Hopefully you'll add the personas individual personas, but then you need to commit to yourself or you as the product development manager need to commit to the or maybe the marketing manager need to commit to the CFO and the CEO. Okay, I want to mix of CEOs and product managers and innovation, you know innovation specialists and stuff like that. And, you know, over the course of February, I'm going to have, you know, two calls with CEOs for calls with product managers, or their minions, whatever right, basically come up with the like literally like, you know, down to the level of. Okay, this week is week two in February. I already knocked down one CEO call I have three more CEO calls to do for the rest of the month that means I should try to get one done this Tuesday right it goes down to the level of. Here's the marketing efforts I'm going to do in February right. Make a commitment to yourself the beginning of February check your check how you did in the end of February and set up the commitments for March. I agreed and also there's a bunch of non dial for dollar stuff that I need to do and can do up front. Lots of it so and I want to do lots of that kind of thing marketing plan should include things like yeah you know I'm going to fish around with God forbid Facebook advertising and fish around with Google advertising and and you know all that kind of stuff. Marketing plan should be everything marketing. I need to do a LinkedIn campaign, for example, because LinkedIn is very happy hunting grounds for these kinds of things. Here's the best releases I'm going to write here's the people who are going to distribute the press releases. When you can afford it and hopefully it's really soon, you should be hiring a virtual assistant to manage some of this, some of the crap right. Like, maybe you can do invoices and but you can't remember to check up on invoice. That's the thing that gets assigned to the virtual assistant right. You know, doing a bunch of calls to PR people or something like that. It's a virtual assistant. When did you want to jump in. Sure. So I've just been looking at surveys and questionnaires lately so it's top of mind. I know you were planning on putting up a forum Jerry but I was thinking more of like a survey that is geared towards helping people feel like their story is heard. So it goes right back to what Pete was saying if you have in mind three or four or five stories then a quick quiz or poll or survey could be could be generated from those stories where you're basically listening into what people are wanting. And they feel like, oh, at the end, the point is for them to feel like this is a perfect match. And so they're pre qualifying themselves. Even though, you know, you would get the same information by just going hey what's your topic. That's all you need, but they need to feel like this product is for them and it guides them through that. So just another idea. I like that a lot. And I think my brain has a scarcity of tools to choose from so my go to tends to be Google forms because it's so easy and I use it and I can generate questions and it looks reasonably professional. And I think what you're saying is the presentation should be very different so that it has more of a survey kind of guiding thing and I don't know, I don't like what to build that in type form is one. Yeah, so it's like if you answer the question, it has logic in it so if you answer the question this way, then I'm only going to show you this is the next answer, right, like this is the next question. I'm sorry, right so it's a little more and it's free. It's a lot more friendly. What's that. It's a lot more friendly. Yeah, yeah. So that was that's what I'm just learning about actually, which is intuitive and weird but which is from type form is a lot better than Google forms. Huh. And I didn't realize it was free or, or has a free free tier or something like that. I think a place, a direction Wendy is going is the, the experience, the experience you want people to have should start before the sale. Yeah, I think so you should be helping them solve their problems you should be helping them think two things, even, you know, even before they decided to purchase another thing but another thing by the way is I have this really simple, simple model of purchase decisions, you know they come to my website they read my blurb they go oh wow I want to buy that and then they buy it. The way in my observationally the way real purchase decisions happen is I, you know I run across, you know, I Google something I run across an interesting ad or an interesting website I look at the materials. I go huh that's interesting I bookmark it. I'm gone for a month. I come back. And I've seen it, you know one or two times before somebody mentioned something oh yeah I had that my bookmarks someplace I go find it. You know and so, and I spend a lot of time kicking the tires on something why would I buy this, you know, if I, you know, okay I'm ready to buy it but so I'll pretend to myself that I bought it and then I'm going to wake up tomorrow and see how I felt about buying it right. I did the purchase process is is really complicated and you want to continue to make that easy for the person to follow their path through it, rather than setting up what you think is the ideal purchase process and and then you know they either make it there they don't I'm agreed and we're near the end of recall but this that you just you all have just opened up a great thing because and this may sound a little bit sort of cynical and I don't mean it that way I just mean it to sort of brainstorm. But they're redesigning airports. Have you guys been an ATG redesigned the airport recently is the airport technology group or something like that. Yeah, so so Newark has has a lot of ATG Minneapolis has a lot of ATG. It's a it's a company that basically turns the gates into restaurants and stores. And you and you walk through and you know never walk into a store like the hall your walk you have to cross through to get to your gate is a store you just walk over pick something up. Every seat has USB charging plugs, a static iPad that you can order with get the weather seat check if your flight's online order food order merch and then just bring everything to your table. There's no you don't walk up to any counter anything like that. It's beautiful. I actually really like