Random Chat, Thoughts, Posts, and/or Rants Thread

[MattR82]

December 1st. I've been waiting for this day for some time.

I made some big mistakes around pricing for my commercial cleaning business that I'm just over a year into now, but am sending out the notices for the Jan 1st price rise over today and Monday.

So far I've lost a few small stinkers which I was kind of hoping for, but had positive replies from my best accounts that are multi site. All good so far.

The biggest thing to learn in this business, for me anyway, is how to price. Everyone is so damn coy about it that it's hard to know until you get in there and completely F*ck it up it seems!

 

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[MitchC]

I made a post a few months ago in here about why now is such a sick time for ecommerce and Facebook ads

I can’t be F*cked finding it but I did want to bump it

These are going to be the good old days of ecommerce and Facebook ads

They’ll be looked back in fondly

No big companies are spending

Consumers are spending

The algorithm is F*cking humming

Shipping and production times are normal

Shopify is easy to use

Content creators are cheap and everywhere

I could go on

 

[Timmy C]

Content creators are cheap and everywhere

Why you come at me like that bro why.

 

[Black_Dragon43]

do you generally feel that you were 100% present and acknowledged the magic of these moments or do you tend to look back with some regret, thinking that you could have been even more present?

I was never 100% present, quite the contrary. So I just don't think about it – problem solved!

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Looking back on some spectacular, most beautiful times in your life (great trips, a phase of your life, honeymoon, first few weeks of being with your newborn, hustling on your first successful business, etc.), do you generally feel that you were 100% present and acknowledged the magic of these moments or do you tend to look back with some regret, thinking that you could have been even more present?

No matter how deeply I take in these precious moments, later I tend to think that I could have been even more present and enjoyed them even more. But maybe that's just normal and indicates how special these moments were?

@MJ DeMarco, I would appreciate your answer as I feel like your knowledge of Michael A. Singer and your daily gratitude could provide a helpful insight here.

Of course I could have been more present, but I don't look back with regret, but fondness and nostalgia. It makes me so much more appreciative of my NOW. My past makes me more present.

I can admit, however, I had some personal struggles in my 40s which; this period of time seems to have flown by for me where I wasn't as present as I should have.

I don't have a lot of highs and lows in my life; they all feel like highs...

So on a scale of 1 through 10, 1 being life sucks, and 10 life is awesome, my weekly life looks like this:

Monday: 9.5
Tuesday: 9.5
Wed: 9.5
Thurs: 9.5
Friday: 9.5
Saturday: 9.5
Sunday: 9.5

Whereas the average person lives life like this:

Monday: 2
Tuesday: 3
Wed: 4
Thurs: 5
Friday: 6
Saturday: 10
Sunday: 7

 

[Aidan04]

View: https://youtu.be/vREokZa4dNU?si=uW-_Qv7ByhRjHGUo


Yay or Nay? Seems so simple.

The greatest inventions usually are.

 

[Eurojanek]

Europe: sub-zero temperatures.
I received the package. The mailman arrived in an electric VW Bus, dressed as if going on a mountain expedition. I sign, take the package, and engage in a brief conversation:

- Terrible weather for driving today. Do you at least have electric heating in that electric box?

- There is heating, but I don't use it because it consumes too much power, and I won't make it through the routes! You have to dress warmly, not turn on the heating, and then there's enough power for the whole days shift!

I guess the business idea here would be: Webasto kits for electric delivery vans XD

 

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[WillHurtDontCare]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1730661216983433668

View: https://twitter.com/vascoabm/status/1730661216983433668

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Let's see your Spotify Unwrapped!

Turns out my preferences are akin to a 21 year old who attends EDC and raves, not a 50-something living in the middle of Mormon land.

 

[FullTimePreneur]

I listen to a bunch of soundtrack music when working/focusing. According to Spotify, it shows I would fit right in, in Provo!

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

it shows I would fit right in, in Provo!

LOL, mine was Oslo Norway.

 

[Strategery]

I’m weird lol

 

[JUAREZ]

View: https://youtu.be/vREokZa4dNU?si=uW-_Qv7ByhRjHGUo


Yay or Nay? Seems so simple.

This is so awesome. Asking for 50k and already is at 430k. This video was posted 2 weeks ago. You always seem to know about newest products. How do you manage to find out so fast about these?

 

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[Aidan04]

Let's see your Spotify Unwrapped!

