Can Anyone Take My Online Class? This plea for help is a common refrain among students clashing with the challenges of remote education. Between confusing assignments, marathon Zoom sessions, and updated technology, taking online classes can feel like an uphill battle. Luckily, several websites promise to take on your online class challenges for you.
Here, we will review six popular sites that offer help for online students. Our reviews will help current and future online learners find trusted services that can actually step in and take your online class successfully.
From completing your assignments to acing your online tests, these sites claim to take your online class off your hands. But can they deliver on that promise?
We’ll dig into how legitimate these sites are when taking your online class and getting you the grade you need and try to have a better understanding of them.

Top 6 Best Online Class Help Service Providers for Take My Online Class

1. Do My Online Class123 -(Rating 9.6/10)
2. Buy online class- (Rating 9.8/10)
3. Take online class help- (Rating 9.2/10)
4. Go Take my online class- (Rating 9.7/10)
5. Pay someone to Do my Online Classes- (Rating 9.4/10)
6. Online class help USA- (Rating 9.1/10)

DoMyOnlineClass123 - Known for the Best Deals

Quality

DoMyOnlineClass123 is carving a niche in the arena of assistance for online courses. Their dedicated team is passionate and ensures students not only get the correct answers but also cover the core principles. At Do My Online Class Services, they offer flexible and customized solutions to ensure academic success for students.

Pricing

DoMyOnlineClass123 is superior in terms of affordability. They have devised pocket-friendly plans, ensuring that students receive premier help without feeling the financial pinch. Their pricing structure, which is unique in this field, displays their sincere commitment to providing high-quality assignment help to everyone.

Customer Support

The brand prides itself on its responsive and helpful customer satisfaction. Ready to assist round-the-clock, they ensure student inquiries are addressed promptly, making the entire process seamless and enjoyable.

Features We Appreciated

• An extensive range of offerings catering to diverse academic requirements.
• An unwavering commitment to punctuality, ensuring deadlines are always met.
• Transparent processes that foster trust and dependability during online exams.
• Robust policies to safeguard students’ confidentiality and secure their data.

BuyOnlineClass- Best for High Quality and Reliability

Quality

BuyOnlineClass sets itself apart with an unbroken commitment to providing unmatched online support expertly matched to each student’s specific needs.
By boasting a diverse team of experts across multiple fields, they provide students access to the wisdom and experience of accomplished professionals.
Their extensive support covers over 150 subjects, encompassing assignments, exams, and projects.
The Take My Online Class service offered by BuyOnlineClass has earned the trust and reliance of a global student community in online learning.

Pricing

Regarding affordability, BuyOnlineClass is commendable for setting transparent and reasonable rates and providing excellent value to students.
They understand the financial challenges many students face. Hence, they offer flexible payment solutions, including installment options.

Customer Support

BuyOnlineClass excels in support of online education. Their dedicated team is on standby daily, ready to tackle questions or provide support.
They keep students in the loop with regular updates on task progress and submission timelines.

Features That Shine

• A website designed for simplicity, ensuring effortless navigation.
• An impressive array of subjects matter in the online course.
• A commitment to originality, with guarantees of plagiarism-free content that isn’t AI-generated. To further instill confidence, they even provide complimentary Turnitin reports.

TakeOnlineClassHelp- Reliability and also Join Referral Program to Make Money

At Take Online Class Help, educators are trusted educators who guide students toward deeper understanding within online degree programs, going above and beyond the typical teaching responsibilities.
Their approach to teaching places a high value on having a thorough knowledge of the subject, ensuring that students learn more than simply a passing familiarity with it.

Pricing

For pricing, TakeOnlineClassHelp strikes the right balance between quality and budget-friendliness, with rates beginning at a modest $20. They’ve structured their prices with students’ budgetary needs in mind, offering packages that are both fair and competitive.
Plus, periodic discount campaigns and promotional offers further enhance their appeal as an economically wise student option.

Customer Support

TakeOnlineClassHelp shines as an online class helper characterized by utmost professionalism and a keen focus on the client. Students have multiple touchpoints to contact them, be it through live chat, email, or phone, ensuring swift and efficient resolution of questions or issues.

Features That Stand Out

• A broad spectrum of offerings is tailored to cater to various academic requirements.
• Unwavering commitment to honoring deadlines and ensuring quality remains uncompromised.
• Airtight security measures to guarantee students’ data privacy.
• A streamlined ordering mechanism complemented by features allowing students to monitor the status of their classes or tasks.

GoTakeMyOnlineClass- Best for Affordability

Quality

Renowned for top-notch online class help, GoTakeMyOnlineClass stands out for its impeccable commitment to quality.
The assignments they deliver are not only well-researched and detailed but are also structured to secure top grades for students.
Their online class takers boast both profound understanding and extensive practical experience in various fields, ensuring every paper’s quality is up to par.
Plus, tools like Grammarly further vouch for their dedication to delivering error-free work.

Pricing

Quality often comes at a price, but with GoTakeMyOnlineClass, affordability meets excellence. With services starting at just $40, students can receive premium assistance without burning a hole in their pockets.
The company’s transparent pricing policy ensures no hidden charges, guaranteeing maximum value for every dollar spent.

Customer Support

Available round the clock, students can easily reach their responsive customer support via WhatsApp for queries related to online coursework or online assignments.
Their team’s quick replies and attentive service ensure that, whether you’re struggling with a math class or any other academic discipline, you’re always in the loop.
Focusing on timely and personalized help, they are a reliable student pillar, 24/7.

Features That Stood Out

• The Take My Online Class service ensures timely submissions, with a track record of achieving high scores like 92% in History.
• Offers help across various subjects and academic levels, serving as a comprehensive online class help platform.
• Maintains high-quality coursework with strict checks to guarantee excellence.
• Ensures the safety of assignments and personal data with secure payment systems and a strict privacy policy.

GoTakeMyOnlineClass is a top choice for students seeking dependable and effective online class help, known for its quality, affordability, and student-focused approach.

PaySomeoneToDoMyOnlineClasses- The Simplest Process

Quality

Paysomeonetomyonlineclasses pledges to deliver unmatched quality online education support. Led by a skilled team, the platform guarantees students don’t just pass but truly comprehend their subjects deeply.
Their service, Can I pay someone to do my online class? meets each student’s unique educational requirements, putting them on the path to academic excellence.

Pricing

When it comes to affordability, Paysomeonetomyonlineclasses has got students covered. With prices starting at a modest $25, the platform aims to deliver premium academic services without denting your wallet.
Their flexible ‘pay as you go’ plans, combined with periodic discounts, make high-quality education more accessible to all.

Customer Support

The dedicated customer support team at Paysomeonetomyonlineclasses operates tirelessly, 24/7, ensuring no student is left with unanswered queries.
Whether it’s a holiday or midnight, students can be assured that their questions will be addressed promptly and efficiently.

Standout Features

1. An intuitive and user-friendly website layout.
2. A pool of experts is always on standby, even for last-minute tasks.
3. Transparent pricing mechanisms with zero hidden costs.
4. A staunch commitment to safeguarding students’ privacy and personal data.

Students considering online class assistance should undoubtedly explore Paysomeonetomyonlineclasses.

OnlineClassHelpUSA- Best for Individual Assignments and Easy

Quality Work from a Dynamic Team

The team at OnlineClassHelpUSA stands out for their energetic approach and commitment to helping students truly learn.
Their well-researched answers demonstrate a dedication to providing correct work and promoting critical thinking rather than just rushed responses.
This emphasis on comprehension sets them apart in the online class assistance field.

Budget-Friendly Pricing

Compared to competitors, OnlineClassHelpUSA offers an affordable pricing structure that makes its services accessible.
With reasonable rates for different academic needs, they aim to help students get assistance without overspending.
Their pricing promotes the belief that quality learning help should be accessible to all.

Responsive 24/7 Customer Service

OnlineClassHelpUSA has fast, caring customer service available around the clock. Their agents are always on hand to efficiently address any questions or issues students may have. Their welcoming approach creates a smooth experience.

Key Features

Some useful features that set OnlineClassHelpUSA apart include

• A wide variety of class help services to match different needs
• Consistent delivery of work before deadlines
• Strict rules to ensure student privacy
• Clear policies that build trust in their services

For quality online class help at affordable rates, all delivered with a dynamic, student-focused approach, OnlineClassHelpUSA is an ideal choice. Their prioritization of thoughtful work, excellent service, and accessibility makes them a top contender.

How to Choose the Best Take My Online Class Service?

Exploring the online academic world can be daunting, especially when considering enlisting help. Here’s a guide to selecting the best ‘Take My Online Class’ service, ensuring your academic needs are met seamlessly.

Research and Reputation

Before placing your online class order, it’s pivotal to conduct thorough research. Seek out student evaluations and testimonies on the service. Positive reviews received consistently might be a good sign of a service’s dependability and efficacy.

Expertise in Online Class Helpers

Your academic performance is paramount. To ensure it’s in good hands, investigate the qualifications and expertise of the online class helpers. Ensure they have experience in your specific subject area and they are equipped to handle both singular and multiple online classes.

Transparency in Pricing

While looking for an online class taker, you must understand their pricing structure. There must be no hidden fees. A transparent pricing model will allow you to budget appropriately and ensure you get value for your money.

Flexibility and Range of Services

Whether you need help with an entire online class or just specific parts, the service should offer flexibility. Check if they cater to a range of academic needs, from single assignments to managing multiple courses.

Communication and Accessibility

Prompt and clear communication can make all the difference in your online class experience. The best services will offer accessible communication channels with your assigned online class taker. This ensures you stay updated on progress and can provide feedback when necessary.

Data Privacy and Confidentiality

Your personal and academic details must remain confidential. Before enlisting help, check the privacy policies of the service. Ensure they have robust measures to protect your data and maintain discretion.

Track Record of Academic Performance

The primary aim is to boost your academic performance. Hence, consider the success rate of students who’ve used the service. High grades and commendable feedback should be a norm, not an exception.

Easy Order Process

The process to place an online class order should be straightforward. Avoid services with complicated ordering procedures. The best platforms make it easy for students to get started without unnecessary hurdles.

Conclusion

In conclusion, choosing the right Take My Online Class service requires careful consideration. By paying attention to these crucial factors, you’ll be better positioned to make an informed decision and excel in your online academic journey.

