#i blame halligan

[spagheddiediaz]

now go stand in the corner and think about what you did

this is so silly and i wrote this v quickly today. i blame @forthewolves honestly.

rating: T

words: 2.4k

Buck was the most forgiving person Eddie knew. In fact, Eddie was pretty sure that Buck was the most forgiving person that anyone knew. He had forgiven Maddie for leaving him when he needed her the most. He had forgiven his parents for their years and years of emotional neglect (amongst other things.) Hell, he had even forgiven that psychopath that blew up the fire truck that almost cost him his career and his life. Which is why Eddie was beside himself that he was going on hour twelve of the cold shoulder from his best friend.  “Buck! Eddie!" Bobby calls as he comes up the stairs and into the loft. Eddie sits up from where he was slouching on the couch, looking over to Buck at the kitchen table, who was still very clearly still avoiding any and all eye contact.

“Can you two please inventory the truck? The 132 is missing a Halligan and Chief Rezdon keeps calling me thinking we accidentally took-” 

Buck clears his throat, looking to Ravi across the kitchen table. “C’mon, Probie. Let’s solve this missing halligan mystery!” He says cheerfully, nodding as Ravi follows him down the steps of the loft, leaving Eddie’s jaw nearly on the floor. 

Hen snorts out a laugh from the other side of the couch, not looking up from her book. “I don’t know what you did, Diaz, but the dog house is a very, very rough look on you.” 

[read on ao3]

[darkmaga-retard]

Peter Halligan

Aug 15, 2024

Leave aside the fact that even thinking about impersonating news outlets is a criminal act, check this out:

Google Blames Glitch for Harris Campaign Running Deceptive Paid Ads – Liberty One News

“The campaign used Google search ads to manipulate headlines from major news outlets such as Reuters, CBS News, CNN, NPR, and AP, making it seem as though they were in support of Harris.”

This coms hot on the heels of another headline:

House panel demands info from Google, Meta over alleged censorship of Trump assassination attempt (msn.com)

“He Republican-led House Oversight Committee launched an investigation Wednesday into whether Google and Meta suppressed information about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.”

Of course, both incidents are described by Google as “glitches”, implying that they only recently “snuck in” to bypass Google’s censorship algorithms and have not, in fact, been deployed for years to prejudice users against Trump!

I suspect they have been caught and these have been rules of engagement by Google and neither glitches or even exceptions.

[stellariders]

i’ve rewatched the first five episodes so far and here are my thoughts:

1. i still hate hank voight and i dont understand how anyone likes him

2. i hate heather for blaming kelly over andy’s death. not only did she blame him for dying, she blamed him for andy even becoming a firefighter.

3. i genuinely don’t understand why casey went back to hallie when she made it clear that she doesn’t want kids. is he just hoping she changes her mind in the future?

4. what the hell is corned beef and why does it look like raw meat?

5. kelly walking around with a fracture neck still doesn’t make sense to me but that man is such a dumbass (i love him, but he’s a dumbass)

6. i’m still bitter that the show only focused on andy’s friendship with casey when andy was also kelly’s best friend. all kelly got was all the blame from heather

7. casey wanting to beat up voight with a halligan was so true of him

8. the firehouse is so full but thinking about it, it’s, realistically, way too many people for 3 firetrucks, 1 ambulance, and a battalion chief car

9. i miss herrmann and his failed entrepreneurship businesses

10. there’s a continuity error because how does severide not know who clarice is? but i love the shayveride friendship

[itsthemysteryofthedroods]

Halligan and Lowry may have some sort of a rivalry going on, but think about this: Steve doesn't change his pose to a normal, "human" one when Brent enters his office, which means he's perfectly comfortable with Brent watching him floating above the chair. Brent doesn't comment on it either. I feel there's something more to their relationship than it seems. 🤔

I enjoy the idea that Steve is something more than human, and that he needs to keep up an act. Honestly, looking at him, he very well could be. I suppose it's just a bit of potential-druid/mythical-creature/deity + ND/Druid solidarity thing going on here. I guess there isn't much point in hiding how out-of-the-norm you are when the other person also is that way, but the fact that Steve doesn't wish to uphold that facade with Brent, despite being an individual who normally seems to wish to uphold all kinds of social norms -based on his demeanor and supposed "disdain" for Brent-, it could be said that there's something profoundly personal about their supposedly impersonal rivalry. I think he likes his audacity, and refuses to allow Brent to see anything other than his "truer" facade self. I suppose that maybe after pretending to be his "ideal" persona like that for so long, he perhaps finds the idea of Brent's more "unnaceptable" imperfection to be kind of irresistible, and can't help but let his guard down a bit with him in an unspoken way that Brent wouldn't really point out because he's Brent? Brent is quite daring in how he speaks to Steve, after all, but he doesn't comment on this at all.

Not only that but once again the floating itself. The fact that it was the later update really does raise eyebrows.

Sorry to bring up this picture again, but look at him. I mean really look. Does this look normal either to you? Based on test-runs I did myself, no, probably not. He looks like a dead shrimp with that pose. Perhaps this version really was the error, and the later one the correction. Lowry here looks like he's about to slip right off his chair and fall on his ass. But the later one? Truly more confident, and his hands do not phase through his knees...I think. He's revealing himself a bit more to his tense rival, and he knows it.

I feel like their rivalry is actually a lot more tension than fighting and they don't admit it. Does Brent have something towards Steve? Maybe, it could also be one-sided, but either way this pair does make you question the heterosexuality orientation of more than one party, which is really saying something when one is wearing purple and gayly floating above a chair. Note that funnily enough, despite their banter, Steve never once calls Brent anything other than Halligan, while Brent actually does call him Steve twice in the game, yes, I checked, I'm completely certain. Enjoy that nugget of information.

They get into really heated arguments. But it is pretty peculiar that for all his threats, Steve is surprisingly lenient towards Brent. Although there are definetely lines where he sounds like he wishes to reach out of his throat and puil a very Brent move on him (by sustained choking), he never lays a single hand on him, in a bizarre act of respect and, something repressed perhaps? It makes sense that he wouldn't want trouble. But a little bit of violence, or even a grab by the collar would be acceptable in the department, presumably. Steve never stops just playing with his thumbs, almost nervously, the entire time. Does he entertain himself like this when he's angry, or is this actually something that happens when he sees Brent? We cannot know, because our only point of reference is Brent himself, and what he sees, so this question is most intriguing. Does he perhaps know that if he were to reach out and touch Brent for even a moment, he wouldn't be able to help himself? Can you blame Steve? Of course not; there's a reason one of my first MOTD posts ever was Halligan's eyelashes-

Whether or not that's an agreement or something Steve himself has decided, there seems to be a mutual understanding that they're not meant to go too far, or even touch each other. Even when there's venom in their voices, it's very clear that at all times at least one of them is partly enjoying the interaction. Even at his wits end, Steve never actively attempts to stop Brent from entering his office, much less interacting with him, or talking to him. If you do get on his nerves enough, he stops letting you ask him things, but he not once stands up to stop Brent. He remains a completely passive observer and you're free to do what you please otherwise. For all of the verbal agression, there is very little action involved, and everything else is a lot subtler. Even one of the milder actions he could've taken against Brent, would have been to take the scissors back from him. Brent has coat pockets and little else, at least canonically since he of course has videogame-character-with-infinite-space-on-their-persona-syndrome. He knows that Brent has his scissors in one of those pockets. But he makes zero moves to get them back, despite his earlier determination to "not lose anything to anyone again, especially not to [Brent]" (perhaps he realizes it's futile, for he has already lost here, against Brent, all the time. Despite his toxic "masculine" facade, he can't help who he is, and this goes unspoken). He just asks him what else he wants, and then tells him to get out, again, just spoken word. Brent is free to stay if he pleases.

This gets interesting when you consider an inocous detail in the game that no one knows how to answer: The fan. Why can you, as Brent, turn on the fan? Perhaps the detail of the fan, even, was meant to represent how this is their dynamic. Steve won't even comment on it, won't even care, because despite everything, he's not as bothered by this as he pretends he is. And perhaps even enjoys someone actually treating him this way for once, with dominance instead of fear. He finds Brent a bit threatening, and he enjoys it. Turning on the fan could disturb his work. It could make his papers go everywhere. This game takes place in the fall. It's presumably a bit chilly, so it could also cause Steve some discomfort, assuming he's not warm, and giving that they don't appear to have telepathic communication (unless they do), I highly doubt that Brent is aware of his current bodily temperature unless he supposes his presence is rising it. That or given that Brent is aware that Steve is floating, he is hoping that if he turns on the fan he will float away from the Yard, but that's neither here nor there.

Whatever their relationship is? ...It is definitely not just your standard rivalry. It is ADVANCED. There is something going on here. I don't know what it is, or what the hell any of this answered, to be honest.

...I'm gonna go get some coffee.

[give-jack-a-lightsaber]

Cool... Bruises? (Chicago Fire)

A/N: I’m back baby (?) I had this idea a few weeks ago but last night a saw it in my notes and started writing it! Just like that... I wish that could happen to me with college stuff but nope. Anyway, I tried a new way of writing that involved not using “Y/N” and making it gender neutral! It was a hard but gratifying experience, I hope you like it!

Word count: 1546 

Firehouse 51. You have been here for a month and a half and saying that it was the greatest house you ever worked in was the smallest compliment you could think of. This was your third, and hopefully last, firehouse in your ten years of being a firefighter.

 Why a firefighter? It didn't run in the family, you weren't saved by one of them, you didn't get excited by the adrenaline of the dangers that came with... No, none of that. You just lived your whole childhood in front of a firehouse and seeing them run to the trucks whenever the alarm sounded, with rain, snow or in the middle of a heatwave, to help a complete stranger who needed it was all it took for you to know that when you grew up you wanted to love your job as much as them and if in the same time you could be helping someone, better. So when you graduated from high school, you went straight to the fire academy and you loved it.

 Now 10 years later you still loved the job with all your heart and the schedule helped with your second job that it was as gratifying as the first one: a tattoo artist.