Turns out my preferences are akin to a 21 year old who attends EDC and raves, not a 50-something living in the middle of Mormon land.

View attachment 52744

My god. Your taste is fantastic. We had Hardwell's The Abyss as the opening song for our Halloween set a few weeks back.

Had no idea MJ was an techno head.

 

[Spenny]

A LOT of rap

 

[biophase]

This is so awesome. Asking for 50k and already is at 430k. This video was posted 2 weeks ago. You always seem to know about newest products. How do you manage to find out so fast about these?

It popped up through my youtube algorithm. I guess it depends on what you watch. I probably watch too many product business videos.

 

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[Daniel A]

I used YouTube and Amazon Music in 2023, so not all of my listening was limited to Spotify. I'm surprised with my minutes listed, but I also used it a lot for podcasts after canceling YouTube Premium, so I can close my phone screen when not in use and still listen. I've seen 3/5 of my top artists live. I was supposed to see 4/5 this year, but the plan didn't work. I listened exclusively to Boris Brejcha while running the 2022 San Francisco Marathon.

 

[MitchC]

Why you come at me like that bro why.

UGC ad creators, not you

 

[MTF]

that homeless slovenian commie who mogged Jordan Peterson talked about how modern societies have this problem where people feel guilty for not enjoying things enough. I'll see if I can find the interview or book passage where he talked about it.

You should definitely try to get the most of your experiences, but are you really better off thinking over everything you've done and wondering if you could have enjoyed it more? You're not obligated to experience nirvana over everything.

I think in my case it's just about a very deep understanding of transience in life. If you don't think about it much, you don't tend to see moments as magical because you think there will always be more and you'll live forever. So you don't look back trying to contemplate if you really enjoyed them to the fullest because they don't have the same value for you.

I've spent a good chunk of my life tired. So I know there have been times in my life when I was not as fully present as I could have been.

The question I ask myself is, did I give the best that I had in that moment? Maybe I didn't have 100% to give. Maybe I only had 80%. But did I give all 80%?

And generally speaking in those moments you speak of, I gave what I had to give. No regrets. Worst case, I promise myself to do better next time. But I don't live in the past. What's done is done.

Hope that helps.

I understand that and I feel that may be the case with me as well. Thanks for sharing that perspective.

Honesrly, I feel like I have enjoyed them to the fullest at the moment that they happened.

I’m going to give you a Pickleball story. I play mixed doubles pickle ball with my friend and sometimes he’ll just serve the ball into the net.

He would tell me that sometimes when he’s about to serve that he suddenly thinks about what he wants for dinner in the middle of his swing. If there is a business problem bothering him, it will suddenly pop into his head in the middle of a rally.

I tell him that I don’t think about anything else but what I’m doing at the moment. This is why I feel like I do enjoy everything to my maximum ability. However, I have many friends that think about other things while other actual great things are happening to them in the moment.

I like this story.

Thankfully if I have a magical moment I rarely, if ever, think about something else. That's precisely why it's such a magical moment: because it makes you really, truly alive and experience, and not be partly distracted.

I was never 100% present, quite the contrary. So I just don't think about it – problem solved!

I know it's just a joke but I really hope that you are present during these moments. Life isn't only about hustling.

Of course I could have been more present, but I don't look back with regret, but fondness and nostalgia. It makes me so much more appreciative of my NOW. My past makes me more present.

I can admit, however, I had some personal struggles in my 40s which; this period of time seems to have flown by for me where I wasn't as present as I should have.

I don't have a lot of highs and lows in my life; they all feel like highs...

So on a scale of 1 through 10, 1 being life sucks, and 10 life is awesome, my weekly life looks like this:

Monday: 9.5
Tuesday: 9.5
Wed: 9.5
Thurs: 9.5
Friday: 9.5
Saturday: 9.5
Sunday: 9.5

Whereas the average person lives life like this:

Monday: 2
Tuesday: 3
Wed: 4
Thurs: 5
Friday: 6
Saturday: 10
Sunday: 7

The past making you more appreciative of the present moment is a beautiful thing. Thank you for sharing this perspective.