If you stumbled on this post it is probably because you are curious about the TEACH program and there is almost no information that is readily available to the public. I want to help people make a decision, so they do not waste their time. Although the TEACH program is a good idea, in practice there are many problems with it too. This is going to be a lengthy post. The bad stuff is at the end. *All opinions are my own and from people I talked to. Sorry for the bad grammar.
-What is the TEACH program: The TEACH program is a rotational program in Government and Public Services (GPS) enabling areas at Deloitte. Most of the rotations sit in operational excellence. It’s for government and public services, so it’s not consulting.
-How does it work: Your first rotation is picked for you. They are typically done in contracts, financial advising, security, business systems, and pricing. You are in your first rotation for a full year. You then get to pick your next 2-3 rotations and you are in them for 9 months to a year. In some cases people stay longer and eventually join permanently. In addition to your rotation you have other requirements for your performance. You have to contribute to both the firm and TEACH, get a certain amount of learning credits, present on an irrelevant topic, and participate in impact activities (like impact day). You also have to get an Excel Expert certification in your first quarter.
-Pay: This depends on your city. They recently expanded and have a lot more options. $55k+ They say that they do not negotiate. You can still try if you want, but I heard they do not budge much. They keep increasing the sign on bonus as well. If you quit before 2 years you have to pay back the entire bonus. Last I heard it was about $4k. Yes, it is taxed. Heavily. They do not pay for relocation. They do not pay based on the standard of living. We asked and they said it is based on the market. Some people have second jobs / side hustles, especially since a lot of the cities are expensive and the pay is relatively low.
-Promotion: Within TEACH you can be promoted to a senior analyst, but only after working there for 2 full years. Your raise is less than inflation so there is basically a net loss in year two.
-Grad school: You can go to school while in the program. Many people are getting MBAs and other masters degrees.
-Moving within Deloitte: You cannot leave / internally apply to go to consulting/advisory unless you have been in TEACH for a year is what I have heard. I’m not sure about stuff outside of that.
Before I share my list of issues, here are my pros:

⁃ A way to try out different jobs ⁃ In some of the cities there are a lot of TEACH members so you can potentially find friends ⁃ Some of the people are very social and host events ⁃ TEACH hosts events monthly ⁃ Different rotations gives you more exposure and you can expand your network ⁃ Deloitte is a good company to have on your resume 

Ok here is the tea you came for: Issues with TEACH

⁃ The pay is low and you have to wait two years to get promoted. We are “cheap labor” and the director literally tells us that she hires two of us for the price of one regular analyst. On top of that, it could take a while to actually get that promotion after you hit two years. Having a bunch of certifications and skills does not boost your pay. ⁃ We do not get to go to DU (Deloitte University) 🥴 ⁃ Leadership ⁃ Talks in patronizing manor ⁃ Tells us they like us bc we are content where we are. Some basically see us as people who do not have much goals/ are not striving to move up or have a meaningful career ⁃ Claims they try to be transparent but feels attacked whenever people ask valid questions ⁃ Occasionally feels like only focused on making the program and leadership look good and not really concerned about employees and their growth ⁃ Likes to gossip ⁃ Not difficult to get on bad side (which she will warn you not to get on) ⁃ If she’s having a bad day, your 1:1 will suck. Vibes/ attitude are so negative and randomly aggressive ⁃ Some of the coaches do not know much about the program or rotations so they aren’t helpful. ⁃ Some rotations are just data entry, which most of us would never agree to do if we knew before. The quality varies a lot. There’s not a demand in a lot of the rotations so you might not be able to do the ones you’re actually interested in. ⁃ Some managers do not want to work with TEACH or teach us a lot because we will be leaving quickly. In these situations you barely learn anything. ⁃ The process for switching rotations sucks. Specifically the new process they just implemented where the role descriptions are vague with numbers as labels ie: “Option 10” instead of “Marketing Analyst” or “Pricing Analyst”, and you can only apply to one, which means your second choice isn’t considered. Before this process, we ranked our top three and then we had conversations about those choices and availability. After that conversation, you did a value proposition (a presentation about you, why you are a good fit/ how you would add value, more of just an introduction). Not every rotation accepts people all the time and some rotations you might have been told about during your interview no longer exist. ⁃ It also seems like you can’t leave a rotation even if you are miserable and hate it. When I interviewed, I was told you could leave. Instead, you basically get told to suck it up and make the most of it. I think they only try to do something if they think you might quit. ⁃ The small presentation should count as a TEACH contribution/ be optional bc they are honestly a waste of time. It’s a 5 min presentation on whatever you want, so most is useless information. Not sure how adding more sessions dedicated to these on top of our TEACH touchpoint (monthly meeting for teach with updates and these presentations that were once called knowledge shares) is useful or productive. ⁃ The budget for TEACH is probably low bc they do not like us to travel. They tell us the money for travel comes out of our raises. ⁃ Mygigs: freelance work. This has to be done outside of your 40 hours of work, but we do not get paid overtime. At one point we were required to do several. I do think some gigs can be great for expanding your network and learning new skills, but why can’t we just do the work when we have downtime? 

I also wanted to point out that a lot of people (most) do not really finish the program. Some quit and leave Deloitte and others just leave TEACH. They started doing large cohorts so now the math might look different, but many people are already dissatisfied so idk, that attrition rate might get worse.
Feel free to ask me any questions!

I have a 1-1 who I work with in math every day. Pretty soon i realized that they have not made the connection between counting and the concept of a quantity. They were able to count some numbers consistently by putting objects on touchpoint spots, but i realized that they were just memorizing the placement instead of actually counting it (for example cramming as many counters onto a 6 as they can) i’m trying 10 frames with them with a bit of success but they often need help keeping track of their place, and and also i still don’t think that connection has been formed yet. on top of all of it they are pretty non vocal and have probably less than 150 words in their vocabulary so it’s hard to gauge understanding or even processing time.
has anyone had anything like this? what worked for you?

TL/DR: Want to better visualize risks for geeky math-research SMEs. What should I do beyond spicing up Gannt charts and regular touchpoints after process mapping?
Might be a niche question but I'm hoping to get some opinions on project tools that may help my situation.
Context: Education measurement space. The org's SMEs have little development and planning background. The web product is being forced from doing 40 years of pen and paper to online. The requirement is the web portal is easy for the public and youth to navigate. Functional teams are older and stats-research heavy folk and spend most of their time discussing literature reviews, testing and statistical methods.
Results and Data Integrity (deliverables) rule over adhering to delivery dates: As everything is driven by opinions of the analysis + research, there is no managerial input (also PhDs- senior literature reviewer folk). A TON of before-and-after review across the demographics/ languages is needed after each user interaction.
They are detailed but contextual folk.
The SMEs ironically don't care too much to stick to timelines or think about downstream teams (our vendor is the developer who is building the site interface and algorithms that will distribute product evenly across a population). Process mapping helps, but they always discover new things to add to their evaluative work, or make serious change requests that need significant time for the vendor to re-config models.
How can I visualize risks easier for my functional team and keep them aware of overlaps? They often overestimate the vendor's ability to develop new features and underestimate their own efforts needed -- involving many rounds of discussions (research, testing, lots of consultation with EDI experts, some legal).
I currently am using a Gannt chart but wonder how I can dumb it down more or highlight / colour things so it makes sense to mathematical minds. Thoughts?

Dear Community!
I tried creating a bindable proeprty for the CroppedBitmap from this tutorial: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/xamarin-forms/user-interface/graphics/skiasharp/bitmaps/cropping
Making the normal bitmap as a Bindable property worked just fine but i cannot figure out how i would create the Bindable property for the CroppedBitmap, since i think i had to place the code inside somwhere else so rthat it gets called every time the cropping rectangle changed i guess but it confuses me.
​

