Neil Hoyne, On Using Data to Win Customers’ Hearts

What makes a successful data-driven company?

Today’s guest says that it has very little to do with the company’s ability to analyze massive data sets. Rather, what’s most important is identifying the right questions to ask, and then finding the simplest ways to answer these questions.

Neil Hoyne is the Chief Measurement Strategist at Google. He has led more than 2500 engagements with the world’s biggest advertisers and has generated billions of dollars in incremental revenue for these customers.

Even at that level of success for someone in his profession, however, Neil says that he goes to work every single morning with the ability to explore whatever he finds interesting that day. It once again comes down to a focus on solving difficult problems over aimlessly reading columns of data.

Further, it is vital to consider the human beings behind the numbers when interpreting any data, even more so when business decisions are made on the basis of those interpretations. Neil himself says: “We still have a lot to learn in business about how intuition and human behavior drives performance.”

Neil also shares how to have meaningful conversations with customers, particularly when that communication is taking place online. He prefaces this by explaining that “you certainly want data to support your decisions”; however, many companies “are incredibly fixated on the short-term” when looking at data.

Basically, they ask: “Did they buy or not?”

But what is missed with that narrow focus is the potential for nurturing a long-term relationship. The key is to approach data analysis with customer lifetime value in mind over immediate ROI.

Ultimately, Neil attributes his success in the data analytics space to his being able to bridge the interpretation of raw data with a deep understanding and appreciation for behavioral economics.

Says Neil: “If you’re going to be successful, you need a head as well as a heart. The ‘head’ is the data and analytics, but it’s not going to be the complete story. But on the other hand, if you’re leaning on, ‘This is just how I feel about a problem,’ you’re going to be missing out because there are times in which your intuition is going to be challenged.”

My guest today is Neil Hoyne. Neil is the chief measurement strategist at Google. He’s led more than 2,500 engagements with the world’s biggest advertisers and helped them add millions of customers and generate billions in incremental revenue. His new book is “Converted, The Data Driven Way to Win Customer’s Hearts”  And I’m just really excited to welcome you, Neil.

Neil Hoyne (00:01:11):

Amanda, thank you so much for having me <laugh>

Amanda Setili  (00:01:15):

So I am curious because you have such a fascinating job. And when we were talking earlier, I think you said something to me that I don’t hear very many people at your level saying, which is you get to work on what you think is interesting. Is that really true?

Neil Hoyne (00:01:30):

That’s the best way that I explain it. You know, you often get those questions from friends and family members to say, what does a, what does a data guy do? And data by its nature puts people asleep. It it’s just even people that love data to really difficult, to get people excited about spreadsheets. And I often comment to analysts when they are beginning their career, that if you reduce your career down to simply looking at columns of data at, you know, cloud systems and big data platforms, you lose the larger picture, which is what are the questions you’re actually most interested in answering. And so I think that what Google’s been able to do and what I think successful data driven companies able to do is to scope people’s responsibilities, not necessarily within, we want you to analyze arbitrary sets of data, but more from a research role to say, here are difficult problems we’d like to solve. And it just so happens at that difficult problem intersection of, of understanding consumer behavior of customer relationships just kind of fits into that area of things that I’m also really curious to study,

Amanda Setili  (00:02:34):

Right? Yeah. I, I love data. But I find that not everyone shares my love <laugh> but asking good questions is super important. And it’s so great that you start that process early when people join the company of the question is way more important than getting the right answer to the wrong question.

Neil Hoyne (00:02:56):

Absolutely.