 

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[The-J]

I made a post a few months ago in here about why now is such a sick time for ecommerce and Facebook ads

I can’t be F*cked finding it but I did want to bump it

These are going to be the good old days of ecommerce and Facebook ads

They’ll be looked back in fondly

No big companies are spending

Consumers are spending

The algorithm is F*cking humming

Shipping and production times are normal

Shopify is easy to use

Content creators are cheap and everywhere

I could go on

Thank god I'm not the only one who feels this lol

I started running ads on Facebook in 2013 and started running actual budgets around 2016. Around 2018 it got really, really hard to make things work. CPMs skyrocketed, targeting options were taken away (did you know that Facebook used to have credit card transaction data? And if you asked nicely and spent big budgets they would let you use them?) But when that stuff went away, all FB had was lookalikes and those lookalikes were based entirely on pixel data. Since buyers typically buy from multiple places, everyone was competing on those lookalikes and they got hella expensive (in the niches I was running at the time)

We adapted to high CPMs because Facebook gave us a lot of really cool tools like CBO and DPAs to make things work. I had a method that would basically run the ad account for me using entirely the stuff they had on platform. Automated rules combined with CBOs on a high enough budget (50+ conversions a week) meant that all you really had to do was slap new creative in the ad sets and Facebook would figure out the rest.

2020 and 2021 were rough because of supply chain issues. And supply chain issues doesn't mean "turn off the ads" because you still need those people coming in. If you turn off the ads too long, Facebook's "seasoning" won't work as well. But that wasn't the worst thing.

iOS 14 was a real punch to the gut. A lot of the old strategies didn't work anymore. Tracking got terrible, and I might say downright fraudulent. But, of course... we adapted. We always do.

Meta, on the other hand, hasn't really adapted. TikTok took a LOT of their advertising share that they never got back. TikTok has much lower CPMs even still so Facebook advertisers who couldn't make it work switched to TikTok. Of course TikTok isn't a walk in the park and many businesses sell to people who simply don't spend time on TikTok. Meta needs those advertising dollars. They've created new placements to compete with TikTok and they work very well for advertisers but Meta still hasn't gotten back its advertising share as far as I know. (Correct me if I'm wrong I don't have statistics in front of me)

Creative is still the #1 thing. Even back when targeting options were good, creative was #1, because the biggest advertisers didn't give a F*ck and just ran super broad campaigns. They just had killer creative. But back then you could make $10 ad sets work on big budget accounts because each ad set was hyper targeted with a particular winning creative. Try doing that now: it won't work very well for you at scale.

Creative is more important than ever. But, like you said, it's not hard to get creators, and a lot of them will say exactly what you want them to say for product alone. I've also noticed that regular old still image creative can work at scale, too.

 

[Aidan04]

Thank god I'm not the only one who feels this lol

I started running ads on Facebook in 2013 and started running actual budgets around 2016. Around 2018 it got really, really hard to make things work. CPMs skyrocketed, targeting options were taken away (did you know that Facebook used to have credit card transaction data? And if you asked nicely and spent big budgets they would let you use them?) But when that stuff went away, all FB had was lookalikes and those lookalikes were based entirely on pixel data. Since buyers typically buy from multiple places, everyone was competing on those lookalikes and they got hella expensive (in the niches I was running at the time)

We adapted to high CPMs because Facebook gave us a lot of really cool tools like CBO and DPAs to make things work. I had a method that would basically run the ad account for me using entirely the stuff they had on platform. Automated rules combined with CBOs on a high enough budget (50+ conversions a week) meant that all you really had to do was slap new creative in the ad sets and Facebook would figure out the rest.

2020 and 2021 were rough because of supply chain issues. And supply chain issues doesn't mean "turn off the ads" because you still need those people coming in. If you turn off the ads too long, Facebook's "seasoning" won't work as well. But that wasn't the worst thing.

iOS 14 was a real punch to the gut. A lot of the old strategies didn't work anymore. Tracking got terrible, and I might say downright fraudulent. But, of course... we adapted. We always do.

Meta, on the other hand, hasn't really adapted. TikTok took a LOT of their advertising share that they never got back. TikTok has much lower CPMs even still so Facebook advertisers who couldn't make it work switched to TikTok. Of course TikTok isn't a walk in the park and many businesses sell to people who simply don't spend time on TikTok. Meta needs those advertising dollars. They've created new placements to compete with TikTok and they work very well for advertisers but Meta still hasn't gotten back its advertising share as far as I know. (Correct me if I'm wrong I don't have statistics in front of me)

Creative is still the #1 thing. Even back when targeting options were good, creative was #1, because the biggest advertisers didn't give a F*ck and just ran super broad campaigns. They just had killer creative. But back then you could make $10 ad sets work on big budget accounts because each ad set was hyper targeted with a particular winning creative. Try doing that now: it won't work very well for you at scale.