 public class PhotoCropperCanvasView : SKCanvasView { const int CORNER = 50; // pixel length of cropper corner const int RADIUS = 100; // pixel radius of touch hit-test //SKBitmap bitmap; //CroppingRectangle croppingRect; SKMatrix inverseBitmapMatrix; public SKBitmap testmap; //public SKBitmap bitmap { get; set; } public Image testImage { get; set; } public CroppingRectangle croppingRect { get; set; } //public SKMatrix inverseBitmapMatrix { get; set; } public static readonly BindableProperty bitmapProperty = BindableProperty.Create(nameof(bitmap), typeof(SKBitmap), typeof(Image),null,propertyChanged: OnbitmapChanged); static void OnbitmapChanged(BindableObject bindable, object oldValue, object newValue) { Console.WriteLine("test"); } public SKBitmap bitmap { get { SKBitmap map = (SKBitmap)GetValue(bitmapProperty); //if (croppingRect != null) //{ // SKRect cropRect = croppingRect.Rect; // SKBitmap croppedBitmap = new SKBitmap((int)cropRect.Width, // (int)cropRect.Height); // SKRect dest = new SKRect(0, 0, cropRect.Width, cropRect.Height); // SKRect source = new SKRect(cropRect.Left, cropRect.Top, // cropRect.Right, cropRect.Bottom); // // using (SKCanvas canvas = new SKCanvas(croppedBitmap)) // { // canvas.DrawBitmap(map, source, dest); // } // testmap = croppedBitmap; //} return map; } set { SetValue(bitmapProperty, value); } } // Touch tracking TouchEffect touchEffect = new TouchEffect(); struct TouchPoint { public int CornerIndex { set; get; } public SKPoint Offset { set; get; } } Dictionary touchPoints = new Dictionary(); // Drawing objects SKPaint cornerStroke = new SKPaint { Style = SKPaintStyle.Stroke, Color = SKColors.White, StrokeWidth = 10 }; SKPaint edgeStroke = new SKPaint { Style = SKPaintStyle.Stroke, Color = SKColors.White, StrokeWidth = 2 }; public PhotoCropperCanvasView(SKBitmap bitmap, float? aspectRatio = null) { this.bitmap = bitmap; SKRect bitmapRect = new SKRect(0, 0, bitmap.Width, bitmap.Height); croppingRect = new CroppingRectangle(bitmapRect, aspectRatio); touchEffect.TouchAction += OnTouchEffectTouchAction; } public PhotoCropperCanvasView() { } protected override void OnPropertyChanged([CallerMemberName] string propertyName = nameof(bitmap)) { base.OnPropertyChanged(propertyName); if (bitmap != null) { SKRect bitmapRect = new SKRect(0, 0, bitmap.Width, bitmap.Width); croppingRect = new CroppingRectangle(bitmapRect, 1); touchEffect.TouchAction += OnTouchEffectTouchAction; } } public static readonly BindableProperty CroppedBitmapProperty = BindableProperty.Create(nameof(CroppedBitmap), typeof(SKBitmap), typeof(PhotoCropperCanvasView), null, propertyChanged: OnbitmapChanged); public SKBitmap CroppedBitmap { get { SKRect cropRect = croppingRect.Rect; SKBitmap croppedBitmap = new SKBitmap((int)cropRect.Width, (int)cropRect.Height); SKRect dest = new SKRect(0, 0, cropRect.Width, cropRect.Height); SKRect source = new SKRect(cropRect.Left, cropRect.Top, cropRect.Right, cropRect.Bottom); using (SKCanvas canvas = new SKCanvas(croppedBitmap)) { canvas.DrawBitmap(bitmap, source, dest); } //return croppedBitmap; return (SKBitmap)GetValue(CroppedBitmapProperty); } set { SetValue(CroppedBitmapProperty, value); } } protected override void OnParentSet() { base.OnParentSet(); // Attach TouchEffect to parent view Parent.Effects.Add(touchEffect); } protected override void OnPaintSurface(SKPaintSurfaceEventArgs args) { base.OnPaintSurface(args); SKImageInfo info = args.Info; SKSurface surface = args.Surface; SKCanvas canvas = surface.Canvas; canvas.Clear(SKColors.Gray); // Calculate rectangle for displaying bitmap float scale = Math.Min((float)info.Width / bitmap.Width, (float)info.Height / bitmap.Height); float x = (info.Width - scale * bitmap.Width) / 2; float y = (info.Height - scale * bitmap.Height) / 2; SKRect bitmapRect = new SKRect(x, y, x + scale * bitmap.Width, y + scale * bitmap.Height); canvas.DrawBitmap(bitmap, bitmapRect); // Calculate a matrix transform for displaying the cropping rectangle SKMatrix bitmapScaleMatrix = SKMatrix.MakeIdentity(); bitmapScaleMatrix.SetScaleTranslate(scale, scale, x, y); // Display rectangle SKRect scaledCropRect = bitmapScaleMatrix.MapRect(croppingRect.Rect); canvas.DrawRect(scaledCropRect, edgeStroke); // Display heavier corners using (SKPath path = new SKPath()) { path.MoveTo(scaledCropRect.Left, scaledCropRect.Top + CORNER); path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Left, scaledCropRect.Top); path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Left + CORNER, scaledCropRect.Top); path.MoveTo(scaledCropRect.Right - CORNER, scaledCropRect.Top); path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Right, scaledCropRect.Top); path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Right, scaledCropRect.Top + CORNER); path.MoveTo(scaledCropRect.Right, scaledCropRect.Bottom - CORNER); path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Right, scaledCropRect.Bottom); path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Right - CORNER, scaledCropRect.Bottom); path.MoveTo(scaledCropRect.Left + CORNER, scaledCropRect.Bottom); path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Left, scaledCropRect.Bottom); path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Left, scaledCropRect.Bottom - CORNER); canvas.DrawPath(path, cornerStroke); } // Invert the transform for touch tracking bitmapScaleMatrix.TryInvert(out inverseBitmapMatrix); } void OnTouchEffectTouchAction(object sender, TouchActionEventArgs args) { SKPoint pixelLocation = ConvertToPixel(args.Location); SKPoint bitmapLocation = inverseBitmapMatrix.MapPoint(pixelLocation); switch (args.Type) { case TouchActionType.Pressed: // Convert radius to bitmap/cropping scale float radius = inverseBitmapMatrix.ScaleX * RADIUS; // Find corner that the finger is touching int cornerIndex = croppingRect.HitTest(bitmapLocation, radius); if (cornerIndex != -1 && !touchPoints.ContainsKey(args.Id)) { TouchPoint touchPoint = new TouchPoint { CornerIndex = cornerIndex, Offset = bitmapLocation - croppingRect.Corners[cornerIndex] }; touchPoints.Add(args.Id, touchPoint); } break; case TouchActionType.Moved: if (touchPoints.ContainsKey(args.Id)) { TouchPoint touchPoint = touchPoints[args.Id]; croppingRect.MoveCorner(touchPoint.CornerIndex, bitmapLocation - touchPoint.Offset); InvalidateSurface(); } break; case TouchActionType.Released: case TouchActionType.Cancelled: if (touchPoints.ContainsKey(args.Id)) { touchPoints.Remove(args.Id); } break; } } SKPoint ConvertToPixel(Xamarin.Forms.Point pt) { return new SKPoint((float)(CanvasSize.Width * pt.X / Width), (float)(CanvasSize.Height * pt.Y / Height)); } } } 

the view:

Dear Community!
I have now spend a week trying to create an image cropper. The most libraries i found or git recommended were to old or did not work. I tried to recreate the iamge cropper from microsoft docs https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/xamarin-forms/user-interface/graphics/skiasharp/bitmaps/cropping and therefore isntalled the TouchTracking nuget Package friom Indrej Kunc but unfortunately i had to find yout that it does not work with this library. M;icrosoft also does not reference what they have used for their tracking. I tried copying the TouchTrecking, TouchEffect etc files from the microsoft exasmple into my project but had to find out, that no corner moves when usign these files. With the nuget Package from Indrej kunc i could at least move one or two corners but the rectagnel was kept very small. How can i fix this? Why is it not working what am i missing? I am really frustrated by now. Why does it seem pretty much impossible to implement a function that seems like beeing everywhere.
The other Problem heppens with the Stormlion image cropper. Unfortunately after installign the nuget package and following the installation isntruction the Stormlion namespace is not found in the android MainActivity.cs
namespace DoggoApp.Droid
{
[Activity(Label = "DoggoApp", Icon = "@mipmap/icon", Theme = "@style/MainTheme", MainLauncher = true, ConfigurationChanges = ConfigChanges.ScreenSize ConfigChanges.Orientation ConfigChanges.UiMode ConfigChanges.ScreenLayout ConfigChanges.SmallestScreenSize )]
public class MainActivity : global::Xamarin.Forms.Platform.Android.FormsAppCompatActivity
{
const int RequestLocationId = 0;
readonly string[] LocationPermissions =
{
Manifest.Permission.AccessCoarseLocation,
Manifest.Permission.AccessFineLocation,
Manifest.Permission.AccessBackgroundLocation
};
protected override void OnCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
{
base.OnCreate(savedInstanceState);
​
CachedImageRenderer.Init(true);
​
Xamarin.Essentials.Platform.Init(this, savedInstanceState);
global::Xamarin.Forms.Forms.Init(this, savedInstanceState);
Xamarin.FormsMaps.Init(this, savedInstanceState);
​
LoadApplication(new App());
}
public override void OnRequestPermissionsResult(int requestCode, string[] permissions, [GeneratedEnum] Android.Content.PM.Permission[] grantResults)
{
Xamarin.Essentials.Platform.OnRequestPermissionsResult(requestCode, permissions, grantResults);
base.OnRequestPermissionsResult(requestCode, permissions, grantResults);
​
​
if (requestCode == RequestLocationId)
{
if ((grantResults.Length == 1) && (grantResults[0] == (int)Permission.Granted))
return;
else
return;
}
else
{
Xamarin.Essentials.Platform.OnRequestPermissionsResult(requestCode, permissions, grantResults);
base.OnRequestPermissionsResult(requestCode, permissions, grantResults);
}
}
protected override void OnStart()
{
base.OnStart();
​
if ((int)Build.VERSION.SdkInt >= 23)
{
if (CheckSelfPermission(Manifest.Permission.AccessFineLocation) != Permission.Granted)
{
RequestPermissions(LocationPermissions, RequestLocationId);
}
if (CheckSelfPermission(Manifest.Permission.AccessCoarseLocation) != Permission.Granted)
{
RequestPermissions(LocationPermissions, RequestLocationId);
}
if (CheckSelfPermission(Manifest.Permission.AccessBackgroundLocation) != Permission.Granted)
{
RequestPermissions(LocationPermissions, RequestLocationId);
}
else
{
// Permissions already granted - display a message.
}
}
}
class PhotoCropperCanvasView : SKCanvasView
{
const int CORNER = 50; // pixel length of cropper corner
const int RADIUS = 100; // pixel radius of touch hit-test
​
SKBitmap bitmap;
CroppingRectangle croppingRect;
SKMatrix inverseBitmapMatrix;
​
// Touch tracking
TouchEffect touchEffect = new TouchEffect();
struct TouchPoint
{
public int CornerIndex { set; get; }
public SKPoint Offset { set; get; }
}
​
Dictionary touchPoints = new Dictionary();
​
// Drawing objects
SKPaint cornerStroke = new SKPaint
{
Style = SKPaintStyle.Stroke,
Color = SKColors.White,
StrokeWidth = 10
};
​
SKPaint edgeStroke = new SKPaint
{
Style = SKPaintStyle.Stroke,
Color = SKColors.White,
StrokeWidth = 2
};
​
public PhotoCropperCanvasView(SKBitmap bitmap, float? aspectRatio = null)
{
this.bitmap = bitmap;
​
SKRect bitmapRect = new SKRect(0, 0, bitmap.Width, bitmap.Height);
croppingRect = new CroppingRectangle(bitmapRect, aspectRatio);
​
touchEffect.TouchAction += OnTouchEffectTouchAction;
}
​
public SKBitmap CroppedBitmap
{
get
{
SKRect cropRect = croppingRect.Rect;
SKBitmap croppedBitmap = new SKBitmap((int)cropRect.Width,
(int)cropRect.Height);
SKRect dest = new SKRect(0, 0, cropRect.Width, cropRect.Height);
SKRect source = new SKRect(cropRect.Left, cropRect.Top,
cropRect.Right, cropRect.Bottom);
​
using (SKCanvas canvas = new SKCanvas(croppedBitmap))
{
canvas.DrawBitmap(bitmap, source, dest);
}
​
return croppedBitmap;
}
}
​
protected override void OnParentSet()
{
base.OnParentSet();
​
// Attach TouchEffect to parent view
Parent.Effects.Add(touchEffect);
}
​
protected override void OnPaintSurface(SKPaintSurfaceEventArgs args)
{
base.OnPaintSurface(args);
​
SKImageInfo info = args.Info;
SKSurface surface = args.Surface;
SKCanvas canvas = surface.Canvas;
​
canvas.Clear(SKColors.Gray);
​
// Calculate rectangle for displaying bitmap
float scale = Math.Min((float)info.Width / bitmap.Width, (float)info.Height / bitmap.Height);
float x = (info.Width - scale * bitmap.Width) / 2;
float y = (info.Height - scale * bitmap.Height) / 2;
SKRect bitmapRect = new SKRect(x, y, x + scale * bitmap.Width, y + scale * bitmap.Height);
canvas.DrawBitmap(bitmap, bitmapRect);
​
// Calculate a matrix transform for displaying the cropping rectangle
SKMatrix bitmapScaleMatrix = SKMatrix.MakeIdentity();
bitmapScaleMatrix.SetScaleTranslate(scale, scale, x, y);
​
// Display rectangle
SKRect scaledCropRect = bitmapScaleMatrix.MapRect(croppingRect.Rect);
canvas.DrawRect(scaledCropRect, edgeStroke);
​
// Display heavier corners
using (SKPath path = new SKPath())
{
path.MoveTo(scaledCropRect.Left, scaledCropRect.Top + CORNER);
path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Left, scaledCropRect.Top);
path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Left + CORNER, scaledCropRect.Top);
​
path.MoveTo(scaledCropRect.Right - CORNER, scaledCropRect.Top);
path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Right, scaledCropRect.Top);
path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Right, scaledCropRect.Top + CORNER);
​
path.MoveTo(scaledCropRect.Right, scaledCropRect.Bottom - CORNER);
path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Right, scaledCropRect.Bottom);
path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Right - CORNER, scaledCropRect.Bottom);
​
path.MoveTo(scaledCropRect.Left + CORNER, scaledCropRect.Bottom);
path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Left, scaledCropRect.Bottom);
path.LineTo(scaledCropRect.Left, scaledCropRect.Bottom - CORNER);
​
canvas.DrawPath(path, cornerStroke);
}
​
// Invert the transform for touch tracking
bitmapScaleMatrix.TryInvert(out inverseBitmapMatrix);
}
​
void OnTouchEffectTouchAction(object sender, TouchActionEventArgs args)
{
SKPoint pixelLocation = ConvertToPixel(args.Location);
SKPoint bitmapLocation = inverseBitmapMatrix.MapPoint(pixelLocation);
​
switch (args.Type)
{
case TouchActionType.Pressed:
// Convert radius to bitmap/cropping scale
float radius = inverseBitmapMatrix.ScaleX * RADIUS;
​
// Find corner that the finger is touching
int cornerIndex = croppingRect.HitTest(bitmapLocation, radius);
​
if (cornerIndex != -1 && !touchPoints.ContainsKey(args.Id))
{
TouchPoint touchPoint = new TouchPoint
{
CornerIndex = cornerIndex,
Offset = bitmapLocation - croppingRect.Corners[cornerIndex]
};
​
touchPoints.Add(args.Id, touchPoint);
}
break;
​
case TouchActionType.Moved:
if (touchPoints.ContainsKey(args.Id))
{
TouchPoint touchPoint = touchPoints[args.Id];
croppingRect.MoveCorner(touchPoint.CornerIndex,
bitmapLocation - touchPoint.Offset);
InvalidateSurface();
}
break;
case TouchActionType.Released:
case TouchActionType.Cancelled:
if (touchPoints.ContainsKey(args.Id))
{
touchPoints.Remove(args.Id);
}
break;
}
}
​
SKPoint ConvertToPixel(TouchTrackingPoint pt)
{
return new SKPoint((float)(CanvasSize.Width * pt.X / Width),
(float)(CanvasSize.Height * pt.Y / Height));
}
}

