Breakeven Brothers

Bennett Bernard (00:11)
All right, we are live with episode 11 of the Breakeven Brothers podcast. name is Bennett Bernard. Bradley Bernard is joining me, of course. How you doing, Brad?

Bradley Bernard (00:21)
Pretty good out in North Carolina, so living life. Last time I was out here I think was last year. funny fact, I think last time I was out here I was on a call with my former PayPal manager, James Divert. Shout out to James, really cool guy. He was calling me, checking in on how my company was going since it was only a few months when I was into things. But great conversation, hopefully he's doing well. Awesome guy. But yeah, out here in North Carolina, flew in last night.

I'm gonna be out here for the holidays for Thanksgiving week. So yeah, things been going pretty well. How about you?

Bennett Bernard (00:56)
Good, good. Yeah, just got back from a work trip up in Seattle, Washington, which is cool. The probably the worst the worst landing of a flight I've ever had. So that was an experience. Yeah, I flew in. So as I was coming in, you know, I had Wi-Fi on the plane and I was like just looking, I was like, let me see what the weather is like when I land, like having no going into it completely blind up until that point. And then I look at the weather and it's like, you know, bomb cyclone or cyclone bomb or whatever.

and like high winds expected at SeaTac, which is the airport there. so right away I was like, I don't like the way that sounds and that reads. And then I don't like flying just to begin with. Like I just I used to not mind it as much and now I just kind of hate it. But, you know, I'm quiet. Like I don't like freak out or anything like that. But as we started descending, the first part that was kind of spooky was I had like the whole aisle to myself, which was great. And or the whole

Bradley Bernard (01:27)
Mm-hmm

That's so nice.

Bennett Bernard (01:52)
or the whole row. Yeah, like it was like a half book flight. I don't know how they ended up like keeping that flight and not like just canceling it and, you know, forcing us on a different one. But, you know, I got lucky there. But I had the whole row. So I went over to the window and like open the window up to kind of see that because it was like, prepare for like descent to kind of start landing or whatever and open the window. And it is so like foggy and like the rain is so much like the rain's going sideways and like the wind. It was just like it looked like I was in like a shower basically.

Bradley Bernard (01:59)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (02:21)
and you couldn't see anything. And I had this eerie feeling like we're going to land without me knowing and seeing where the ground was. I was like, I had no gauge of how high we were. But then eventually I saw, I could see the lights of the houses down below. I was like, OK. But then that last, I don't know, this is completely me thinking, but the last 1,000 or 2,000 feet of descent was just getting whipped around, up and down, side to side.

Bradley Bernard (02:25)
yeah.

Day.

Bennett Bernard (02:50)
Like you could just feel when the aircraft was like in the wind's grasp, basically. Like it just felt like you just felt like in those moments like Mother Nature could just take me out. Like it just felt like you're kind of helpless. But but everyone was kind of quiet, you know, no one like said anything. People were kind of looking around the windows and stuff like that. But it was tense. like I wouldn't I wouldn't have gauged like how bad it really was until we landed. People started clapping. I was like, OK.

Bradley Bernard (02:57)
Mm-hmm.

that's interesting. Yeah, do you remember, I think when we were younger, there was a moment where we were on a plane together and I heard some announcement come out and I got really scared about being on the plane. Do you remember that? Yeah. Yeah, I think I probably started crying.

Bennett Bernard (03:19)
I wasn't the only one that had that. Yeah, yeah, I was like.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, you thought it was Pirates and though he said pilots. Yeah. Yeah, which is so funny Yeah, pirates, I mean like why would you be scared of pirates to begin with you know, but yeah

Bradley Bernard (03:45)
Yeah. And off your story, was thinking, I was on a flight recently with my wife and she was sleeping and I can't sleep on planes that well. And right when we're about to land, I like woke her up because I also feel similarly about like, I need to like see the plane land like through the window or like some like I need to know when it's happening. Cause I feel like it's kind of an experience. And so I woke her up like maybe a minute before landing and she'd kind of, you know,

Up from a day's I was like, I just kind of woke you up because we're going to land. don't want you to like be freaked out about that. And so yeah, I, it was one of those things where it wasn't bumpy at all, but like just seeing it is kind of nice. So then when you're talking about the turbulence, there's this famous tick tock that went viral that was talking about the planes being like in jello where when you hit that turbulence, you're in the air and you're shaking, but you're relatively safe. Like oddly enough, it feels scary, but you know,

Bennett Bernard (04:16)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (04:37)
And the grand scheme of things, that's like very, very minor. And so I think when I hit those turbulence events, I was thinking that TikTok and I'm like, you know, like can be jarring depending on the magnitude. But at the end of the day, it's like totally, totally fine. Usually.

Bennett Bernard (04:50)
Yeah, usually. I mean, I was on a Boeing that wasn't I wasn't helping my my super, you know, my fear at all. I was on a Boeing 737 800, not the Max, though, because I won't do the Max. And, you know, yeah, that's kind of like the logical part of your brain that goes like, well, like, is this statistically way safer than driving? Right. But like, it's that helplessness, you know, that that is like the most jarring part. And, you know, it's funny because I can handle it.

Bradley Bernard (04:53)
Usually.

Hmm.

Right.

Bennett Bernard (05:18)
easier like up in the air for some reason because it's like like you're 30,000 feet like if that's if you're gonna go you're gonna go like it is what it is but like I had a couple times where it's been really turbulent landing and I kind of do a couple of boarded landings not in this flight but you know where you go down the conditions aren't good enough so they kind of go back up and go around and like landing like you're almost there you know but like to have to like

Bradley Bernard (05:37)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (05:42)
deal with all that crap after either a long flight or just a regular flight, but you're excited to get where you want to get and excited to kind of put your feet on the ground, so to speak. It's like a big buzzkill, I guess, for me to kind of have all that and be like, like I'm, if I go down right here, like I was almost there. I almost made it. But that's kind of where my brain goes. I was like, I wasn't like texting. I wasn't texting my wife like anything. You know, I wasn't like.

Bradley Bernard (05:57)
Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (06:06)
It wasn't at that level. I was pretty close to being like, hey, you know, I love you. But it was like, I thought about it. I was like, this isn't really fun. And then what was kind of funny and interesting was, you know, when I actually got to the office, people that had also flown in on Tuesday night where I had the same exact reaction, like, holy hell, that was awful. you know, was hugging the kids extra hard, you know, when I got home and all that kind of stuff. was just like, yeah, it was a was a doozy.

Bradley Bernard (06:09)
Damn.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. It sounds like we had a similar schedule. I also did a work trip out to Santa Monica, which was meeting my team manager for the first time in person because Snapchat's headquartered in Santa Monica. One of the few companies, or at least tech companies, I think that are doing that. so, yeah, drove out there, was in LAX, so then stayed Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and met everybody in person and did like a little top golf event with the team, which is a lot of fun.

It's just so nice meeting people in person. So I feel like there's a different transactional relationship being online where if I asked for help and they haven't like met me, it's really hard to understand like the seriousness or the jokiness of like certain Slack messages. And once I meet them in person, like, it's just like a normal guy asking for help, you know, not, not annoying. Cause I feel like being the new employee or like new engineer in the organization, I lean on people a lot initially just get like quickly onboarded.

And that can be like different Slack messages, different people. And at times I'm like, I'm like, am I annoying people? Is this like too much? And then when I meet them in person, I think they realize just like, it's just the nature of things and they don't really have any beef with me or anything like that. Not, not that I would, but it's just like so much nicer, I think, to meet people in person. And so a lot of people were like in the Orange County area that drove all the way out to LA to like come meet, which is really nice.

Bennett Bernard (07:31)
You

Bradley Bernard (07:51)
Yeah, it's, it's different. Like when I joined Facebook, it was COVID era. You remote onboarded all that. Now with the return to office for Snapchat, everybody's in person, but most of my team is in LA. So it was really, really big for me to meet like the, you know, 70 % of my team that's in Santa Monica where I'm up in, in the Bay. So yeah, fun trip, but short. And then now in North Carolina, then back to the Bay area after this.

Bennett Bernard (08:17)
Yeah, yeah, I was bummed actually. One of the events, one of the outings. So like on the first night for my trip, we had like a team dinner, which was great. It was at an amazing restaurant. And then the second night that I was flying out, so I couldn't attend just due to some scheduling issues. But the second night was like a like a ping pong bar kind of thing. And yeah, I was really going to miss it. So I was telling people, I was like, I'll be honest with you, like I would smoke you all. So I'm not going to.

Bradley Bernard (08:42)
Hahaha

Bennett Bernard (08:42)
You know, I'm a bit bummed and I think I'd run the tournament, but that's OK. But, you know, because people ask me, like, do you play a lot? I was like, I play. I don't play as much as I used to, but like we used to play a lot. And I was like, it's such a big part of like what my family does that it actually was mentioned in my brother's wedding. Like that's how like much ping pong is infused in the Bernard household. So I was like, yeah, we definitely played a lot, you know, compared, I think, to the average folk.

Bradley Bernard (08:45)
Yeah

Mm-hmm. yeah.

Yeah, recently in the Bay Area, put a ping pong table in the lunch area in our office. so ever since that came out, I've been having a quote unquote secret meeting with a few people and we'll take a look down there and play for a few minutes. And then in the Santa Monica office, there's a foosball table that's like right behind where we sit.

Bennett Bernard (09:11)
But yeah, I was bound to miss that one.

yeah.

