Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Welcome to the Rogue Startups Podcast, where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 2 00:00:20 All right, welcome to Rogue Startups, episode 2 77. Craig, how are you doing?
Speaker 3 00:00:27 Uh, I'm not doing great, man. I gotta tell you, <laugh>, I picked my son up from the bus stop today and was greeted to questions about Dungeons and Dragons from him. And so,
Speaker 2 00:00:41 Dude, this sounds like a net
Speaker 3 00:00:42 Positive. Come on. I am mean <laugh>. I am gonna have to break down and join the, what do you call, a Dungeon and Dragons group, Dave, I know you're into it.
Speaker 2 00:00:52 Uh, is this a
Speaker 3 00:00:54 Joker question or, uh, whatever you call it. Um,
Speaker 2 00:00:59 Yeah, I don't, I I didn't just usually a d
Speaker 3 00:01:02 D group. Yeah. So, I mean, he is,
Speaker 2 00:01:04 It doesn't have a special,
Speaker 3 00:01:05 He's over at his friend's house right now, like talking about it, and I don't even know. Like I, I have no idea other than what I've seen in Stranger Things. And so I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to convert, I think, and figure this stuff out so I can play with him. So it's a, it's a weird day around here, man. Oh,
Speaker 2 00:01:22 Dude, I am so excited for you, <laugh>. I'm so excited for you. Dungeons and Dragons is awesome. Now I get that not everybody's totally into d and d and there's a wide variety of reasons why it might not be, you know, your cup of tea. But yeah, I mean, I always enjoy the imaginary aspect, the character creation, the role playing aspect, and then, you know, honestly, combat was always a lot of fun for me. Beaten the shit out, you know, invisible monsters that don't really exist. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:01:55 Yeah. So <laugh>, yeah, I, I mean, I have a lot of like, uh, ill conceived notions, I'm sure just, you know, uh, of, of what it means. But he's super into it and I'm not surprised. He's just a big, like, video game kid. Uh, so the fact that he wants to do stuff in person with actual people that live in our town, <laugh> is amazing. So Yeah. We'll, we'll call that a net win <laugh>. Yeah. So, oh, that is the highlight of my, uh, my last few days for sure.
Speaker 2 00:02:22 That's awesome, man. How about
Speaker 3 00:02:24 You? That's awesome. How are,
Speaker 2 00:02:24 Thanks. Yeah. Uh, things are good here. Yeah, I haven't been skiing actually since big snow and I had to miss a weekend because we had some house maintenance stuff kind of go sideways and I had to deal with that instead of not, uh, not go skiing, but yeah, it's, uh, it's good. Um, no, uh, no mass d and d events around here. In fact, we kind of stopped doing that, uh, after Covid. That was like a, that was a Covid activity on Sundays where we would all hang out and I got to be the DM for the family. Okay. Uh, and, and even my wife played, if you believe
Speaker 3 00:03:01 That. Oh, nice.
Speaker 2 00:03:01 Okay. So, yeah. And of course the kids loved it. She always played this, uh, this wizard and she wasn't, she didn't know a lot of the spells, so there was like one spell that she could cast all the time. And so, you know, she was always asking me, why should I cast? I'm like, use Ray of Frost. And so she's like rolling to, to do the Ray of Frost thing, and it would always miss, cuz you have to roll to see if you hit something. And then, so I would have to make up something, oh, you froze the side of the cave. Or look, you froze a tree over there. Or
Speaker 3 00:03:33 <laugh>,
Speaker 2 00:03:34 Uh, oh, you've coated the road with ice or something to the kids would just peel over with laughter because they were like, and after a while it got to be this chant freeze that tree <laugh> freeze that tree. But yeah, no, nothing, nothing like that.
Speaker 3 00:03:48 Nice, nice. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, I think I wanna talk about two things today. Uh, one being, uh, I'll say hiring f uh, above and hiring below, right? And, and the other is conferences. Hiring above and below is like a metaphor that I heard from Dan Martel recently. So he has a new book, buy Back Your Time, which is supposedly really good. My copy of it is coming tomorrow from Amazon. Um, talking about like hiring executive assistants and, and folks, you know, to help you. And the, the concept here is what a lot of folks do is, you know, you wanna do more marketing. So instead of freeing up your time to do more marketing, you go hire a marketing person, right? Or you hire a product person, you hire a salesperson, whatever. Whereas another option, I dunno if it's right or wrong, it's just a different approach is hiring someone to free up more of your time so you can do these high leverage things.
