Business Hacks & Epic Wins – Mike Taber – MicroConf 2014

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0:07[Music] I've got five different topics that I'm gonna be talking about today the five of them touch on different things that I've worked on or accomplished over the past year and I've got some graphs and things that I want to show you about some of the the ways that some of this stuff works and how it has worked out for me and if you guys have questions obviously feel free to follow up with me either at the end of the talk or at the conference going forward so I'll be talking about social media financial automation content and SEO automation and then also a little bit about personal development

0:39and overall health so the first one is about Twitter automation and I've actually gotten some comments recently in questions about how I've grown the audit shark Twitter following from what it was before to which was virtually nothing up to about 16 to 1,700 Twitter followers in the past six to eight months so I'm gonna talk about that first and one of the first things that comes to mind is why would you even have a Twitter following what does what good does it do for you and really the idea behind having a Twitter following is that it helps expand your footprint so if you're talking to people and you're

1:12getting them to follow your account then you can tweet out to them and you can create personal interactions with people so if you see somebody who follows your account and you can look at their profile a little bit you can find out what sorts of industries they're in specifically what they do and you kind of backtrack a little bit so if you're launching a product and you have people following your Twitter account you can backtrack that and essentially do some customer development and it's really really helpful for that because people who follow you on Twitter tend to be I'll say much more in some ways social about it but they are not

1:42necessarily reined in by you know corporate politics so especially just people in general using Twitter so you have these concentric circles you've got the people who are following you and then you've got people who you can kind of use as prospects and in on the inner circle you can look at some some of those people as customers now some people will start out as a customer and then they kind of end up following you but that's not necessarily always the case but the idea is you really want to be able to build those concentric circles to help bring in an audience for your product so this is what the auto

2:15shark Twitter following looked like last year so you can see in the bottom left January of 2013 all the way up to August of 2013 it's probably not too different than most Twitter accounts that you see if you go out there you start following some people and trying to interact with people this is generally what the graph usually looks like so last August and August is an important month and I'll talk about that in a little bit but August I decided to do something a little bit different I started doing some experimentation to try and figure out how I can grow the Twitter following and what sorts of

2:44things that I can use for it and this right here is kind of the result of that experiment so what I did is I experimented for about a month or so between August and September and I said okay well what can I do to grow this Twitter following and I totally blatantly ripped this off from neil patel so don't I can't take credit for it for this strategy but it does work and you can see that from August to September I went from was a hundred and eighty-three followers to three hundred and fifty-two so I very nearly doubled it in one month I don't have the exact date so it wasn't

3:16like I started on the first and ended on the 31st or anything like that it was probably mid to late August when I started and probably somewhere in the middle of September that I ended it and then I backed off for month kind of worked on other things and then I came back to it and I just kind of put an automation process in place and you can see kind of what the results of that are I went from 371 in October to 8 44 in November 11 29 in December and then 14 47 in January and then in February to March timeframe I basically backed off

3:45of that more partly to see what would happen but also because I wanted to you know kind of focus on some other things that I was doing so if you start taking a look at the numbers on the far left side what you'll see is the number of followers monthly growth and you'll you can just look at the percentages they're probably as I said the first nine months so that your first eight months that you're pretty similar to what you would probably see if you just created a Twitter Twitter account and then for the next six to eight months what you see is a pretty massive growth rate on any time

4:15that I put some time and effort into it so the question you have here is what what happened what did I go about doing and does it have to do with the number of tweets you make does it have to do with retweets anything like that this is the number of tweets per month that the auto shark account put out there and you can see that there are some spikes here and there but generally speaking it's between about a hundred and sixty month and about two twenty to thirty there one month where it's like 268 but not terribly common so based on this graph there's not really a correlation there

4:44next one is number of retweets so is the content getting better and if you look at this until about November it doesn't really spike and then it's December backs down a little bit and then it kind of continues back up and I have some theories as to why some of that happened which I'll talk about in a couple minutes but you can see that the retweets aren't really relevant and then you can see the number of mentions again it's not really a huge correlation between what the number of followers is versus you know what the content is that I'm actually putting out there so the key piece of

5:19this though is in order to build an audience on Twitter the easiest way to do it that I found is to actually just follow people like brutally follow people left and right and it works really well so for every 100 people you follow you will gain roughly between 15 and 25 new followers and what you can do is you can essentially put a process in place where you follow and unfollow people as they interact with you so you follow a hundred people a day and then after seven or eight days if they haven't followed you back then you unfollow them and essentially move on to another group of hundred people and

5:51there's easy ways to kind of automate this process a little bit so here are some of the tools that I use to do that the first one is HootSuite which HootSuite is kind of a material you can use pretty much anything you want but I used to sweet just so that I could give access to my Twitter all of my Twitter accounts to the my assistant who lives in New York and so she could basically manage sending out all the tweets and you know following up with people and thanking them and everything else and then the next one is tweet adder tweet adder I'll talk about that in a minute

6:21it's a one-time fee it's you know $75 or so to buy the product and you get to manage up to 5 Twitter accounts and then the last one is Google Docs so Google Docs I use that more or less for collaboration with my assistant who manages all the interactions with the Twitter followers and basically document the the process for doing that so that if she ever leaves then I can have somebody else pick that up and there's a documented process of you know what to do how to do it etc this is a screenshot of the the tweet adder interface and in the top left what

6:53you'll see is there's a there's an area where it talks about following people so you can create lists the people that you're going to follow back based on what sorts of things are interested in you can do searches you can add them to a list and essentially you can add them to this follow later list and what that does is over on the right-hand side and it's not on the right screen but on the right hand side top right you'll see where it says unfollow and then whitelist if you're on the list to follow back later then if somebody is on that list it will step right there that button

7:23will say follow and you can just sit there and click on that button and what it'll do is just follow you know whoever every time you click the button it follows a different person and then that person kind of drops off it's very quick very easy to do one thing you do have to be a little careful of is that when you're dealing with Twitter you do have to follow their rules so when Twitter has some pretty strict policies around you know not automatically following people and if you do this too quickly what will happen is it will look to Twitter like it's being done in an