Bradley Bernard (09:30)
And one of the team members on my team scheduled a foosball tournament. I'm like, Hey, is there any ping pong tables? Like I'm terrible at foosball. Like, is there anything else? And he's like, no, there's no tables around here. And so I played foosball and I don't know. It doesn't translate. I'm horrible at it. And like, I think for me as someone who's more competitive, it's not as fun to play things that I know I suck at. So like I'm playing foosball, like jiggling the things rotating. I'm like, I'm just not, I don't know. I haven't spent enough time to be good at it. So.

I got knocked out in the first round. think the tournament finished without me, but still fun to play. Although ping pong, I take it more seriously and have more fun and I'm better at it. So I plus one on that.

Bennett Bernard (10:08)
Yeah. Yeah. Ping pong is funny for both of those. So for foosball, when I was at PwC, one of my year end audit client had a foosball table. And a lot of times we were the ones that were there at the end, after everyone had kind of gone home, because that's just the way auditors work, is that you do 10 hour, 11 hour days. And so I remember the team would go up there and play, just to take a break and stuff like that. And they'd get super heated. And it was funny because for the most part,

Bradley Bernard (10:24)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (10:36)
Like just that audit team. It was I think a really fun audit team. The people there were for the most part pretty good and like everyone had their own individual strengths. Like I remember there was a senior and she, you she was like, you know, like, I don't know, five foot two or five foot three, like kind of just on the shorter side, but you could hit it so hard, like had like a left and like her she'd like like twist her whole body and like and like hit it. And when you hit it, it was like a cannon, dude. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (10:52)
cheese

Bennett Bernard (11:01)
And then, you know, my the manager too was also just like super good. Like it was so those are some pretty heated battles like two on two. But that was just amazing. And you got to blow off steam, right? So they put those things there at workplaces. But a lot of trash talk for sure. And then the other one was at one of my jobs, not at not PwC. They had like outdoor ping pong tables and me and me and a buddy, we'd go out and play and.

Bradley Bernard (11:12)
Hahaha

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (11:26)
You admittedly, he wasn't like he didn't say he was good. Like he was just like, this was play and have some fun. But I wouldn't take it easy on him and we would just play for a while and I got to go left hand on him. You're like, come on, buddy. Come on. You can't, you know, just just talking trash.

Bradley Bernard (11:33)
Hahaha

Yeah, it's funny when people ask you at work like, do you do you play ping pong? Like, not really, you know, you got to set the bar low. And then you go like, inch it up as you go because you don't want to be that guy. like, yeah, I play a lot. really good. You know, it's like, I consider myself maybe slightly above average, like for people who play are legit. Yeah, I probably get smoked, but I think I'm into it. I've played a lot. like, yeah, that's, that's where I pin myself, but definitely in a work environment, you got to undersell that over deliver.

Bennett Bernard (11:43)
Mmm.

Yeah, yeah, then it's funny because at that job with the ping pong tables, there was a guy who actually played ping pong competitively, but he refused to play. like, come on, dude, like, come on. It's like, Kevin, like, let me just like let me just get get beat down by you. Like, I want to experience it. And he was like, no, no. It's like, damn, you got to, you know, got to show us what's up. But yeah, he like and we saw like videos of him playing and it was like, yeah, this is like, you know, like where they like stance were far back and like just.

Bradley Bernard (12:11)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (12:31)
crazy stuff. Like that's not definitely not my level, but like I think just for a casual, I'll take my chances. I'll bet on myself for like a casual work tournament. Yeah. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (12:31)
Hmm

Yeah, I definitely want to play some. That sounds like fun. Cool. Well, one thing that I've seen on Twitter recently that I want to transition to is on Twitter, there's a viral thread probably like two weeks ago, it was talking about this new iPhone app that scaled to 10,000 MRR in two weeks. And so for me, as someone who's been in the indie hacker business,

Bennett Bernard (12:58)
Mm.

Bradley Bernard (13:01)
MRR is the coveted metric of any business in that space and 10,002 weeks. was like, okay, you you have my attention. Like that's the clickbait that anyone would click on. So I took a look at it and it's an iPhone app. So for me as a mobile developer, I'm thinking, okay, like they've unlocked some secret. I downloaded the app. I went through the onboarding flow and this is kind of where I realized something is not right. So to set the context, I think the app is called.

Lovie L O V I not exactly sure on the app name, but found on the app store, download it. It's a free app. It basically tells you after you scan your face and answer a few questions, what skincare products and like recommendations to do for your face. And so for as people being in the social media scene, caring about how they look, you you can imagine on the forefront that this app is already geared to be somewhat successful.

So as I went through the onboarding process, you kind of stick out your phone almost like a face ID scan of like move your face around and then answer I think five questions about your goals and the problems of your face. At the very end of that onboarding flow, maybe it takes you two or three minutes, it presents you with a hard paywall. And so for folks unfamiliar with what hard means, it means you cannot continue. Whatever you've done in the whole app so far will be discarded unless you pay.

And then that's when it hit me and I was like, okay, these people are making 10,000 a month, at least, you know, so far and probably more now, but it feels very, very toxic. And the reason I say toxic is because Apple, pretty sure I'm like 90 % sure does not allow apps to have a hard paywall without the user getting any value out of it. And I think.

I'm not 100 % sure, but I think how to get around this is that during app review, so when you submit your app to Apple, they take a look at it, they run it, they interact with it, you tell them what to test. What you can do is detect if there's an app store reviewer, kind of like reviewing your app, and you can change the behavior of the app based on that. And so what I think a lot of these app companies are doing is if there's an app store reviewer, they don't have this kind of like quote unquote hard paywall.

But once it gets approved, you can do whatever you want and they turn this on. so for me, I think my gut reaction is just like, ugh, like I think I've spent so much effort and time building what I find to be quality tools. And admittedly, I think the category monetization that my products were in in the past is hard to monetize. And when I see apps like this, which are probably built with a monetization first,

where they design this kind of onboarding flow to get people to spend time and effort and then hit them with a hard paywall. Like that is the complete opposite. Maybe the app's super valuable. Maybe it's great. I didn't pay for it, so I'm not sure. But I think I just have like an icky feeling of apps that do that. And I think the whole like, I'm making 10,000 a month MR in two weeks and I download the app. went through the experience. I thought this like sucks. know, like maybe if I really cared about how my face looked.

Bennett Bernard (16:07)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (16:09)
And, know, I was really into that. would immediately pay, but for me, I was like, I want to see some value before I pay, like not a free trial, nothing. It was just, you know, here's your hard paywall. And so, yeah, I don't know if you've seen apps like that, but there's others in the category that are like that. And yeah, it just gives me this like, you know, gross feeling.

Bennett Bernard (16:26)
Yeah. Well, and also to just from what you're saying, like where it scans your face and like just recommends products. That sounds like what it was. I'm not familiar with the app, but like, are they really like it's just shelling out or shilling out like whatever product that like is going to probably earn them a commission or like, you know, pay them for sending them buyers or like paying them for leads. I guess not like actually I highly doubt and I could be wrong, like, but I highly doubt.

Bradley Bernard (16:37)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (16:54)
that it's like looking and like detecting moisture levels in your cheek and going, you have dry skin. Like, let's do this here. And then, like you have and I'm not a I've never put on any kind of stuff on my face for anything. But like, you know, you have like super hairy eyebrows. Like, let's make sure you do this over here. Like I doubt it's doing that kind of like algorithm. It's probably just like, let's just recommend you which everyone earns us the most commission. Like, you know, I'm just a little skeptical that like the advice it's giving you is like

Bradley Bernard (16:59)
Right.

You

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (17:23)
really tailored to you. think they probably put on that facade of like, we're scanning your face. And so therefore this is customized to you. But like, that's probably a marketing gimmick. If I, if I had to guess, like it's just a marketing thing to kind of make it seem like it's yeah, more tailored to you.

Bradley Bernard (17:34)
Yeah. Yeah, I think what I think what they were doing, if I remember correctly, I think they held like a Twitter spaces where they talked about like, quote unquote, how easy it is to make a like 10k MR app, which, again, it's like a very click baity title. I think that's everyone's like goal in the indie hacker space. And so when people host things like that, obviously, you're get viewers and listeners. But I think one of the conversations that

Bennett Bernard (17:51)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (18:00)
popped up during this Twitter space was how can we make more money? Obvious question. I think they were tinkering with making that onboarding flow even longer. So it's kind of succumbing to like the human behavior of I just spent five minutes in this onboarding flow answering five questions plus a face scan. Like I want to know what my results are. And I think they were tinkering with what if we make that 10 questions? What if we make that 12 questions? Like would our, you know, MRR go up if we

take more people's time initially, and then hit them with the hard pay while at the end. So in my head, I'm like, I don't know, I think I'm much more of a product and value builder than a marketer or monetizer. And sadly, the prop like the tool builder in me doesn't make as much money as the kind of growth hacker monetizer that these people are, you know, right, rightfully so experts at and are beating me in that category. But at the same time, I don't know, just like, I think I downloaded the app.