Speaker 3 00:04:40 So like hiring below is, is the term, and that, that doesn't sound right. But, um, not to replace this activity for you, which is highly like hiring both, but to free up more of your time. So you as like the founder who arguably are like best at a lot of these things can, can do these high leverage activities. And so like, yeah, I don't have an answer for it. I'm kind of exploring this paradigm a little bit. Um, because like I do need some help in kind of sales and marketing activities and am exploring the options of, of like marketing help or, uh, something like an executive assistant, uh, to free up more of my time to do that. So it's really just a question and kind of posing this philosophical approach to, uh, you know, getting, getting more good stuff in our business. Um, but, but that's kind of one question I'm asking myself these days. I don't know if that sparks any thoughts, Dave?
Speaker 2 00:05:31 Uh, it does. So, uh, you know, we, uh, we kind of mentioned this I think last time about Dan Martel's book being based on the work of Dan Sullivan and I've been reading more about all of the, the background stuff that Dan Sullivan has, the four Cs, the gap and the gain and stuff like that. Well, one of the, the things that is, uh, that really has resonated with me recently is, and it kind of goes into the, the, the buy back your time concept here, but it's about optimizing your time in a way that makes you more productive. And so, what do I mean by that? I mean that he's got a concept of basically three types of days. So there's like free days where you just do whatever the hell you want and usually that's some non-business activity. And then you've got focus days where you're, you're working on the one thing that you really need deep, long-term, you know, intense focus for.
Speaker 2 00:06:32 So for something like that, you're talking about like multi hours, no meetings, no interruptions, uh, stuff like that to get something really intense done, whether that's a research project or you're doing some writing of some kind or whatever. And then in between those two are like buffer days where you're doing prep or cleaning things up after a focus day. And those days are the ones where you're, you know, doing little tidbits of things here and there running, uh, particular errands or maybe you're doing some personal stuff in there as well to kind of catch up on, you know, your personal finances or your, you know, whatever it it takes for you to kind of get your house in order, uh, in general, so to speak. And so I'm trying to organize my days right now in terms of those things, mostly around the buffer and the focus days.
Speaker 2 00:07:26 Cuz I've noticed, like for example, Mondays, there's just no fucking way Yeah. I have ever been able to focus on a Monday. Yeah. Never. It just, it, it can't happen. And the reason is that there's just stuff that piles up over the weekend, whether that's questions from my team or issues with customers or other stuff that just arrived between Friday night or Monday morning, uh, something like that or something that I thought about over the weekend and now I need to go do something about that to move it forward so that the team can take care of it. I, you know, any one of those things can happen, but the end result is Monday is just shit for being focused about anything. It's just, for me it's about cleaning off the plate and catching up so that the rest of the week is productive in some form or another.