7:50automated fashion the reason tweet adder works is because it is not automated you are actually physically clicking a button to do each individual follow so it's essentially getting around that it's kind of like government policies you're just kind of sidestepping it as soon as they change the rules but like I said it does work and then down below you've got this system where all these options are around unfollowing people so when you unfollow somebody what you can do is you essentially just wait and I think this is the right screen at the bottom there it says hide users who were followed within the last seven days so

8:23you essentially give them time to follow you back and if they're not interested then you can essentially drop them and then go follow somebody else instead who might be interested and it's not necessarily about specifically picking up customers it's about finding people who are willing to interact with you and are interested in the types of things that you have to say if they're not interested in the stuff that you have to say you know it may very well be that you're not necessarily interested in the things that they're interested in and if there's not a match then there's not a match it's not really that big a deal so

8:51really what you're trying to do is you set up this repeatable process in place so you've identified the people who you are interested in following you do it by keywords you can search and you can do all this in side of tweet adder it's very very simple to do you can identify basically heroes in whatever particular industry so you can say I'm gonna if it's a security you might say I'm gonna follow Bruce Schneier and you follow him and you can tell the software to go look at all of his users and all of his followers and add them to this list of people that you're going to follow

9:23because if they follow him chances are good that they're interested in security and if they are then possibly they would be interested in the audit shark account for example because it's related to security so you set up these lists and then you basically go through this process of following and unfollowing people on a fairly regular basis as I said you don't want to step over the bounds when you're looking at Twitter's policies you do want to make sure that you are adhering to some general guidelines so the first guideline is that you don't want to follow too many people all in one shot you also don't

9:52want to unfollow too many people in one shot either one of those things twitter looks at that frowns on it a little bit what I found is about a hundred people per day seems to work pretty well if you do the math on that you can kind of backtrack to some of those graphs that I showed you earlier and what you'll find is a hundred people a day as I said it comes out to about 50 somewhere between 15 and 25 new followers every single day and then you know that's how fast your Twitter following will grow a couple of other things to keep in mind is that you

10:28do want to provide like legitimate interactions with people you do want to provide value to them it's not just about gathering Twitter followers it's not just about you know gaining noir notoriety for your Twitter account you do want to interact with them talk to them make sure that you are providing value the stream of information that essentially gets tweeted out from the auto shark account right now there's a list of security websites that I went to and basically put together a list and have my assistant go through those and look for interesting stories that are kind of relevant to the product and if you're interested in that particular

11:01industry you've got this list of stories the basically gets tweeted out they're all news sites so and chances are really good that they probably would have missed those new sites anyway so essentially I'm providing them relevant information the second thing is you also want to as I you want to thank them for you know following you I mean it's not it's not uncommon to at least have some form of interaction you don't want to just ignore the people who are following you because really realistically you are kind of doing them favor or they are kind of doing you a favor so if you execute this correctly what happens is

11:32three things and you'll see let's see here what's Dustin Koch I'm Dustin I work in the security field I enjoy my friends my laid-back style and I'm looking for a job in law enforcement field so what you'll see is interactions like this where you will go out and as I said you do want to provide a legitimate interaction through people not in an automated fashion and what my assistant does is she actually goes out and every time we get new followers she goes out and literally handwrites it out and thanks several of them in one shot that's it can probably be automated we don't do that but we do actually go out

12:05and thank people for a problem so when you actually get this right though what will happen is these people will come back and they'll favorite your your your tweet your just by thanking them they say hey I really like this thanks thanks a lot for interacting with me in addition to that sometimes they retweet it in this one case it got retweeted to 215 followers I've had thank-yous that have gotten retweeted to 40,000 people and this is again from the same person and then the third thing that will happen is that they'll actually respond back they'll say hey thanks for following for finding me so those are

12:39the three things that you can get out of executing this strategy the next thing I'm going to talk about is automating your finances a little bit one of the things that as you run a business being successful has its own challenges and its own problems I own three different companies I own Moon River software Moon River consulting and then I'm co-owner of the microphone or Academy which is the backdrop for the micro partner Academy website and this conference so my finances get a little hairy and on any given month I get tons and tons of bills and tons of paperwork and at one point I just decided you know I really

13:18just don't like paying bills and that's a that's a direct quote so I actually stopped doing it I don't pay my bills anymore they do get paid I just don't do it so what I did was I essentially set up an automation process where how was I going to get myself out of this because they got to be done but do they need to be done by me the answer is no you don't want to be doing things that could be automated now automation is not all about software you can use human automation is basically outsourcing 101 so essentially you just simply plan execute and review so the first thing in

13:55planning is you decide what it is that needs to be done and in this case what I did was I decided okay well I don't want to pay all these bills but they've still got to be done so let me take these figure out how they need to be paid and I essentially just listed him out in a Google Doc and share it with my bookkeeper and said these are the things that need to be done then I went through and I actually executed a few times on my own to make sure that there weren't edge cases that I was missing so I did this for a couple of months before I

14:20handed it off to her and this this process took me probably six months before I finalized everything and handed it off to her but the reality is I haven't paid a business bill with the exception of one which was last month and I think three months or so three or four months so basically she's handling everything she has signing authority which I'll get to in a minute but she handles everything and then the last thing as I said is the reviewing what's going on so if you get through that process and you decide hey there's other things that need to be documented there are other things that maybe I missed the

14:52first couple of times you really want to approach it as if you're new to the business you've never seen anything in there before and is there anything missing from that documentation so you can detain hand it off so some caveats or tips here is the first one is that you want to give authority to the people who are doing this so whenever somebody works for you and is doing stuff you want to give them the authority to do pretty much whatever whatever they want or whatever they really need to do in order to make decisions for you because really what you're trying to do here is

15:20you're trying to extract yourself from the process and give somebody else the ability to make those decisions so that you don't have to whenever you have to make a decision you become a bottleneck in your business so by extracting yourself and giving them authority then you don't have to do it my as I said my bookkeeper has sign-in authority if I wanted to write a check for the business I actually can't because she's got the checkbooks I can do it online but that's kind of a because then I gotta go add somebody everything else I just shoot her an email and say hey can you do this so she