Bennett Bernard (18:40)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (18:58)
went through the onboarding flow, then went to the app store reviews after I didn't pay for it. And I think it was like eight reviews so far and it was like 3.4 stars. And one of the reviews was like, Hey, I downloaded it, you went through the flow and it hit me with a paywall. I uninstalled it. And it's like, you have to be okay with a large volume of that if you build apps like that. But in my head, I just, can't get over the hump of building an app to like prey on. mean, maybe it's a great app again. I never got through the paywall. Maybe it has amazing recommendations, but the

Bennett Bernard (19:23)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (19:27)
The first thought in my head is, like you were saying, it probably doesn't scan my face that well, probably recommends the same things. And it kind of preys on human behavior and spending all this time in this onboarding flow. so, yeah, I just, I don't know. I think it's becoming much more of a focus for these indie app builders. People want to take that formula and replicate it. So there's one called Cal AI, which was, I think, calorie scanning. When you take a photo of food,

Bennett Bernard (19:49)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (19:55)
It would analyze it and give you like the macros for it. And it also has the same exact onboarding flow. you, I think you go through like 10 questions. It's like, how much do you weigh? What are your goals? What do you usually eat? How much do you work out? Like X, Y, Z. And at the very end, hard paywall, if you decline it and offer pops up saying here's 20 % off, I'd go forward. And it's just all of this, like, I don't know, like to be honest, the apps are pretty smooth and I think they're built natively like in Swift or Swift UI, which is great.

but they are designed around this monetizable behavior and paywall and onboarding flow, which is usually an afterthought for most traditional app builders. It's like, I'm going to build the core product and then build the onboarding flow. Like for some of my expenses, the onboarding is kind of weak and it's cause I didn't spend months and months there. And yeah, and so it's, it's different. want, I want people to build like good products, but these guys are making tons of money and that will only influence more people to kind of chase that.

Bennett Bernard (20:30)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, well, and think it goes to kind of what we talked about with, you know, in support, promote and I unfollow. I think you and I, I think approach business in a way of like, you must be doing something valuable. And like, that's the way you get people to pay you. And I think there's a subset of businesses out there that like, you will pay me for something that really isn't that valuable, like that you could easily just Google. Like when you're talking about the macro one, like

I scan a piece of chicken and tells me how much protein like you can just Google that. You know what mean? Like I don't. And I'm sure there's some details that I'm missing, but like the value has to be there first, like first and foremost. And like even in, you know, I'm not an engineer and don't build products, but like just as an accounting professional, like with services like you are charging based on the quality and the value of what you're doing, not like you're charging first and then you got to go provide the value some way after. Like it's kind of like a reverse. But

Bradley Bernard (21:46)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (21:48)
It's interesting too, though, because, you know, I think we're in like this electronic world where like people don't have to pull their wallet out and pull it give you cash. Like you just double click a button on your phone and you do the Apple Pay or whatever. So it's easier than ever for people to be like flippant with their money and just go, yeah, let me just, there's a paywall here. Whatever, let me just do it. I already scanned my face. Might as well just do it see how it is. I'll cancel it later or whatever. And then do that so I can understand.

Bradley Bernard (22:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (22:16)
Like why does feel like low-hanging fruit, but like it's not it's probably not sustainable it's in my opinion kind of predatory a little bit or like That might be a harsh word But like you're just not adding that much value and I think it kind of goes back to two I think I mentioned this on the podcast before we're like at one point in time I kind of thought it'd be funny and like even profitable to like basically scan Twitter for like political memes or political sayings and then like auto

Bradley Bernard (22:21)
Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (22:42)
generate like merchandise with like those political sayings and like sell those people so like it's like if the president says something dumb or funny like you know put that on a t-shirt and like sell it because there's so much like politically charged people out there but then I was like well I'm really adding like am I doing any good doing that like I you know and this is a bit more of like a moral thing but like I didn't feel good even if I could build that and I'm not saying I could have but even if I could have built that would I feel good about like

Bradley Bernard (22:46)
yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (23:10)
sowing more division and an already really divisive topic, you know what mean? I felt like that would be something that I wouldn't really look back and be proud of even if I made some money. I'd be like, I'm gonna kind of keep that off my resume maybe. But I was like, it's like those websites of like, Bum Fights, remember those back in like the early 2000s. like, you really doing anything? Made a ton of money, but like, are you really doing anything good?

Bradley Bernard (23:14)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

You

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (23:37)
And on that note with the apps too, like I see all the time with like kids games, like my kids have iPads. I'm not like one of those like people that don't believe their kids should have like access to technology. You know, they have limits and all that kind of stuff. But what I've noticed is a lot of games are free to download and then like they'll give you like one character like just say like My Little Pony just as an example, like they'll give you one of the little pony characters. But then in order to get the rest of them, you got to pay like 20 bucks a month or whatever.

And like for a kid, it's like, of course they want it. And I have to be like, no, like you're not getting that. But like they're all like that. And it's like a, you know, nothing illegal. I'm sure. Like, I'm sure they're operating within the legal, you know, legal scope. But like, you know, it's definitely is a little bit. It's a little bit sneaky. Like it just kind of gives you a little bit of the ick a little bit. You're like, OK, and there's a of that out there for sure.

Bradley Bernard (24:05)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think when we were growing up, like, the only purchases I had through parents was probably, like, Xbox Live, the account that we were logged in with had, an attached credit card. And I don't even think you could buy, like, you know, digital games. You had to buy the disc, so that didn't work. I think the only thing we could actually buy is, like, DLC, maybe, back in the Xbox days of, you know...

We're playing Elder Scrolls Oblivion, a new DLC came out, and it was downloadable content so you could buy it through the Xbox Store with an attached credit card. Now, I mean, I don't have kids, but now it's like, you know, a hard paywall pops up and this kind of marketing tactics of press a button to continue and, know, maybe kids just like continue. Boom, like Face ID or passcode or whatever. And, you maybe they know that to unlock the phone or iPad or whatever. Boom, done, like charge and charge. And I think we didn't have as much.

paywalls in our face, there wasn't the micro transactions, everything was like more simple, you know, 10, 15 years ago. don't, yeah, I don't think it's illegal, but it definitely pushes the limits of how they can eke out money where like people are saying, like my kid bought that, whatever. Like I would tell them, no, maybe in real time, but if they bought it, like, whatever, like not worth the hassle to go talk to people and do all that.

Bennett Bernard (25:36)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, well, and I think micro transactions are interesting because I think that to me is and I'm not saying you're saying it's the same, like I'm just kind of bringing it back to the paywall thing. Like I think micro transactions are super annoying, just coming from like our own background of just having the disk and you pay for everything and then you get everything that was part of the game. Whereas now they shell out only part of the game and then they have to buy to get like all the other characters and all that kind of stuff. But like, you know, games like Fortnite and like fall guys like

Bradley Bernard (25:56)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (26:10)
they're producing new characters or new emotes or new dances or whatever. There is a value there and then the people want to buy it. That's up to them. But it's funny when you're talking about how easy it is to buy something on those games. My daughter one time was playing Fall Guys and I was in the other room and fortunately she yells out, Dad, I bought something or whatever.

Bradley Bernard (26:17)
Mm-hmm.

Hahaha

Bennett Bernard (26:31)
And then I'm like, wait, how would you buy? I go and look and like, sure enough, she had like bought like seventy dollars worth of like fall guy like credits or whatever, because she was just, you know, I must have had like, you know, just purchases allowed on my account, just charging my card. And like she could have like if she didn't yell out, like who knows how much money she would have spent and, you know, Xbox, Xbox reverse it once I told them what happened and it was all fine. But I was just like, geez, that was I need to be careful or add some kind of like passcode to like for purchases now if they're going to be doing that.

Bradley Bernard (26:49)
Yeah.

Yeah. I think they are investing a lot more in like parent, parent controls on payments, especially, especially like kid accounts, like in Apple and Xbox and all that. But talking about fall guys jog my memory when I was in LAX, I recently went to Mexico, Puerto Vallarta. Before my flight, there was a gaming lounge in LAX and one of the terminals. And if you had priority pass, which my Amex card gives me, you're allowed to enter this gaming lounge. gives you one hour of gaming.

Bennett Bernard (27:00)
unsupervised.

Bradley Bernard (27:29)
and a free snack and a free drink. And my flight was probably in 15 minutes, like it was boarding. So me and my wife walk in, we get our like free drink and free snack. And the guy asked me, Hey, do you want to play PC, Xbox or PlayStation? And I'm like, looking at my watch, like, am gonna be able to play anything really? And so I told him, let's just do like, like, I want to play Dragon Ball Z because we talked about that over text, like, Hey, the new game came out. I want to try it. He's like, I think it's only available on PlayStation. And that's the one I don't play. But I took it. And so I sat down.

Bennett Bernard (27:45)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (27:58)
played like Dragon Ball Z, I wanted to play a quick match. But how Dragon Ball Z worked, at least in this new game, I wanted to play like me versus the computer, but it's I had to choose like five characters on each side and you had the life for each of the characters. So like, if you beat like Frieza on the computer, it would swap out to a new character. So I'm sitting there looking at my time. I'm like, I'm not going to finish this game. And then I switched to Fall Guys to play Fall Guys and I win the first round. So I was like the first person to complete the checkpoint the first round.

And I left and I told the guy, was like, know, fall guys is there. And my wife was like, do you want to quit out of the game? I was like, no, like maybe they'll play it. Like I just left it hanging there, but it was a fun experience. If you're in the LAX airport, go check out the gaming lounge. you have priority pass, I probably wouldn't pay for it if I didn't have the pass, but it was actually a pretty nice environment. Like for me as a gamer, if I did have an hour to spend there, they give you headphones, they give you a snack. I think you can even have a beer or two. Pretty, pretty cool. So I would recommend.

Bennett Bernard (28:35)
Mm-hmm, yeah.

Mm.

Yeah, that's cool. How was Dragon Ball Z? Was it fun?

Bradley Bernard (28:59)
It was good. Playing the game without going to the tutorial is quite hard. So was like, do I charge? How do I do the abilities? And I finally figured it out maybe five minutes in, because the computer was just whooping me. I was like, OK, how do I block? do I teleport? All these things. And then I think I became the top Goku, maybe the monkey one or whatever. And then he had the

Bennett Bernard (29:12)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (29:22)
super grandfather Kamehameha and I just kept spamming that because I was trying to kill the computer as fast as I can to complete it. Amazing animations, good fighting. I want to try it. I want to try playing it with you. I think it'd be fun. But yeah, I didn't have enough time to really eke out everything. So was kind of like, I need to get out of here.