 You loved drawing your whole life, which is why your friends and family were kinda surprised that you didn't follow an art or design type of career. But nowadays it was as important for you as being a firefighter. It was your way of interacting with complete strangers without the fire or a halligan in the middle, and also an escape for your mind from bad calls or stupid discussions with your colleagues.

________

It was a completely normal Friday... except for it really wasn't. The whole past week, in and out of work, you started to notice that your coworkers (that luckily you can also call your friends) were acting strange towards you. At first not everyone was like this, if you don't remember wrong the first you noticed acting like this was Cruz, but now the whole shift was starting to whisper around you, stared at you worriedly and asking you things like "how are you been lately?" or "everything okay at home?".

 'Maybe they're joking with me because I'm a newbie', you thought, although is kinda strange because you been with them for almost two months... Still, you decided to ignore it but if it did get worse you will intervene.

 After the everyday reunion with the chief all went straight to have breakfast but you needed a quick detour to get your vitamins from your locker. Entering the common room you went straight to get a glass of water, popped your vitamins in your mouth and grabbed a plate for your breakfast.

 "What'd you take?" Herrmann asked beside you.

 "Vicodin. You can all call me Dr. House now" you joked and faked a limp in your way to the table. You knew it was a lame joke but you also knew that Brett and Capp would have laughed at that, so when you looked up from the plate and saw everyone staring at you with long and saddened faces you couldn't take it anymore.

 "Okay, what is going on with all you?", you asked standing up from the table and moving to the door so you would have a view of everyone, "did I do something to bother you guys?".

 Immediately a chorus of "no", "not your fault", "hey don't blame yourself" invaded the room and surprisedly were cut off by chief Boden.

 "You did nothing wrong kid, but it has come to my attention that some of your coworkers are worried about your well-being, and I know you still feel like the new face here and maybe you can't open up to us yet, but we are here for you when you are ready" he said looking at you with kind eyes.

 "Uh" you stared at everyone for a few seconds, searching for words to describe  how you felt right now. "I don't want to be disrespectful to you chief or anyone but... What the hell are you talking about?".

 "Come on, Cruz saw them when you were changing in the locker room" chastised Severide while frowning at you.

 "Saw what?" you questioned, getting confused more and more.

 "The bruises!" Joe yelped, "I saw a big ass bruise in your left leg. You can stop lying now".

 "Bruises? Wha-" that's when you realized what was this about. Oh boy... "It's not a bruise-".

 "Nah don't come at me with this crap" Herrmann halt you, "you didn't fall nor got hit by anything in the lasts two weeks and Cruz said those looked like a big deal so start talking".

 "Hey you don't go threatening people who need help" snapped Brett at the grey haired man.

 "Sylvie is right, is a sensitive matter that needs sensitive-" stated Casey before being cut off by the comments of everyone present in the room.

 "Guys, really is not what you think of" you protested but by now the discussion of treating the "problem" with a delicate or hard hand was swallowing your voice completely.

 Then a crazy idea came to you and you thought 'what the hell, this is already out of my control'. You felt through your uniform pants and silently cheered and thanked your past you for putting your biker shorts underneath.

 Big inhale and...

 "HEY!!" you shouted with all your lung capacity, that thankfully managed to get everyone quiet.

 "It's not a bruise and-" you started but stopped to send a threatening look towards Mouch who was about to interrupt, "AND I can prove it". Finished that sentence you started to unbuckle your belt even if you could feel their eyes, many many eyes, on you.

 "What are you..." Stella trailed off with a confused chuckle.

 "I am not bruised" you stated just before pulling your pants downand waiting quietly for the reactions. Every single one was amazing to see, the pants down technique was totally worth it.

 "Goddammit Joe you don't know the difference between a bruise and a tattoo?!" roared Herrmann looking at the firefighter in question.

 "H-how am I supposed to know?!! Literally the whole leg is tattooed and I just saw a glimpse of it in the locker room!" Joe excused himself while pointing at your leg.

 "You can put your pants back on" sighed the Chief and left the room.

___________

 "Those are some nice tattoos" commented Matt, now all sit down eating breakfast.

 "Thank you, I designed all myself but just tattooed the parts in my leg. The thigh section was done by a colleague" you beamed at him. "I'm really proud of it".

 "Wait, are you a tattoo artist? That is so cool" marveled Brett. "For how long? Do you work of it?".

 "Well I started when I got out of the academy, so around 10 years. And yes, a friend and I have a little tattoo shop in Little Village" you informed them.

 "How come we never knew about this? You been here for a month and a half!" Stella sputtered while shaking her head.

 "When I came here you guys where dealing with a wannabe commissioner. I guess being under a microscope didn't leave us much time to socialize and when the situation passed we had lived together some things that made us become closer, even if we didn't know each other fully" you expressed. "Like for real, I never thought that a firehouse family could be this strong and attentive of your own, but today's misunderstanding was the cherry on the top. You truly are amazing ".

_________

 A few calls through the day went past and before they noticed the shift had ended and they were going straight to Molly's to share with their fellow first responders the now top 1 story from firehouse 51: you minus pants.

 You were thrilled. Yeah.

 "Yes, keep laughing. At least I'm going to be a famous legend in the 51" you rolled your eyes at the people in the table, them being Brett, Kidd, Severide and 21st precinct boys Jay Halstead, Kevin Atwater and Adam Ruzek.

 "For pulling your pants down?" asked Atwater chuckling with his partners, receiving a middle finger from your part.

 "Hey, can we get discounts in your tattoo house now or do I have to arrest you for exhibitionism?" Jay asked you.

 "What, you want a tattoo of Captain America's ass, soldier boy?" you smirked at him, "and if you don't stop laughing I'll charge you with a 10% plus".

 "Copy that", they laughed and keep joking around for about an hour before you stood up.

 "Okay ladies and gents, is time for me to go, I have an early client tomorrow" you stated while stretching your arms. "Talk to you later, bye".

  A chorus of soft "bye" and "good night" were heard, but when you were going towards the front door a booming voice broke through.

 "Hey, I didn't get to see that famous tattoo, could you do that pant trick here?" Adam yelled, trying poorly to hide a smile.

 You froze for a second, slowly turned to him with a smirk in your face and in your cockiest voice ever you answered him.

 "You wish".

[procrastinatorimagines]

🤡 with Kelly Severide pls and thanks xx

A clown car. A freaking clown car pile up. Of course, because what other call would you get on Halloween? Unbelievable. 

You hung back a little at the scene, obviously doing what you were instructed, but still keeping your distance from the three car pile up on the highway, trunks of magic props and dress up accessories strewn all over the road.

It wasn’t quite clear how the crash had happened, but as you helped Casey hook up a cable to the back car and pull it away from the main scene, a fight broke out between two of the clown, in full costume as they screamed at each other, apparently blaming one another for the incident. 

As much as you didn’t want to, you were the only one currently available to try and break it up. So, putting down your halligan and marching over with an air of confidence you didn’t not actually possess to try and stop it escalating. 

“Hey!” You yelled over the noise of the jaws currently trying to free yet more clowns. They ignored you, the tension between them brewing to the point where you knew they were about to get physical.

Kelly had seen it too, instructing Cruz to take over what he was doing as he made his way over to assist you. 

You reach the two men, squaring up as much as you could for someone a head shorter than both of them, “I said hey! Cut it out, you can sort this later, you still have friends that need assistance and fighting isn’t going to help anyone,” you told them, trying to keep a steady and authoritative voice as both clowns faced you.

“Tell that to him!” They both yelled, pointing to each other before turning back with angry glares. You expected the swing, but the second clown clearly hadn’t, staggering back with the force of his blow as he nearly tripped over his giant feet. 

You stepped in between them, “stop!” You yelled, facing the instigator with your hands out. The next swing was slightly less expected, but you ducked just in time for Kelly to arrive. 

He grabbed the clown by the back of his colar and pulled him backwards, “did you just try to hit my firefighter?” He demanded, getting in the man’s face. 

The man, to his credit, realised what he’d done the second he’d done it. “Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry,” he repeated, head moving between you and Kelly like he wasn’t sure who he was supposed to be apologising to.

Kelly glanced at you and you shook your head, it wasn’t worth it, so he shoved him away, “go cool off,” he ordered, the man obliging without another word, the second clown pulling himself up to his feet. He looked like he was going to follow, but with a stern look from Kelly, he stalked off in the other direction, grumbling as he went. 

“You good?” Kelly asked, hand on your shoulder. You gulped and nodded. 

“Yeah,” you lied, a lie your boyfriend saw through very quickly. 

“Sure about that? You look a little shaken,” he noted, scanning your face. And honestly, he wasn’t wrong. Nearly getting attacked by a clown? Definitely a nightmare you’d had before, and would probably be having again tonight.

”You know I’m terrified of clowns, right?” You admitted after a moment, earning a chuckle from Kelly as you swatted him hand away from your shoulder, pouting a little at him amusement.

“I did not,” he replied, still grinning as he opened his mouth to say something more. 

“Y/L/N! Need you over here!” Casey called, interrupting him as you looked back to your Captain, standing next to the last clown car to be dealt with. 

You took a deep breath and sighed. “Good luck,” Kelly laughed, winking at you as he wandered back to his post.

Why did it have to be clowns?

[phoenixflames12]

New Year Get To Know Me

I was tagged by the wonderful @whiskynottea- thank you love!

Nicknames: Phoen (I blame @ianmuyrray for that one), Rach, Rachy, Rachelle 

Zodiac: Sagittarius 

Height: 5′5″

Time: 18:05 pm GMT

Favourite band/artist: Peter Hollens (look up his covers on Youtube, they are excellent), Sam Smith, Rob Halligan, The High Kings 

Song stuck in my head: Fire on Fire by Sam Smith 

Last thing I googled (I don’t use Google, I use Ecosia, which plants a tree every time you use their search engine): University of Bristol Library jobs 

Other blogs: One that I set up when I was working at a residential community in west Dorset two years ago in order to have a go at blogging after having my brain numbed by writing academic essays for my undergraduate degree and to keep my friends and family up to date with what was going on. 