15:48takes care of that the contractors that I have working for me she pastes them I assume they're still getting paid there's one person there's one person here Eric he could probably tell you whether you still getting paid or not I actually don't know I don't look looks give guidance one of the things that I have set up is a standard operating document in Google Docs where I basically list out all these different procedures that I have and then I have guiding principles and then a mission statement the mission statement is kind of the grand plan for the business the guiding principles say kind of what to

16:22do when wonder you know how do we operate the business what do we do when a customer asks for a refund how are we going to handle that and it's pretty liberal but what it does is it gives whoever's working for you kind of leeway to make decisions for you so in addition to giving them the ability to do this stuff you have to give them guidance for those exceptional situations that are not actually documented and you also want to give them the ability to add to that documentation so anyone who has access to the standard operating documents from Moon River they have the ability to go in and make changes to any

16:51of that stuff so if there's any documentation that isn't right or needs to be deleted or removed or added they can go ahead and do that and they can do that without my permission and that's perfectly acceptable and in fact I encourage that and the last thing is you want to give praise to these people because they really are helping you out they are doing a lot of things for you that you know quite frankly you either shouldn't be doing or you don't need to be doing or sometimes you just don't want to do it but these two people are helping you out and it's very important to thank them

17:19for the contributions because otherwise you know if they don't feel like their work is valued for the business and for you personally then chances are they're going to kind of move on or they're gonna do a subpar job this is my super-secret financial system at work it's very advanced basically what I do is any time I get a bill that I don't want to deal with I just throw in the box and my wife drops it off to her once a week and that's kind of that's how we handle it as I said that the Google Docs outlines exactly what to do for you know you can probably see it if you get some

17:56of these there's a verizon bill there's an 18t bill there's some junk mail I just throw that in the box too and that gets chucked it's kind of nice it gets Chuck's twice but again it doesn't need to be complicated again this is this is about human automation this is about making sure that work gets done that needs to get done and freeing your time up to work on the business rather than in it and as I said this saved me probably between four to six hours a month and that's going to be on an ongoing basis there's a lot of stuff that I just I don't I don't do so the

18:31next one next topic is on leveraging internal data for SEO last year brac Palumbo did a talk on public data sources that he used to expand the the breadth of his website in order to gain some long tail traffic so what I did was I talked to him a little bit back in the fall and kind of asked him some questions about how he did it and what sorts of things he did and I decided I was gonna implement that and kind of see what happened so I'm gonna kind of present as a case study of what actually happens if you follow his advice so it

19:01is kind of generic it does work in additional situations but I did want to kind of demonstrate that and highlight it and this is not something I've shown in the past this is the auto shark website traffic and you can see that there's two distinct places where the traffic goes up and their first one is between August and September and then it trails off a little bit and then you'll see between December and kind of on to the current point you'll see that the traffic just kind of rises up into the right and there's two different reasons for this and I'll walk through both of them the first one when that first spike

19:34that first spike happened you map from probably 800 to 900 visits a month to about 1800 so basically doubled in one month the reason for that is because I went out and I submitted auto shark to a bunch of pre-launch email directories or yeah pre-launch email lists and there's lists of websites that you can go to I actually have a URL to it this URL points over to white tail software from Robert Graham he's here as well he mentioned to us on the we did a show where we talked briefly about this on the podcast and he brought in to us and said hey I've got iku

20:10the list there's about 50 different websites on that list and what we did was I talked to my assistant and said hey can you go out to all of these websites and I need you to compile a spreadsheet take that spreadsheet list all of the websites on the left and across the top I want you to put an X where they're asking for information and tell me whatever the information is that they're asking so she sent that back to me she compiled all the information I looked through it and some of these websites asked for things like you know provide a 500-word description of your software or your website

20:40some of them say I want a 2000 words description so it's essentially you kind of have to massage the data a little bit but at the end of the day you probably are better served by doing that yourself and actually put it the information together I handed that back to her and then she went through and you know iterated through all these 50 websites and just submitted them and as I said before the you know that kind of initial that initial spike is kind of the result of that and then it tapers off because obviously that's not really a scalable you know mechanism for scaling web

21:11website traffic so the next one is that after I implemented attacked it to go through and actually create content for my website this is this comes from the Google tools I forget exactly which one I think is a Google Webmaster Tools which tells you how many people are or how many website web pages on your website are indexed and you'll see here that it went from it was probably about 40 or 50 website pages up to about 661 on December 8th so late November is kind of when we implemented this put it out there and then this is kind of the result of that and you see that that corresponds really

21:51really well with when website traffic really started to kind of take a turn upwards so here's some pictures screenshots from what we built on the top left you'll see there's some some visual studio solution files where there's one called generate generate content on build server and essentially what that does just goes in the database sucks out a lot of the information that we've built to ship with the product and then it generates all these content pages and those content pages are put in a specific directory and then their links to dynamically from another so that way we run one we've run one project to build the content then we run

22:29the second one to incorporate that content into the compiled website and then we push it out to the website to the web server on the right-hand side you'll see just a screenshot of kind of what some of the you know one of those pages looks like at a high level so we have all these different policies so if you have Windows 2012 server or a Red Hat server or Debian or Sint OS etc those have their own policies so reach of these policies we have a dedicated set of web pages that are associated with that and then they're all linked back and forth so we've got some cross

22:58linking in there as well and the top left you can see where you know there's some category links and then on there just to the right of it a little bit where's those basic Windows 2008 server policy that lists all of the individual things that we're looking at so for example there's one for disabling the guest account maximum password age minimum password age account lockout duration etc now with these we're essentially targeting the long tail keywords that nobody in the right mind is going to go out and create a web page called disabled guests account no what's the point in that but when people go search for that what

23:32are they gonna find and they're gonna end up finding this so you go out there and what I did was I basically just it's just SEO 101 and right here the disabled guests account that's an h1 tag and then on there you also have to make sure that you are providing relevant content because you don't want your bounce rate to go too high if your bounce rate goes too high Google's gonna start penalizing you for basically poor content on your website and that process will take a little while but what you'll find is that your website traffic will dive a little bit so we did some iterations on