Bennett Bernard (29:26)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that's cool. Yeah, the it's interesting the like the gaming world and how much money those those companies make just all the know seasons and all that kind of stuff. It's just a whole different world from how it was probably, you know, 10 years ago.

Bradley Bernard (29:54)
Yeah, and transition to like the single game multi-season season pass every six or 12 months. then back in our day, feel like was Halo 2 was out. They had DLC like maps every, I don't know, maybe year or so, Halo 3 DLC. But other than that, was like just the core game was great. You didn't have to anything extra. And that's just how it was.

Bennett Bernard (30:02)
Mm-hmm.

Interestingly enough, I feel like video games have like kind of held out with inflation, like because I remember video games being like $59.99 at Target, like always. So you go to Target and like whatever you're getting is $59.99. And like for the most part, I think like your your blockbuster games are kind of still priced that like you can of course now they have like the hundred dollar version where it's like has all the microtransactions already bought, you know, but like still for the most part, like just the sticker price of the base games is like for like your

Bradley Bernard (30:26)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (30:45)
big title releases is like 60 bucks, feel like. And that surprisingly hasn't changed. Is it 70 now? Okay.

Bradley Bernard (30:49)
I think it went up to 70, but still, still, I'm pretty sure it's 70 now, but still, I also felt the same. It's not that far off given all things considered, but the quality of games on way down. So.

Bennett Bernard (30:57)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean...

Yes, true. Yeah, I have some I have some favorites that are newer. I think but in general, yeah, it's definitely gone down a little bit. But yeah, it's interesting. I wonder where all that's kind of taking back to the paywall stuff. I wonder where that goes. You know, like if that's ever going to like get like a natural backlash or if there's just always going to be like like I get rich quick kind of people trying to do that kind of stuff. Right. It's kind of what it sounds like. It's

Bradley Bernard (31:02)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (31:28)
you know, like this hacking thing. But yeah, we'll have to see. We'll have to keep an eye on it and see, see whatever comes of those if they if they only last. We should like bookmark it and come back like a year later and see if they're still around. You know, just like.

Bradley Bernard (31:34)
Yeah.

Yeah, see what the App Store rating is. My guess is in the long term Apple will be more intelligent about cracking down on the paywall behavior versus an app reviewer and a real user. Like they'll probably index more on a real user saying, hey, I can't even use the app without paying. Like, please, you know, do something about it. But yeah, I guess we'll see.

Bennett Bernard (31:52)
Mm-hmm.

You know, it's funny, one quick thing on this before we move on, this wasn't really on our list of outline here, but I watched a video talking about gaming and all that kind of stuff and paywalls and just transactions that completely just refresh my memory of, there's a really cool YouTube, I'll link it in the show notes, it was like an indie game developer and he had, there's actually two videos I'm thinking of, because guess this is something that happens, people...

Make a hit game and it goes viral and then they post a cool YouTube video about it. It's kind of talking about it was it really well done. Both of the examples I'm talking about. Basically, I'll just pick on one because it was kind of more like a finished product. It was an indie game developer who made like a like a Roman battle kind of game, like where you're you're a character and you battle like in Roman times, something like that. And, you know.

Bradley Bernard (32:46)
So.

Bennett Bernard (32:52)
He like chronicled working on it for like over I think two or three years, you know, all by himself, 100 % by himself and putting it up on steam. And then like, I think he did like an early access thing where it got some initial attention. And then when he by the time he launched, you it was on enough people's wish list that like the launch went crazy. And I think he like, it went made like two hundred thousand dollars like in a a 24 hour period or something like that, like something crazy. Like it was absolutely nuts.

Bradley Bernard (33:13)
That's

Bennett Bernard (33:21)
And it's cool because it kind of goes the opposite way of like the trend that we're just talking about all the micro transactions were like now more than ever, like solo devs can like make really good games. And I think he was selling it for like 30. Let's see if I can find it. Thirty nine bucks or something like that. Or like maybe even like 20 bucks. Yeah, what was it called? Ask about me.

Bradley Bernard (33:40)
That's pretty high actually for an indie game.

think they're usually like five or ten dollars.

Bennett Bernard (33:48)
Yeah. And then there was another one, the other one, same exact thing. So I won't go over all the details, but the same exact thing. And it was like a farm based like horror game. And he just did the demo, but then like had so many people on the wish list. And he kind of like documented like how he built it and like what it's been like releasing an indie game and like all the conferences he went to and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it's super cool. Again, like going the opposite direction of like the commoditization and just

Bradley Bernard (33:57)
Hmm.

It kind of reminds me of like the marketing efforts of a single person I talked about in the pod a long time ago, but the

Bennett Bernard (34:17)
inundation of, you know, micro transactions like the indie games have gotten like way more accessible and way better. And those are some of the better ones, you know, that you can find out there. So, yeah.

Bradley Bernard (34:35)
TikToks or like the videos I had tried to make outlining kind of my journey as like a solo founder or promoting my expenses. Some people like the Gen Z crowd are really, really good at it. Like they have the marketing hype and know how to make these like self promoting videos that don't feel self promoting. And when I tried to do it, you know, clearly don't have the skill or expertise and it flopped, but it's like, if you can find the right kind of combo of being good at building products and being good at promoting yourself while not.

Bennett Bernard (34:39)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (35:04)
feeling like self-promotion. That's a really powerful combo. I was never, never good at that though.

Bennett Bernard (35:10)
Yeah, yeah promoting we've talked about before having a great product is one thing getting people to use it is a whole different thing and it's not as easy as just you know, this is great come use it there's a lot of like psychology and Which is actually an excellent segue another thing I wanted to kind of talk about with you is the idea of niching and I don't know if niching is technically a word I think it is I'm not getting any spell checker. Yeah niching and

Bradley Bernard (35:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, too much.

It's defined today.

Bennett Bernard (35:37)
The reason I bring it up is because that's a big topic in the accounting world right now is people I think are more and more feel more empowered than ever to like go out and start their own company. You know, there's lots of good technology that make practice management way easier. And but there's a recognition that there's lots of players in the space and like niching as a way to like narrow your scope of services and then be able to charge a higher price.

This is the idea behind it, at least. And one book I'm listening to, it's an audio book. I do actually want to buy and read it, but it's very, very popular. You've probably already heard of it. It's like 100 Million Offers by Alex Hormozi, I think. okay.

Bradley Bernard (36:18)
I've not heard of it. Don't ask me if I've heard of any books because the answer is probably no.

Bennett Bernard (36:22)
Well, I think he's kind of in the I don't know much about him. I think he's kind of in like the business world like he's a good marketer. He's a very good marketer. So I see him all the time before I read any of his books. But it is actually I'm like probably five chapters into it, so I haven't gotten through it as much as I would like to. But he talks about basically like niching down to like, you know, a very core customer base, because like what you're solving is going to be very unique to like

Bradley Bernard (36:24)
you

Okay

Bennett Bernard (36:52)
their concerns or whatever. And I think the example he gave, and I might butcher this a little bit because I'm just going off memory, but the example he gave is like, companies might want to sell like a CRM platform. And it's like, okay, like that's a really competitive space. You know, good luck. What if you want to sell a CRM platform for like, you know, inside sales or whatever, like some kind of further specification, you know, that might be.

Bradley Bernard (36:54)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (37:17)
a little bit less of a crowded area and you can probably charge more because you can get more specific about their problems or what they run into. And then he kind of ends up going to like, what if you sold a CRM for like inside sales, like in the like turf care industry or whatever. And they got super specific. But then was kind of basically saying like that specificity allows you or enables you to like basically better market, first of all, like your product. But then like you are speaking directly to

Bradley Bernard (37:18)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (37:46)
the problems and pain points that like a very core group of people have. And so that was like his whole hypothesis. So it's a really interesting perspective and something that I think a lot of accounting firms are trending towards. But I was curious to hear from your perspective on niching. And I'm just curious if you've ever thought about doing it for like any of your businesses like that you've had like I unfollow or.

you know, my expenses or even if it was something that you're just like, because you're very product driven, I think, and like engineering driven. So if you're more like, I'm just looking for like a cool product and people are going to find it and they might like it. That's like my ultimate like feedback loop. But I'm just curious if you had any thoughts on niching, niching, gosh, as I describe it.

Bradley Bernard (38:13)
Mm-hmm

Yeah, I think it reminds me of a conversation I had. I'm in the microconf community and there was a talk months and months and months ago talking about how to market your product. And in this talk, I think it was Kareem, I can't remember his full name, but he was walking through how

other indie businesses change their marketing copy on their homepage to attract the right customer profile. I think his kind of thesis or his hypothesis was figure out who uses your product, like do your own analysis and then change the marketing content to attract that user that you want. And I had kind of interjected in his zoom session saying, Hey, for split my expenses from my kind of product that I was building.

Bennett Bernard (39:08)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (39:15)
I have two customer profiles. One is couples, so people who routinely split at maybe 50-50 or some other ratio between their partner. The other is group travel. To me, those are very, very different. They want different things. They pay different money. They have different use cases, even desktop versus mobile. I asked him, said, what do do when I have two completely distinct customer profiles? He had told me, probably choose one and just focus deeper on that.