Speaker 2 00:08:12 So now Monday's like my effective buffer day every single week. And then I'm trying to find like between Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, which one is my best focus day. And then Fridays are a free day for me, cuz that's when I go do stuff over at my mom's house, um, to take care of her since my dad has passed last year. So yeah, I mean, I've got, you know, I'm trying to like structure my week and think about stuff in those terms to try to make the business move forward as best as possible, but at the same time keep my sanity and, uh, you know, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So, so yeah, I mean that, that, that buy back your time means, means quite a bit to me right now because I feel like time is definitely my most scarce resource right now mm-hmm. <affirmative>,
Speaker 2 00:08:57 Uh, even more so than money because I just, you know, I'm, I'm already limited. I have a four day week work week, and I'm also limited in terms of like my ending part of the day. I'm usually the one dealing with driving kids to various activities or picking 'em up from their activities in the afternoon. Yeah. So, you know, I don't, I don't get to work until six, seven at night. Uh, I get to work until four, maybe five in the afternoon tops, and then I've gotta go deal with that other stuff. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that puts a real hard stop and having those constraints is actually very interesting to make me, it forces me to be more productive. Like when I, whereas I used to just find time to fuck around with stuff where I'd get lost in random tangents or something and I'd be like, oh, uh, that wasn't what I was supposed to work on a couple hours later. And now I'm sort of like with the productivity planner that I've got on my desk, kind of keeping me on task and, you know, what's the one thing you need to accomplish today that always being able to come back to that and go, oh yeah, that's not part of my most important task. All right. Setting that aside for now. Maybe we'll get to work on that later when I get this other thing done. Yeah. So that kind of stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:10:07 Yeah. I, I, I am, uh, I'm getting closer I guess in terms of my, uh, my schedule about six weeks ago, maybe two months ago, um, I blocked off completely, uh, Tuesdays and Fridays for any kind of calls in internal or customer calls. Um, and so Monday, Wednesday and Thursday are super intense. I probably have eight calls each day at least. Like if I, if I showed you my calendar, you'd vomit <laugh>, but, but it's, you know, one-on-ones with customer, uh, with our team, uh, team calls like the dev team or support team or, you know, we have a all hands call Mondays and then just like sales calls and partner calls and stuff like that. Yeah. But then Tuesday and Friday are completely open and so yeah, that's when I do a lot of like content stuff and strategy and process and stuff like that. And that's really nice. It's just, yeah, I'm the same way. My, my schedule in my time is just crazy these days and so like, I, I just need more time. And, um, yeah. So just evaluating the best, most effective way, way to do that, um, right now and don't have an answer. It's a work in progress, but we'll report back when, when I have an answer, I guess.
Speaker 2 00:11:14 Nice. Nice. Yeah, I'll be interested to hear what that, what that kind of turns into you
Speaker 3 00:11:18 For you. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that, that I'm thinking about is conferences. I've, I've heard a lot of talk about conferences from, and, and, and I, I think we should clarify, I'm not talking necessarily about a microcom or a, a entrepreneur kind of conference, founder conference talking about like industry conferences. Yeah. I know some people love them and have a ton of success with them, and they're very profitable for, uh, for certain people in certain industries in terms of certain types of businesses. And I've just, just never really done 'em. Like I've been to the big podcasting conference called podcast movement once, it was three years, four years ago. Got pre pre covid, right? So four years ago, I guess, and I'm considering going again this year and just like having the back of my mind, like other people I talked to in the industry with similar kinds of businesses as mine, uh, saying how like they just, they don't get much outta conferences.
Speaker 3 00:12:16 That's how I felt for the large part the last time I went. But don't wanna like, have blinders on and be missing something that's like really obvious. Uh, cause I know like a ton of people will get an enormous amount of value outta conferences. And so I'm just kind of trying to like, be critical of my own thinking and say like, Hey, what, how can I make a conference valuable? Uh, because like I don't go to any otherwise and that's not cool. Yeah. So I guess like, Dave, the question is like, do you go to industry conferences? Do you find them valuable either way? Like how do you approach them? How do you set 'em up? Do you have meetings? Do you go to the talks? Like, what, what's the story?
Speaker 2 00:12:50 Oh, boy. You know, I've been to a lot of different industry ish conferences in both email marketing, e-commerce, and, you know, stuff for the plugins and all of them are very different. Uh, you know, the first comment that I really wanna make is that it is fucking hard to find a really valuable conference of that, of that kind. I've not, it, it seems like, and, and I'm drawing from not just my experience, but the experience of other peers of ours that we know. It, it is a rare thing to hear of somebody who goes to a conference and finds it wildly valuable from a business perspective. Yeah. A lot of times I hear that people will go and either they don't, they go without a plan, and that almost always ends in disaster. If they go with a plan, the plan doesn't always happen. And then those that go with a plan and execute and come back with a ton of leads, those are like the unicorns of our peer group.
Speaker 2 00:13:58 Uh, I know it does happen, but it doesn't seem to be the most common experience. So I think, yeah, I mean, I, there's probably a lot of stuff at work here, but, you know, I can, I'm only gonna talk about my personal experience on those conferences because that makes the most sense here and it's the one I can speak with, uh, the, the most conviction, I guess. Yeah. And in this particular case, uh, you know, we'll go back to the WordPress space first. So, you know, I used to attend WordPress conferences, like PressNomics, um, word camps, stuff like that. And when I was selling the plugins, I thought that, I thought that I would go and connect potentially with other customers. Now, of course, that didn't happen. That's not who was mostly attending these conferences. It was either agencies or other plug-in and theme developers.