Amanda Setili  (00:02:58):

What makes you happiest? Like what’s just, if you have a great day, what happened

Neil Hoyne (00:03:04):

If a great day happens? I, in the broadest sense it’s when you learn something new, but to be more specific, what separates a good day from a great day is where you learn something that challenges where you see data, that challenges one of your, your fundamental assumption, something maybe that you feel like intuition a and there’s a certain power of intuition. And that’s why we see a lot of leaders actually pull to that when they’re making decisions. I, I kind of referenced in the book at some point that a vast majority decisions, sadly today are still made on intuition almost 10 to one because it’s immediate, it’s available, it’s built by experience. And so you get to those moments where it’s like, Hey, this is what your intuition says, but the data actually backs up something else. Tho those are things that you start to unravel and then rebuild to be like, well, why do I think that why is the data different? And then you start to reevaluate your decisions and different things you’ve built over, you know, over years to think what if we did something different. So it’s kind of revealing more about our selves than what we may have thought. Otherwise,

Amanda Setili  (00:04:03):

I love that too. Do you have any examples of where you had a counterintuitive result?

Neil Hoyne (00:04:08):

You know, not for, for me personally, I think, you know, having great days, it’s something that you see every couple weeks, every couple months, one that is still standing out actually was born in a research project which we’re just generally looking at promote oceans in this case for the retail category to say, how do you get people buying? And there’s a general thing with retail. You’ve probably always observed it where you go to a website and immediately they throw up that coupon for you. Or if you register and you become a new customer, here’s your 10% off, your 15% off. And generally retails have trended towards giving you enough time to, to buy your a product. You know, Hey, here’s your first coupon. It’ll be your first purchase whenever you make it. And we think intuitively we think, God, that’s a lot better than saying, Hey, you need to spend this in the next 24 hours, 48 hours.

Neil Hoyne (00:04:50):

That makes us feel forced. And what a lot of the data has shown is that when you ask people, you know, if we give you a 24, 48 hour redemption on this coupon, in this promotion, how likely you to use it? And then they say, well, how likely are you to use it if we give you three months or we give you six months and, and intuitively a lot of people think, Hey, longer time period. Definitely. I would use it shorter time period. You’re kind of crushing me in, I don’t think I’m gonna use it. And so I think the opt-in rates for people saying, they’re gonna use a promotion long term are somebody like 60. So 70% short term people in the low twenties. And then you look at the data and you actually find out that even though we intuitively say that the longer windows are better for us, the redemption rates actually flip for the two groups mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so we, that more time is great. And what we find out is when we look at how we act, it’s like, no, actually, if you gimme the shorter window, I more likely to use that promotion. The longer window I just sit and I procrast and it on and then forget about it all together.

Amanda Setili  (00:05:49):

Absolutely urgency scarcity, all of those things tend to drive behavior. And also I just forget about it. I just <laugh>. I just, frankly, that’s not my eyes priority is remembering that I had that promotion.

Neil Hoyne (00:06:04):

Yeah, go ahead. I have to bring this up because you, you mentioned these, these ideas, you know, scarcity a lot of these behavioral conditions, you know, one of the other cases that I saw was even just a little bit before that study is that they looked at 700 there’s a study that at 700 retail experiments, how they could make their websites better. And a lot of people change. We’re gonna change the color out of the buttons. We’re gonna change our call to action, all this typical marketing stuff. And what they generally found was those were a mixed bag, 50, 50 Chan. But when they looked at those behavioral interventions, those things that really kind of poked at who we are and how we think as individuals challenge our intuition in our thinking, those consistently led to better results, which kinda gives us that insight to say, we still have a lot more to learn in business about how intuition and human behavior drives performance and simply thinking it’s those things we can most easily modify.

Amanda Setili  (00:06:56):

Well, it’s amazing that behavioral economics didn’t even exist a few years ago or a few decades ago, at least like people just didn’t, people thought everybody was rational. No, everybody’s not rational. <Laugh>

Neil Hoyne (00:07:09):

We drop the

Amanda Setili  (00:07:10):

Price. <Laugh> yeah.

Neil Hoyne (00:07:11):

Yeah. Everybody did those, those studies you, you know, we’ve probably all seen them where, you know, you get the economist who draws graphs and be like, and here’s how peanut butter changes in relationship to bread or jelly or here’s how mm-hmm <affirmative>. We use taxi cab drivers. When I was at UCLA, like again, the price of taxis goes up and then usage goes down and we think that’s how people behave. But that conditions us to, when we go into the world or say, well, if we nudge the price in this direction, or if we change this message, people will respond accordingly. And they do something weird, like with that window longer coupon redemption periods, but fewer people use it and it doesn’t seem, it doesn’t seem rational to us. And so that makes it such a, a great area to explore.