Do I get asks?: Yes, very occasionally!

Why did I choose this username: This username has been my username ever since I first got into the internet when I was about 17 (I was a late starter) and wrote my stuff on MuggleNet and FF.Net and it’s got so much sentimental value, that I can’t let go of it now. 

Following: 278

Average amount of sleep: I try to go for 7 hours at least, otherwise I’m not very pleasant to be around.

What I’m wearing: A blue wool mix jersey dress which has got orange stripes at the bottom and on the sleeves that I really love, blue cardigan, leggings and Thought bamboo fabric socks. 

Dream job: Anything that involves books and people and lets me live in a one bedroom flat in a city with a room that has a big bay window that looks out over a river, where I can write to my heart’s content. 

Dream trip: I’d love to go back to Norway one day and stay in the little fishing lodge that my Dad’s family has had for generations. 

Fave food: Big, hearty soups with lots of roughly chopped veg, lots of herbs and flavour. 

Play any instruments: I played the piano from the age of 8, as a form of physical therapy in order to strengthen my hand-eye coordination until I left school to go to university- so 18. I’m now wishing that I kept it up, because I miss it. I can still remember my basic scales though, so all the hours that my wonderful piano teacher spent making me practice until my fingers ached were well spent! 

Hair colour: Auburn 

Languages you speak: English, Scots, a tiny bit of Norwegian, school French 

Most iconic song: Nowhere to Go but Up from the Mary Poppins Returns OST 

Choose the secret we know, before life makes us grow/there’s nowhere to go but up!

Random fact: I fractured my wrist whilst riding my wonderful pony Candy on a beach on soft sand. 

Describe yourself as aesthetic things: A line of books backed against a wall, a PURE radio, a book with a bookmark pointing through the pages, soft tweed gloves, a rugged moorland view looking out over a dale, a tweed cap and a horn crook walking stick. 

I tag: @sassenachwaffles, @holdhertightandsayhername, @cagedbirdsong, @sassy-sassenach, @kcrabb88, @theministerskat, @ianmuyrray, @ecampbellsoup, @thesketchingwitch, @thefraserwitch, @cassiopeie, @firstruleofthediogenesclub and @katiesuavert- only if you want to, of course! 

[lollipoplollipopoh]

A never-ending Brexit: Democracy undermined? | UpFront (Headliner) by Al Jazeera English Boris Johnson became prime minister in July, promising to take the United Kingdom out of the EU by October 31 - with or without a deal. He said he would rather "be dead in a ditch" than ask the EU for another delay. But Johnson has been forced to do just that. While he managed to get MPs to back his withdrawal agreement, they rejected his plan to push it through the House of Commons in three days. Johnson was forced to send a letter to the EU asking for yet another Brexit delay. It has been more than three years since the British public voted to leave the EU, but their wishes have not been met. So, what has gone wrong with the democratic process in the UK? Labour MP David Lammy, who wants the UK to remain in the EU, blames Johnson for trying to ram the agreement through Parliament. "He's not taking it seriously. And the reason he's not taking it seriously is because he actually doesn't want the withdrawal bill and the basis on which he wants to leave the European Union properly scrutinised," Lammy told Al Jazeera. Lammy wants a new referendum and denies any suggestion a second vote would undermine the result of the first. He says it would be more democratic. "No one can tell me [about] a country that has ever undermined democracy with more democracy. That is why you can have a general election and you have another general election in four years' time," Lammy argued. But economist Liam Halligan - a Brexit supporter - believes a second referendum would be wrong. "I have a major problem, I'm afraid, call me old-fashioned, with the idea of not implementing a referendum when Parliament has sanctioned the referendum and given the decision to the British people," Halligan said. "Authority is vested in the people via Parliament, not in Parliament itself, and I think it's a major concern if we don't implement that decision," he added. In this week's UpFront, we debate the ongoing Brexit negotiations in the UK, and the chaos it has triggered both inside Parliament and on the streets. Follow UpFront on Twitter @AJUpFront and Facebook.

[dydturktek]

Nem Kurutma | Nem Alma | Rutubet Kurutma | DYD 444 0 719

To that minimal baby on the inside of us

To that minimal baby on the inside of us

Eliminate I explain to you guys just what could be the funniest story you’ll have heard seven nights a week, I want y’all to know that will at the time that it happened We were new to location. I was young and I was imprudent, but do not get we all? Come on, man let’s take a step back and put ourselves in my boots for a subsequent. I am a seven years old child (at least within the inside) who else shouldn’t be happen to be walk exterior by myself. Now I got foolishly dumped at a new university half a environment away from home (someone definitely need to be blamed with regard to this). Some have that a great many friends and had not toured the school previous to matriculation.

This kind of story will start, as many can, with this alarm clock calling at 8. 00 o’clock in the morning. I obtained up and also lazily obtained a bath before going towards my main. 00 o’clock English training. My professor introduced herself, had united states do a version of https://letusdothehomework.com/do-my-math-homework/ those old ice-breakers before giving us the of precisely what his study course would be around.

So I give my elegance and head on out to morning meal where I did my taste of wide variety that chicken breast sausage patty. (Honestly fellas, whoever discovered this is a renegade, God bless that grateful soul. ) I abandon the dinner hall an excellent thirty minutes previous to my subsequent class considering that Mother explained me as being a good lad, and take a look at my program for which is where I’ll be maneuvering next.

Schedule says I have to be on the way to the computer important for our intro to help Comp Research lab session.

Good!

My spouse and i check the location where the class will be. My set up says frankly and in almost all caps TBD.

Now,

So i’m not one intended for abbreviations, so I had little idea what TBD meant. I assumed it was the name of one of the halls here at Stanford. I mean it creates perfect sense right? So I retrieve a place of Stanford from this is my bag as well as thoroughly seek out the lounge TBD.

I just don’t need to advise you that TBD hall could not exist. We put the place away and decided to take a look it up online maps. Really the only result in which shows up considering the slightest little bit of sense is undoubtedly an Art Gallery around New York, yet I know for that fact that that isn’t where the training is. When i scratch our scalp temporarly. There has to be someone who knows from where the hall, thus i do the the very first thing that I ought not to have done. I actually ask arbitrary stranger running down the road.

‘Excuse me, are you aware where TBD hall is? ‘ I just go. Not a soul seems to have virtually any clue exactly where this community hall is. The doctor has to all be freshmen like I am. I wonder if the other folks in my science lab class have any success finding the school. I probably should have created an effort to find out people in the past. I do all of I can do at the moment, I actually keep wanting to know random people hoping Factors . get successful.

‘You may well go to the local library help children’s desk, they’ll be allowed to help you, ‘ a kindhearted stranger claims to me. As i put your girlfriend words to the back of my mind as I question other unknown people if they might help me. I had been now twenty minutes delayed for type.

I purchase a stroke involving luck, another person I actually recognize walks my favorite way. As i smile throughout relief.

‘Do you know everywhere TBD room is? ‘

‘No, I have never got word of it. Do you possess class now there? ‘

‘I do, ‘

‘Ooh, do you have looked it up on the place? … How about on google cartography? ‘

‘I have.. ‘

‘Okay, I possess time, I really could help you discuss with. ‘

Most of us spend the considerably better part of all 5 minutes wondering random passersby before together with the possibility the fact that TBD might not exactly exist. I actually decide to let my friend go and I go on to the stockpile like I have to have.

I actually make very own way to the library and the lady at the front side desk inquires me therefore cheerfully things i am interested in. I open up and tell her I’m required to have elegance at TBD hall together with she appears it up on her place. She realizes that it would not exist. Due to nowhere, Annie, a friend associated with mine, nudges me over the shoulder and questions me precisely got my insides many tangled up in a knot. I tell her all about my very own day, along with mid-narration, I recall bumping towards another person Thought about met before walking to Halligan for their compensation lab.

I just suddenly remember my mentor saying that labs could be at Halligan hall. I had developed earlier considered her thoughts to imply nothing, because it was my thinking that the schedule undoubtedly said where to meet. I now think TBD could have been manner for a thing, and the phrases come suspended from my very own schedule for dazzling glory, ‘TO OFTEN BE DETERMINED! ‘

It all makes perfect sense if you ask me now. I actually dash out from the library along with head to some lab that we am right now forty five short minutes late with regard to. I kind into the space in time pertaining to my TA to take see of me personally. I to use one of the computer systems and rapidly ask the content going on during the interval I have missed. Long account short, I got to complete invisalign assignment on time, and all was well within this side in the horizon.

When I think about this account, I laugh at how childish I can receive sometimes. It is necessary hard My partner and i try to be a carefull adult, the baby Ben locates his way in there in addition to ruins all kinds of things for me. Determine hold a straight face to avoid wasting my life, after see a bottle of pringles, baby Mary wonders what it would be prefer to dive on there and break it. While i look at the incline I have to ascend to get to school every day, I wonder just what skidding lower it over a makeshift sledge would looks like. When I turn in every night, I actually wonder who else thought it would be a good idea to hit me to school by myself.

Truth is, 1 / 2 the time, I want an adult anytime baby Ben shows up. I have pals who do this, only yesteryear a friend halted me from falling together with breaking this arm. Gowns what I appreciate most around my time frame thus far. I really like that I experience friends about me that assists me after i need help, such as Chris just who joined my family in pondering on random visitors (I basically forgot the name however let’s faux it’s Chris), Annie just who inadvertently made it easier for remember just where my training is, and even Lexi plus Favour who seem to saved all of us from suffering myself pretty bad yesteryear. They make the Tufts that I love. I just don’t necessarily mean to end this specific all in a cheesy technique, but I am going to say the item, I love them all dearly.