24:01this to try and figure out well how can we kind of improve that and this is what we ended up coming up with because in each of these policies there's all these different rules that run and it's like okay well what does this rule do why would you use it and how do you remediate it how do you check for it and these are all the things that we added in there so we added how to validate it you know what are the acceptable value is what are the remediation steps and then we cross-linked it and said okay you can go from one to the next so that

24:27way all of the links on the pages are not at the bottom of the tree they basically all those bottom leaf nodes connect to one another so that way when Google's spidering it they'll look at it and say oh well yeah this this is not just one random end page that people are using to gather traffic here's a list from also from Google you can see here all of the pages maybe it's a little bit hard to read there's a ton of pages that start with control point content slash CPE and then just a random string of numbers those are actually the page names so in some cases like for

25:04extremely long keyword traffic a longtail keyword traffic the page name doesn't necessarily matter as much so I don't have a page called disabled guest account but it is in the title so if it's longtail enough Google doesn't care because nobody else is really targeting it and you can see that some of the average positions of these some of them are not very good but some of them are you know three four or five on this on this front page you'll see one that's like eleven but it also tells you the number of impressions clicks click-through rate etc so those are the types of things that you can use to

25:35essentially iterate on this to make that process better over time so if you have any sort of internal database of information that you have for your products or you're using you know as backwoods you do using public data sources you can essentially massage that data to help target some of these longtail keywords and as I said that will bring in a heck of a lot of traffic I mean it's probably quadruple traffic in about four or five months for the website

26:05so my next section is on personal development we're going to talk a little bit about increasing your productivity how many people here would like to increase their productivity pretty simple question I also made the mistake once of asking people if they were just interested in security of their servers for audit sharks so can be a little too generic sometimes but why is that do you guys would like to you know you know increase your productivity to three answers comb out more stuff in the day more free time more efficient okay say that again do things that bring back better rewards I mean all these are great reasons to

26:45look at that and what I did was I started looking around I said okay well how can I increase my productivity and what I realized was that there was I've used a couple of different apps I've used I kind of settled on focused time right now I've used Pomodoro and a few others and I've kind of settled on focus time because I look at that and I say okay well I can I can put something in and I work really hard on it for you know 20 25 minutes and then I take a break for a little while and it works it works reasonably well but you look

27:12around on the internet and say okay well how can I increase my productivity I want to work less so that I and I still want to be able to get more done and you just do quick searches and you'll find books like these work less do more I'm not gonna recommend this book I've never actually even opened the cover it was just an example that I wanted to show that you know there are books out there like this there are also other books that we're probably much more familiar with like the 4-hour workweek how many people have read this how many people like it fewer hands interesting

27:45so I looked at this and I said well that's it's an interesting concept to have like a four-hour work week and I kind of thought a little a little bit about it and said well how can I switch this on its head how can I flip it over a little bit and you know look at it in a different way because the 4-hour workweek it's - I don't want to say it's too abstract for me but I think it gives a false impression of you know you hire people and they do all the work and you just kind of sit back and reap the rewards and let's be honest it just does

28:14not work that way so one of the things I looked at and says well you know if you're trying to work less what you know why would you do that how would it work and what sorts of things can it actually do for you and the question I ask myself is what if you only had four hours each week to actually get all of your work done and what I realized was that when you start working less hours you actually become more productive if you are conscious about working less hours and the reason is because you become more productive because you start trying to squeeze more time into a shorter time

28:44period so let's say that on any given day instead of working eight hours to work for and you know that you only have four hours to get that stuff done well what happens is you stop looking at Reddit you stop looking at Facebook you stop looking at all these news sites because you don't have the time anymore to spend so you're essentially compressing that eight hour workday most of which is probably fluff anyway into a four hour work day and that's how when you start you know looking at some people who are out there in the industry who are doing extremely well for themselves and you're saying well how is

29:14he only working two days a week or three days a week or how is it that he only works from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. and is able to get all this stuff done that's exactly why it's because they are getting some more stuff done because they have compressed that workday and they know that they don't have the time to spend they can't go out to Facebook because it's going to waste their time that they do have you know that's the the the corollary to that is work expands so as to fill available time for its completion has anyone ever done consulting work in here anyone ever have

29:44a 10-week project that could have used less time like consistently [Laughter] the fact is most of these projects could probably use a lot less time but the fact is if you a lot 10 weeks for it you're going to use 10 weeks if you lot 12 you're gonna use 12 if you lot 4 you're gonna use 4 and once you start butting up against that nobody goes back and says well we'd like you to pay us for less time because we're not gonna use that that just doesn't happen so the issue is that how far can you take this though are you going to be able to say

30:15okay well I've got this two-week project and I'm gonna give myself two days for it and the problem is that does break down after a while but there are corollaries for that where it does work extremely well when you start limiting things now if you look at something like this this is the microcon Europe website when we started selling tickets and you'll see right here that there's four tickets remaining do you think there's anybody who's gonna put that off there are people who I've talked to who you know looked at micro conf and they're like well I'll think about it and they see the tickets come available and then

30:47you see something like this and your impetus to move on that and make a decision right then and there is much much higher there's lots of research out there that shows that if you take a bunch of students and you give them a two-week project they're gonna take two weeks if you give them two days they'll take two days but they're gonna hate you for it but they will probably get it done when you start compressing that time it makes it much more I'll say motivational to actually get those things done and it it will help your productivity so as I said the limiting the time you have to do

31:20something will increase productivity but is its effects are limited you can't always take a two-week project and drop it down to two days or three days you do have to be conscious of how long it will actually take to do something but by cutting hours intentionally it will help you out in terms of productivity which does for you up for other things other things and not necessarily work things you know freedom as Heaton was talking a little bit about it can free you up to essentially you know just be happier in life because you get to enjoy your free time and live your life instead of kind

31:50of suffering through it so I'm gonna talk a little bit about personal fulfilment as well and this kind of goes back a little bit to productivity I'll kind of draw those a little bit too one of the things that you can do if you if you're not really sure what sorts of things you'd like to do one of the things that you can do is you kind of look at the things that you're good at so one of the things that I think Rob and I have done this on the podcast before is we took the strengths finder and did an entire podcast episode on it