Amanda Setili  (00:07:50):

Well, you had another interesting example in, in your LinkedIn feed, which was something you posted that said, if you make it too obvious that something is on sale, people don’t buy it as much. People like to think that they kind of discovered the secret sale. Like the tag was kind of hidden and it was 50% off <laugh> I love that. It’s like, oh, I’m so smart. I found this thing that’s on sale. Nobody else knew about it. That,

Neil Hoyne (00:08:14):

That, that sense of exclusivity, that sense of adventure in discovering products, again, we think, you know, reduc friction as much as possible highlighting the lowest price products are going to drive the most sales. And then you look at this data and you’re like, wow, this is, this is crazy. A and that goes back to your original question. If, if you can hear why I’m so excited about it, those are the types of questions they allow me to just kind of explore because these questions and these discoveries are important. Not only because of that connection to the work that I do, but because it’s through the companies that we work with, they’re curious about these exact same things, and maybe they don’t have the same data or the time to analyze it. So it’s just a wonderful privilege to be able to look at these types of questions and then be able to go to companies and say, Hey, here’s a slightly better way that, that we may look at doing business.

Amanda Setili  (00:08:58):

That’s fantastic. You know, another funny example you gave in your book is that you, you show the data and the, the client or the customer says, well, let’s throw out this outlier and you do that. And then they say, let’s throw out this outlier. This is not representative. And let’s throw out this outlier. And before, you know, it, the data only shows what they thought in the first place.

Neil Hoyne (00:09:18):

<Laugh> that’s that, that is every analyst that I’ve spoken to said, I’ve had these moments, right? That’s, that’s the problem with this idea of an outlier is you can really, anything’s an outlier. We’re gonna, we’re gonna throw out all of our 2020 data because COVID is an outlier mm-hmm <affirmative>. And it, it’s not to say that genuine and outliers don’t exist, but with a lot of analyses, there’s a very fixed way of doing it. And when you get into this idea of outliers, all of a sudden it can become very subjective, or you can look at an individual respond and say, I, I know that person, and I know they’re interested in this product, or I know this company now they’ll, they’ll, they’ll definitely do you this versus that. And you add that subjective judgment to say well, to what end. And it’s generally, we find that the, the outlier step exists until somebody’s really satisfied with the results. Otherwise, it’s always a reason to look a little bit deeper into the data,

Amanda Setili  (00:10:09):

Right? What I’ve seen a lot with my clients is that the outliers are actually fantastic. How of things we might see in the future. So look at those outliers and say, what are they doing that nobody else is doing? And maybe more people will be doing that in the future. Like the outliers can be gold,

Neil Hoyne (00:10:31):

That, that those can be your, your, your, your canaries in the coal mine. Right? They’re gonna give you the insight to say, this is what may happen outside of the mass market. But yeah, so often they look at like aberrations. They’re like, do we really wanna trust that this person’s going to spend 10 or 20 X more than the average? I don’t know. But I think that those questions are always worth more investigation instead of simply saying, wow, they’re outside of our, our, our cluster here. Let’s just throw them out all together. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>.

Amanda Setili  (00:10:56):

And on the day outside, if you see someone who’s not buying or who’s abandoning their card or whatever, why the heck is that? What, you know, maybe they experienced some glitch that nobody else has seen yet. That’s gonna kill your sales next month. So figure it out,

Neil Hoyne (00:11:10):

Look at ’em. Well, that’s, that’s exactly it. You know, even when we’re talking about broader insights, one of the ones that stands out is, you know, for, for a majority of companies, they look at that adding to the cart as a signal, right? And they obsess about it and like, oh, somebody added something to a cart and they didn’t buy yet. Let’s target them with more ads. A lot of the data is starting to show that actually the adding to cart is a very soft signal. It’s kind of a holding area and the consumer’s mind say, Hey, this is kind of neat. What’s a strong signal. That’s often ignored people, removing things from their cart. Ah, because if you’re gonna abandon the store altogether, you don’t really care to remove your cart. Your cart will disappear. Whether it’s in seven days or 30 days, when you purposely start removing things from your cart, that act of curation is saying, Hey, I am actually getting closer because I’m thinking I’m gonna buy this. Not that I’m not gonna abandon you all together. It tends to be a lot stronger than people just saying, Hey, I’m gonna add this to this kind of wishlist over here. Maybe just in case