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NEM KURUTMA HİZMETLERİ

[thewebofslime]

Home My Feed Saved Search Video Rewards Subscribe - 30 days free Login Register HOME NEWS SPORT BUSINESS ALL SECTIONS Business Economy Companies Opinion Open economy Markets Alex Telegraph Connect Events Newsletter FTSE 100 7104.31-0.74% FTSE 250 19047.67-0.71% GBP/USD $1.2963-0.91% GBP/EUR €1.1543-1.26% BRENT OIL $65.67-0.39% BITCOIN $3897.43-0.90% GOLD $1298.18+0.99% More share information on PREMIUM Telegraph Business World Bank chief economist Paul Romer steps down Save 3 World Bank Chief Economist Paul Romer is returning to his position as university professor at New York University. Lucy Burton, financial services editor 24 JANUARY 2018 • 9:30PM Follow The World Bank’s chief economist Paul Romer has resigned from his role after less than two years in the job, according to a memo seen by The Telegraph. Mr Romer, who made his reputation in the 1980s with his study of economic growth and coined the phrase "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste", is returning to his position as university professor at New York University. His exit comes a week after Chilean officials claimed the Washington-based bank had treated the country unfairly in one of its key reports on competitiveness rankings. Foreign minister Heraldo Muñoz tweeted that "fake news [had become] fake statistics" while president Michelle Bachelet called the situation "very worrying". ... Only subscribers have unlimited access to Premium articles. Register for free to continue reading this article Register Or unlock all Premium articles. Free for 30 days, then just £1 per week Start trial Save 40% when you pay annually. View all subscription options | Already have an account? Login Related Topics Banks and Finance 3 Show comments FOLLOW TELEGRAPH BUSINESS Follow on Facebook Follow on Twitter Follow on Instagram Business latest 10 Mar 2019, 7:30pm Hamleys chief leaves as toy store’s owner seeks buyer PREMIUM 10 Mar 2019, 7:00pm ECB response to eurozone slowdown risks ‘doom loop’ PREMIUM 10 Mar 2019, 7:00pm Chinese owner lends Wolves £48m as losses soar PREMIUM 10 Mar 2019, 6:30pm Hedge funds double their bets against Royal Mail PREMIUM 10 Mar 2019, 5:00pm Fresh doubts surface over Jamie's Italian restaurants PREMIUM 10 Mar 2019, 4:30pm Comment: Stuck in Japanese post-bubble trap? I really think so TOM STEVENSON PREMIUM 10 Mar 2019, 4:00pm Big pharma in the dock as America blames it for the opioid epidemic PREMIUM 10 Mar 2019, 4:00pm Comment: Hammond would be well advised to do nothing in statement this week ROGER BOOTLE PREMIUM 10 Mar 2019, 2:37pm 10 reasons to be cheerful about the UK economy as we head towards Brexit PREMIUM 10 Mar 2019, 2:08pm Comment: Escape from Brussels - it’s now or never LIAM HALLIGAN PREMIUM 10 Mar 2019, 1:00pm Steel tycoon Gupta aims to silence critic by floating Australian arm PREMIUM 10 Mar 2019, 6:00am Questor: ConvaTec has lost its momentum so we must stomach our loss and sell PREMIUM 10 Mar 2019, 6:00am Comment: Prepared to be underwhelmed by Hammond’s Spring Statement JEREMY WARNER PREMIUM 09 Mar 2019, 9:00pm US economy faces 'real risk of recession' PREMIUM 09 Mar 2019, 8:00pm Telecoms bosses 'forced Phones4U out of business' PREMIUM 09 Mar 2019, 7:00pm 'I'm worried; we have got nowhere else to go': Interserve chairman on the fraught battle to save the ailing government contractor PREMIUM 09 Mar 2019, 7:00pm Comment: Interserve shareholders should back rescue deal - the only alternative is oblivion BEN MARLOW PREMIUM 09 Mar 2019, 7:00pm Interserve chairman warns shareholders: back rescue plan or we face administration PREMIUM 09 Mar 2019, 7:00pm Debenhams shareholder scorns boardroom assault as bid deadline lifts PREMIUM 09 Mar 2019, 6:12pm OneSavings Bank and Charter House in talks to join forces in £1.6bn challenger bank PREMIUM 09 Mar 2019, 6:01pm Deutsche starts merger talks with rival Commerzbank PREMIUM Contact us About us Rewards Archive Reader Prints Branded Content Syndication Guidelines Privacy Terms and Conditions Advertising terms Fantasy Sport Voucher Codes Modern Slavery © Telegraph Media Group Limited 2019

[dorothydelgadillo]

"Why Your Customers Are Your Best Marketing Channel Ft. Sam Mallikarjunan of BirdEye" (Inbound Success Ep. 53)

What is the single most effective - and least expensive - marketing channel available to all businesses?

Sam Mallikarjunan

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, BirdEye Head of Marketing Sam Mallikarjunan shares why your customers are your best marketing channel and how BirdEye is developing a platform designed to help businesses leverage trust - via customer evangelism - at scale. 

From his year's spent as "the face of HubSpot" to teaching marketing at Harvard to taking over marketing for BirdEye, a martech SaaS startup, Sam has gathered fascinating insights into what it takes to build a high growth business and the role that marketing plays in that process.

Listen to the podcast to hear Sam's thoughts on leveraging customers for your marketing and to learn more about his plans for marketing BirdEye.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth and today, my guest is Sam Mallikarjunan, who is the Head of Marketing for BirdEye. Welcome, Sam.

Sam Mallikarjunan (guest): Thanks for having me.

Sam and I recording this episode

Kathleen: I'm excited to speak with you. You told me that this is going to be your first podcast since joining BirdEye, so I'm really excited to dig in and learn a little bit more about it and share that with the audience, but also talk about some of the things you've learned throughout your career because you have a really interesting background with many years at HubSpot, and you're doing some teaching now. I have a lot of questions that I want to ask you!

Sam: I'm looking forward to it. It's been a weird ride, so we can go in whatever direction you want.

Kathleen: Great. Well, why don't we start by having you tell the audience a little bit about yourself, and your background, and how you wound up where you are today.

Sam: Sure. So my name is Sam Mallikarjunan. If you can't pronounce it, you can Google anything even close to it and you'll generally find me.

For seven years, I worked at HubSpot, which if your listeners don't know, is a software company based out of Boston.

For the last three or so years, I was teaching the advanced digital marketing course at Harvard University.

And then for all of last year, as we discussed before we started recording, I lived in a van, both teaching at Harvard, and then also I was HubSpot's full time speaker. So I spoke in 49 US states and about eight other countries last year on a range of topics: innovation, and innovation marketing management, et cetera, marketing strategy. (to learn more about Sam's adventures traveling the world and living in a van, check out the "Sam from the Van" Facebook page)

So now, however, what people thought would never happen is happening. They used to joke that we could change my name to "Sam from HubSpot," so that people didn't have to say Mallikarjunan. But no, I have left. I have left and taken over as Head of Marketing at birdeye.com, which is based in Dallas. So I'm moving from Tampa to Dallas, and I'm really, really, really excited because it feels ...

First of all, we share some board members with HubSpot, so it's kind of similar in that way. But second of all, it feels like HubSpot did back in the early days. So I'm very, very excited.

Kathleen: Oh that's great. So true confession, both times I've heard you say, "I lived in a van," in my head what comes up is Chris Farley. And I want to say, "Was it down by the river?"

Sam: Many times it was down by a river. We posted on Instagram, everybody got their joke, ha ha ha, very funny.

Kathleen: I'm sure it's not the first time you've heard someone say that. I'm not super original in that.

Sam: In fact, if you bust out, "Do you like green eggs and ham," based on my name, between those two jokes, you'll have hit about 50% of the recurring jokes that I've heard in my life.

Kathleen: Oh, I didn't even think of that.

Sam: Yeah.

Kathleen: Alright. Well, fascinating kind of journey to where you are.

Can you share what was it that prompted you to leave HubSpot after so many years? Because you were there for a long time, and I mean, when I hear what you've been doing - you were Head of Experimental Marketing, you were the full time speaker - I mean some of those gigs sound like dream jobs. What got you to move on?

Sam: So here's the weird thing about dream jobs, is that once you do it long enough, it becomes work again. And then also, I had an enormous privilege being at HubSpot and getting to work with and under some incredible people. HubSpot was the same size when I joined it as BirdEye is now, but I always had Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the two co-founders. I had Mike Volpe, the former CMO, Kipp Bodnar, the current CMO ... I always had them to fall back on, right? It was never ... There was always a limit to how much damage I could actually do to the long term success of the company.

HubSpot's huge now. I think it crossed the five billion dollar market cap rate, 2300 employees and something like seven or eight global offices. It's absolutely huge and to be honest, I could have spent the rest of my life at HubSpot and been absolutely happy. But what I wanted to see is if I could do it if I didn't have Volpe, and Kipp, and everybody else to fall back on.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Sam: So now I'm the Head of Marketing for a company that's the size that HubSpot was when I joined it, and if I fail I have nobody to blame but myself.

HubSpot's always had this role where if you have good trust with your manager you should be able to tell your manager when you think it's time to move on. So Kipp, and Dharmesh, and everybody always said that to me, "If you eventually want to leave the company, let us know and we'll help you find something awesome."

And so I did, about six months ago I told them that, "Hey, I really want to try and do this on my own." So I had a freelancer make me a list of 144 different start-ups in the U.S., post-Series-B, pre-IPO, either MarTech SaaS, blockchain or AI. I shortlisted those into three categories of pretty cool, really cool, and insanely cool. And then I got introductions, and feedback, and everything else from my bosses, from the people on the Executive Team. From those 144, I chose BirdEye.

Kathleen: That's amazing actually. I mean, it says a lot, first of all, for HubSpot's culture that they've created an environment where you can go and feel safe saying basically, "I'm mentally getting ready to leave." That's a scary proposition for anybody, but I think it's wonderful that that environment exists there. 

Sam: It's good both ways, right? Because it's a good retention mechanism. So I have turned down two formal CMO offers in the last several years, and many, many more opportunities and it's because they've made me really snobby. I would look at it and I would be like, "I bet Brian, and Dharmesh, and Kipp, between us we could find something even better."