Speaker 2 00:14:50 So what I ended up doing more than I did with the customers was communi, was connect with other people that were kind of doing the same thing that I was. But even that wasn't quite a perfect match because I found that many of those conferences, you know, I would talk to other people and in the WordPress space in particular, you know, making money was in, in many cases still is kind of like a dirty little topic. They don't, they don't wanna talk about business, they don't wanna talk about how to make their business better. They just want to talk about the utopia that is WordPress and, uh, open source development and, you know, community and a bunch of other stuff. And, you know, I don't hear me, hear me clearly here. I don't have a problem with any of those things. And I think that they were all valuable in and of themselves, but, you know, those weren't the things I was struggling with. I was struggling with trying to run a business and make it grow. So I wanted to talk to other people about that. And I didn't find a ton of people that did that. And so there was like one conference where I did find that was more of a focus, and then the last time I went to it, they didn't hold it after that. Oh, wow. Okay. <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:16:01 Now with that said, it, it wasn't like I was generating a ton of business from that conference. I was just connecting with people in the space. So there were some valuable, you know, valuable relationships that were being built as a result of that. And I think that's valuable too. And, you know, that's what I mostly get outta Microcom at this point as well, but when it comes to, you know, trying to find other people to use and or promote recapture, like that's not an easy thing to find. I went to Shopify Unite, and it was mostly Shopify app devs. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> and there were a few agencies there. And I actually went with the intent one year, uh, in fact, was it my first or second year? I think it was my first year, I went with the intent of trying to connect with agency partners.
Speaker 2 00:16:51 And so, you know, I went in there with guns a blazing, aggressively trying to get contacts, and then I followed it up afterwards. I had a list of 13 agencies that I had talked to when I was there. I got exactly zero response from all of them afterwards. Like, they're just, there wasn't any good synergy there. Right. You know, it was like I was asking them to marry me on the first date. Yeah. It was totally, it was not the appropriate response. So, you know, the, like, like a lot of things out there, I think stuff like this becomes a very slow burn because the one, the conferences where I've gotten the most value out of, and the conferences where I either didn't necessarily have an agenda but just went to connect with other people and have a good time, those ones have slowly blossomed into other more interesting things.
Speaker 2 00:17:41 But going to a conference with a specific, I'm gonna get X number of customers, I wanna try to get certain number of leads or, you know, set up a bunch of meetings or stuff like that, like that, that has had less success for me. The, the things that I think were more successful were like going to Microcom for 10 years and then having kind of some established relationships, established presence there. And then I hosted like an e-commerce dinner where I got to connect with other folks that either ran stores or developed other apps, and then we could all sort of swap tips. And from that, you know, I got other people to go to masterminds and, uh, you know, connect and, and hang out with at big snow or stuff like that. But yeah, I mean, in terms of like getting a hard ROI out of a conference, especially like the first time you attend it, I feel like that's a fucking unicorn man. Yeah. Like, I, I just don't know people that do that. I, I mean, that's not true. I do know one guy that does it, but I think he's the
Speaker 3 00:18:41 Unicorn. Yeah. <laugh>. And, and I think that it's a great, it, the, the, the way or scenario that I would try to optimize conferences is if I was probably like this example, you're thinking about a, a type of business that is like a b like a real B2B play or where I needed a bunch of integration partners, uh, that I don't know or can't get in touch with and, and a conference is the only way that I could get like, exposure to them. I, I think that's, that's really good. Um, I think selling to agencies at a conference, maybe where agencies would be there seems reasonable. Like, I understand why you did that, because you can't get in front of agencies otherwise they get sold to all the time by, by people like us. And, you know, the interesting thing about like, and you know, okay, so I me preface all this <laugh> or, or have a disclaimer around all of this with, I hope folks listening have better suggestions <laugh> for me, because I feel like I just don't see the value at all.