Amanda Setili  (00:12:06):

That’s brilliant. See, that’s the type of insight that once you hear it, you go, oh yeah, of course. But you can’t forget it.

Neil Hoyne (00:12:13):

And then you go, <laugh>, that’s the thing. And you look at it and you’re like, wait a minute. I’ve, I’ve been doing this for a decade. How many of, how many of us have looked at deleting from the shopping cart? And then you look around and there’s just blank stairs. Nobody’s looked at it. You realize nobody like most retailers haven’t looked at it. You’re like, ah, and now we have something that we can discuss that we can go on that we can really be curious about because we just didn’t think about shopping cart behavior in that way.

Amanda Setili  (00:12:38):

you mentioned conversations and your book has a whole section on conversations, how to have conversations with customers so that you gather the information about what to expect from them, which ones are good customers, which ones are bad, and you begin to build the relationship. And I imagine that that conversation is happening online. So it’s largely automat. Do you have any tips that would help our audience just to understand what you mean by that and how, how does it work when it works at its best?

 

Neil Hoyne (00:50:23):

Sure. The, the larger, the larger observation behind it is that for companies that were data driven, and we saw this early with the rise of digital advertising, with digital marketing, with e-commerce that you certainly want data to support your decisions. But unfortunately what’s happened with a number of companies, is that the data that they’re looking at is just incredibly fixated on the short term it’s did you buy or not? And if you bought great, but then we’re gonna kind of forget that relationship. The next time we see you, personalization is incredibly light. Maybe you get a recommendation engine, you get somebody mentioning your first name when you get to the website, but companies just operationalize their processes because everything they were looking to do was around short term ROI. And so what we’re talking about here, when we talk about is really what are the metrics that companies are starting to adopt that allow them to be rigorous, allow them to be data driven, but also allow them to consider the long term impact of what they’re doing with the customer.

Neil Hoyne (00:51:21):

And when you move from the shortterm relationships where everyone needs to buy right away to something where you can say, look, we can let the relationship to help over time. We’re going to look at and customer lifetime value is one of those key metrics. We look at how much each customer is going to be worth. When we start to consider that we actually see different opportunities to engage customers, to service customers, to take care of customers, because we’re able to look at and measure the longer term perspective. And so that’s really what we’re talking about with the rise of conversations. And we use that language because that’s more natural to us than to say, well, we’re going to build into the customer funnel. And then we first have to define customer funnel. It’s like, no, your customers have relationships with your business. How do you recognize that through data so that you can make the most of it?

Amanda Setili  (00:52:04):

So a conversation could be a term that really means what have we been doing with them, Reese? Where have we seen them? How often do they come? What are they looking at when they’re there? Things like that.

Neil Hoyne (00:52:16):

Yeah. And what, where’s this relationship going? I use I, I use personal examples to say, look, there are people in your life, your friends, your family members, that mean a lot to you that, that you love and you go to for advice. And then you also have people. Here’s the Uber driver that brought me back from the airport, good relationship, but they’re not gonna bring the same amount of value to your life. And the way that a lot of businesses are saying are, look, people are people they’re all equal. It just depends what they did for me today. He say, well, that’s not the case. These people are gonna be around for a while and contribute a lot of value. These people are very short term and transactional, and I’m never gonna see them again. And it’s just giving businesses a lens to look at those customers in a different way.