So it was never a surprise to them, it always gave them an opportunity to move me internally. Almost every time you see a job in the last five years that I've moved internally at HubSpot on my LinkedIn profile it's because Sam was thinking about leaving, and we figured out a way to make it better for me to stay. And, obviously, it's good for the employee, right?

Probably the most interesting opportunities in my professional career was a couple months ago. I'm literally sitting at breakfast with my boss, texting back and forth with my new boss negotiating comp. Most people hide the fact that they're looking for a new job from their boss? My boss helped me negotiate comp. Which is good, because I had never heard of things like single option triggers and stuff like that.

Kathleen: Yeah. That's amazing and it's also really smart on the part of the employer because, especially if you're talking about key personnel. I mean, really in the technology space any personnel it seems like is key, but particularly someone like yourself who's been there so long. You're the kind of person who's hard to replace, and so having that ramp or that runway to know that you're ready for that departure as an employer is really great as well.

Such an interesting process that you went through. What an incredible opportunity to get introductions - warm introductions - to all those companies.

Now you have me dying to learn more about BirdEye because I want to know what it is about this company that made it the one, right? I feel like you were on The Bachelor and there are all these companies handing you roses and you chose this one.

Sam: Yeah. So first off, you're right. They functionally got six month's notice, so it was a little sad actually, by the time I left they no longer needed me because they had a replacement. So I didn't have that ... you know. I don't know, it was both good and bad.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Sam: Yeah, so BirdEye. There was a couple of things I was looking for, right?

One was I wanted to work for a company where solving the problem was meaningful. What I loved about HubSpot in the early days was inbound marketing felt right. You know? The way the world was was that you made money by pissing people off. I used to train ... Those annoying people in the mall who try and sell you cell phones? I used to train them, so that was my background.

But it felt wrong. I was never happy about it, the work that I was doing.

Inbound marketing felt right. You should be able to build a big, profitable business off of creating an experience that people love on the internet and in all of your market.

What I love about BirdEye was that it felt right too, which is - the website we're still working on, clarifying our value propositions - but the way that I think about it is if you're a world class dentist, or a lawyer, or autobody repair shop, or whatever, you should not also have to be a world class internet marketing professional. You should be able to just be good at your job and empower your customers with a framework that's going to help you grow your business.

Obviously the opposite is true, which is that if you ask your local mechanic how they feel about the local big dealerships, they're going to say the work is subpar and overpriced. Same thing if you asked most dentists, or lawyers, or whatever the small business is.

So I loved that bit of it, where every day I come into work, my team comes into work, the better we do our jobs, the closer we are towards shifting the world of business the way that it should be.

I also just like it too because I love things that are unfair advantages that really irritate large entrenched companies. So for a hundred years functionally, the business growth has been about, "Can my Sales and Marketing team beat up your Sales and Marketing team? Can we just sell better than you?" In this day and age, I think as we've seen with companies like United, right - great Sales and Marketing team at United - but if you piss off the customers there's no defense from that anymore.

Kathleen: Oh yeah.

Sam: Right? So it's not this marginal battle anymore. Companies like BirdEye came and flipped the table over and it says that, "My community of empowered community fans can just obliterate your Sales and Marketing team."

That's what I loved about it. So it was the mission, it was the brand. I mean, it's a MarTech SaaS company with executives that I love and it's a very comfortable fit. But for me, I wanted to do what Brian and Dharmesh and Mike did for inbound marketing, which is create that movement.

I wanted to do that for what I honestly think ... We haven't finished defining it yet, but this has got to be the next wave in growth, right? The only thing that matters about you is how empowered customers are that like you. Because you don't want the only empowered customers to be the ones that don't like you.

Kathleen: You know, it really resonated because you talk about doctors, and dentists, and lawyers, and people like that. I owned an agency for 11 years and I had many of them as clients, and the best campaigns we did - in fact we won HubSpot's first ever Client Campaign of the Year award back in 2015 for work we did for a LASIK eye surgeon.

The reason it was so successful is, it was kind of like what you're talking about mixed with a little dash of influencer marketing. We found a guy that happened to have a really strong Facebook presence, and out of nothing but dumb luck figured out that he wore glasses, would love to have LASIK.

We paired him up with a doctor, they agreed to do the surgery at no cost if he would just blog and talk about his experience, good, bad, or otherwise, there was no requirement that it could only be positive. He had a great experience; he went and vlogged, and blogged, and just spoke to his audience about it and that campaign far and away crushed anything else we've ever done.

Especially with things like healthcare and attorneys, you really trust your friends and those people in your network so much more than you trust an e-book, because we did plenty of those too. But it wasn't the e-book that killed it for us, it was this guy telling his story and personally endorsing the doctor and the procedure that was the lightening in a bottle. So I can totally see how that's so important.

Sam: Yeah, now the question is, can you do that 100,000 times, right?

Kathleen: Right?

Sam: Especially for local marketing, there's not always local influencers who you go to to determine what dentist you go to. For dentists it's funny, it's the old joke, it's a cliché. It's, "What do you call the person who graduated last in their class in medical school? You call them doctor."

Kathleen: Right.

Sam: So the only way that I, as a patient, or whatever, can tell the difference between Dr. A and Dr. B is what their patients say about them online. And yeah, we trust them way more than what people say about themselves.

I think the other thing that's changed is the passionate relationship we have with certain brands. It feels new. I don't have data on this, but it feels super new. I love using Uber as an example, because Uber in 2011 was banned by the state of Massachusetts for 23 hours. It's the fastest I've ever seen government move. And it's not because Uber had a bunch of lobbyists then like they do now, it's because ... We literally got a phone call from the mayor of Boston's office at the HubSpot office asking us to stop slamming them on Twitter. It was a decision by the governor's office, not the mayor's office, and we just didn't know that.

Uber got hundreds of people to show up to the Cambridge City Council meeting, which is used to a dozen or so people showing up. When I see that and I see things like what happened with United, or I see things both good and bad, communities of customers rising to your defense, or communities of customers tearing you down, there's something there.

Kathleen: Oh, it's incredibly powerful. I was going to say Uber is a study in and of itself of both dynamics, like how it can go well and how it can go not so well.

You said a word that I think is so important, which is trust. You know, one of my colleagues at IMPACT is Marcus Sheridan. I've seen him speak numerous times and he has this one thing he always says that I find so powerful, which is that, "Every company is in the same business, whether you're Uber selling rides, or you're McDonald's selling hamburgers, or whether you're HubSpot selling software."

When you boil it down, they're really selling trust, because if somebody can't trust you they're not going to buy from you.

Just like my campaign, even though we had an influencer, it's really no different than if I go on Facebook and ask my friends. It's about who do I trust, who's opinion do I trust?

So it sounds like what you're building is something that helps you leverage trust at scale.

Sam: I like that, "Leverage trust at scale."

Kathleen: There you go, you can put that on the website.

Sam: When I teach at Harvard there's a metaphor I like to use, which is about how all economists, of which business is a subset, of which marketing is a subset, have physics envy, right?

In physics, I can drop this pen a hundred times out of a hundred, and it's going to fall and hit the ground. I can stand in Harvard Square handing out a hundred $1 bills and at least 20 people will make the irrational decision, they'll call me a "chowda head" and keep walking, right?

We work in a profession where it's not this simple, "If this, then that, zero in one binary value," marketing is a social science, economics and all of business is a social science and the definition of social science is, "A science about which we are very uncertain."

Kathleen: Yeah.

Sam: The most important variable, by far, is exactly what you said, which is that trust. That's what separates us from all of the other professional disciplines, is our dentists, or lawyers, right? Whatever, they know there's something objectively true that they can work against.

We have to work in an environment where that's never the case, things are always changing. The one constant is it doesn't matter how compelling the argument is, or how cheap it is, or how cool it is, whatever, if there's no trust that's the deal breaker.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Sam: Fell out of your hand while I'm standing in the square.

Kathleen: Yeah. So, I would love it if you could talk a little bit about how you see this playing out for companies, whether these are dental practices, law firms, any other type of company in terms of trying to leverage trust at scale. What does that really look like and how does that manifest in terms of a company's marketing? And you using that at all with BirdEye or planning to use it at all?

Sam: Yeah, well first of all, you should always drink your own champagne, eat your own dog food, whatever metaphor you want to use, so we definitely are ... That's really important to us because people want to buy from a company that sells to people like them. So we're not done with this yet, but you'll notice that soon, if you come to the BirdEye website from one of our dental ad campaigns it's all going to show you reviews and stories of dentists versus lawyers, right? That would be very different.

I will say one of the cool things, again, about how this is like HubSpot was in the early days is you remember how easy blogging was back in 2011? 2010?

Kathleen: Yeah.

Sam: I mean, it was great. If you had a blog, you were light years ahead of the curve, right? If you were blogging frequently, you would win your market, right? I had a toenail fungus remover company, I had knee scooters, I had mortgage companies, if you just did the work, you'd be fine and absolutely crush it. Now that's really hard, growing your traffic, your acquisition engine off of blogging is really, really hard because it's a very crowded space.

The good thing about reputation marketing, reviews, and leveraging your customer base like that is almost universally everyone is really bad at it. 

The large companies, like T-Mobile sends me an NPS survey, right, which is one way to begin the conversation about leaving a review, and whenever a company does it I always give them a zero because I know I'm not going to mess with their data that bad. I want to see if there's follow up. If I send you a zero ... If I send you a 10, right, yes, I'm absolutely going to recommend you, you should send me a link. Say, "Hey, here's an easy way to do that."

Kathleen: Right.

Sam: If I send you a zero, I would expect that a company would have that mentality of following up with me to find out way. Almost no one does.

T-Mobile, Verizon... you know, as much as I hate to admit, even at HubSpot it was still a very basic implementation of no, somebody gave you a bad NPS score whether or not they'd get a follow up. You know, if you do it at all, you're going to be in good shape.

Asking your customers for reviews is still innovative as weird as that sounds. We don't feel that way because we see everybody moving in this direction. You and I see lots of people are talking about this sort of thing, but the vast majority of businesses and the vast majority of markets don't even ask their customers for reviews. If their customers say something negative, they don't follow up, and if their customers say something positive they don't use that in any way.