So I work at a very small (around 100 person) media agency and what we do is work with both in-house and agency clients looking to run their ads in the digital realm. There are account execs that are the only touchpoint with client, account managers that do all of the execution of the campaign, and media buyers to help out when additional inventory is needed.
I am an Account Manager, and my job is basically to take the insertion order, and set the campaign up where needed, monitor, provide reporting, and perform VERY simple optimizations where needed. This can be done in any of the DSPs (primarily Yahoo, DV360, TTD, Vistar) or socials (TikTok, FB, Reddit), and reporting through Datorama.
I’ve been in this position for 6 months, after graduating with a bachelors in marketing from a good business school. In school I was always good at numbers, although I didn’t take any of the crazy math classes.
The pay in this job is low, and I make commission once I start managing accounts, which started about a month ago (pretty slow growth). I know this contradicts what most people say about advertising, but my job is super slow. It’s sometimes painful how slow it is.
What I’m looking for advice on is where I can take this? I would be excited for either agency or in-house experience. I want a bigger company with an actual culture that I can be a part of. Also, better pay and decent benefits would be prime too.
If you read all of this I appreciate you!!!

I am not an expert, I am just another student. However, hese tips have helped me so far in quarantine and I intend to follow them into UCI. If there is additional information you feel is missing, I will add it.

1. Following the mandates I will be masking up at all times, especially when indoors and in common areas unless I am completely alone in a room. Be mindful of what you touch and use. It is important to keep your hands clean and avoid touching your face. If you have a habit, start working now to break it, wearing a mask can help. I will also be social distancing at all times when possible. Of course, get vaccinated if you can, the PfizeBioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine is fully FDA approved and it is effective in keeping you and your fellow peer safe. Remember though, you are not invulnerable. Increased protection means nothing if you take foolish and unnecessary risks. Be safe and sensible. Keep an eye out for the 3rd Booster shot coming this Fall. Additionally, you can get COVID tested at UCI for any reason: https://uci.edu/coronavirus/testing-response/testing.php
2. Carry disinfecting supplies Undoubtedly, you will have to touch doors and bathroom sinks. Carry a package of disinfecting wipes and a bottle of sanitizer. If you have to open a door, just open it and sanitize your hands. When using public surfaces such as bathrooms, a table, etc, use a disinfecting wipe. Cover all the common touchpoints: corners, edges, sink handles, soap handles, door handles, armrests, etc. Anywhere that you know you will or might touch. There is nothing more thorough than proper handwashing. When you have the opportunity, say between classes, wash your hands with soap and warm to hot water for 30 seconds. Get between the fingers, under the nails, and around your wrists.
3. Inquire about seating arrangements Concerned about what class seating will be like? Email your professors. You can find what school they teach from the Schedule of Classes: https://www.reg.uci.edu/perl/WebSocJust visit that school's website, find their department, and go to Faculty to find their email. Check WebReg too for which classes will be virtual or in-person. You'll notice big lectures, such as Math 2A with 420 students, will be virtual. (All to my knowledge as an incoming Fall 2021 Freshman.) Do not be afraid to voice your concerns with your professor throughout the year. If a student isn't taking the mandates seriously or you feel you're too closely grouped with people, communicate that. Be direct, explain your concerns, know your options.
4. Your ultimate weapon is your better judgment You are not locked in whatever housing you have. By all means, take a walk around the park, visit the University Town Center, etc. Your awareness and judgment determine your safety. "The town center is looking a bit crowded today, I should come back later or perhaps another day." "I was going to do some exercise in the park but there seems to be a large gathering." Trust your gut and commit to it in all situations. If someone is inviting you to do something or go somewhere, but the sound of it is making your gut twist, stick with your intuition, especially if it involves people or a place you know very little about.
5. Housing Communicate with your roommate. Be direct about your concerns over safety such as masking up when together in the room/house. You can also buy a Medify Air Purifier to help keep the air clean of aerosols: https://www.ocm.com/uci/gifts-and-care-packages/personal-care/air-purifiers. In general, they are also great if you are sensitive to dust or other allergens, and it filters odors. For residence hall restrooms, just follow Point 2: Disinfecting supplies. Wipe down the touchpoints and bring your own toiletries: soap, toilet paper, towels, etc. Observe when the busiest times are to decide the best times to shower, brush your teeth, etc.
6. Keep calm These are unprecedented times, and you are right to be concerned or worried. It is perfectly normal to fret over the worst-case scenario. However, do not panic, use today to plan ahead for the future. Make preparations to keep yourself safe to avoid scenarios you are strongly concerned about. Find and make note of the resources available to you at all times, such as the UCI COVID-19 Dashboard: https://uci.edu/coronavirus/. Know that UCI and its staff are dedicated to your safety, and make sure to do your part. Report symptoms, have masks/mask filters, keep your disinfecting supplies in stock. Keep a calm mindset to keep yourself safe, prepared, and, most of all, make your year enjoyable.

Again, not an expert, but this is how I have been keeping myself safe during the pandemic. Many of you are worried, and that is completely justified. However, it all comes down to how you care for yourself. Trust your intuition at all times when something feels wrong. Find things to enjoy while understanding your boundaries and acknowledge the boundaries of others. Make plans, stay calm, and be direct. Stay safe everyone.
EDIT: Here is a link to guide on mask layering
EDIT 2: Link regarding Point 2 about transmission through fomites (touchpoints) and its low risk compared to the standard respiratory transmission.

Previous Post Here

I Pet Goat Two

Source Here
Look at the picture of humanity's evolution above the chalkboard. Notice anything? Like how humans evolve to carry guns (at least I think that's a gun, it's hard to make out, but the point doesn't change even if it isn't). But then before they reach the final stage there seems to be some sort of barrier in the way. Yet afterwards, they reach enlightenment. And how is enlightenment attained?
With a crown on the humans head. You know, a corona. Tenuous? Sure. Maybe. Or maybe it's metaphorical? Maybe it's on purpose. From a wild viral video that was made in 2012. By a company called Heliophant. Which breaks down to Helio • of the sun, and Phant • from the ancient Greek that means to show.

Infection Fatality Rate

December 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis estimated that population IFR during the first wave of the pandemic was about 0.5% to 1% in many locations (including France, Netherlands, New Zealand, and Portugal), 1% to 2% in other locations (Australia, England, Lithuania, and Spain), and exceeded 2% in Italy. That study also found that most of these differences in IFR reflected corresponding differences in the age composition of the population and age-specific infection rates; in particular, the metaregression estimate of IFR is very low for children and younger adults (e.g., 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at age 25) but increases progressively to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85. These results were also highlighted in a December 2020 report issued by the WHO. Source Here
Doesn't seem nearly that bad when you look at the stats, now does it? Maybe there was something wrong with the testing? If only there was someone who invented the testing who could speak out about it?
Kary Mullis, whose invention of the polymerase chain reaction technique earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993, died of pneumonia on August 7 (2019), according to MyNewsLA.com. He was 74 years old. Source Here
Oh. He's dead. That's unfortunate timing. Oh well. At least the vaccine is safe with absolutely no super ultra rare side effects! After all, it's gone through so much rigorous safety testing and data accumulation!

Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna labels updated regarding risks of rare heart inflammation

"The Canadian evidence is expected to evolve as more people in these populations are vaccinated," a statement from the agecy said. "Available short-term follow-up data show that these events were typically mild and treatable; however, information on long-term outcomes is not yet available." Warning tied to capillary leak syndrome On Tuesday, Health Canada also recommended that people with a history of capillary leak syndrome not be inoculated with drugmaker AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine. Source Here

So we don't have all the data that we need. But at least it'll be updated as we go along! Phew. But is there anything else strange with this pandemic? Yep.