I think for me there are bill splitting apps out there that are like purely for couples. I don't see any that are like purely for travel because I think travel it's like everything else plus travel and then couples like I think couples is the kind of odd one out. So if you're not building for couples you're building for the other segment. And so I had taken his advice and thought should I change my marketing like should I go all in on couples. But to me I like building tools that are generally useful and I like building features that

Bennett Bernard (39:49)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (40:12)
can apply to both sides. Although when you want to be that perfect solution to that one thing, you'll see search queries that are Bill splitting app for couples, Bill splitting app for trips. And I can have different landing pages on my site that rank higher for those keywords and kind of outline the features for it. Or I could go all in and say, Hey, know, SME split my expenses is the platform for Bill splitting for couples, like screw trips. We're just going to do like very, very tailored features for it. And I was

kind of caught off guard because I didn't feel like I want to make a massive pivot and niche down to that. I didn't really love how my customer segments are almost like 50 50 across that because I get way more users getting these group participants where someone would join the platform. They'd invite their 10 friends on the group trip and then boom, I have 10 more users. If it's a couple they join, they invite their partner and that's it. Like I get way more users.

Bennett Bernard (40:58)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (41:04)
to the platform with groups, but way less through couples. But I think couples spend more money because it's a recurring thing where group travel is a one-off every quarter or six months or a year. And so it put me in a hard spot where I wanted to niche down, but I felt like both were almost valuable in the grand scheme of things. And again, I'm no marketer, I'm no product strategist. I like building things and doing my best and a lot of times building for my own itch. But when I thought about it, was like, maybe the right decision is to niche down. And I think for I unfollow,

Insta-promote all of those. You think about the follow for follow as the general category and then niching is like choosing that platform and building that best experience for that. And I think for SME, I don't have any plans to like convert it to be couples only or group only. Maybe it's the better long-term move in terms of like monetization, but at the current moment, I'm just kind of like leaving things as is and moving forward on that. So it's, it's probably the best advice to find the right niche.

Bennett Bernard (41:41)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (42:02)
But you need to do a lot of research in terms of market size, how much people will pay, you need to look pretty deeply at your product analytics and all that stuff takes time and effort on top of running your own indie business. So I was like, I feel a little bit overwhelmed trying to think about that decision.

Bennett Bernard (42:17)
Yeah. Well, and I think too, you know, especially in your experience having Ion follow and promote, you know, be successful. You know, it's almost like in those kinds of products, you know, you kind of want to go viral, like you kind of want to. And like when you want a big, you know, wide swath of people, like generalizing is better, like, or like a general approach is better. I think it just depends on like what your business goals are, you know, and like, you know, for a lot of accountants.

Bradley Bernard (42:33)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (42:45)
they would rather have, you know, a fewer number of higher paying customers because like ultimately accounting is much more of a, you know, you're trading your time for money. And so, you know, rather than have 30 clients that pay you, you know, a lower average ticket price is better to have five that pay you double that ticket price if you can justify the value. And so I think that's where that comes into my arena. But, you know, for software and like building products, you know, it's much more like

Bradley Bernard (43:01)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (43:12)
It's not as costly for you to service a thousand customers versus just ten customers as far as like your time goes. Like when you build a product like there's no, you know, hopefully it's a very like passive product where like, you know, we've talked about how high and follow the kind of just you set it and forget it. Basically, it just, you know, you'd get transactions. So it didn't even matter if there was, know, like you weren't trading your time for that money at that point. But, I did wonder when I saw and was talking about and listening to the audiobook, you know, like

Bradley Bernard (43:29)
Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (43:41)
Could you have had a higher price point if you were solving for a certain group of people? Even if you accepted that you would have fewer fewer overall users But you know, it's marketing is you know for someone and I'm like you like it's definitely not my cup of tea You know, you're an engineer. I'm an accountant. I think those two things don't typically you know mesh with marketing but I it's funny when I I was listening I talked about this book on the podcast before building a story brand and

Bradley Bernard (43:46)
Mm-hmm.

Hehehe

Bennett Bernard (44:07)
I was talking about like advertisements and like, you know, copy and all that. And I did think of an amazing commercial for you. And I was like, dude, if I could like put this together for split my expenses, like this would sell, sell billions and billions of dollars. It was basically a complete tangent, but we're here. So basically it was like friends going out to dinner and there's no like narration by you. It's just friends going out to dinner. So like, just like a cool like Korean barbecue place or like, you know, like a hot pot place or something.

where it's a group setting, and it's fun, getting drinks and all that kind of stuff. And then the waiter comes and brings the check. And then you have a shot where everyone's looking around awkwardly, kind of like, what do we do? Like, I'll split it. that be like, in contrast, then it switches over to someone happily smiling, like, I got it. Spend my expenses later or whatever.

Bradley Bernard (44:50)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (45:02)
and then like, you know, it just takes care of it and everyone's like smiling and the vibe continues like in the vibe, the good vibes keep rolling. I was like, that'd be a great commercial for us with my expenses. So, you know, if you're looking, you know, if you're looking for a, yeah, yeah, we got, we got ideas over here, but yeah, it was, I was like, that'd be good. I don't know why I thought about that when I was walking my dog one day and I was like, it's a good commercial.

Bradley Bernard (45:11)
I like it. I like it.

I think on my long-term roadmap, it's writing a lot more blog posts and getting the SEO engine humming. I think, yeah, there's a lot of unique opportunities to go viral. think a lot of my successes in past products has been flipping that switch to get it to go viral, which there's no formula for is what I found. And a lot of people are dying to get that one viral post. Like when I made those TikToks on their video content, the main goal was have one do really well.

Bennett Bernard (45:28)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (45:47)
I don't care if they all fall flat, if one takes off, like that is the goal. And, you know, none of them did unfortunately, but I'm still holding onto the hope that someone, you know, picks up SME loves it, makes a video about it. They go viral. I don't have to do anything. That's the goal. Cause I get comments probably once a month, like emails into my inbox. like, Hey, you know, I just picked up this tool. Best thing ever. Like, I can't believe this is free, you know, keep up the good work and

Bennett Bernard (46:02)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (46:14)
For someone who builds products primarily for themselves and then creates the platform for others to use it. Those comments feel great. I'm like, glad someone likes it. Not like I need people for validation. I love it, but it's like nice to hear that people go out of their way, like draft me an email that, you know, is not that convenient and just say like, this is, this is amazing. And so, yeah, I'm hoping one of those people will go the extra mile. you're, if you're an SME user and you're listening, I'm open to a video feedback or

you know, some creator video of publishing it because I tried and it didn't work very well and I gave up. So if you're out there, would love some help and you know, maybe we'll make it go viral together. Marketing is way too, way too hard.

Bennett Bernard (46:51)
Yeah. Yeah, or you can even do one of those like I can just imagine my head like the the the tick tock voice of like yesterday me and my friends all went out to dinner and like picked up this hefty bill, but we split it. You know, talking about I could hear it like in my head already. It's like you just got to get like a couple of influencers to like shill that. And then maybe maybe you can.

Bradley Bernard (47:01)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I think the effort to make those videos for someone who's not familiar with making videos was extremely high. And I was sitting there like recording, editing, doing all that. And in the back of my head, I'm like, I could be building like four features and feel like direct impact. Or when I make these marketing videos and I post them to TikTok way back when and they get no views, I sit there like, I just wasted five hours of my time. You know, that's great. So like, I think it's like a realization that marketing is hard and

Bennett Bernard (47:17)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (47:38)
I want like immediate feedback, the things that I got or the results that I got were abysmal. And I was like, okay, back to cutting.

Bennett Bernard (47:46)
Yeah, well, it's crazy, too, is like our like the millennials, which is both you and I fall into, you know, millennials, we didn't like grow up with like the ability to like easily edit video like like people do now. Like I remember that we had a camcorder and like you get that camcorder, you know, take it out of like the camera, like hook it up to the PC and then like download the video. And then you had to have like an expensive Adobe license. Like what was that?

Bradley Bernard (48:00)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (48:12)
One that we made videos. What was that video that you used to make? Like, what was it? Final Cut Pro or something like that?

Bradley Bernard (48:12)
Mm-hmm.

We use Sony Vegas. Sony Vegas Pro? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was Final Cut on Mac and Sony Vegas on Windows.

Bennett Bernard (48:21)
And there was, we made like, you made like action videos, right? With like explosions and stuff like that. So like, but yeah. But like so much harder and so much more work to make videos that were obviously less quality. But like now, like, and I'm not like, I have TikTok, but I'm not like on it, you know, but people make like crazy videos, like super creative, like very cool.

Bradley Bernard (48:36)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (48:46)
Like they go viral and it's like, I'm sure it took you five hours to do that. That marketing video you're talking about. But like someone goes viral and it took them like probably two minutes to make because they're just like fast at it. Like, you know what I mean? And again, this is probably it's a it's a point where I'm probably the person like falling behind, like the society of like making I don't know. I could not make a video right now if you asked me to do on TikTok. I wouldn't know how to do all the cool like little cuts and all that kind of crap. But, you know, it's.

Bradley Bernard (48:51)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (49:12)
It seems like that's definitely becoming more and more of like where people are. You know, if you're a business trying to find clients, you know, you can always kind of meet them where they are. And it's definitely like video is the place. But I just feel like, you know, I need a lot of like I need a lot. I need like a boot camp in that, to be quite honest with you, because it's just a whole different world. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (49:24)
Mm-hmm.

Me too. Me too. Yeah, there was a guy who created a bill splitting app and he was marketing himself through TikTok doing a day in the life of a founder, which is exactly, and I wasn't going for that same video content, but I think he was Gen Z. He built like a bill splitting app and it, the content he had made, the video content went viral. And so I had maybe four or five people send it to me saying, Hey, have you seen this? And in my head, I'm like, damn, like

I don't know if his product is better or worse, but the fact that he has eyeballs and this attention market that we have is a great sign. so, and the back of my head, I'm like, like I spent so much time building things back when I was like full time bucks by, but I don't do that well in marketing. And when you see someone do well in marketing, it's like pure jealousy of like, you know, I wish I had that guy on my team. You know, it's getting that attention is so important. Like even the product sucks. They'll try it.