Neil Hoyne (00:53:02):

Because if you recognize it, if you say here’s a customer, that’s gonna be with your business for five years, it’s gonna spend a lot of money. Here’s a customer. That’s gonna buy something on a deep discount sale and gonna tribute almost no margin to your business. Do you wanna treat those customers the same? Do you wanna give them the same promotions? Do you wanna spend the same amount of money acquiring them? If they have a customer service question, do you wanna answer them in the same order? And companies will say, no, I was like, good. Well, okay. That’s, that’s that intuitively yes. We know that. Now let’s put some data behind it to say how you can identify who those people are and what you can do to service and adjust your business processes around them.

Amanda Setili  (00:53:40):

That’s fantastic. If you have an example to describe that, I think it would be very, very valuable because what you’re saying sounds really aspirational in some ways where we go, well, yeah, it would be good if we knew who was valuable and who wasn’t and we would treat them better, but oh, we’re drowning in data. We’re just, you know, we’re overwhelmed. And three years from now, we’re gonna finally have our data, like all set up and all the data’s gonna be, be clean and we’re gonna analyze the heck out of it. And then we’re gonna be in Nirvana. So how, how do, how do you bridge the gap? Oh, that would between the here and the, and the future.

Neil Hoyne (00:54:16):

Oh, that would’ve been, that would’ve be a beautiful thing. I would say that when, when bridging the two together, I say, first of all, a lot of companies look at collecting more data as the Nirvana, which is gonna collect more data, cuz data is valuable. And, and really what we’re looking at is saying, if you understand the processes and what’s out there, these are models and approaches that have been out for decades, published peer reviewed, they work incredibly well. You can do it today. And first companies are surprised like, wait a minute, this is within our grasp without doing a 12 month, 18 month project. Yes. So it’s simply awareness so that these techniques exist and they’re pretty straightforward. And the book pushes hard on that. And, and the second part is to almost push back on companies to say, a 12 month process is not normal. You don’t wanna wait that long and that you really wanna get to it in short iterative bursts. And that’s really what we’re also trying to focus on. So almost saying the companies, this, this enterprise software led long form process is not the best way to do it.

Amanda Setili  (00:55:14):

So you mentioned in your book that sometimes you just start with a little data, you start with a spreadsheet and you just demonstrate some success that or failure that would enable you to take the next step. That, that sounds so much more palatable. And it sounds like such a more fulfilling thing to the poor analysts and marketers that work for the client companies. If you have any examples of, of clients that you’ve worked with that started that small, I would be fascinated to hear them.

Neil Hoyne (00:55:47):

I would tell you, I worked with a, a large insurance company and we were having the, this conversation and this was right before Christmas. And like, can we do this? I was like, yeah, you can. I gave them the, the process behind it. They were able to go end to end in about two weeks. Mm. And just to have that prediction. And there was another, a large airline I worked with where it actually took eight months to convince them of the process and the format. And then they were like, okay, finally gonna build these models. Let’s get in con contact with the analyst team. And I spoke to the analyst and they said, we already built this. We built these six years ago. <Laugh> the problem was organizationally. They didn’t want to hear it. They believed that it was more complicated that we needed, you know, three or four huge systems in place, but we have the data.

Neil Hoyne (00:56:26):

And so a lot of times it’s simply awareness that these things can be done. And just as we’re talking, we were talking earlier about dispelling some of those ideas about what people think about a shopping cart. Sometimes it’s just poking to say, we think this is a process. We think this requires more software and more time, and it sounds like the future. And then once somebody shows you that it’s actually more achievable with smaller amounts of data, you can’t forget that you can’t separate yourself from it. And, and the world no longer looks the same as it did before.

Amanda Setili  (00:56:55):

Such a good point. Neil, just giving people the confidence that it can be done and that it shouldn’t be that hard and that they don’t don’t have to bite off the whole, the, you know, bite off the whole thing at once. They can bite off a little piece and get something done in two weeks. That’s fantastic.

 

I wanted to ask you about how the world is changing over the next. I don’t know. Let’s take, let’s talk a about your kids, your kids, I think you said are two and five ish. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> the world is gonna be really different in 15 or 20 years when they’re entering the workspace. How do you think it’ll be different?