Covid: Disabled people account for six in 10 deaths in England last year - ONS

Source Here
So the COVID-19 seems to be disproportionately affecting the elderly and disabled. Isn’t that a wee bit odd? So why did we shut down society when we could have protected the vulnerable? Why did we inoculate an entire planet with a vaccine that seems to have super rare never happen side effects, like here:

Senator Johnson, families speak: COVID vaccine adverse reactions

Source Here
These people aren't making it up, and shame on anyone who claims otherwise. And if you watched the video of a child in a wheelchair hooked up to a tube, you'll also notice the medical doctors tried to put her into a psychiatric hospital. You know, because she's making it up.

The Timeline

Let's go over the timeline again.
July 14, 2019

Chinese researcher escorted from infectious disease lab amid RCMP investigation

Source Here
August 5, 2019

Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns

Problems with disposal of dangerous materials led the government to suspend research at the military’s leading biodefense center. Source Here
September 17, 2019
Blast sparks fire at Russian laboratory housing smallpox virus
Facility know as Vector is one of only two sites holding virus, and also houses Ebola samples Source Here
October 18, 2019

Event 201

Source Here
October 18, 2019

2019 Military World Games

(In Wuhan) Source Here
So call me crazy, but we have all those incidents at major biolabs just before a pandemic breaks out in Wuhan? And then we have Military games being played in Wuhan at the same time that Bill Gates holds Event 201? Do you know what I think that's called? Muddying the waters. Keep your options open. But why? It's just a harmless pandemic, right?

Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier inaccurately claims that the novel coronavirus is man-made and contains genetic material from HIV

Numerous articles published in April 2020 report that Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier claimed that “SARS-CoV-2 is a manipulated virus that was accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China” and that “Indian researchers have already tried to publish the results of the analyses that showed that this coronavirus genome contained sequences of another virus […] the HIV virus (AIDS virus).” The claim that SARS-CoV-2 contains “HIV insertions” began circulating in January 2020, and was propagated by outlets such as Zero Hedge and Infowars. Health Feedback covered this claim in early February 2020, and found it to be inaccurate. Source Here

That Nobel Prize winning guy better shut up. Seriously! Can't have anyone freaking out.

This HIV/AIDS Specialist Explains Its Similarities — And Differences — To COVID-19

So how similar are HIV and SARS-CoV-2? A few recent studies on the effects of HIV and SARS-CoV-2 indicate that they do have some similarities. Shanghai-based researchers provided evidence that SARS-CoV-2 can infect T lymphocytes, the same cells targeted by HIV. Other researchers have documented that individuals with severe COVID-19 may exhibit lymphopenia, or an atypically low number of lymphocytes in the blood. Likewise, HIV infection results in this abnormality, eventually causing the immunosuppression associated with AIDS. But these findings should not cause us to assume that SARS-CoV-2 is like HIV. Source Here

Oh. But hey, don't assume. Ok? Ok.

Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag

We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses. Importantly, amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV-1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag. Interestingly, despite the inserts being discontinuous on the primary amino acid sequence, 3D-modelling of the 2019-nCoV suggests that they converge to constitute the receptor binding site. The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity /similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature. This work provides yet unknown insights on 2019-nCoV and sheds light on the evolution and pathogenicity of this virus with important implications for diagnosis of this virus. Source Here
Uh. But fact check already said this is false. Man, I'm so confused. Maybe we should dig around some more.

Development of unique Australian COVID-19 vaccine halted

The backers of Australia’s homegrown COVID-19 vaccine candidate today announced a halt to its further development, after some of the first people to receive the vaccine in a safety trial generated antibodies to an unintended target, the AIDS virus. A small fragment of an HIV protein is a component of the vaccine used to add stability to the intended antibody target, the spike protein of the pandemic coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Source Here

This isn't looking good, is it? Now. Just because it has similarity doesn't mean that it is airborne HIV. OK? So don't freak out. Besides, we have experts, ok?
Feb 4, 2020

Renowned Canadian scientist Frank Plummer dies in Kenya, where he led HIV breakthroughs

Renowned Canadian scientist Frank Plummer dies in Kenya, where he led HIV breakthroughs
Uhm. First Kay Mullis, now Frank Plummer. Is Luc Montagnier going to follow a trend?
Luc Montagnier, a French virologist and recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), has recently exposed the dangers of the COVID-19 vaccines. The vaccines don’t stop the virus, argues the prominent virologist, they do the opposite — they “feed the virus,” and facilitate its development into stronger and more transmittable variants. These new virus variants will be more resistant to vaccination and may cause more health implications than their “original” versions. During the interview, professor Montagnier referred to the vaccine program for the coronavirus as an “unacceptable mistake.” Mass vaccinations are a “scientific error as well as a medical error,” he said. “The history books will show that, because it is the vaccination that is creating the variants.” Montagnier explained that “there are antibodies, created by the vaccine,” forcing the virus to “find another solution” or die. This is where the variants are created. It is the variants that “are a production and result from the vaccination.” Source Here
Fact Check:

Unvaccinated people are 'variant factories,' infectious diseases expert says

Source Here
Nope. It's you!
Sigh. Keep Calm and Carry On. We're All In This Together. But how long are we in this together for?

At the heart of the move to touchless travel is a trial the federal government is undertaking with the World Economic Forum and The Netherlands called the "Known Traveller Digital Identity" project, or KTDI.The official said the KTDI program is still in its early stages and technological issues are still being worked out. He said that privacy protections would have to be in place before any such system could be launched.A CBSA spokesperson told CBC News that the $656.1 million federal investment in border security modernization over five years will fund other "digital self-service tools" that will "reduce touchpoints" and create more "automated interactions" at Canadian airports Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is attending the G7 summit in the United Kingdom this weekend, where leaders are expected to discuss international vaccination certification — a so-called "vaccine passport"."We're really leaning on vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. That's a place where you can have some differentiation of the travel experience to make it a little smoother, a little bit more pleasant for those who have been vaccinated. But we don't know yet what the government's plans are for that," Gooch said. Once a traveller's vaccination can be verified, Gooch said, they can be treated differently — perhaps by giving them a single test upon arrival or before they depart, rather than the multiple tests required now. Source Here

There's that timeline again. 2025 to 2026. Strange isn't it. But surely they won't keep this up until then, will they?
Delta the ‘most transmissible’ of variants, spreading rapidly among unvaccinated populations: WHO chief Source Here
No way are they going to do this over and over again until we have our digital passports, are they?

Around 70% Australians Under Covid Restrictions Amid Delta Variant Surge

Around 18 million Australians, or around 70% of the population, are now under some form of lockdown or COVID-related restrictions as officials grapple with COVID-19 flare-ups in almost every state or territory. Source Here
So the passports are supposed to be completed by 2025 or 2026. What else can we see that may indicate this timeline is something to worry about?

The U.K. Has Vaccinated 80% of Adults, But Delta Variant Cases Are Rising. What’s Going On?

The U.K.’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty said cases would keep rising for the next few weeks leading to further hospitalizations and deaths, in a speech on Thursday. He added it was uncertain how big the current spike would be but also warned of another Covid surge in the winter. Whitty also said it may take five years before vaccines could “hold the line” against a range of variants. Source Here

Health chiefs' Covid winter plan could mean masks and social distancing for next 5 years

EXCLUSIVE: A draft blueprint drawn up by officials is said to include options to make masks mandatory and bring back social distancing in future outbreaks Source Here
Not. Good. At. All.

Puzzle Pieces

As I pointed out in the beginning, the I Pet Goat Two evolution chart is mighty strange. Could it be a coincidence? Yes. But what if it isn't? What if there is something happening here which involves a massive shift in humanity's evolutionary plan? Or maybe I better call it what it is, a technoevolutionary plan.
I know. Belive me, I know. I can't even believe that I'm typing these words. Nope. I really can't. But these days, nothing should be left off the table. So please watch the next video of an accredited professor who makes a living from vaccines, speaking out with a Canadian politician.

Bryam Bridle

Source Here
Did you watch it? Did you catch that weird letter that a member of our military sent in to the politician? Something concerning there. What? Well, the military member stated that people in the armed forces weren't allowed to get their vaccines from civilian sources.

What!

Yeah, I don't know either. Is it true? False? Not sure, but it's definitely concerning, isn’t it? Especially when you consider one meaning of delta is

Uppercase delta (Δ) at most times means “change” or “the change” in maths.

The change. Like the evolution chart over the blackboard. So let's take another look at COVID-19.
Do you remember when everyone claimed it stood for certificate of vaccination and the year 2019. I do. And maybe it does. But please consider this as well:
In Latin the term Circa is represented by C. So let's just pretend that the C. in Covid stands for Circa, which means, preceding a date. So what about Ovid? What could that mean?
Well, Ovid was a Roman poet who was best known for his work called (wait for it)
The Metamorphoses, Ovid's most ambitious and well-known work, consists of a 15-book catalogue written in dactylic hexameter about transformations in Greek and Roman mythology set within a loose mytho-historical framework. The word "metamorphoses" is of Greek origin and means "transformations".
Well isn't that a coincidence? But what about the 19? Does it just stand for the year? Well....
1= A 9= I
So, maybe, just maybe...

Covid-19=Circa Metamorphosis Artificial Intelligence

Great Reset, anyone? Build Back Better? AI World Government?
Is my interpretation of a Covid-19 meaning a stretch? Yes. Could it be apophenia? Yes. But I saw it, and I wrote it. Besides, it could also be, Covert ID-AI. Or, maybe it is certificate of vaccination ID-AI. Now people can claim that it just stands for what it is. And that's fine. And maybe it was. But, I have a hard time looking at an overall picture and dismissing the notion of a hidden definition.
But why? Why would they include admissions in their definitions? Wouldn’t it be better to keep it completely hidden? My response: does it matter? Honestly, does it? Barely anyone would believe it anyways. This is how effective the level of control has become. I'll admit my interpretation of the name may not be accurate, but look at society, you can show them facts and they'll just dismiss them because they don't align with their narrative. Cognitive dissonance is the New Normal.

Final Thoughts

This isn't easy to explain. Not at all. There are far too many moving parts. But at it's core, it looks like an attempt to install an AI technocracy world empire. Yet this attempt is trying to move past a challenge from China and a possible War for supremacy, while navigating a possible cataclysmic event due to our planets location in the Galactic Plane. What kind? Who knows. Solar flare. Asteroid impact. Magnetic Pole Shift. Take your pick. But what isn't a coincidence? Everything they tell you that is just a coincidence. Ok.
So what about all the seemingly false associations with HIV? Is this the same level as the Fake Lab Leak Theory? Which is now acceptable to be discussed? Because let's think here for a minute. There is a battle for AI supremacy happening right now. This battle may or may not evolve into a Third World War, but chances are high. And doesn't the lab leak theory make a war more likely? Yes. But, why would we go to war if the virus isn't really deadly? Whelp. They keep going on about long Covid don't they? And we keep getting these odd associations with HIV popping up. But we also know that most cases are asymptomatic, right? Line all of that together. Picture an announcement like this in a couple of years: the virus did come from a lab, but we have found that it was designed to be a stealth virus, and that Covid-19 causes implications similar to HIV.
Can you think of a better Pearl Harbo9-11 moment to launch WW3? Because I can't.
Remember, five years to beat the virus, and five years to implement the vaccine passports. And do you know what else lasts until around 2025?