32:18and you'll see here that I think my strengths are strategic focus analytical competition and command and when you take this there's a I have a URL there goes out to Amazon and it's I think fourteen or fifteen dollars for the book and they give you a code inside of it you go to their website you take this test and it will essentially walk you through and ask you a bunch of questions and in that and afterwards it will give you almost an e-book that sells you these are the top five themes in your life and these are explanations of it and here are some you know inspirational

32:51quotes that might kind of motivate you I think that kind of helping out with personal fulfillment you kind of need to understand who you are and what sorts of things you'd like another one that I got involved with was the Lumina spark which was given to ever all the members at the business of software conference this past year and you'll see that there's several people here they're probably looking at this saying why was he weird because I and I actually asked the presenter Paul Kenney about this because I said well you know I'm not terribly extroverted but I'm pretty balanced over overall and he's like wow you're weird

33:28most people are not like this apparently the the vast majority of people have are skewed in a couple of different directions the one that I'm not is extroverted I'm not the type of person to be you know the the center of attention I know I don't necessarily want to be I'm okay being in a big group of people where I'm just talking to them kind of sharing my opinions but being the center of attention for me is not necessarily what my goals are is not really my focus in life and it's you know being up here as a speaker is a little different but what I did was I talked to John Knox

34:01from Evernote when I was at the business software and he had Google glass so I said well what's the most interesting thing or surprising thing that you've found out about yourself or about Google glass and wearing it and he said that he talks to a lot more people which is interesting because it it and Google Glasses like oh it's a technology gets to check your email you get to browse the web it's right there I have it and I actually have a with me if somebody wants to take a look at it later but you know I kind of be the center of attention at the moment so I'm

34:29not wearing it but I got it primarily because I wanted to kind of expand my focus a little bit and go in areas that I was not necessarily comfortable with and one of those areas is being a little bit more extroverted and I have found that by wearing it around people do talk to me more they're like hey what is that and they instantly want to talk about it their conversations I never would have had otherwise so as I said understanding who you are and pushing your boundaries into other areas essentially helps with personal growth and I thought what's the worst that could happen I think that did happen to me once in

35:06school but the reality is when you start doing new things you have to ask yourself what's the worst that can happen if I email this person to ask him hey what do you think of my website what's the worst that's gonna happen they just say no or they just don't answer is that really a big deal and the answer is no it's not but when you're in business you're running your business there's lots of things that you're doing that are extremely scary they're all new things to you because you've never done them before and you're not really sure what you're what you're doing or how it's gonna be taken so you kind of have

35:37to push your own boundaries to become comfortable being uncomfortable because you once you put yourself in that position it helps build on your successes it helps you become comfortable with those positions and the more that you do them the more comfortable you become with them so there's a lot of benefits to try new things does build your confidence you know it does build your courage cures boredom I found that just looking into different things that you were I might have been mildly interested in before it does take my mind off of work for example so you know these are a bunch of different things that will help you and it does

36:13increase your productivity and part of that relates back to curing boredom so if you think too much about work and you're always thinking about it there's it's always in the back of your mind and as entrepreneurs I think that a lot of us are always thinking about okay well I got my day job and now I've got to go home I got to work on the code got to do some of this marketing stuff then they lay in bed and you're sitting there thinking about all that stuff for like the next two hours and you you just don't get to sleep because you've been thinking about that stuff whereas if you

36:36take a break from it and you intentionally take those breaks and knowing that these are the results of those breaks then it will definitely help you move the business forward last thing I want to talk about is personal health so there's essentially three pillars of personal health and these are no surprise to anybody anyone who's been to any given health class in high school it's going to know what these are there's sleep exercise and eating habits if you have poor sleep there's a bunch of problems associated with it exercise eating habits etc how many people in here get seven to eight hours of sleep on a very regular basis more than I

37:12expected how about exercise two-and-a-half hours a week plus muscle training a lot more hands down eating habits 1,600 to 2,500 calories a day yes now put your hand up of if you focus on all three of these and you actually do all of them a few hands not not nearly as many the problem is that when you focus on one of these three things but not all three of them or if you focus on two of them what happens is those problems bleed over so for example if you're not sleeping well it causes it has a tendency to cause increase the BMI mainly because you're not sleeping well

37:51your levels of cortisol increase and you're hungrier because you've been up for longer and so you intend to eat more and then with exercise same thing eating the same thing I mean these things bleed into one another so if you're not actually doing all three of them they can really negatively impact you know your life in a lot of different ways and I don't think that many of them are terribly obvious either mainly because we don't necessarily have graphs and charts and stuff to show you you know oh your productivity is here but if you do these three things then your productivity will be up here because

38:25it's very hard to measure because they usually take these generic statistics and they do them across a large number of people and there's all this variability and you may have done them yourself but tracking some of that stuff and tracking the the actual metrics associated with that can be very difficult so a lot of what happens is that you end up with a lot of ink prestress in your life so you'll have things like you know an increased workload you'll you know you've got to take care of your family and especially as entrepreneurs I mean these are really high priorities for most people as an entrepreneur you're building a business

38:54you know people have certain expectations oh you and your own business you know how are things going with that and they they expect you to do really well because they have these high expectations for you I'll give you an example my neighbors stopped me the other day and they asked they're like hey have you heard about this new company I think it's called giggle and I'm like you mean Google yeah that's it that's it those guys made like a billion dollars I I'm suddenly you know in the realm of Google because I told them that I work with software so they have these lofty expectations for me and they were

39:27wondering why I Drive a Honda you do get stressed out in terms of you know from paying attention to your some your competition lack of closure really what lack of closure amounts to is that a lot of the things that you're doing you're sending out emails to people you're trying to make introductions do networking talk to people and you're not getting a response you're trying to close deals with trial customers they don't talk to you and this lack of closure actually contributes to higher stress levels so this kind of goes back to if you're getting if you're suffering from these things which pretty much everybody in this room has suffered from