Speaker 3 00:19:41 So like, if you go to conferences and you have a lot of value that you get from 'em, please let us know. Hit us up on Twitter so that, uh, so that we can get enlightened. But um, yeah, I feel like if you go in there trying to get customers, you have like zero chance, even if you're spending a hundred grand on a booth and a thing and a person, whatever, like no chance, right. Because at least for me, and I think like the WordPress example and, and even like, I don't know about Shopify Unite, but like very few customers go to those, you know, with, with the I intent of like, Hey, I'm gonna go find podcast hosting, or I'm gonna go find, uh, you know, an email, email, you know, uh, marketing solution or whatever. Um, I think they're going there for much bigger picture things, uh, with, with like whatever their interest is.
Speaker 3 00:20:24 Um, so like finding customers probably not gonna happen. Um, finding like partners I think could happen. Um, but like all of our businesses are online so we can just find those people online and, and chat with 'em. Like, I don't, I don't know that like, it's worth going to a conference just for that. Like, if you're going anyhow, yeah, that's probably the best, um, like tangible thing you could hope to get out of it. And, and that will be me. Like, so, so the two conferences I'm, I'm looking at is like, there's a big podcasting conference called podcast Movement. Uh, should I go to that or not? I don't know. Like I'm, I'm coming up in the air. I, I think I probably won't just cuz I don't, I don't need to partner with a whole bunch of people. Like we're, we're good. You know, we like, we have all the partnerships that we, that we need.
Speaker 3 00:21:08 And anybody else I can just get in touch with. We probably are going to Word Camp Europe, um, because it will be around our team retreat. And that's what I had told the team that we would do is we're going to Greece, uh, and we'll have our retreat a couple of days before Word Camp Europe and a couple of folks will stay for Word Camp with me and I'll meet all the folks from Automatic that I've just talked to on the phone and stuff and that. But that's like just partnership stuff. Like I don't have any intentions of getting Right. Seriously similar podcasting plugin users, <laugh>, you know, out of that or anything. But, um, like, I'm gonna be there anyhow, the goal for me is like meeting a bunch of industry folks and hopefully having like partnership opportunities.
Speaker 2 00:21:44 Well, you, you also asked like, should, should we attend the talks or do I attend the talks? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. And you know, uh, I, I didn't answer that question before, but when you were talking about stuff, everything that we've discussed here at this point doesn't involve going to those talks if you noticed that, right? Yes. Yep. And so I did try to do that at Shopify Unite. Like I did go to some of the sessions, but I, I pretty much found that the hallway track talking to other people and making those relationship connections and things like that was way more valuable than actually sitting there listening to the content. Uh, the content just wasn't that valuable to me because first of all, it was a conference designed to talk about tech stuff for developers. I'm not the developer on recapture. Right? Yeah. So I'm sitting here listening to them talking about the latest API changes here for coupons. And I'm like, yeah, I don't really fucking care <laugh>.
Speaker 3 00:22:40 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:22:41 Uh, it's great that you did that, but I, I really don't care. And you know, there were ones that were other less technical sessions, but I felt that those were equally as, you know, not valued for me where I was at. Uh, and I thought, you know, I attended them just because I thought it would maybe help me, you know, meet somebody, break the ice and, you know, talk about afterwards, oh, you remember that talk when they were talking about the coupons api? What did you think about? Um, yeah, that didn't, it really had nothing, it was more interesting to just have organic conversations and the same was true of PressNomics. Like I, I just didn't gravitate to the talks and mostly was hanging out, uh, outside talking with the other devs at that point. Yeah. So in terms of like going to the conferences for the talks, if you're going there to make relationships and make connections, the talks are generally not where that's at.
Speaker 2 00:23:33 Yeah. Uh, and yeah, and when I, even when I went to uns spam this last year, like one of the, uh, I was a speaker so I kind of had to go to my own talk. Right. And out of courtesy I went to some of the other speakers talks cuz I was interested in what they had to say and then their particular content. Uh, and for me it was also kind of a bonding thing with the other speakers mm-hmm. <affirmative> because they came to my talk and I was trying to go to their talks, uh, so we could talk about their stuff afterwards, which was interesting. But one of the talks I did miss, and I was actually kind of bummed about this because it was regarded as one of the better talks there, but at the time I didn't, I didn't find that that was a problem because I ended up connecting with this one woman who was like super deeply connected into the whole email marketing community in ways I had never thought of.