Neil Hoyne (00:57:37):

I, I would say I I’ve learned this perpetually that there are some business models. Like talk’s a great one. I’m not on TikTok. Younger audiences are because that fits and that’s relevant to their life. I know I’m not the target market. And so all the platforms that we have for communicating with people, for personalizing web services, for how people buy will invariably change. And a lot of the frictions that we see, even with eCommerce and simply entering credit card information will get easy year. But I always go back to, as I say, when you look at, at things fundamentally across business for, for decades, the, the benefit is really that they’re still built on some of those fundamental mechanics as to who we are. As people we still will do ridiculous things and respond to sale items. We will not be perfectly logical in the future.

Neil Hoyne (00:58:25):

We will still will care more about relationships and even look at our interactions with businesses as relationships, as opposed to simple monetary transactions, we buy out of emotion and we’re subject to all the fallacies that come with it. I don’t think those are going to be abandoned. And so the same thing that I look at when, you know, my kids are not interested by the way, right now, in marketing to them, everything comes from Amazon. They’ve seen Amazon truck. Every Amazon apparently has everything in their life, but as they get older and are interested in marketing, I mean, the lesson really is that you wanna build systems and processes that are going to withstand the test of time. Then it doesn’t make sense necessarily to chase short term tactics to say, we just invest in channel, or we need to have this type of format. But it’s to say, what are really the systems that are guiding this type of behavior, this very real human behavior, knowing that those are likely going to persist well beyond any of the short term trends that are consistently being innovated and replaced.

Amanda Setili  (00:59:22):

That’s an interesting insight. So what are the innate human tendencies almost that we need to build into our principles for design of the next thing that we’re gonna offer? Exactly. And how do people wanna live in the world? That’s, that’s a question make that

Neil Hoyne (00:59:41):

Happen and, and what do you wanna build? And so I, I I’d say, I don’t think in 15, 20 years, we’re gonna stop becoming human. I mean, how we may express ourselves and how we may buy and transact, and those individual tactics will differ. But at the core, it’s still saying, if you’re gonna build a business, do you wanna build a business around short term flash in the pan actions, hoping that every day you can go back and try to recreate that magic, or do you wanna build systems and brands and companies that can stand the test of time? And you look at this at some of the most established brands out there. When you look at the Disneys and the Coca-Colas, they’ve done a fantastic job. Not saying that our entire company is built around just our latest release, but to say, we want a culture. That’s going to continue to connect with, with people and their children and their grandchildren. And that’s how we’re going to develop and invest in our processes and our people.

Amanda Setili  (01:00:30):

Right? Yeah. You’re convincing me that anyone who has kids coming up, having them have the people skills is probably more important than the data analytics, the engineer, the coding and stuff like that. Cuz you can get those, you can get those codings and data analytics skills through training, but people skills are something you need to start building when they’re two years old.

Neil Hoyne (01:00:57):

I, I, yeah. I’d, I’d agree with that. I’d also go as far to say, if you’re gonna be successful, you need a head as well as a heart. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, you know, the head is at the of data in the analytics, but it’s not going to be the complete story. It’s gonna give you the numbers. But on the other hand, if you lead it and you’re like, this is just how I feel about a problem, you’re gonna be missing out because there’s times where your intuition can also be challenged. And I think what a lot of companies find is just, they do find teams that are balanced on one side more than the other. So they either need to figure out how to build more balanced teams that take into account both views or get both teams to collaborate so they can share on each other’s strengths.

Amanda Setili  (01:01:30):

Right. And develop those two capabilities. When it, within each individual, some people have more head than hard. Other people, people have more heart than head, but you gotta have both or you really can’t operate.

Neil Hoyne (01:01:42):

Absolutely.

Amanda Setili  (01:01:44):

So we we’re nearing the end of our time. What should I have asked you that I didn’t ask you Neil?

Neil Hoyne (01:01:50):

I, I thought these questions were fantastic. We could probably go for several more hours. We’ll have

Amanda Setili  (01:01:54):

To do it again.

We’ll have to do it again. I really look forward to that. How should people find your book? How should they find you? What to, should they do if they wanna work more with Google in these ways. So tell me what, what you would like people to do to engage with you.