They don't put it in their email. They don't put it on their website, they don't put it in their ads, so the-

Kathleen: Why do you think that is?

Sam: Well, you know, the bell curve of adoption, right? So you've always got the people who are the innovators and the early adopters who are going to try everything just because it's new, and they're worried about being second place, and you know, we just haven't got there with some of the technologies and behaviors that are new.

Stuff like Bird Eye is new. How important reviews are may not feel new, but it's relatively new to the world of business. It's not been around for 30 years. The underlying concepts have, but the websites - Yelp hasn't been around for 30 years sort of thing.

The other thing is that, you know, if you've read 'The Innovator's Dilemma' by Clayton Christensen it's a really great book. I have a different concept of the innovator's dilemma, which is that it's really, really easy to be innovative when things are going well, because you have lots of breathing room. It's really, really easy to be innovative when things are going really poorly.

So like, when I first applied to HubSpot I didn't apply. I built hiremeHubSpot.com and ran ads targeting people who worked at HubSpot to register for the free webinar on why you should hire me. It's because I was a college drop out with no previous experience, so you know, when you have no chance of success it's easy to be innovative.

It's the middle area where things are going okay, but if you mess up they could go off the rails really quickly where it's hard to be innovative, and that's where most of the world of small business is right now.

You know, if you're a dentist or a lawyer, auto repair shop, whatever, you're running on pretty thin margins. You're having to fight pretty hard to get your customers. You're already behind the curve, because you don't know the highly technical things, like local SEO and PPC. You generally don't have a sophisticated understanding of the marketing engine behind that, and you don't have the luxury to be innovative, so that's, again, one of the things I loved about Bird Eye was we try and take some of the hard work out of that and make it a little more attainable.

Kathleen: So focusing on reviews for a second, because that seems like it's a big part of this, you know, you want to get a customer to review you, and I've worked with different companies and talked to them about this, and you know, some of the times it seems like they don't do it because they're just afraid to ask. Other times, they don't know how to ask, so can you talk about what is the right way to ask for a review?

How do you navigate that process in a way that doesn't seem too pushy and doesn't seem like you're placing too much of a burden on the customer?

Sam: I mean, so NPS, the net promoter score, is sort of an easy cheat, because it asks on a scale of zero to 10 how likely are you to refer us to a friend or colleague. If they give you a zero through six you should follow up immediately, right? Sevens and eights are passives, and nines and 10s are promoters. You would really only tell the people who would give you a nine or a 10, "Hey, that's awesome. I'm glad you were happy. Can you share your story with the world?"

Then, everybody who's less than that you would put them into a service remediation process, right? Just send a text message to the business owner or whatever you want to do to follow up with this customer because they're unhappy.

I definitely think you're right, which is that people are somewhat afraid of the answer, because it is, especially for small businesses, highly personal. This is ... I put my blood, my sweat, and my money, and my risk and everything into this business that I built, and then to actively solicit anybody to say anything negative about it is hard. It's a hard thing to do emotionally.

There's a humility in that, which is that you've got to know that you're never going to be perfect, and as we say here it's not about being the best. It's about being the best at getting better.

We have a tool that tells you all of the things that your customers hate in a market. You can look at it just by your company or you can look at it by your entire industry.

Kathleen: Oh, that's really interesting. Like if you're a dentist, is it the anonymized aggregate feedback from all the dental-

Sam: Yeah. Cool thing about our industry is most of the data set we're working with is public, so I call it our blue ocean finder for the business strategy nerds who are listening to the podcast, because you can literally plot what's important to my customers and which competitors are bad at that? You can adjust your strategy accordingly.

Also, on the more micro level you can say what's important to my customers that I'm bad at? What's important to my customers that I'm good at? Then, you make the decision. Do I fix the things that I'm bad at or do I stop doing those things entirely, or what, right? The exact same process you'd follow going through a blue ocean strategy canvas.

Yeah, it's about listening but not just about hearing, right? It's actually listening and making change based on that.

Kathleen: And what industries do you currently have that for?

Sam: So the really good ones for us so far, the people who have been willing to take a risk, are people like dentists and lawyers and auto body repair shops. We're working on our own buyer persona exercise right now, so you'll forgive me. I don't have a nice "Marketing Mary" to show you like we had at HubSpot.

The key variables for us are people who their customers don't want to be their customer, so like divorce lawyer, collision repair shops, etc. People for whom differentiation is very difficult, like dentists. And then people for whom the consequences of the decision are extremely severe, right?

Kathleen: Surgeons.

Sam: Surgeons. Well, wedding venues, that sort of thing, right? You mess that up you can't get that back, right?

Kathleen: Yeah.

Sam: So those are generally the three psychographic categories of businesses that we're looking at right now.

Kathleen: Interesting. So for example, if I were to go on and I wanted to get that industry-wide view of what customers are and are not happy with, could I get that right now for marketing agencies for example or is there a certain pick list I need to choose from?

Sam: I don't know if we have marketing agency ... We should. We have advertising and media as one of our categories in our database, but we're a startup, so you know exactly what that means-

Kathleen: Oh yeah.

Sam: -which is that odds are all of the data exists. It's just a question of if anybody has asked that question before. That'd be a fun follow up to do for the podcast. 

Kathleen: I mean, I have a feeling I know the answer, but you know, you can't assume. It would be interesting to look. I'd love to play around with that at some point, so if you ever want a beta tester for agencies, you know who to call.

Sam: Absolutely. Yeah.

Kathleen: I think that kind of competitive intelligence is really interesting, and one of the things you said really struck me, which is that it's not just about understanding how to change your messaging and your marketing. You could truly use that to make very fundamental decisions about your product offering, your service offering, what you want to do as a company, you know? Do we cut certain services because we're just never going to be great at it and it's a huge pain point? There are some really interesting potential in terms of how that data can be used.

Sam: We haven't even begun to tap into this, but you're right. It's the lipstick on a pig. If you're changing your sales and marketing but not changing who you really are, in 2018 you're going to be found out, and you're going to be found out because your customers are going to sell you out hard.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Sam: They're going to hop on Google, Facebook, and everything else like that and tell people that your marketing does not match up with the customer experience.

I will say man, you're getting me excited here, because it is super fascinating. You know, when we think about the world of disruptive innovation and - forgive me for the Harvard jargon terms here, right - but you think about things like the extendable core, which is what's the thing that a business should lean on to survive the disruption of its market? The classic example here is, like, hotels, right? Have you ever stayed in an Airbnb?

Kathleen: Oh yeah.

Sam: Yeah, have you ever attended a conference in an Airbnb?

Kathleen: No.

Sam: Yeah, right? So there's some things that Airbnb simply can't do without adopting the same cost structure. Turns out they're really important. So business travelers, there's a reason Airbnb's never really nailed business travel. It's because of the standardization.

You can look at what is important to the customers who are leaving me and what is important to the customers who are staying around? You can look at some of those mappings, and you know, if I'm Marriott hotel group right now, I'm not actually worried about spending too much time solving for the destination vacation traveler, right? I'm really focused on events. I'm focused on business travel.

I landed here in Palo Alto at 12:30 in the morning, didn't matter. I walked into the Sheraton. I know exactly what the lobby looks like even though I've never been to this hotel. That's what I value. I don't have to think about it.

Kathleen: Yeah, yeah.

Sam: So yeah, you're absolutely right. There's a lot of interesting data that can come from the fact that we now have the ability to listen to our customers at scale and make decisions.

Kathleen: I'm always struck by how many companies have that information - like have it in their hands, not just have access to it, but have been given it - and don't do anything with it.

Sam: Most of them.

Kathleen: Yeah, it's kind of shocking actually.

Sam: So this is going to sound super weird I guess, but I don't work at HubSpot anymore, so I'm allowed to say nice things about them. HubSpot was so humble by the way that we never felt comfortable bragging about ourselves. You know, in DC they have the beltway syndrome, right? Everybody in DC thinks everybody else in the world sees things the way people in DC do.

At HubSpot we had "sprocket syndrome," which is we thought everybody in the world was just as sophisticated in their concepts of economics and growth and business as we were, which isn't true, right?

You know, things are changing so fast. What was the Deloitte research? The average life span of a knowledge stock, a competitive piece of information like a knowledge that you own, is down to like five years. Whatever it is you own that you're basing your business on, much less your career on, you can expect to be a differentiator for something like five years as opposed to we literally used to name our families after what we did.

You were Smith, you were a Wainright, you made wagons, whatever. Now, it's like you can't even name your company after what you do, right? Like you know, it's hard to even have a job title after what you do, because everything changes so fast. The mechanisms for perpetual learning and keeping up with all of that, I just don't think most professionals and definitely most businesses haven't figured out.

Kathleen: Yeah, you know, it's so funny that you just said that about the pace of change, because as I was telling you before we started, I just came back from a two week vacation, and I'm going to fly my geek flag now.

On vacation, I decided to read 'Becoming Steve Jobs'. There's probably a lot I could have read, but for some reason I was really into that. And you know, I lived through the whole evolution of Apple. I'm old enough that I was working pre-Apple, but yet I had forgotten how quickly all of that happened - how we went from we didn't even have personal computers to "wow, we have a laptop," to "oh my gosh, now we have a little music player and iTunes," and then "we have phones that are full screen and tablets." I mean, rereading it was really both exciting but also kind of frightening.

I have an 11 year old, and all I could think was "wow, I just have no idea what the future holds for him when I read this book."

It's true. When I think about any business, you know, my company that I used to own, we were EOS practitioners, the entrepreneurial operating system, and they talk about having your long term plan. I don't know how you could ever have more than a ... You could have a three year plan, but it's going to change dramatically, right? I don't even know how you could have a five year plan anymore. It used to be when I graduated from business school it was all about the rolling five year plan. I just think that would be a piece of fiction today if I created it.