40:00lack of closure for some customers because they're just not talking to you it does affect your brain it does affect you you know your body and your stress levels and everything else what are the some of the symptoms of this so the symptoms there's a lot of them and there's too many to actually list I'm not going to bother but you'll see things like low energy and insomnia and difficulty relaxing shutting off your brain inability to focus I mean some of these things you look back at the effects of not exercising not you know getting enough sleep at night they overlap and there's a very good reason

40:36the overlap is because they're essentially the same thing you're too stressed out your cortisol levels go up so you know your your body is just starting to react negatively to the stress that you're putting it under there's typically a lot of stress associated you know people think oh you know fight-or-flight response you've got adrenalin that rushes in - you know flee danger and things like that well trying to fight through that with your brain it actually hurts you because you know you have to deal with that at some point how many people have ever experienced you know probably two or three of these symptoms we're guessing just about everybody stress is

41:13something that actually can be pretty serious so some of the things that you can do to alleviate that is that for for example what I did was I actually set aside different times for evenings and weekends so I actually backed off if you can if you have the ability to back off from that stuff stop it especially if you're working full-time on your business if you're able to essentially put stuff down at five o'clock in the afternoon and just walk away as I said before when you limit your hours you increase your productivity and part of the reason you increase your productivity is cuz you're reducing your

41:45stress you don't have to worry about it until you come back and then when you come back you have this dedicated time your productivity is increased so limiting your hours will actually help with that scheduling one of the things I started implementing is you know accepting this week of course at 10 o'clock 10 o'clock 10:30 at night I just stop whatever it is I'm the donating start getting ready for bed I know I won't get a bed for another probably half hour 45 minutes but that's okay I mean it's the system that I put in place because statistics and studies show that people make bad decisions when they're

42:15stressed out and they've been working too hard there was a psychological story that was done a study that was done where they took a bunch of people and they split tested him and they said okay this group of people over here we want you two guys to remember these three numbers we're gonna test you on them for the next four hours they took another people group of people and they said we're gonna have you remember these seven numbers in a row and we're gonna test you for the next four hours so they tried all these different numbers said thank you very much here's a check for

42:41your time and go out you know you get your check out front and by the way there's some snacks over by the you know by the door on your way out like typical behavioral analysis the whole thing was of course a sham and it had nothing to do with any of the numbers what they wanted to know is which snack were they gonna pick on the way out the door the people who had to only remember a couple of numbers were kind of pitted against the people who had to remember a lot of them and the people who had to remember seven numbers were five to ten times more

43:12likely to choose an unhealthy snack and part of that is because they start making bad choices because their mental energies or their mental stores are trained because they've been working so hard that's why people sit in front of the TV at night and sit there snacking on chips and popcorn and soda and things like that while they're vegging out in front of the TV because they're trying to relax but they don't have the willpower in order to stop themselves from eating that stuff because they just can't they've been working too hard they haven't taken the time to kind of decompress from work last one is healthy

43:43eating you have to make us make an effort to you know eat what you're you know what you're supposed to be doing you know at certain times a day so that means no midnight snacks no del taco runs as much as heatin will hate me for that but those things all you know they end up being very bad things for your body and for you know your brain ultimately because a lot of these things boil down to these strategies boil down to three basic concepts the first concept is that they help your brain and body function the way that they're supposed to function the second one is

44:18that they essentially reduce stress so by focusing on these strategies they reduce your stress levels and you're able to get more things done and the last one which is probably the most important thing is they essentially balance out the hormones and chemicals in your body so that you can pay attention and do the things that you want to do and put your brain in control of your body because that's a very very difficult thing to overcome is when your body wants one thing your body wants cookies and your brain says no that's a bad idea but you eat the cookies anyway you can't stop it's not something that

44:49it's not a matter of willpower it's a matter of the chemicals that are in your body saying I want cookies so there's a whole slew of things that come out of having you know too many hormones in your body cortisol is obviously one of them I can't read here insulin shock that's probably the one that most people are familiar with and then another one is kidney stones those are those are both direct results of having too many of specific hormones in your body and then there's corollaries for not having enough and the - that won't smoke people are probably familiar with our insulin deficiency though so

45:30diabetes and then I can't even pronounce this you know Unicoi ISM low testosterone so these these two things are probably things that most people are familiar with and even Tim Ferriss has probably brought that one to the forefront because in his 4-hour body book he actually has this entire section on how to increase your testosterone and if you look on his website he's got a cheat sheet for how he essentially raised his testosterone levels where from you know medically low to something like eight or nine hundred or something like that it was something ridiculously high and again testosterone is just a hormone in your body just like anything else

46:10whether it's sugar insulin you know testosterone estrogen there's all these different chemicals in your body and you your body has to operate within like certain tolerances and when your body gets out of whack then it starts affecting you it starts affecting your ability to get things done it starts affecting your focus your sleep patterns your weight everything else so if mush you're operating within those tolerances it can really be shooting yourself in the foot so just let's just take as an example of this one of the ones this testosterone and I use that partially because you know Tim Ferriss has put that out there in his book and as I said

46:42he's got some pretty good stuff in there the one I want to point out right down here is for men it's supposed to be between 270 and 1070 something like that and for women it's supposed to be between 50 to 15 to about 70 so these are average ranges and if you look at some of the symptoms these are some of the symptoms of that I think I've seen this before there's other ones as well that you're the other ones are probably much more familiar to people that people have heard about you hear things like low testosterone and you know loss of libido and hair loss diabetes things

47:18like that those are the ones that probably people are much more familiar with but a lot of these things overlap with your general basic health and part of that is because of the cortisol that is can you know can in fact and act your ability to make good decisions during the day your stress levels etc so so kind of dig into that a little bit further I want to point out two different things here there's here's an example of a common problem for this from a study from 1996 where it shows you over time decrease in testosterone levels in men and it shows you like what

47:49the standard deviations are so you'll see that for somebody you know 3545 range should be around 600 to 700 something along those lines and for the standard deviation that's generally what it looks like I couldn't actually get Excel to do this for me it was kind of a pain in the neck so I couldn't actually graph those for you very well but the problem is that sometimes lifestyle adjustments just simply don't work this is Gregg Gregg was a speaker at the business of software conference this past year and Gregg did a an extremely good talk I would highly recommend taking down that URL right there and go