The Parker Solar Probe

Also, we may be entering into a solar maximum of the current solar cycle, but we're still in an overall solar minimum. Just as they declared a change in the reporting of climate change to climate emergency. At the same time as they declared a pandemic. And just at the same time as they pull a disclosure on UAPS/UFO. Yep. Information overload anyone?
In short, as I've already stated, the Five Eyes are trying to establish an AI WORLD GOVERNMENT, yet two roadblocks stand in their way, a possible cataclysmic event(s), and China. And the virus? What a perfect way to establish Biosecurity for potential bio-attacks in this war, while at the same time increasing their control over the population. While also practicing erecting emergency medical hospitals. And remember who the virus seems to hit the hardest, the elderly, those with health complications, and the disabled. Exactly who you wouldn't want around in a potential cataclysmic event and/or WW3. Can't have those hospitals full if chaos breaks out, can we?
I'll have more coming about I Pet Goat Two upcoming. Because we aren't even close to being finished.
Keep Your Head Up and Eyes Open. Talk soon.

Edit

Coronavirus could attack immune system like HIV by targeting protective cells, warn scientists

Researchers in China and the US find that the virus that causes Covid-19 can destroy the T cells that are supposed to protect the body from harmful invaders
One doctor said concern is growing in medical circles that effect could be similar to HIV
Source Here
I forgot this little nugget.

Game has changed
Often I hear that Amazon FBA business model is dead or that only those who started early and/or have tons of capital at their disposal can be profitable. That's not true. Whether you started in 2017 or a month ago, you can still make (a lot of) money by selling on Amazon.
BUT it's essential to acknowledge that the rules of the game have changed over the years.
The good old days when it was enough “just to launch products” to be successful are gone. Competition is becoming ferocious, and it's harder than ever to stand out. The quality of listing that was extraordinary 5 years ago is barely a standard today…
In other words, if you want to get noticed in the crowded Amazon marketplace in 2021 and be highly profitable, you have to play according to the new rules.
More is required
There are critical business needs that every Amazon business has. Product development, supply management and forecasting, keyword optimization… If you are bad at those, it’s almost guaranteed that your business won’t succeed in the long term.
The problem is that it doesn’t work the other way around anymore - nowadays, being great at those doesn’t mean you’re automatically successful.
If you want to maximize your chances to thrive on Amazon in 2021, you have to do more. You have to level up your game. Increase your traffic and conversions and get more sales by adding branding to the matrix.
Why branding?
Nowadays, you'd hardly find a product that's not already sold by someone else (kudos if you did). So if you aren't a fantastic innovator, there's only one option left, and that's to sell something similar to what others sell too.
But why should the customer choose your product over those of competitors if they're almost the same?
The single most important factor has always been price. When there are two products available, both offering the same fundamental features, most people will always choose the cheaper one. It's wise after all - why would you pay more if you can have (more or less) the same thing for less.
But unless you are a Chinese factory, you probably can't compete on price because your costs are simply higher than theirs. And even if you'd somehow manage to do that and match the lowest prices, the tiny margin you would get out would hardly be worth it.
So what to do? How to differentiate from other sellers who are selling more or less the same product as you do while keeping your margins high?
Well, here comes the power of branding.
If you do it right, branding will allow you to:

• differentiate your products from those of competitors,
• increase and protect your margins,
• boost your traffic by increasing click-through rates from both search results and ads,
• boost your conversion rates,

which all together shall result in more sales and profit.
Branding on Amazon
Branding on Amazon is very different from branding in general. The reason for that is Amazon standing between you and your customers. On the one hand, Amazon allows you to tap into its immense traffic; on the other hand, it makes it much harder for you to create genuine, long-lasting relationships with your customers (IMHO, the core of branding in general).
Even successful 7-8-figure FBA brands that I’ve worked with had only around 5% of repetitive customers. That means that the long-term value (LTV) of acquired customers is limited to one sale in the vast majority of cases.
On any other platform, e.g., Shopify, the goal would be clear, to increase the % of repetitive customers and thereby the LTV of a customer way higher.
Unfortunately, this is hardly applicable to Amazon. Because it’s so hard to create a relationship with your customers there, it’s generally more efficient to focus on driving more traffic to listings (more impressions, higher click-through rate) and, most importantly, increasing conversions.
Simply put, focusing on traffic and conversions has a more significant impact on the bottom line - bring you more dollars - than focusing on building relationships with customers.
\At some point, it may make perfect sense to switch the strategy and approach an Amazon business like a “standard brand” and strive to create genuine relationships with the customers, but that's up for a longer, more in-depth discussion.*
Frankly, during my career as a brand manager of an 8-figure FBA business, I struggled to apply general branding principles to the Amazon ecosystem myself. I studied dozens of successful Amazon brands, put the findings together, and created the Amazon Branding System.
Amazon Branding System
Amazon Branding System narrows down the usual approach to branding to what matters the most for Amazon businesses.
There are 3 parts and 13 elements of the system:
Brand Identity

• Customer Avatar
• Brand Positioning
• Brand Message

Brand Assets

• Graphics
• Copy
• Photos
• Videos

Brand Touchpoints

• Product Listing
• A+ Content
• Amazon Store
• Brand Website (for legitimacy purposes, not an e-shop)
• Product Packaging
• Packaging Inserts

Imagine it like a pyramid.
The Brand Identity level is a prerequisite for the Brand Assets level and so on. When doing the branding work on your Amazon business, always ensure that the pyramid’s previous level has a solid foundation before focusing on the next one. If the foundation is not there, it is more likely to “fall apart”.
Don't get me wrong; it’s possible to sell with, e.g., excellent graphics and photos even if you don't know who your target customer is. But the probability that you’ll make a sale is dropping down significantly.
In the utopian world, you’d always create the pyramid from the base, one element at a time. First, you’d create the Brand Identity level, then proceed to the Brand Assets level and only then to the Brand Touchpoints level. In the real world, it's not that simple. You probably already have some of those elements in place, e.g., lifestyle photos on product listings, and others not, e.g., your message and brand positioning are not clarified.
That doesn’t mean you should stop using your current photos until you figure it out, but you should definitely invest in the creation/optimization of lower parts of the pyramid first.
Optimization is the key
To reap all the benefits mentioned above and get more sales and profit out of your business, it’s vital to optimize as many brand elements as possible.
Do you know who your target customer is?
Do you use consistent patterns in your main images and secondary images?
Do you use icons and infographics to communicate your brand message? Do you know what that message is in the first place?
Do you have lifestyle photos and videos showing how people benefit from your product?
Do you use A+ Content, Amazon Store, Amazon Posts, and all the other features Amazon is constantly adding?
Do you do all these things? And if you do, do you do them well?
Probably not. I understand that there are more important, pressing business needs you have to take care of. Still, by not having those elements optimized, you’re literally throwing money out of a window, respectively leaving them on the table. Give me a chance to explain this.
Imagine a situation quite familiar for many Amazon sellers:
You are spending a lot of money on PPC campaigns, but your main image sucks. What’s going to happen? Many potential customers who saw your ad won’t go to your listings or Store because of the image, although you paid for them to see the ad in the first place. In other words, you’re throwing money out of a window.
Or imagine another common situation:
Traffic to your best-selling product is damn high, and your conversion rate is around 25%. Although you have the Brand Registry, you don’t use the A+ Content feature on your listing. Suppose that the A+ Content feature generally tends to increase conversions by 5% percent on average. How much money are you leaving on the table by wasting that 5%? You do the math.
Final thoughts

1. FBA is still a viable business opportunity, but the rules of the game have changed.
2. Whether you are just starting your FBA journey or own an 8-figure Amazon business, you can surely benefit from branding.
3. You can't focus on branding instead of, e.g., supply management and forecasting, which are undoubtedly more pressing business needs - you have to add branding on top of it.
4. Branding on Amazon is very different from branding in general - it's more focused on traffic and conversions than on genuine relationships with customers and their long-term value.
5. The key is to know what to focus on (which branding elements are the most important for Amazon businesses) and optimize it.

In case you find this helpful, I will gladly share my insights for all the parts of the Amazon Branding System and its elements in future posts.

Course Hero is scaling! As the Senior Analytics Manager, you will combine leadership, technical insight, and product design thinking to help a growing team of Data Scientists and Analysts deliver high-impact, actionable insights. Your passion for mentorship and feedback will amplify a culture that brings out the best in each team member. You will guide and structure the development of statistical models and experimental designs while enhancing the storytelling capability of the team.
This role reports to our Senior Director of Analytics and Insights. Your work will have a direct impact on the company’s revenue and product strategy. This role requires empathy, business acumen, and an obsession for using data to drive product enhancements.
How you'll make an impact:

• Provide inspirational leadership for a team of Data Scientists and Analysts
• Recruit, hire, and retain world-class analytics and data science staff
• Ensure that projects have sound technical architecture and make use of appropriate technologies
• Solve mission-critical business problems with appropriate statistical rigor
• Partner with product leaders and provide deep strategic insights
• Demonstrate grit and break down complex problems into actionable development plans

Are you our Senior Analytics Manager?