Bennett Bernard (50:03)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (50:25)
just because it went viral and people share with their friends. So that's kind of what had my success in instant promote. And I need that moment for SME, but I just don't know when it's coming. It'll come soon enough.

Bennett Bernard (50:36)
My one of my favorite like, I was sorry, were like conundrums maybe or like head scratching moments is I remember there was like a video on YouTube and it was like similar, like a day in the life of like a founder, but it was much more like it was very like you knew watching it that this is kind of BS. Like it was just like, as I explained, it'll be more, it'll make more sense. But so basically it was like a day in the life of but it was like a million dollar founder. Like it was very, like very click baity, very like

Bradley Bernard (51:04)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (51:06)
like just very like me me, I guess, if that's even a word. But like so it shows like this guy gets about four a.m. right. And he's like in his young 20s, you know, so exactly, exactly, exactly like wearing like a face mask in the morning or something like that. Just like watch too much American Psycho and thinks that's him. And, you know, the Patrick Bateman meme and all that kind of stuff. And what was funny was like he did like

Bradley Bernard (51:16)
Cold shower, worked out by 5 a.m.

Bennett Bernard (51:33)
You know, if you like looked him up, whatever he did have a company, but the company like didn't do it. was like some like BS, like Shopify consulting company, right? Like, you Amazon, one of my favorite or like my biggest pet peeves is like when people say like, I've sold over $500 million of like product or no, they've said like they've made $500 million. But then we look at like, you like dig into a little bit. They've just like helped sell $500 million of

Bradley Bernard (52:00)
Hmm

Bennett Bernard (52:00)
product. They didn't actually make five hundred million dollars. Like there's a big difference if you know, just being an accountant, that kind of stuff irks me because it's definitely like, know what you're doing. You're just trying to be sneaky. But anyways, where I'm going with this was the video itself was more of like the product than like the actual company. You know mean? Like it was really it just became like a media company more than like actually a Shopify consulting thing. Like he got more famous from that and like more eyeballs from that.

Bradley Bernard (52:25)
Hmm

Bennett Bernard (52:28)
because it was like a really good edited video. Like it was very well done. I had like all the, you know, like professional editing, like the intro and like the very like aesthetics and all that kind of stuff. but you know, probably got a ton of eyeballs on this company just from that silly day in the life video that was obviously, you know, completely embellished, but you know, yeah, that's where people are, you know, so you got to kind of meet them where they are, I guess, but it is, it's a weird unfamiliar world for me.

Bradley Bernard (52:52)
Yeah. I think in 2025 I'll try to make more videos. I think you gotta spend less effort and just make more. I think I spent too much time on one video that I thought, you know, in my head was, this is gonna be a hit and then it doesn't. And then you have this very sour taste in your mouth.

So I think I would try to spend more time on making a higher volume of videos with like less quality overall. Although it sounds a little spammy. think that's just the algorithm is so uncontrollable that one could go viral and I don't even know why, but I don't care why it's just, you know, it is what it is. So probably on the 2025 goals.

Bennett Bernard (53:28)
Yeah, yeah. Cool. Well, let's wrap this up here in a little bit, Brad. guess any other things that you want to go over before we went over our bookmarks here?

Bradley Bernard (53:37)
Yeah, I think there's one thing that I've been seeing on my Twitter feed. I've been a busy few weeks of traveling both like to Mexico and to Santa Monica, but as I've been checking into Twitter infrequently, I feel like every day there's been a new post on my feed that people are migrating to blue sky. And I don't know about you, but I follow Elon on Twitter and I think his tweets have really invaded my feed.

For example, I'll pull up the Twitter app on my iPhone, take a scroll, and my main objective for Twitter and the community that I've curated and my following, or my followers, whatever side, is getting tech news, which is AI, PHP, and JavaScript. Those are kind of the three bubbles that I look for and find useful facts or stories or tips.

And as I've been opening the feed, I've been getting, you know, one out of every 10 people that I follow is migrating to blue sky, which is the other social media, Twitter clone kind of, so to speak. and then the other thing is just like tons and tons of politics and Elon tweets, which when I followed him initially, I thought, you know, he's doing interesting stuff. It has a very, you know, interesting take on a lot of things, which I don't want to get into, but you know, it's a little bit.

Bennett Bernard (54:31)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (54:50)
unique and novel that I think with the election and with the politics and all that, it's become a lot like he's very much shifted from technology and engineering and like interesting stuff to more politics, which I don't go on Twitter to see. If I want to see that, I'll go look for it elsewhere. And so I recently muted him and a lot of my followers are going to blue sky, which, know, it kind of hurts a little bit because I spent all this time curating the community that I'm looking to hear from and when people leave and some people actually delete their Twitter posts as they move.

Bennett Bernard (55:01)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (55:19)
It sucks because I want the feed that I've always had. It's becoming more politics and less people that I follow. So I'm kind of in this in-between point where I want to make a Blue Sky account just to follow the people that I care about, but I don't want to use two apps. And so for me as a lazy person, like I just want an all-in-one or I want my people back. Sometimes you don't know what you're missing out until you get there. And historically, I think a year or two ago, a bunch of Apple people that I used to follow in terms of like the iOS category.

Bennett Bernard (55:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (55:46)
They all went to blue sky and I thought that was a significant moment. Now it's coming back up. think people are tweeting like the blue butterfly emoji because I think Twitter will like try to remove posts that directly mention it. But a few layer of how people are starting to migrate to blue sky that I follow. And I'm just like, dang, like, why can't we just stay here? I don't love Twitter. I don't love X. I haven't posted much for like recently, but at the end of the day, I'm more of a consumer than a poster and having these like important people that I follow.

migrate off because of the whole landscape of Twitter. It kind of sucks. I don't if you've seen that too.

Bennett Bernard (56:21)
I've seen a little bit of it. Yeah, I think it's more of a tech thing. Like my following is a lot of like accounting. I do have some tech, but not as much as you, of course. And then like real estate, like real estate Twitter. And there's some of that, you know, but it reminds me a lot of Macedon, which was around like a couple of years ago. People were moving over to Macedon and like had their own Macedon server and all that jazz. Yeah, so then that didn't really stick around, I think, at least with the people that I was following.

Bradley Bernard (56:32)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (56:48)
So yeah, I don't know. Like it's something if Twitter goes, I won't miss it too much to be quite honest. You know, I have it for the I have it for the news and like updates here and there. like, you know, it's not something that like I engage with that much. And but yeah, on the on the for you like tab, it's all like Elon stuff. I'm just like, yeah, you know, the for you tab, I don't ever go on to begin with. Like unless it like just auto defaults there on my page. Like sometimes I'll my app.

Bradley Bernard (56:54)
Yeah

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (57:15)
And like, I'll see stuff. I'm like, I don't follow these people. And I'm like, I'm on the wrong tab. So I go over to like the following tab. So then it gets a little cleaner, but yeah, it's all, it's all politics. It's all, you know, outrage bait and all that kind of stuff. and it's a weird place right now. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (57:30)
Yeah, think that, yeah, there's two things that I want to do to probably clean it up before I would ever leave one is I think there's a Chrome plugin that removes all the junk that isn't like the core tweets where, you know, I described creating my community as me choosing people to follow and getting like tweets directly from them. And so the for you to have violates that because they're sourcing tweets from the algorithm, but I found sometimes they pop up with good stuff. However, they've changed things recently.

It just doesn't feel right. So I'd probably go back to the following tab and then install this plugin, which kind of just removes all the distractions. Then two, which I've seen a lot is adding mute words on Twitter on X where you can put politics or put whatever and any tweets I think that have that content will not be showing your feed. However, I just don't want to spend all this time putting in 500 mute words. And if I miss something because I added a mute word, you know, I'll never know.

Bennett Bernard (58:10)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (58:25)
So part of me is like, want to keep the door open, but then I get this negative reaction when I see just the slew of like politics tweets where I want to see a PHP, Laravel, AI, JavaScript, TypeScript, whatever. That's all I care about. And that's why I'm here. And that's why I follow these people, but I just don't see enough. So yeah, we'll see. Maybe on the next pod, I'll create a blue sky report back. at the end of the day, think people are kind of frustrated with the for you content. And then two, you can't post direct links in your tweets on Twitter.

Bennett Bernard (58:36)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (58:55)
They will penalize you and not push your posts out as much if you do that. So you'll see posts that say, I just launched this new product. Here is what it is. And then in the next tweet, it'll be like Lincoln comments. In the next tweet, they'll post the direct link. Stupid. And I think that's why people have kind of migrated to other platforms. And they're like, my God, I can post a link in my tweet and blue sky. I don't get penalized. Like there's no.

It's so stupid to not be able to post the links that you care about because it takes you off the platform. Things like that that are just obvious, yes, that should be allowed, but it's not on Twitter. All these other platforms are like, quote, unquote, winning on that front for that behavior. So I'll have to see it. If more people go, I'll definitely follow, but I'll probably keep my Twitter account around because it's something that I still get lots and lots of value out of because of the people that I follow.

Bennett Bernard (59:43)
Yeah, yeah, it's a, I'm definitely more of a consumer too. It's definitely, you know, and I'm always impressed that people grow their business there. That seems like a very hard thing to do, but, people, you people figure it out.

Bradley Bernard (59:48)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Well, speaking of being a consumer, how what's the latest update on the LinkedIn analytics for you? How are things? How are things looking for you?

Bennett Bernard (1:00:01)
Mm.