Sam: Yeah. There's somebody ... I don't remember who it is. They had this great graphic of the pace of change, and if you went back to 10,000 BC you could bring somebody forward in time to 5,000 BC before they saw something that fundamentally challenged their world view, and then 5,000 BC, okay, to 2,000 BC and then 2,000 BC to zero BC. You're starting to see some innovation. Zero BC to like 1,000 BC, very different world. 1000 BC to 1500 - hugely different world, and now if you brought somebody from the early 1900s to just 100 years later it's nuts. If you brought somebody even just from the 60s or the 70s-

Kathleen: Totally.

Sam: -right just with no context, they saw everything new, this is dark magic, right? It's incredible. That pace of change is accelerating, and the virtue of planning is being replaced by the virtue of adaptability.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Sam: It is not nearly as important to me. When I'm interviewing people, for example, it's not nearly as important to me for most roles whether or not you have deep domain experience. What matters to me is your ability to comprehend new concepts that you've never studied before and your ability to adapt to change, because you know, it's a cliché that the only constant is change, but that used to be true, and now it is not only true, it is the defining characteristic of what life is for all of us.

If you can't be adaptable, if you can't wrap your mind around concepts that you've never even been presented with before, you're not going to survive - definitely not in the world of business.

Kathleen: Yeah, and the other fascinating thing that came out of me reading that book was Steve Jobs talked about how there's a difference between people who are focused on improving what already exists - which he kind of looked at as the Microsoft model - and seeing what doesn't exist but what is fundamentally needed. That's what obviously he saw as the Apple model.

It's a really interesting construct if you think about it, because if you're only working off of the existing reality and looking to improve it, you can only experience change so quickly, whereas if you kind of forget about the reality and are able to think about what's not here that should be, all of a sudden you get these leaps and bounds that start to happen.

That's a tough ask for a lot of people though. I don't think there's a large percentage of people that are comfortable in that realm.

Sam: Yeah, I mean, if you do what everyone else does you get what everyone else gets sort of thing, right?

Again, it's one of the reasons I loved this company is, for a century it's sales and marketing versus sales and marketing team, and now it's we're flipping the table and doing something new.

I think part of that is the way that we grow up, right? We grow up not learning how to think but learning what to think. It's this graded progression, right? It's still amazing to me when people come out of college and they come into their first role and there's all these stereotypes about them needing positive feedback. That's because that's how they were raised, right? Like "I do the thing, and then I get this" - it's an "If this then that" sort of world.

Kathleen: Everyone gets a trophy.

Sam: Yeah, I study ... Not everybody just getting a trophy, but it's even the high performers, the exceptionally good people were told that the way to be exceptionally good, okay, you study, you take the test, you get an A, and then the assumption was you get a job, which everybody who's graduated college in the last five years knows that's not true.

You know, and now we live in a fundamentally different world where we have to take everybody who grew up in that universe and teach them something new. We also need to start teaching our kids and future generations it is not about knowing the thing. It's about knowing the way to think and knowing new ways to think and processing it that way.

When I'm in an argument at a bar, it's not a question of whether or not I can figure out who was batting for the Red Sox in the 1986 World Cup or something like that. I can just ask my phone that. What matters way more is that I know that I should ask that question and why that question's important. Some of the stuff, it's not as clear. It's not this logical, linear progression.

Kathleen: Yeah, man, that makes parenting sound more intimidating.

Sam: It is. I don't have kids, but good luck, right?

Kathleen: I'm not convinced I'm doing a great job, so ... No. It's a lot to think about, and it's pretty overwhelming, but love the philosophical bent that this conversation took, because this is all really important stuff, and it's easy to sink into just talking about tactics, because marketers love that, and it's easy to say, “Oh, give me a 10 point checklist of the things I should do to be successful,” but a lot of times the reality really is it's not a 10 point checklist, it's take a step back and think differently.

Sam: For everyone listening to this, if you ever come across a blog article that says "here's exactly what you need to do," that means that it has been codified to the point, like "10 steps to do whatever," it has been codified to the point that everybody else in your industry knows it too. Right?

This is why it's valuable, because it's hard. It's because it's not clearly defined. I can't just write a roadmap for you, I don't even have a name for this movement, yet. Right?

What's my inbound marketing? We haven't figured that out yet, but I can tell you it's important, and you and I know intuitively we believe that it's important, and the people who are going to grow by leaps and bounds, 10-X, 100-X, are going to be people who work with people like you and me to figure that out, not the people who wait to, you know, AOL still makes what, 20 million a year, or something like that off of their dial up internet subscription? Those sorts of people are not going to be the ones who are going to figure this stuff out, and are going to make that big change.

Kathleen: Unless everything old is new again, and dial up comes back just like record players did. Kidding.

You have all these years of really interesting experience at HubSpot. I mean, you were with other companies before that. You've been in marketing roles for a very long time, you taught marketing at Harvard. You're coming into this role at BirdEye, I would love to just hear a little bit about what are you planning to do with BirdEye, what's in your roadmap that you think is going to really help you achieve the goals that you set out?

BirdEye's Marketing Roadmap

Sam: Yeah. This isn't like the cool thing to say, but what matters most is the fundamental mechanics, right?

We have to execute consistently over time. We have to build a team that's aligned very closely with an inside sales team. That's why I'm moving to Dallas, by the way, that's where most of the sales team is, even though we have a Palo Alto office. I'm building the marketing team where the sales team is. We've got to measure the right things. We've got to train and empower folks. We got to build just the disciplined cadence.

That sounds easy. That is not easy, right? Making sure that people are aligned. Making sure that people can execute. Making sure that the right people are on the bus, because there are some people at this company, and at all companies who help them get from zero dollars to the run rate they're at now. But the people who are going to help you get from $30 million dollars to $300 million dollars are not necessarily the same people, and the people who are going to help you get from $30 million to $300 billion dollars, are not necessarily the same people.

Making that transition smooth, making sure that you're recruiting people who are good fits, that's all the basics, right?

The next thing that I wanted to do is this is a community play. We have to build a movement here. We have to build something like inbound marketing.

It was such a moment of pride for me, it was actually 2015 on Google Trends the phrase inbound marketing exceeded the phrase cold calling.

Kathleen: Oh, that's awesome.

Sam: We won. It was great.

We need to figure that out. What that is on our end, and we need to... Again this is the innovators, the real innovator's dilemma, is things aren't going bad, but they're also, we're not like 10-Xing for no reason, so it's how do we make the time, and make sure that everybody on my team is carving out that bandwidth to do the things that for lack of a better term are end plus one, they're innovative. Right? How do we have a podcast that tells the story of peoples' favorite customers?

So I used to host an AM talk radio show, AM/FM talk radio show about cigars, right?

Kathleen: I was sniffing around online, and I saw on your LinkedIn profile that you once worked for a company called cheaphumidors.com, is that right? Do I have that right?

Sam: Yeah. This was before that, but yeah.

Kathleen: I totally wanted to ask you about that, but we'll do that in a separate conversation.

Sam: This was before that, but every cigar lounge, like Cheap Humidors is another good example, but every cigar lounge in the country, I joke, has somebody named Rex who remembers Cuba before the revolution. He's usually a great guy to talk to, you can sit down and have great conversation, and what we are selling is that kernel, that relationship between the business owner and their favorite customer. That is just storytelling gold.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Sam: Right? We've really got to nail that. We've got to know the strategy better than everything else. On Cheap Humidors, by the way, don't judge me, because back then exact match domains were really important, so if you googled cheap humidors ...

Kathleen: I was going to say it's probably a domain a lot of people would like to own.

Sam: Yeah. Now, I mean, with RankBrain and everything it's more about the conceptual topic extraction from the search engines-

Kathleen: Right.

Sam: And stuff like that. You could call yourselves reallylowcosthumidors.com and somebody googles really low cost humidors they're not necessarily going to find you.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Sam: Marketing - it's hard. It used to be easy. Well, it used to be way easier.

The problem is, is now we've got brilliant people, who their minds are working against yours, and you're really fighting, you know, at least if you're following the old sales and marketing team versus sales and marketing team you're following this optimization, this game of inches, sort of thing, and it's hard. I can't do seven eCommerce applications of LOLcats any more - it's one of my favorite articles I wrote.

Kathleen: It's hard, but I've got to tell you, in some ways I think it's great for smaller businesses, because when it wasn't so hard, when you could game the search engines, you could basically buy your way to the top, and that favors people with deeper pockets. You could never compete against them.

I feel like now, if you're willing to put in the elbow grease and really create awesome content, you have a shot, and that's a matter of time. Granted, time is always at a premium for everybody, but in some funny ways there's a little more of an even playing field than before, but I could be wrong about that.

Sam: Not to sound too self promotional, but again there was a reason I chose to work for this company, all of the arch of history has bent - business history at least - has bent towards doing the right thing, being more profitable, right?

You could never run a business model now based off of the horrible things that people used to do back in the day. The way they treated their workers, for example, much less the way they treated their customers, or their competitors. The cool thing is companies like Google - whether we like to admit it or not - have forced us to do better marketing. Doing the right thing is now good business.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Sam: And that feels great, right? Because when I talk about T-Mobile, I could do that sales pitch in Spanish, even though I don't speak Spanish, right? Because it didn't matter. I didn't care what you were going to say back to me, you were either going to sign it or you're going to walk away, so it didn't matter to me that I understood what I was saying. I didn't feel good about that, right? It was just the best way to make money at the time.

Now, like creating a good value-added inbound experience is the best way to make money, and that's again what I love about this company, which is the best way to make money should be being good at your job, like serving customers well, and I think all of the weight and inertia of the history of business is driving us towards this point, where whether it's Google, whether it's Yelp, whether it's Facebook, or whatever, you're going to have to solve that bit, or you're never going to succeed in business.

Kathleen's Two Questions

Kathleen: I want to ask you my favorite two questions that I ask everybody, because I think you've given me the perfect segue into it, and we've talked about how to be successful in business these days you have to right by your customers.

When you think about the world of companies, and brands, and even individual marketers out there, my usual question is, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well, but I'm going to put a little twist on that, and say, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well by virtue of how they are kind of nurturing, and building, and leveraging that trust with the customer?