• 5+ years of subject matter expertise in data analytics or data science for online consumer software products, e.g. online shopping, social media, streaming services, content aggregation, gaming, etc.
• 2+ years of leadership and people management experience
• Hands-on experience conducting quantitative product/business analysis using Python or R, and SQL
• Passion for enabling analytics and data science best practices
• Create analytical frameworks to measure team success: partner with cross-functional teams to define success metrics; create approaches to track the data and troubleshoot errors; quantify and evaluate the data
• Establish meaningful business insights and lead development and implementation of statistical and machine learning models to drive improvements in products
• Hands-on experience with experimentation, including design, implementation, and interpreting results for stakeholders methodologies (e.g. hypothesis testing and regression analysis) for analyzing and interpreting results to stakeholders
• Comfortable functioning in spaces with high ambiguity and adapt easily to changing environments

Bonus Points:

• Experience with big data tools such as Spark, Hive, or Pig is a plus
• Knowledge of Google Analytics or Tableau
• Understand end-to-end user journeys for web platforms and the challenges of managing user funnels that have multiple attribution touchpoints
• BA/BS or Masters in a field that emphasizes data analysis and visualization (e.g., computer science, social sciences, physical sciences, math, engineering, or statistics), or equivalent work experience

Learn more about this role and apply here

Alright hear me out- I'm not sure if I qualify as your 'average' teethdrummer, but then I realized there's probably no such thing, so I'll ask! Does anyone use teethdrumming for mental math?
When I was in first grade we were taught this odd way to add numbers called "touchpoint" which essentially was dotting your numbers in a pattern and then counting the number of dots to add them together. (Weird, I know, but it worked). I, however, being the type-A little miss always HATED the messy pencil dots on my paper so I decided I would transfer the process to my teeth. So I would drum my teeth back and forth to count in that quick motion, while envisioning the specific touchpoint pattern on the number in my head, and "hear" the clicks and counted them. 3+4 was *click right left right left right left right* 7! (I hope this makes sense, it's difficult to explain.)
20 something years later and I still do it for all mental math and counting, but I also drum when I have songs stuck in my head like most of you do. I wanted to see if anyone else came from a different area of denticulation orchestration other than the classic musician/drummer background.

This is part 2 of 5.
Part 1
LET'S DO THIS!
Big thank you to everyone that upvoted and commented on the last post.
I’m pumped, this is part 2 of 5 for those keeping track at home.

1. Start with your revenue and monetization plan (are you targeting a sector that has money and can/will pay - Part 1)
2. Align yourself with others in your space (cheapest way to get traction/credibility)
3. Work on road mapping your product to align with what complements your partnerships (cheapest distribution)
4. Work on building a marketing strategy that can help expose and align your brand while strengthening its recognition with your partners (will this make us both look good)
5. Build customer advocates along the way, tell their stories (lead with examples)

Early traction, everyone wants it, very few people know how to do it effectively. Hell I’ve seen it all, run all the experiments, all the tests and I can tell you from experience if you have the patience, slow, steady, and surgical is the way to grow. Especially in the beginning.
In part one we spent a lot of time asking some basic fundamental business questions. Including, an exercise in the importance of being able to niche down.
We’re going to expand on the niching down because it’s how you gain clarity and find people to align yourself with early on.
The goal of this will be to understand:

1. How to niche down
2. How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
3. How to position within that market
4. How to give yourself the biggest chance of success

I’ve chosen to outline these in all our steps for niching down.
You’re going to see these steps move from research to market evaluation to list building stopping just short of outreach. We’ll touch on this in part 3.
Last week I took a call where someone told me their target market is males 25-45 that like sports.
This is the most important part of your entire business. I’m serious.
Let’s rock through this together so we can get you super focused and know where and how to spend your time and money.
(The below was laid out in part 1 and was the layered niching exercise)
LEVEL 1: We’re a helpdesk product.
How to niche down
The big question is “for who”?
So you’ve picked the type of product you are building and a use case, the problem is there are lots of people like you out there and this doesn’t tell me much about your market, it’s too broad.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
Because this is so broad, it’s impossible to actually target a market and without being able to do that, it’s not possible to recognize opportunities, there’s just too many of them.
How to position within that market
Competition is good and bad, but it’s always better to be a big fish in a little pond, the best way to reduce the size of your pond is to niche down as much as possible while still understanding a large enough TAM (total addressable market).
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
No wasted effort. Every idea, concept, must have a small goal attached to it.
It’s too expensive to try to be everything for everyone and when you take this approach you end up failing at doing any one thing well enough for people to switch.
Let’s build on this.
LEVEL 2: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies.
How to niche down
Pick an industry or trend that is on the rise - look towards a shift or something that relates to changes people are making in their daily routine.
In this case we picked eCommerce because it’s on track to hit over $7 Trillion worldwide this year and has steadily been increasing across all brands. So we have an industry with a large enough economic driver to let us start niching down.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
We now buy things online that we never would have thought to do so even just a few years ago. Amazon is selling Tiny Homes now, seriously, if you can buy it, odds are you can do it online. There are massive opportunities to bring goods and services to people through convenient online shopping. And with that increase they will all need a help desk platform to provide the best experience for their customers.
Customers today don’t want to speak with people, they want answers quickly and easily. It’s all about reducing friction.
How to position within that market
Narrow down within the market. eCommerce is a good starting point, there are different industries, subsets, and categories. Go narrower. Start thinking about where the friction exists in the industry and for what subsets.
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
In the beginning, it’s going to be an uphill battle, picking the right trending industry will give you the best chance of success. Something that is rising up to the right in popularity is way easier to sell into than a trend that is declining.
Know your competitive landscape.
Everyone has a competitor, whether direct, partial, or mildly related. Spend a lot of time on understanding this and knowing that your product is part of a very large landscape or landscape of potential competitors. Any one of the existing partial or mildly related competitors may be building something to more directly compete with you down the road.
Practical advice
Most companies stop here and hope for the best.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a go to market plan or a sustainable business model.
There’s an important bit worth mentioning here as it will become a theme of this entire post.
Great products enhance workflows through features, the focus isn’t on the product but what the product enables people to do. Success in the software business is all about understanding existing workflows and simplifying the experience.
As you do this exercise to niche down ask yourself:
What does the current workflow look like?
What are they currently using?
How are they currently using it?
Where are the gaps?
What are the best practices for creating workflows?
Always seek to understand how your product works in a workflow - what role it plays, how it best optimizes - this is the data play referred to in Part 1.
What are the things that matter most to people in the eCommerce space?
That’s a lot of questions with even more answers, when you peel everything back it becomes very clear that it’s not possible to answer all of them without going deeper.
Too many people to talk to, too many industries, too much everything.
Let’s take a different approach - how I got to Shopify in the next niche down.
No successful new SaaS company today launches without an integration.
So let’s find an eCommerce platform to integrate with.
We have to look for a stable player that has an app store and is a market leader.
As a starting point, my goal is to be a help desk for ecommerce companies.

1. I need a list of all eCommerce platforms
2. I need to understand which help desks they already integrate with
3. I need to understand what people like and don’t like about them
4. I need to find out which platform is going to be the best fit for my product

There are lots of sources for this and even more articles, google and read.
If you’re looking for numbers though and data, use BuiltWith and run a search on the platforms after you have your list to figure out which is the most popular.
Ok so we have our list of eCommerce platforms, we’ve analyzed the data, made sure they tick all the boxes and we’ve run our reports and found that Shopify powers 1.2 million stores.
Let’s lock it in as our next step in niching down.
LEVEL 3: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify.
How to niche down
It’s more than just market size. Going with a market leader is always a safe bet but it also provides the most competition. Sometimes going with a smaller platform that doesn’t get all the attention is a worthwhile research project.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
There are two sides of the opportunity and this is something that I didn’t touch on in the original niching down. Shopify and BuiltWith categorize the types of stores that are on the platform, so you can niche down to a certain type of store, for example just cosmetics or just apparel.
The other side of the opportunity is putting together your list of companies currently operating in the ecosystem.
How to position within that market
Smart people are really good at collecting data and interpreting it.
Let’s get some data.

1. Go to the shopify app store
2. Type in “Support”
3. Click paid on the left margin and click the “Support Category”
4. Use something like Simple Scraper ( a great chrome plugin, no affiliation)
5. Get your scrape on, this shows 87
6. Time to get busy - categorize them
7. Pick the ones most similar to your offerings
8. Click on them, look at their reviews - all of them on shopify Scrape them
9. Go to G2 and Capterra and look through all those reviews as well
10. Put them all in a spreadsheet, read them all, highlight those that stand out
11. Find the ones that are popular, others that have features people like etc.
12. Document, and integrate the baseline features into a trello board on your product roadmap
13. Take all the bad reviews and complaints - look for gaps that you can fill

How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
So take a look above, we went from a bunch of questions to being able to do a ton of market research to do product research and understand the current market offerings and where we might be able to gain some ground and offer something people might be interested in and ARE PAYING FOR.
How do you stand out?
You need to have a workflow that is 10x better than a current competitor in the market with a strong roadmap that lays out how you intend on optimizing this workflow. Features are built to augment the workflow and simplify the work of your clients employees, less work, more data, better understanding.
Ok so we’ve narrowed it down to eCommerce and Shopify and we have a list of other products that are currently playing in the space. We’re now looking at workflow - let’s figure this bit out.
LEVEL 4: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation.
How to niche down
Add another variable - it doesn’t have to be Shipstation, but it’s a good example as for eCommerce you’re likely shipping products places. By adding another variable, we’re shrinking our population to target.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
The biggest problem for all companies these days is combining different one off services and getting them to play nicely together. Stand alone products usually outclass all in one products as stated above because the focus is better. This is generally always going to be where you can find a gap in the market as the integrating of products is an afterthought rather than something contemplated in the very beginning.
How do you decide on the technologies you want to work with?
How to position within that market
Don’t guess. Understand the workflow of an eCommerce company and how it relates to support. For instance, most support tickets relate to order status, tracking, and returns. These all involve the store, transaction, the service desk, and the shipping carrier. Look for ways to streamline the experience for the service rep - for instance if refunds require approval, build a system that allows for all those tickets to be queued up with an easy interface for approvals or different color tagging to allow for them to be easily sorted by type.
By focusing on two technologies you can start by creating a better visual collaboration between tools to improve overall experience.
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
Stack the deck in your favor.
Focus on where you can drive early alignment between your product offering and the audiences of your now two products. When you reach out to both companies especially the smaller ones like a Shipstation, you can collect more information about who they are catering to, volumes etc.
Most companies have a partner program - look into connecting with the lead.
When the time is right you might even get a shoutout on their social or blog or you can decide to co-publish some research report together. Lots of options.
Let’s double down on what being niche allows us to do:

1. Know our audience
2. Research with purpose
3. Personalize outreach with early feelers
4. Better understand a realistic TAM (total addressable market)
5. Understand overlap between products
6. Early alignment with bigger names