Speaker 2 00:24:22 And so we were talking about, you know, uh, all kinds of email technical stuff about S P F records and DKM setup and block lists and uh, you know, spam house and all these providers and firewall algorithms. It was a super interesting, super amazing conversation. And then that led to some other things later. But I totally missed a talk for that. And at the end, you know, I felt a little bit guilty that I missed the talk, but at the same time I thought that was one of the most valuable pieces of that conference for me was sitting there and talking with her for that hour, hour or so that we ended up chatting about all that stuff. Yeah. So, yeah, I I think that the talks, you know, the talks have value, but maybe if you're going there as a B2B SaaS, I don't know that that's gonna be where you're gonna get your primary roi.
Speaker 3 00:25:14 Yeah. Yep. For sure. For sure. And I think that like alternatively like an approach that, that I've heard some folks do is, you know, go to the conference city but don't register and attend the conference at all. Right? So just have lunch and breakfast and dinner meetings, uh, and, and do that for a couple days and, and just don't go to the conference. And so I think that's, I think that's valid if you, if you're saying that like networking is the, the highest leverage used of your time, you know, save yourself the thousand bucks <laugh> of registering for the conference that you're not gonna attend anyhow and just set up, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner meetings for three days in a row. And, and like that's probably very reasonable.
Speaker 2 00:25:51 Yeah. If you've got an alternate way to connect with either the attendees or maybe you just already know some folks that are there and you wanna meet with customers or something like that, you know, that, that's great. And you know, I will say that they're, the one example that I do know of, it's our friend Charles who runs Spark Shipping, and he goes to conferences where his customers literally hang out and, you know, it turns out that there are, you know, at least a half a dozen different types of those conferences. And then of among those half a dozen different categories, if you will, then there's like, you know, at least one, maybe two conferences per vertical per year where all of his customers are just hanging out there. So all he has to do is go and talk and then he can meet people that he can literally go and sign up. I mean, I'm so jealous when I hear him talk about that because I would love to be able to just walk up to people at a conference and say, Hey, would you like to sign up for Recapture? Yeah. Because he can and does, like, he, he gets customers from that and he's trying to like turn it into an actual sales channel exploring that more deeply. But yeah, that's like a super awesome thing. But I also think it's totally rare.
Speaker 3 00:27:02 Yeah, I think so. I think so. Yeah. I I think it's one of the, you know, what it almost kind of reminds me of is that it's, I mean, it's a marketing channel, right? It's a customer acquisition business development channel. And if you're starting from a dead stop and expecting to take this to be a substantial part of your business without much effort, you're, you're probably not gonna see it. So I think to me, the question is like, do I want to invest the time and energy and money to develop this into a thing? Or do I have better things to do with my limited time and resources? Um, I don't know the answer to it, right? Cause I, I think it has value and, and could be a really interesting aspect of, of how we grow the business. Uh, but I'm not convinced that it's the best one.
Speaker 3 00:27:41 So, but honestly, like what I said before, like you and I are just two perspectives on this and as every, as with everything. And so I'd love to hear from folks maybe like Charles or or others who, who approach conferences in unique ways and get a lot of value at it. Like hit us up on Twitter and, and tell us about it. And, and like we'd love to like, you know, chat through your experiences on the next episode or something. Cause I think this is something, uh, an approach to kind of business growth and development that we don't talk a lot about or I don't talk a lot about. Um, and so it'd be cool to get other perspectives of folks who do better than Dave, you or I, uh, at this. So that would be cool.
Speaker 2 00:28:17 Well, that's certainly shouldn't
Speaker 3 00:28:18 Be hard. <laugh>. There you
Speaker 2 00:28:19 Go. And as always, the one ask that we have of everybody out there is, if you found what we are saying valuable, then please share it with somebody else you think would benefit. And if you have a minute, uh, please give us a review on iTunes. We'd love to hear from you there as well. Until next time,
Speaker 1 00:28:37 Thanks for listening to another episode of Rogue Startups. If you haven't already, head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show. For show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey, head over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