Sam: Yeah. HubSpot does a good job, that's way to softball of an answer.

You know what I really love, and this is one of my favorite business models in the world, is Netflix, because Netflix has scaled the relationship. I've rented more than 900 movies through Netflix, and I do that because I know that every time I give them that information, they're going to listen and use that to make my experience better.

If the internet is about bringing together some of these groups of people with similar interests, Netflix does that beautifully, because it figures out, "Hey, listen, like you like Star Trek, I like Star Trek - people may not put the two of us next together on a demographics sheet, but Netflix will put us back together." The more information we give it, the more valuable that relationship becomes.

I actually couldn't leave Netflix now, like let's say you launched your own streaming service for a $1.00 a month, I still wouldn't leave Netflix, because there's so much value in the history of that relationship that I have.

They're probably my favorite from the customer delight, and customer retention perspective. From the actual using your customers to grow, Apple is still amazing, because there's three things you can never talk about at a party or at an office. Right? Politics, religion, and PC versus MAC, because no one can have a rational conversation about that, and -

Kathleen: Or jiffy versus giffy, at least in our office.

Sam: Whoa, that's true.

You start talking about MAC, and the MAC fans will just like, they're so passionate, they're so ravenous. Right? And Apple actually does a pretty good job of leveraging those evangelists. So do companies like Uber. You know Uber grew enormously fast, because I told everybody to take Uber, you know, companies that did not have that like Lyft, Lyft started about the same time, if not slightly before Uber, but what they never nailed was that customer evangelism piece, and so that's why Uber managed to outgrow them. Those are some companies that I think do it right.

Kathleen: Yeah. Those are great recommendations.

You also touched on the fact that marketing is changing so quickly, and that you look for people who are able to keep pace with that change, and are able to embrace, and quickly learn and understand new concepts. Given that pace of change, how do you personally stay up to date, and educate yourself on everything that's happening in the world of digital marketing?

Sam: Yeah. That is a difficult question, which unfortunately has a difficult answer, which is that we are, especially in this day and age, like our own businesses. My fathers generation, my grandfathers generation, could expect to work for one company their entire life, get a pension, and move on.

We have to think about ourselves as businesses. We're generally not going to stay with the same company for our entire lives and then get a pension, and whatever, which we define ourselves that way.

We have to start thinking about disruptive innovation the same way they do. There's a few core characteristics of that. One, is get ridiculously good at defining the value you bring. We call this the "jobs to be done framework." Henry Ford had the most famous quote, if he'd ask his customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.. Obviously he didn't found the Ford Horse Breeding Corporation. He founded the Ford Motor Company.

Kathleen: That goes back to the Steve Job's thing-

Sam: Yeah.

Kathleen: Find the thing that's missing.

Sam: Right now, if I asked my boss what he wants me to do, he's going to say, “Drive more leads for the sales team.” That's not really what it is. Right? That's not the value that I bring. The value that I bring is the coaching, and unique perspective, et cetera, so I have focused not on the tactics of marketing, but I'm focusing, and I'm ridiculously good at coaching, and ridiculously good at strategy, not, and that's sort of self disruption.

That self disruption is the next piece, so you define your value, you need to be really, really paranoid.

The best companies, like HubSpot Labs, for example, are those who are continually investing in testing whether or not they can provide more value for their customers than the core model.

So the free version of HubSpot, right? For example, we knew somebody was going to do that eventually, and it might as well be us and not some random nerd out of MIT's basement who does it, don't fight, it's uncomfortable, but don't fight the change. Lean into that change, and be very, very, like... get comfortable with change.

The value that I'm adding to business right now is probably not going to be, as you said, the value that I'm adding to five years, it's going to be something different. We have to be comfortable with that.

Now, the flip side of that is adopting this mindset of continuous learning, which is, I hate when people ask me for book recommendations, because very rarely do I feel you have to read the entire book to get the point.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Sam: And it's way more interesting to me to see specific blog articles, like send me the three most interesting blog articles that you've read in the last six months on recruiting marketers.

You could probably do that, and that would take a shorter amount of my time, and add more value than you telling me to read random books on hiring.

That self selection comes from joining communities, not from going and getting a degree, not from trying to read a book a day, or something like that, but from joining communities and asking those hard questions, and never being afraid to ask stupid questions. That is my greatest pet peeve.

We saw this on inbound.org, so I ran Labs, which built inbound.org, HubSpot's community site, people never wanted to use our "Quora for Marketers" that we built because they were terrified of looking like they didn't already know the answer, those are the people who are going to find it very hard to have long successful careers. The fear of asking stupid questions is how company's are killed, the fear of asking stupid questions is also how careers are killed.

Where to Find Sam (and BirdEye) Online

Kathleen: Yeah. That's great advice. Wow. There is so much to think about, and this was really fun. I'm so glad I got to be the first person to talk to you about BirdEye, and excited to check it out myself, and hopefully learn a little bit more about what people do and do not like about marketing agencies. If somebody has a question, wants to followup with you, and learn more, what's the best way for them to connect with you online?

Sam: Again, if you Google anything close to my name you will find my website, my Twitter, my LinkedIn. I answer every website inquiry, every tweet, every LinkedIn message.

Before you do that, if you're going to ask me for an opinion on something my one favor that I would ask you go check out the BirdEye website, and try to do something. I'm not trying to get you to buy here, what I want you to do, though, is play around with it, see what things break, see what things are interesting to you, and then let's talk about that, too. We're a startup just like HubSpot was back in the day. A startup is a temporary organization in search of a repeatable business model, so I want feedback from you all now that I don't have Kip and Volpe and Dharmesh and Halligan, and everybody else to hide behind. Yeah. Definitely, please do that, and reach out to me if you want. I'd love to talk.

Kathleen: All right. Awesome. I'm going to put all those links in the show notes, so that if people don't know how to spell your name they can just go to the show notes, click the link, and find it, but we'll also of course put links into BirdEye, so that they can go and try to find all the bugs, and expose the weaknesses, and then make that the platform for their conversation with you. Great.

Thank you so much, Sam. I really appreciate it.

If you are listening, and you found some value in today's conversation, I would really appreciate it if you consider giving the podcast a review on iTunes, or Stitcher, or whatever platform you chose to listen on, and if you know somebody doing kick ass inbound marketing work tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. Thanks again, Sam.

Sam: Thanks.

Want to stay updated when the podcast is released?

Drop us your name and email address below and we’ll send you the show notes every Monday!  

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/why-customers-best-marketing-channel-sam-mallikarjunan

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Deadlines and Ditches: The UK's Brexit saga continues | UpFront by Al Jazeera English In this week's UpFront, we ask whether the seemingly never-ending Brexit process is laying waste to democracy in the United Kingdom with Labour MP David Lammy and economist Liam Halligan. And in a special interview, we discuss what leaving the European Union (EU) means for Northern Ireland with Sinn Fein politician and Member of the European Parliament Martina Anderson. A never-ending Brexit: Democracy undermined? Labour MP David Lammy and economist Liam Halligan debate whether Brexit has damaged the UK beyond repair. Boris Johnson became prime minister in July, promising to take the UK out of the EU by October 31 - with or without a deal. He said he would rather "be dead in a ditch" than ask the EU for another delay. But Johnson has been forced to do just that. While he managed to get MPs to back his withdrawal agreement, they rejected his plan to push it through the House of Commons in three days. Johnson was forced to send a letter to the EU asking for yet another Brexit delay. It has been more than three years since the British public voted to leave the EU, but their wishes have not been met. So what has gone wrong with the democratic process in the UK? Lammy, who wants the UK to remain in the EU, blames Prime Minister Johnson for trying to ram the agreement through Parliament. "He's not taking it seriously. And the reason he's not taking it seriously is because he actually doesn't want the withdrawal bill and the basis on which he wants to leave the European Union properly scrutinised," Lammy said. Lammy wants a new referendum and denies any suggestion a second vote would undermine the result of the first. He says it would be more democratic. "No one can tell me [about] a country that has ever undermined democracy with more democracy. That is why you can have a general election and you have another general election in four years' time," Lammy argued. But economist Halligan - a Brexit supporter - believes a second referendum would be wrong. "I have a major problem, I'm afraid, call me old-fashioned, with the idea of not implementing a referendum when Parliament has sanctioned the referendum and given the decision to the British people," Halligan said. "Authority is vested in the people via Parliament, not in Parliament itself, and I think it's a major concern if we don't implement that decision," he added. In this week's UpFront, we debate the ongoing Brexit negotiations in the UK, and the chaos it has triggered both inside Parliament and on the streets. Will Brexit lead to violence on the island of Ireland? Sinn Fein's Martina Anderson explains why any form of Brexit would be bad for Northern Ireland. Anderson was a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and was freed from prison when the Good Friday Agreement ended the Northern Ireland conflict 20 years ago. She is now a Member of the European Parliament for the Sinn Fein political party. Anderson is advocating against a Brexit deal between the UK and the EU that creates a physical border dividing Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Many believe a hard-border could lead to a return of violence. "Brexit is totally incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement," said Anderson. "The people of Ireland will not allow the British establishment to have us as collateral damage." She said the UK's departure from the EU and a potential hard-border has increased support in Northern Ireland for Irish reunification. She added that under a provision in the Good Friday Agreement, if a majority of people in Northern Ireland support reunification, the UK is obliged to hold a referendum on it. "Irish people in the north of Ireland voted to remain," she said. "Under the Good Friday Agreement, we have a democratically endorsed pathway back into the EU." In this week's special interview, we speak to MEP and former IRA member Martina Anderson. - More from UpFront on: YouTube - http://aje.io/upfrontYT Facebook - https://ift.tt/1PrXsRQ Twitter - http://twitter.com/ajUpFront Website - https://ift.tt/1J8E6xn - - Subscribe to our channel: https://ift.tt/291RaQr - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish - Find us on Facebook: https://ift.tt/1iHo6G4 - Check our website: https://ift.tt/2lOp4tL

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