Yeah, so full transparency, I haven't been able to post. It's like actually something I want to kind of get caught up on here. It's been super busy with work and like kid stuff. like probably the last week I haven't posted, I think. But before that, I was posting like every day, I think, for the most part. And like my process has been, you know, for the most part, like I'm reading a book or like doing like a deep, deep research. It sounds kind of like.

like growth hacking or whatever, like doing like some really deep reading on like a certain topic or whatever, and then kind of just generating some thoughts on the matter for the most part. So I read I think I talked about this last time or maybe two times ago where I read a book about franchising as a business strategy and then just, you know, what's important for franchising, like when it comes from an accounting perspective. So like that's generally been like kind of content mill or so it's that or it's been

Bradley Bernard (1:00:31)
you

Bennett Bernard (1:00:55)
like kind of just accounting stuff. So I think the first one is like speaking to like business owners and small businesses just to kind of like give some free, you know, on LinkedIn, just some free kind of advice that they can, you know, might read and might find valuable. This is the hope. But then the second one, just because I have a lot more fellow accounting professionals on my connections than I do like small business owners, just by nature of my work experience and everything, is more geared towards

you know, accounting isms. like the one that did the most, which was like completely surprising, was a. I post about balance sheet reconciliations and so for the non accountants that are listening, like a balance sheet reconciliation is basically a process that accountants go through where they look at your like dollar balance of accounts for your business. So I could just the easiest one to kind of think of is cash. And so like you're saying that you have a thousand dollars of cash in your account.

Bradley Bernard (1:01:28)
You

Bennett Bernard (1:01:50)
you know, on your financial system, like, does that match your bank? If not, like what's different? You know, do you have checks in transit or do have deposits that need to be posted? So like you kind of research that. And cash is a really simple one, because it's really black and white. But there's lots of different accounts that you have in your business. And some of those accounts are much more complicated than than just cash. Like you have to kind of do a lot of digging and research. And so that post where I basically was like, hey, an underappreciated task

is like balance sheet reconciliations because if you don't do them well, then you really don't know. You really can't rely on your numbers. It's basically like it really validates your numbers. I think it's the best way to think of it for non accountants. And that post. Let me pull up my stats here. That post like took off, like, you know, went viral for from my perspective at least and. Ended up doing three, I'm looking at it now, three hundred sixty five thousand eight hundred sixty two impressions.

Bradley Bernard (1:02:27)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:02:45)
Over the last of the last 365 days. Yeah. And then ended up getting, 1182, you know, likes or loves or, you know, insightful, like whatever the little reactions. Yeah. 104 comments. And this is the one that kind of shocked me the most to be honest was got a hundred and 117 reposts. So like people were so it must have really resonated with people. Yeah. And people that I. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:02:45)
Wow.

Reactions.

Wow. That's probably how you got all the impressions is people sharing it.

Bennett Bernard (1:03:09)
Yeah, know, people, large that I don't think I'm connected with, I ended up reposting it, at least for the most part. So it was really cool. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:03:15)
You know what you should do? Just random thoughts. Sorry. Is you should comment on that post and just drop the podcast link because maybe I'm not sure how LinkedIn works. Although I worked there, if people have liked it and they've shared it, I think if the author comments, maybe everyone will get a notice that that is, maybe those a thousand people across likes and comments, then they could come to the pod. If they've interacted with it, they might be interested.

Bennett Bernard (1:03:35)
Hmm.

Bradley Bernard (1:03:42)
And if Ben does it and you're here listening to this episode, guess it worked. So thanks for listening. But yeah, maybe worth that. You know, because what I see on these platforms is when you go viral, there's always like, here's my Venmo or like, and here's my XYZ, like to kind of plug their socials. so since you wrote such a banger of a post, maybe it's time to capitalize on that and, you know, bring people to the pod because we'd love to have you.

Bennett Bernard (1:04:02)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I'll drop my Venmo link. You guys can pay me for that. Just kidding. Yeah. You know, that's the funny thing is like, I don't see like all that insight. Like I don't have that. You know, I'm kind of just throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks. And yeah, that one did really well, you know. And it's funny, I've texted you this, you know, just in our own conversations, but like things that I thought would go like way more like don't end up doing it. And then, you know, these ones tend to do.

Bradley Bernard (1:04:13)
Mm-hmm.

But it's working.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:04:31)
like more well, like the example I was telling you was like, I always think that video is going to do really well, like on LinkedIn, like the LinkedIn algorithm. And, you know, for whatever reason, it just, it just doesn't like it doesn't hit, but like the text ones and I'm just basing this off impressions. And so I think the argument can be made like, well, how valuable are just impressions? Like should you be looking at a different kind of metric? Well, you know, they put that aside. If I just look at impressions, the video ones don't do nearly as well as just like the text ones.

Bradley Bernard (1:04:37)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:04:59)
So I don't know what the rationale or what the reason is for that. But yeah, I'll try that. I ought to kind of pick your brain on exactly what you were talking about, because I don't know all the little ins and outs. But yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:05:12)
Yeah, yeah, I can share. mean, I think at the end of the day, like getting those eyeballs is super important. It's it almost reminds me of advertising where they'll see your name and they'll see your profile picture. And as long as you don't change your profile picture, the next post that you do that does well, they'll be like, I've heard of this guy before. Can't remember where maybe it was don't remember that post. And then now you kind of just have the authority in that domain over time and

Bennett Bernard (1:05:18)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:05:37)
Again, yeah, not everyone will go viral and maybe that's the best one you'll have this year, hopefully not. But next time you post a good one and it goes viral, people are like, I've heard of that guy. Then boom, boom, you built up the rep. And now it's just easier because you have the kind of background and track record of doing well on the platform. So that's cool.

Bennett Bernard (1:05:54)
Well, and it's annoying too, because I told you this, I've tried to get my website on LinkedIn, where it's like there's a button where you say, visit my website. And look, I'm not selling anything. It's just a personal website where people can contact me and see my work experience and all that kind of stuff. But for whatever reason, LinkedIn, they're like, no, it's only for certain accounts. But then I look at every other account and they all have that. And I'm like, don't give me that BS.

Bradley Bernard (1:06:03)
Mmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (1:06:22)
So it's a shame that I end up getting hundreds of thousands of impressions. And I don't look at my website links or stats very much. But it'd be great. think I would have gotten more just purely just by basic common sense. I definitely would have gotten more visits to my site. There was a nice big button that said, visit my website on my profile. I know. Yeah, you got to talk to your folks over there because,

Bradley Bernard (1:06:34)
Mm-hmm.

We gotta fix that for you, for sure.

I'll talk to some people. Yeah, that's not right. You got to capture like all that effort you spent and all the virality. That's like untapped market. Like again, that comment that you're to put down there going to be great. Like having that view my website button. It's the funnel to like, get you more credit where credit is due. And I feel like you're not, you're not there yet. That's maybe the second step of the puzzle.

Bennett Bernard (1:07:08)
Yeah, because I had I was looking at this. I had like a thousand, almost eleven hundred people view the profile. And like, obviously, that's not all due to that post, but like that's definitely a lot from that post, I'm sure. Or or others from some similar posts. So because my next best one was like thirty five thousand impressions. So like this was a very clear like outlier. Yeah. And even that thirty five thousand was like still kind of an outlier. I think it tends to be around.

Bradley Bernard (1:07:18)
Mm-hmm. That is a lot,

Which is still a lot.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (1:07:35)
3 to 4,000, think, on my text-based ones.

Bradley Bernard (1:07:37)
Yeah, I think most of mine are like three to five thousand, which yeah, maybe I just don't write engaging content, but I also don't post as much as I would like.

Bennett Bernard (1:07:41)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it's it's definitely the one thing I'll say on this before we move on is When I've been posting I kind of like just do it like that day Like I don't I don't I'm not one that not yet I want to get there, but I'm not one to sit down and like okay. This is what's going out Monday It's going out Tuesday like I have a general like schedule But like I kind of come up with it on the fly. So like, you know here on you know Sunday You know, I want to kind of think about what I'm gonna write for the week

Bradley Bernard (1:08:03)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:08:13)
And then I'll be like, OK, I'm going to post on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. But like, kind of go into that day like with like an idea, but like not like a full post. And I'll just kind of write it. And I don't I'd be much better to kind of like set it and forget it. And I've done that here and there. But I just need to get better and more consistent at like making that a process, because sometimes it's like on the fly, which I think is good because I think the content is a bit more like, you know, like I'm not using chat to write anything.

I'll use it for an edit, just a quick grammar check, but not any actual content. But I do want to balance it a bit more where it's much more on a schedule that's consistent. Because I think that does help the algorithm a bit too. So I don't know. We'll see.

Bradley Bernard (1:08:38)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Well, last question for the kind of LinkedIn stuff. Do you think the success that you had for that one post pushes you to write more? Because I've heard lots of advice of like keep posting no matter what your metrics are. And I think that. Taylor is more to the folks who don't have these viral, you know, kind of posts.

Bennett Bernard (1:08:58)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:09:12)
Since you had one that did well, do you think you're like, I'm like way more bought in, or do you think that doesn't change your strategy? Cause when I was posting on TikTok and I just got defeat after defeat after defeat, I kind of stepped away and said, maybe this isn't for me. And I feel like you got to success rather quickly, which is awesome. And means you have a talent, skill there. Did that propel you to write more or didn't change anything?