48:28watch his video it's about half an hour long it's a very good talk on developers and depression one of the things that he points out is that Gregg has bipolar and eight ADHD and essentially both of these things are a result of having a chemical imbalance in his body as hormones are basically screwed up and there's nothing he can do about it because there's certain organs that are just not functioning properly and in order to fix it he basically has to go on you know medication in order to help straighten those things out without that medication you simply wouldn't really be able to function I want to go back to

49:03this graph just really quickly and I want to point out that 600 to 700 number right there and I also want to point out this one so remember how before I talked about this August timeframe where I did started doing a lot of different things and that was about the time that I was actually diagnosed with low testosterone and I it's I think it's very rare to be able to take a look at you know hormone studies or something like that where you have solid numbers of productivity from before and after for very specific people so I did want to share some of the stuff with you but that 376 number

49:39right there it says 485 to 100 year old men it was seventy-six and the standard deviation is 134 mine clocked in at about 211 so scary question here if you're over 30 and male raise your hand leave them up and pick a number between one and four inclusive of both numbers in your head put your hand down if it is not number three one in four people are one in four men are affected by it and of those only about 10% are actually treated so that's actually a very serious issue and when you start looking at that stuff it can become very scary especially you know and it doesn't

50:25matter whether you're a man or a woman because the you know they know each other usually and deck that can affect your ability to get things done so remember I pointed back to August and when you get these things taken care of when you start getting your hormone imbalances in check you start seeing productivity gains like that and like this and like that this is something that's probably been going on for a very very long time for me not something I knew about but I think everybody really thinks about these health consequences of not exercising not eating and you know you know what they are but you

51:03don't necessarily have hard hard data to look at when you start looking at this stuff and say okay well if I do this stuff what's actually going to happen so by getting those things in check it can actually help your productivity and get you through some of the stuff a couple years ago I think it was said it was here at micro cough Jason Cohen came out and gave a talk and one of his points was that you know family is really why a lot of people here at micro cough because you're not here to make money I mean you are but you know it's not necessarily because you want gobs of

51:34money it's because you want to make living for yourself you want to support your family you want to be able to do good things for the people around you you want to talk to your customers and help them out and everything else and what Jason said was the only reason people who speak put pictures of their kids is so that they you know can explain to the world that they're not a version it's the only reason why people put kids at pictures of their kids in these slides but the fact of the matter is you know those are the types of people why we do these things the they're the

52:04reason why we're here why we're doing the stuff that we're doing is because we want to be able to spend more time with them and if we're not enjoying that time then really what's the point the issue is that if you're not taking care of yourself nobody else will nobody else can really force you to go to the gym or eat better or make changes in your life and if you're not helping yourself how do you expect to help anyone else thank you very much could you talk about a little bit more about the spark bund allah the source where you heard that where we can read

52:43and get more information about them sure she's doing that yeah so if you search for luminous spark it's el um I na there's a company I think the name of the company is called Lumina it's a call to spark mandela and essentially what it is as you go through this profile personality test they ask you a ton of different questions and at the end of it they give you I forget it was like a thirty or forty page report that tells you kind of where in that color spectrum you lie in terms of whether you're extroverted or people person or aggressive and all these different things and it I don't know I'm pretty

53:21sure that they sell it commercially but I think that if you talk to them and just say hey I was at a conference I heard this I don't know whether they sell it to individuals or not but should may be able to just buy it from their website I haven't really looked at it cuz like I said I got it for free so does Twitter actually help us in finding customers who would actually convert in your experience have you seen that I get a fair amount of traffic back to my website from Twitter I don't find that it converts very well but what I do find

53:48is that it opens the door for conversations so if I see if I go look at somebody's profile and I see they're in the security industry or they do penetration testing for example I know what industry they're in and I can probably ask them you know it could start a dialogue with them and then ask for like an introduction to somebody you know at their business it's kind of similar to LinkedIn where you can you know you talk to people obviously we want to see if you can get those direct messages you don't want to unfollow people who have followed you because you want to maintain those relationships but

54:19it does give you the ability to essentially walk and walk up to their door and knock on and say hey by the way can I talk to you about something I just want to you know okay can we chat for a few minutes I'd be really interested to hear your opinion on something and by couching it like that you are able to open the door in such a way that's not salesy and that you know that helps you start that discussion so that if later on down the road it does lead to a sale then great but it is high-touch so it's not something that would probably scale very well but if

54:47you are kind of in the early stages or still trying to find your target market and understand what customers are truly interested in paying for it will help you in that regard I just had a quick tip on the sleep thing I struggled a lot with like I'm like you I go to bed at like 10 o'clock now but I struggled a lot with it before and one thing I learned is you know like a lot of people here I do everything on my computer I read I watch movies and all that and you know the light from your computer kind of tricks your body into staying up later

55:18than you should and there's a application called flux which maybe you gotta sell know about it already but it's helped me a lot it basically dims your computer so it's like you're using a candlelight a fluorescent light in your house yeah if anyone didn't hear that the application is called Flex it's for the Mac I believe I personally don't use it I've tried it what I found was that just turning off my electronics at like 7 or 8 o'clock is a much better option because I hate having a screen just dim on me but I just like squinting at it so I got laser surgery so I see

55:49better I have a question about your content strategy you said that you automatically create some content from some documentation but is this documentation that you have created for your product or it's a max of documentation you know what's the source of of that the source is a database so Eric Kenny who is running around here if you talked to him you could probably give you some insight about the policies themselves and how they're built and what sorts of things go into that process so essentially what we're doing is we're pulling data from external sources like publicly available stuff we're putting into our own database because we need to be able to format

56:22that in such a way that it feeds into the auto shark engine because it's basically in some ways a scripting language and there's it's basically a lot of key value pairs and then it gets fed into our engine the engine executes it but what we do is we take that information pull it out of a database and then format it into an HTML content that we put out on the website when you have a business with a low complexity domain so you don't have like naturally a way to have 500 pages on really interesting topics that people actually Google for what are some strategies to identify what you should have long tail