Neil Hoyne (01:02:12):

The, the, the book again called converted is available at most major bookstores, both online and it’ll be available in, you know, physical, your local bookstore. You’ll be able to find it. One of the pleasures of working with penguin random house is that they have Y distribution. So Amazon almost anywhere you can buy it as well as a dozen other places. I’d start there. Definitely take a look at, at the website, converted book.com. If you just wanna read an excerpt and see what you’re getting into all the better in terms of reaching out, LinkedIn tends to be my primary channel to the outside world. So you’re free to connect me, follow me there, or even message me. And the general world’s the same way that I collaborate internally is that if you do have a question or something I can help with and I can’t do it, I probably know someone that’s equally interested in solving that type of problem. And, and I’ll do my best to connect you with those resources. Also curious to hear other people’s stories. You know, there’s billions of stories out there yet that I have not, I have not heard. And I’m so curious as to how people look at some of these questions and these ideas and you know, how they take these very much. As people try to take Google’s culture and apply it to their business, what they see with these ideas and how they apply it to their experience. Cuz that helps to develop my perspective as well.

Amanda Setili  (01:03:17):

That’s so great. Hey I for forgot to ask you somewhere in your book, it says that you’ve got a website with additional content that supports lessons in the book and it has a community of practitioners and a set of tools. Is that already up or is that something that’s in the future future idea?

Neil Hoyne (01:03:33):

It is coming on on pub date. So it’s being tested right now, but it’s just that give you a sense as to what you’re getting into is that we are, are going to bring in a lot of the people that work in this space and have familiarity. So you have an open way to ask those people questions to go a step beyond the book. So we know the book will cover everything. Let’s give you a place to say, Hey, I had this question about the Booker it’s material. Have you ever seen someone do this? And we wanna encourage that. The other part is simply when we talk about some of these things that are data heavy, how do we calculate lifetime value? In which case there are some tools that will take away the heavy lifting. So we effectively have a data book that doesn’t require you to do the data stuff. It just requires you to know how it fits into the business and know that that heavy lifting that engine can be built and commoditize someplace else. And that tool gets gonna help you get you there.

Amanda Setili  (01:04:18):

And is there a price to you use this website as a subscription or is it it’s just gonna be,

Neil Hoyne (01:04:24):

It’s just gonna be free as much as it can. Oh, oh my God. That’s awesome. If people start like there is that concern that you’re gonna get some, the occasional bad act it’s gonna be, oh, they’ll let me model my data fine. Here’s 50 terabytes of data. And you’re looking at the, the cloud bill and you’re like, oh man. So there there’s always a chance that that could change. But right now the goal isn’t to commercialize anything of it. In fact, all the profits from the book itself are being donated to food pantries across the country because the goal really is to get the information out to people, to help them build better businesses, to help grow their businesses and to kind of pay that knowledge forward a and the tools, if you try monetizing, it just interrupts that flow. So it’s, let’s just put it out there. Let’s give it to the people that are buying the booklet’s help them through that process. And then we’ll figure out the, the growth part later on.

Amanda Setili  (01:05:09):

Can you already say what the URL is for that website or is that something that’ll be released on? No,

Neil Hoyne (01:05:14):

It’s it’s inside the book. It’s just converted book.com is right as boring, as straightforward as it is. It’ll probably be probably the toolkit will appear a couple days before the book’s release. But people can also reach out to me if they want a little sneak preview of it to see what’s on there beforehand.

Amanda Setili  (01:05:29):

Yeah. I can’t wait to see that sounds so valuable. Fantastic. Thank you so much for being with us. Neil, it’s been a lot of fun talking with you and I hope that we’ll do this again in the future. And I hope that everyone will go to converted book.com, buy this book and follow Neil on LinkedIn because I’ve looked through a lot of his posts and he’s always got something weird, unexpected and useful on his

Neil Hoyne (01:05:55):

Feed. Amanda, thank you so much for having me.

Amanda Setili  (01:05:58):

All right. Thanks. Bye. Bye.