Bennett Bernard (1:09:23)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

I definitely definitely was a more positive like pat on the back than like not getting it for sure I think in you know, cuz I sign about this with my wife because she's like, that's amazing Like that's that's super cool that you have that many people so I was watching it. It was like a hundred thousand I was like, that's really cool. And then like I'd come back like later in that day I was like 150,000 and like someone like two or three reposts and all of a like 200,000 so I kept going up and I remember being like, that's pretty cool But I was not like, you know, like I gotta do this again and again and again

Bradley Bernard (1:09:40)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (1:10:05)
Because especially I think that content was again, very geared towards like other accounting professionals. And like I, I love my fellow accounting professionals. Don't get me wrong, but like, you know, that's not like a customer. not like a, you know, it's not like a client. Like if I'm thinking about like, you know, my LinkedIn as like an area, like just to engage with like small businesses or just business owners in general, you know, that, that wasn't the audience for that post. So that's kind of where, you know, I was kind of saying like, I have kind of two kind of categories of posts.

Bradley Bernard (1:10:05)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:10:35)
And I think where I would be more like excited. And again, I don't want this to make it sound like I'm not excited about that post going as viral as did. I was really excited for sure. And it was cool to see so many fellow accountants. But yeah, this is a really important thing. Like I loved that kind of like, like, yeah, we are all on the same page here. But I think where like I would have been like more excited is like if people were like, you know, and if like small business owners like DMing me being like, this is awesome. Like, you know,

Bradley Bernard (1:10:57)
I

Bennett Bernard (1:11:05)
Like kind of being a bit more like than just like liking something or just like seeing it on their feet, like a bit more direct engagement. You know, I did have a lot of DMS. A lot of it was spam, which we'll talk about in my bookmark section. But that came out of that post. But yeah, it was definitely cool. I'm going to keep posting, I think, and I'll keep doing the mix of like probably accounting type things and then also kind of more like entrepreneurship and small business type things.

Bradley Bernard (1:11:17)
you

Bennett Bernard (1:11:31)
You know, and but, for me, I like kind of trying to post about things that are useful and add value to business owners. Like that's my like happier place. So like, you know, it's great to have the success with that. But I think for me, it was it wasn't like a grand slam, like euphoria. was like, this is cool. Let's keep going and, you know, just see where it leads kind of thing.

Bradley Bernard (1:11:50)
Mm-hmm. Okay, cool, cool. Sounds good. All right, well, let's wrap this up with bookmarks. So, mine on X is talking about the Huberman

blue light glasses. if you're a Huberman follower, he talks probably too much and tells you how to live your life. And he recently came out with blue light glasses. And as for someone who stares at the computer screen all day, I follow Nick Dobos, who I think was an iOS engineer on Twitter. And he did a review on a Huberman blue light blocking glasses and his TLDRs, they are quote unquote, legit. And he said, since wearing them, he dreams dramatically more.

I'm not sure if that's a success metric or not, but I'm always in the market for things that are going to improve my quality of life. And I've never done blue eyeglasses, even though I'm like staring at screens all day. So who knows? Maybe I'll give it a try. If you're a listener and you have them, please let us know if you like them. Because I can't really tell. Every time I see things on social media that are promoting a product in the back of my head, I'm like, is this guy getting paid? like, did he ever reach out to this guy because he has followers?

Bennett Bernard (1:12:55)
Yeah, yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:12:58)
Yeah, it's interesting. there's a Black Friday deal, maybe I'll try some, but anything for the health. I'm always like, hmm, maybe that's worth it.

Bennett Bernard (1:12:58)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, well, that's the thing people will spend money on. I can't remember the exact, there's like three things. It's like health, wealth, like, you know, so if you're helping them get healthier, they'll happily spend money on that. If you're helping them, you know, make more money, they'll, you know, that's people generally will spend for that. You know, if it's like, Hey, I can turn your business around and help help you make a hundred thousand dollars. You just got to pay me 5,000 people be like, yeah, I'm going take that deal all day. And I think the other one was like relationships. I think it was the third one. And so anyways, point being is that like, yeah, I'm with you. think health stuff is.

Bradley Bernard (1:13:25)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:13:34)
easier to spend on than like, you know, a new computer gadget or gizmo. I have had blue light glasses before, like just kind of like a generic Amazon brand one, because for a while I was getting really bad tension headaches. I still get them occasionally. And I thought that that was a culprit. found myself wearing them like inconsistently to really be able to get like a good sense of it was helping. But I think. And the reason I kind of stopped using this is years ago.

Bradley Bernard (1:13:39)
Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (1:14:00)
but I felt like I found the real culprit and it was definitely like these these kinds of headphones that I'm wearing right now. Yeah, like if I am on Zoom all day and I got these headphones on by the end of the day, like my neck and like I don't know it's because I like I lean forward or what I don't know what the issue is, but like my neck and like top of my head are just like so irritated. I got to take some Advil. So yeah, but yeah, mean, I think, you know, look, I know the Huberman hype and all the like the, you know, again, all the little

Bradley Bernard (1:14:04)
Interesting.

Thank

Bennett Bernard (1:14:29)
things that they're looking to sell you. you know, it's always like for me, if there's good studies behind it, because I think I'm guessing it's mostly targeting sleep, because I think that's when blue light glasses are supposed to kind of really help. And sleep is super important, like for sure. So if that's if you have a problem with sleep and you feel like you're not getting enough or not getting enough quality of sleep, then, you know, it's definitely worth it worth a shot to at least try it, because that's not something you want to kind of skimp out on, I think. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:14:38)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can use Ben's coupon code, ben20off on the Huberman Live glasses and pick yourself up a pair. There you go.

Bennett Bernard (1:14:59)
Yeah, Ben 10, 10 % off. There you go. Try it. Let me know if it works. Yeah, cool. I have two bookmarks. I'll do the LinkedIn junk one first, because I kind of alluded to it in the spam when we were just talking about the post. So one thing I didn't realize until posting on LinkedIn was just how much, like just pure

complete spam there is on the platform. And I think every platform has this problem. So I'm not picking on LinkedIn. But wow, when you start putting yourself out there and like you're just not like a generic account, the amount of DMs that you get are just like astounding. And it's obviously very automated, like the vast majority of them. Or then also to there's a lot of people that are like just looking for work. And it's almost like I feel like Upwork, you know, that platform where you can like bid on jobs, stuff like that. Like it's almost like

I post this stuff and then like literally thousands, maybe hundreds of people like are in my DMs being like looking for work or like asking if I need any help with my business, which I'm not promoting a business. So I could kind of, you know, like, where are you getting that from? Are you just like completely cold emailing me? So it's a lot for sure. And then so my bookmark was a post by and I'm not familiar with this person at all. It was like on my feed through someone else liking it.

And the professional's name is Priscilla McKinney. I have no idea who she is or what she's about, but she has a period in front of her name. And she posts this like a recent post as of today, 11, 24. She has a post about people ask me all the time why I have a period in front of my name on LinkedIn. And she posts a screenshot. And basically, it's all these DMS saying hi. And that has dot Priscilla. So it's like so basically like it's taking.

the template of like, hi, first name, and then it's like some prompt. And so because she has a period in her name, she can easily see what's just a automated prompt-based outreach versus a true human reaching out to you. So yeah, I thought I was pretty smart and pretty funny. just cold outreach to me in this day and age just seems like such a low.

Bradley Bernard (1:17:01)
That's pretty smart.

Bennett Bernard (1:17:12)
has to be such a low ROI, but people are still doing it. And like I said, I'm getting spammed for my business that I don't have. I'm not promoting anything on LinkedIn or any kind of business, but yet I'm getting all these weird offers for accounting and bookkeeping, outsourced accounting out of the country. Yeah, like it's a lot. So I thought that was pretty funny. So that was my first bookmark. And then the other one, this is actually one I thought was really, like this is not a silly bookmark.

Bradley Bernard (1:17:26)
They're shooting their shot.

Bennett Bernard (1:17:39)
It's from Matt Wilkinson, who I think is a website builder in, I think he's in New Zealand or something, but it's specifically for accountants. And he just has some things about, like, you know, your website needs to be simpler, like just add some real photos, have less text, have less menu, simple calls to action. And I thought it was a good post just to remind people that, like, I think back in the day, I had this thought or this philosophy that, like, you needed to have, like,

certain pages on your website, like you need to have an about me and then you needed to have like our services and that services you need to have like three or four different things with like stock images of skyscrapers in like, I think that's kind of old school and you know, he's much more like focused on hosting or focused on like social proof. Make sure that your hosting is good so you have faster a faster website. So I thought it was just a good post and a nice reminder to like simplify.

Bradley Bernard (1:18:17)
You

Bennett Bernard (1:18:34)
focus on social proof, have less busyness. People just can easily see what you're about and what you provide. And it's actually very similar to that growing a story brand marketing book that I've been reading. So it's very along the same vein. so bookmarked it and thought it was a good post for my own personal website to update when I have some time.

Bradley Bernard (1:18:55)
Yeah. And things change over time. I was looking at Instapromote, just for the last pod, there's a way back when machine kind of the internet archive and I could see the original homepage of Instapromote, I unfollow and I use this kind of bought HTML theme. thought it looked really good. And obviously when you look at things that are 10 plus years old, it looks terrible. And so talking about like simplifying your website and understanding the kind of core values and pages that should exist.

Whatever you look at today might be very relevant and like be the trends and who knows in a year or two, could be vastly, vastly different.

Bennett Bernard (1:19:31)
Yeah, sorry folks that are, yeah, I'm getting some, my windows open, I'm getting some audio noise, but that's a great segue, because I think it's time to wrap this sucker up. So I'll take that as my cue to exit. yeah, good stuff as always, Brad. And yeah, we'll wrap this one up. Enjoy your Thanksgiving and yeah, I will talk to you later.

Bradley Bernard (1:19:31)
Are you good over there? Okay.

Yep.

Sounds good.

See you next time.