56:56content on I would definitely look at google webmaster tools and see what they're telling you in terms of like related keywords and recommendations if you don't have any longtail stuff I'm not sure what I would recommend every detail yeah I didn't want to be overly obvious about that recommendation but tail Pro as well is actually a very very good tool head tail does give a lot of good keywords I think when Rob switched it over to use it to interacting directly with webmaster tools I got something like 85 or 95 new keywords that hadn't shown up before and it does rank them with like five stars if

57:34they're very good even down to three stars it's pretty good and you can just request articles directly out of there talking about automating your finances and having somebody else handle paying the bills what system do you have in place so that you stay aware of how much money you're spending and if things have gone awry from a particular vendor that you're buying from and things like that what system do you have in place to for you to stay on top of things so I this past year I migrated all of my accounting stuff from I had Moon River consulting books in QuickBooks which was a desktop app I didn't have it in there

58:08online thing because both of them suck and then Moon River software I had it in less accounting and then I'd moved that into Xero so I basically moved both of them into Xero at this point and because of the way that I can just toggle between them it's the same system I can pull the same reports so depending on the business I can separate expenses and you know customize my reports to kind of see where the money is going and what I'm spending on a monthly basis that helps a lot the all also the other thing that helps is I really only have one credit card for

58:36each business I'd like the debit cards and stuff but I just have an American Express Platinum for my consulting business and I have an American Express gold card for my software business and every month I see the bills come in which this month is very skewed because of Micra comps was like tens of thousands of dollars but so I would have to dig in order to find information but generally speaking for a month a month I know what those expenses are just because I'm kind of looking at them on a monthly basis a quick question on the testosterone did you just get a test through your doctor did you order a lab

59:08online and then do you take now do you take supplements is that how it works yes good question so there's two different ways to get the test done there's one you can buy off Amazon it's about 30 to 35 dollars depending on which lab you get your tests done add that ones will saliva test and is not nearly as accurate and depending on which lab it goes to it cannot be as accurate as well the most efficient way or the most accurate way is to have a blood test done so you can have it done probably at your doctor or your urologist either one will do it when they get those test

59:42results back they can take a look at them and see kind of where on the spectrum you stand and you know if you're having if you've got stress for example that will drop your testosterone levels if you see here there's so there's lots of things to do it if you're not getting enough zinc that affects your testosterone production if you're not getting enough selenium that it's affects production you're not getting enough sleep if you get less than five hours of sleep for five days that'll drop your testosterone by 15% right off the bat there's a lot of things that and that's significant I mean if you talk about oh

1:00:13well you know I'm at 500 normally and 15% or 20% it can go up as high as 20% if you're not getting enough sleep 20% drive drops you from 500 to 400 and you can immediately take 20% off of your productivity in terms of treatment there's a lot of different things you can do I'm on a testosterone gel that I basically have to put on my arms and shoulders every day which it kind of sucks but the other options needles and I'm not a very good heroin addict so that's just not going to work for me there are downsides to that too the issue is that if you go on a

1:00:45testosterone they call it hormone reply therapy if you go on a hormone replacement therapy for something that your body is supposed to regenerate on its own the issue that you can run into is that your body stops producing it because you have it so you end up in this downward spiral spiral where you almost need to take more of it in order to kind of maintain where you were when I first started on it obviously you can see what happened and like I said I think statistics like that are very very difficult to come by but since that time if I don't take it for a day I notice it

1:01:16but not nearly as much as I probably would have like the second or third day and I brought that I'll be honest I brought a lot of that stuff up because partially because of Gregg's talk of the business of software and I think that mental health and is not something that's talked about because people tend to look down on it it's like whoa well you know you can't think clearly or you're stressed out just power through that stuff and it's like it just doesn't work you know there's times where it just it falls apart that entire system falls apart you can't force yourself to do something that your body and your

1:01:45chem and the chemicals in your body are telling you no I'm just not able to do that and I thought that it was a good topic to bring up as something as a discussion because I think that here micro cough were very open with a lot of stuff financials numbers everything and I think that that's a topic of conversation that could probably be pretty beneficial to people because I think that stress levels in this room are probably sky high we have time for one more yep if you have any other questions afterwards let me know I think something that was good talk the outsourcing of your signing authority

1:02:19and kind of the the legal structures that go around that how did you work up the the trust to give that to a VA and what do you have in place in case they get hit by a bus so it's not outsourced to my VA the the financial stuff is all outsourced to my bookkeeper so I have a bookkeeper who manages my books on a monthly basis then I have a CPA who does the books at the end of the year so there's at the on a yearly basis at the very least my CPA is looking stuff over but on a monthly basis she's handling all of the you know day-to-day or you

1:02:48know weekly and monthly expenses and handling like my health insurance and dental and credit card payments and all that other stuff I haven't gotten to look quite quite to the point where I'm handing off all of my personal finances to her as well but I will be doing that probably sometime this year but how did I was the other part of the question how do I get to the point where I trusted her at some point you got to take a leap of faith it's what she does for a living she's a bookkeeper so it's almost like jeez I wouldn't say do you trust your lawyer but do you trust your

1:03:19CPA to try and make good decisions for you now don't get me wrong there's definitely CPAs I've heard horror stories where it's like my CPA cost me $30,000 this year and now I've got this credit with the government that I'm never I'm not going to get back for the next 10 years because it's only being taken off of my taxes there are certainly horror stories out there you know there's definitely things that can go wrong like I said I asked Eric if he's still getting paid I'm sure he is but I don't hear any complaints from anybody about things going wrong and I do I do look at it at least on a cursory

1:03:50level I looked at it much earlier on much more deeply but now I don't so much and it's it's a process it's not something where overnight you just hand it off to him the first part the way I started it off was having her help bring the books over from one accounting system to another so that I have visibility to which she has visibility to it I can give my CPA visibility to it because before it was kind of all walled off because of QuickBooks and now it's not so much so it's just a it's an iterative process that Trust does not come overnight and there's other ways that you can kind

1:04:21of cheat with that as well so for example the person who I have doing my books is also a student of my wife's a Zumba class so that does help with trust but thanks Mike [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]