Creative is more important than ever. But, like you said, it's not hard to get creators, and a lot of them will say exactly what you want them to say for product alone. I've also noticed that regular old still image creative can work at scale, too.

So for example if I wanted to market an invention/product of mine, utilizing creative content and video either made myself or from influencers is the prime move in 2023, rather than using hyper-targeted ads?

I'm a bit new to marketing so a more broken down explanation would be appreciated.

I'm trying to figure out how to properly market my inventions.

 

[Rabby]

December 1st. I've been waiting for this day for some time.

I made some big mistakes around pricing for my commercial cleaning business that I'm just over a year into now, but am sending out the notices for the Jan 1st price rise over today and Monday.

So far I've lost a few small stinkers which I was kind of hoping for, but had positive replies from my best accounts that are multi site. All good so far.

The biggest thing to learn in this business, for me anyway, is how to price. Everyone is so damn coy about it that it's hard to know until you get in there and completely F*ck it up it seems!

I like to price things either too high or too low, then adjust when I discover it's all wrong

 

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[IceCreamKid]

do you generally feel that you were 100% present and acknowledged the magic of these moments or do you tend to look back with some regret, thinking that you could have been even more present?

I'm certainly more appreciative of every moment now than when I first started the journey. Here's a pic of me at 21:

 

[Lyzmin]

Interesting to look back . Pretty diverse

 

[Spenny]

View attachment 52755

Interesting to look back . Pretty diverse

I absolutely love Stromae - I listened to him all the time while I was learning French years ago.

 

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[Antifragile]

What a bunch of nonsense.

Charlie Munger lived in the same home for 70 years: Rich people who build 'really fancy houses' become 'less happy'

Billionaire Charlie Munger intentionally lived in the same California home for seven decades — making him "happier" and benefitting his children, he said.

www.cnbc.com

This whole concept of being a billionaire who spends nothing is ridiculous. Strong opinions but completely unfounded… I’ve met rich people who don’t have any flash, and their kids turned out total idiots. And vice versa, some rich folks whose kids just dominate and live in mega houses, buy planes etc.

So what? Neither is a path to happiness. Happy people are happy in big houses. Unhappy people are unhappy in small or big houses.

Articles like this are “trending” only because they give poor people an excuse to remain poor because… oh no!!! If you buy that big house you’ll be unhappy, Charlie … dead Charlie said so.

Nonsense. Utter nonsense.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Articles like this are “trending” only because they give poor people an excuse to remain poor because… oh no!!!

This is what I call an "anti-success article"

It also doesn't push people out of their comfort zone, it makes them compliant and not a threat to establishment power.

Why encourage the next Elon Musk to rise up from the ranks? Someone who won't parrot narratives and do what the media tells them? Your desire for that big house will make you less happy.

Shit like this makes me want to puke.

 

[The-J]

So for example if I wanted to market an invention/product of mine, utilizing creative content and video either made myself or from influencers is the prime move in 2023, rather than using hyper-targeted ads?

I'm a bit new to marketing so a more broken down explanation would be appreciated.

I'm trying to figure out how to properly market my inventions.

Hyper-targeted ads are fine but you're limited with how you set up ad set targeting. Your creative has to call them out and Facebook's algorithm will do the rest.

You'll at least need a prototype that you can show off, have like 20 UGC creators in your market use it & talk about how awesome it is, then you've got a good batch of ads.

Don't pay a lot for UGC creators, you can find them on Fiverr. Other people might have better recommendations for findings UGC creators, I typically use an agency anyway & those agencies will find people willing to make videos for product only.

Marketing is nothing complicated but you need to test ads and learn what YOUR market is interested in.

 

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[Daniel A]

Amalgamation Choir - Ksenitia Tou Erota (TH;EN Remix) (Unreleased)
Song of the weekend for me @ 3h50m45s

View: https://youtu.be/_lTDx5T6SkE?si=ho2NtXxvEycOUAw-&t=13845

 

[MTF]

I rarely watch TV series but this may be super good (I played old school Fallout 2 for months when I was a kid):

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kQ8i2FpRDk