these gates and and let me now marry that up with I love brainstorming lightly on ideas and then and all that kind of stuff. I just don't know how to create an automated with me not present thing that's a quiz that'll lead people through which is a really fun design puzzle. Like that would be really fun to come up with. But people browse my brain and part of our conversation in, you know, free juries brain or whatever has been like, Hey, the brain is to obscure whatever, but there are people who browse my brain all the time. And, and what if I showed up in the aisle next to them going oh yeah, and would you like to you know have this service that's kind of how I'm thinking about this like, can, can there be some light experience of triage of service that makes them feel heard exactly. And I don't know exactly how to manifest that but that sounds like a fabulous idea and it sounds completely aligned with what I, you know, how I would how I would normally work. And it can also be kind of a topic based thing. So I, it would be lovely to solve that problem problem, a question challenge. Another thing though is you could actually offer a fairly basic one, you know, let's explore the concept of trust, you know, and then have a type form thing that goes through, you know, a little branching thing about trust, you know, and they learn something that they didn't know before that, you know, is easy for you to teach by wrote, you know, by, by the machine. It doesn't have to be exactly their need or it can be a demonstration of the way that you think and, and helping them learn something interesting. So I could create three light type form hiking trails down three different concepts that are interesting, and that aren't very long, and that would be good. That would be really useful. And I like that a lot. The ATG checkout thing. Yeah. The, you know, you're walking towards your, your gate, you pick something up, you keep walking towards your gate, you like swipe it or whatever, and you paid for it, and it wasn't like you go check out. It's like the checkout happened as in the course of you making your, you know, you making your progress to your flight. It was really sweet. It's amazing. Along with all the amenities that the Terminals duty free stores. Hold on. Okay, I can't find them. That's really weird. For lounges. There we go. OTG. Sorry, it's called OTG. And I was getting it wrong and here's their link and I'm going to be paced. This is the group. And here they are in my brain. And if you haven't been to an airport that it uses them, you'll notice them next time. And it's just a, it's just a, I think a really smart merchandising path not too bad that pandemic probably shattered their business model, because no traffic, although traffic's way back up right aren't like aren't airports getting full really fast, like shockingly quickly over holidays and stuff. Despite massive everything is despite massive cancellations and everything else. Yeah, cool. They're full of people whose flights were canceled and had changed their whole lives and stay someplace, which is a way of perpetuating the business model it's like just cancel enough lights that you fill all the flights. You know, lose a little bit on each sale but make it up in volume. And even out even out your volume. Yeah, those were a problem just because the staffing for that bump was a problem. Cool. One thing I'm curious about about OTG this is kind of off the subject is, is it a way to deal with the zone one zone to zone three, you know, it doesn't change the boarding, it doesn't change the boarding process. Well, it would be really smart. Think about how much is sold. I mean, as a, as a, as a former magazine person, I know what the checkout funnel is, you know, people standing there and having the chance to pick up these candy or a magazine or whatever the things that are sold there is gold. And if the checkout lines were an enjoyable and interesting and transactional place to be that that that would be so. So when somebody when somebody from OTG is a pick your brain client, throw them that. Yeah, exactly. But also you're saying like the boarding the boarding lanes the boarding process, not just to check out from buying food or whatever you mean, like getting on the plane. The zone five people like if you're in zone five, it's like, okay, I'm going to go get a good spot in the zone five line right. It's like all of those people should be milling around shopping and OTG OTG can understand where they are in the airport, right. And they can say okay you know it's time to move to this next Carol you need to start shopping for blah right. And, you know, don't worry we'll make sure you get to your gate on time and in order and stuff like that but right now, you don't have to be stressing in line you need to be like buying a candy bar or a magazine or whatever. One of my first jobs in the world was at Disneyland in the park in Anaheim on the jungle cruise and it was 15 minute rotations you'd be you'd have a dock side job, you'd be in the boats you come back to the dock you go and break you basically do that all day except for a half hour break for lunch we got to race across to one of the mess halls, half an hour is not a lot of time for lunch. Anyway, often your position was managing taking tickets and managing the lines and saying things over the PA to calm people down in line in Disney's famous lines before they had any technology. So you learned a couple things most of which I forgot, but that was a fun job. And just to show you how old how long ago that was I have no photograph surviving I took no photograph of me in that job. I brought a camera to work the camera wasn't way it wasn't a way to bring it to your position to you know, on the dock. There's no photo I've got a couple artifacts from back then but no so I've got my name tag in my, and in one of the boxes in front of me I'm going to hopefully find my hat because I rolled it up I balled it up and stuck it in my shoe on my way out the door and said, I threw it in the rivers the world. I don't have it. Sorry. Anyway, thank you all for your help. This is a been super fruitful. I will go learn up on type form and do some market planning, some market, do a marketing plan and a couple other things so. Yeah, and let me know if you want help with type form. Thank you very much. Appreciate that Wendy. Thanks everybody.