This whole topic is about alignment, alignment with partners, customers, and your product.
We have a list of potential customers now, but we need to segment them down further.
LEVEL 5: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus.
How to niche down
Why less than 100 skus?
This means they are small enough to try a new product. It also means you can see what works and what doesn’t work on a potentially smaller store. When you’re managing a store with more than 100 skus, things get a little complicated, it’s an arbitrary number but changing internal processes and workflows when you get to that level means that your staff is coming from a place of having used a system before that could handle the volume and trying out something newer or unproven is a tall order.
This process can be applied to anything, if your product does better project management look for people that run less than 20 projects at a time or projects that are less than 6 months, whatever it may be. We’re starting small.
Always default to the path of least resistance. Work smarter, not harder.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
I’m sure this could be automated, but in lieu of it being automated, you should start by manually figuring this out for yourself.
That list you have from BuiltWith that has urls, yeah we’re going to use that one.
Put the websites in the spreadsheet you downloaded, then create a new column and add “products” to the url - so you have the website in cell A, the word “products” in cell B then in blank cell C write “=CONCATENATE(A:B)” congratulations now you have cell C that will take you straight to the product page to see how many skus they have.
Update this hack doesn’t work on all shopify websites like I had hoped and after some research it seems like this is a bit of a struggle point for others as well.
I’m sure someone could write a script to scrape this information.
Go find an intern or hire someone to do all the lookups for you or find someone to write a script to automate the results - remember always work smart.
Run this and you’ll come up with your go to target list.
How to position within that market
The best helpdesk for stores on Shopify using shipstation with less than 100 skus - all of a sudden this starts to sound like something someone would almost search for. That’s the point.
We’re working our way down where it becomes a simple checklist if someone was searching for things.
Shopify - check
Shipstation - check
Built for smaller stores - check
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
Remember you’re not building a product for everyone yet, your goal is to dominate a niche. You can always expand from there.
So we’re about half way through and we have figured out our potential partners and now we’re working on narrowing down this customer list. Before we dive in and start reaching out we need to really understand who we’re targeting and we need to start small.
Let’s narrow this down even further.
LEVEL 6: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue.
How to niche down
Why the less than $10 million in annual revenue? The only reason I would say this in the beginning is that they won’t have as much traffic and ticket volume, they make for better early clients, you can learn a lot more from their use cases and improve the product without worrying about something going wrong and a larger client really getting mad and churning. You also usually have greater access to work with their staff to improve your product.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
Unless you’re currently on the front lines, you need to find some early providers of feedback that are on the front lines. In essence, this is the starting point of a community and information play.
There aren’t a lot of data points available about companies in the early stages. People always have questions and there are limited resources in the early days, even across similar companies.
(Just look at reddit there are tons of repeat answers and questions.)
Someone answering tickets all day is the last person that wants to provide feedback, as much as they would like their job made easier, they don’t have the time.
How to position within that market
“But I need a big logo to let people know that I’m real.” You don’t, not in the beginning. All you need is a few good customers that are open to lending you the feedback you need to get better. A lot of smaller brands do a good job of branding, play the long game, find brands that are growing and try to get in early - grow with them.
Logo hunting has its place but you need to find product market fit before you can really make that happen.
By now you have probably figured out that whenever possible you should automate things. The way you do this is through data collection.
Using logic, math, and a spreadsheet you can do enough to be dangerous.
Use a service to figure out what their unique traffic is, take a look at their products and assume that their cart value is around 2-4 products per order then take the conversion rates by industry - you can find these online they are openly listed.
Your sheet will look something like this:
Company, Traffic, Conversion Percentage, Order Value, Sales Percentage, Revenue
eCommerce blended average is 2.2% - go use a spreadsheet and some formulas and bam you now have the revenue numbers. We’re not looking for exacts here, but more generally a good estimate.
I’ve actually run these numbers, if the products are sold through other channels, Amazon, retail, etc, then a rough estimate would be around ~33% of the revenue will come from the ecommerce store.
Factor in a range based on the size of the brand and it’s channels this should give you a rough estimate of the revenue even if they don’t publish it.
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
Provide value - the most overhyped phrase but still true - the question then becomes, with something as subjective as “value” rather than just create, instead ask and create. This part is coming up, we’re almost ready to turn this on.
We’ve started to move from who are partners are to who are our potential customers. This is on purpose - my stance is that your first customers are really your partners and you should work on aligning yourself with those that are the best fit for your product.
You want your first clients to buy into your vision and invest the time to help shape it.
Ok on to the next -
LEVEL 7: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people.
How to niche down
So now we’re getting into the easier stuff - this is just a simple LinkedIn Search - small teams are usually before the real deep process point, they are also really good at providing feedback on tools that can actually help them out.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
If you have less than 5 people on a team, it’s a small enough number to target the entire team - multi prong approach to product awareness.
For customer support they are often the least paid and they have the most stressful jobs - it’s an all around shitty position to be in, so if you can provide them joy, you’re going to make fans quick. Also, they aren’t usually sold into, they are rarely asked their opinion, etc.
How to position within that market
Give them a voice. The same goes for any lower level positions as well by the way. When people are getting started in their careers they are looking to hear about the jobs people have even at the lower levels but the resources just aren’t there. Even for more senior roles, it’s hard to get a beat on what the current status is of their projects, people don’t like sharing - I still don’t know why.
We’re seeing communities around Sales popup SalesHacker, sales, Bravado etc. We don’t see as many for other roles, there is a wide open space in this. I don’t see any places for people to better understand customer support/success which is THE ONLY INBOUND TOUCHPOINT WITH CUSTOMERS POST SALE.
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
This is part of the philosophy and psychology of understanding human dynamics. Find a persona that you can relate to immediately and build your product around fixing their problems, be obsessed with this.
They get paid nothing, but they’d like less tickets, how do you reduce that ticket count, how do you bring other parts of the business that they may need to have access to more prominently in your support system so they don’t have to have multiple windows open. How do you build something to maximize their efficiency?
Better yet, how do you tag someone in the CRM and flag it over to the sales system to see if they purchase more product as a result of a good interaction with support - this is how you turn a cost center into a revenue generator. This is a killer feature that I’m not aware of out of the box.
This could unlock a commission structure and reward system for what is arguably becoming a dealbreaker for most companies.
Which is a great segway to the next drill down - you should be starting to see how this all really blends together if done correctly.
LEVEL 8: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people who are looking to automate their processes.
How to niche down
They have to be looking to automate their process or improve their workflow. When people find a tech stack that works, oftentimes new technology doesn’t stick around very long, we’re all creatures of habit.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
You’re only looking for people that are talking about processes or a company that has something related to the pride they take with their process - you can check out BuiltWith and see a list of products they have tried over the last 18 months.
When a company is testing a bunch of different products it means they are looking for a better process. This is your sweet spot.
How to position within that market
You’ve seen me sprinkle “workflow” into this post. This is pretty much a preview of Part 3 and the importance of product design.
Your product must improve someone’s existing workflow. If it doesn’t it’s not a viable product.
There are two parts to this, does your product improve an existing workflow AND how easy can your product be inserted into that workflow?
Remember, this is their business and they need to make a transition as smoothly as possible with as little disruption as possible. This goes for any product you’re selling. Change is hard.
Understanding a company’s process really is everything.
If people aren’t looking to automate or improve their process, there’s a good chance you should change your approach immediately and work towards more of an education campaign and double down on what it would take to let people quickly switch over from an existing platform. Focus on reducing friction.
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
Looking for people that are interested, not those we need to educate early on.
Data migration and implementation is one of the main reasons people don’t want to switch or entertain new products. There is always a fear of lost productivity.
Everyone is looking to automate right now, but the price has to be right, and that includes not the subscription amount, but the training, the migration, the new workflows, the time to adopt, the willingness to adopt, etc.
During almost any transition, the company will be paying for two systems at the same time during that handoff. This is rough, not enough companies actually address this in a meaningful way.
The argument is that a pure SaaS play doesn’t exist or shouldn’t exist for an early stage company, there should always be a service and consulting component. Hold everyone’s hand, understand their problems and make them feel like you’re building a product just for them.
Ok we’re almost there -
LEVEL 9: We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people who are looking to automate their processes who are currently using Zendesk.
How to niche down
Let’s spearfish.
Zendesk - great platform - but has its limits that only show up based on workflows. Zendesk will work great until you have a workflow that incorporates other tools - then it starts to struggle.
This is true of most large legacy platforms. As legacy platforms moved up market to Enterprise for revenue reasons, they usually forget about smaller teams. Instead relying on dev house partners to do customizations.
This is where industry experience really comes into play - knowing the goals of a company or team, their workflows, and where you can create a better solution for those with those workflows for things that the legacy platforms prefer to source out to their dev house partners.
How to use this to target a market and recognize opportunity
Your calls can now go from generic to focused with questions that can hone in on workflows and gaps. For example, Zendesk’s UX/UI sucks for partner integrations, we’ve seen companies like Kustomer, Gorgias, and others become more popular because of a better UX/UI that supports the whole customer experience and journey. This is a fundamental switch in approach.
From one of our earlier research steps we found 87 companies that people were using for support with shopify, we have them in a spreadsheet, we then could take those and put all the competitors in builtwith to run some reports to understand market penetration (you can do this with number of reviews as well by the way if you’re lazy - don’t be lazy).
Download your list - populate your CRM - you now know what people are using, how long they’ve been using them.
Narrow down your list to the top 20 clients - yes only 20.
Even if you have 100 clients or a thousand clients at this point, this process works for every single Sales rep you have - and I’m going on a 95% chance none of them are doing this stuff. And if you tell me they are, I know from the amount of generic ass emails I get regularly spewed out to me they aren’t doing it well and I guarantee you money is being left on the table. (Topic for another day)
How to position within that market
You know what software they are using, you know their tech stack, your goal is to figure out their workflow. If you don’t know, ask. You should understand the general business workflows for the industry - again industry knowledge is required.
Engage them with conversation and find out. Base your questions on conversations you’ve had with other people in the space and be a source of information about how other people are doing it.
The above is completely able to be put into a human measurable process, one based on quality over quantity, relationships over transactions, and geared towards long term growth.
Be about the things that other platforms are not. Focus on changing the narrative from cost center to revenue generator.
The helpdesk for Shopify and Shipstation customers looking to streamline their processes and free up their support teams to become revenue generators in an organic and measurable fashion.
How to give yourself the biggest chance of success
It’s all about workflows, data, and automation.
Niche down, learn from the inside out, follow the trends and work on being able to tie back data to creating more revenue no matter what your product does and you’ll be able to start conversations with people actively looking to create more optimized workflows.
Focusing on a legacy product and small businesses usually allows you to find a sweet spot, they don’t find value in all the features because they won’t use them all. But they do want the more advanced features like automation and workflow help. These are usually cost prohibitive in the platform.
This is why you focus on workflow over features, you’ll never catch up with the big guys in terms of features, but there are always ways to compete on workflows, because everyone has their own independent goals around them. There aren’t standards, only best practices.
Side note - there are entire companies that are hired to implement systems like Zendesk and build integrations on top of it and it’s a market leader. The same goes for any market leader.
LEVEL 10ish: You can add location to the end of our narrowing down. A company physically local to you (at least this was the case prior to COVID-19) can allow for an in person visit which has been massive in building trust with early clients. Makes it easier to have a conversation as well.
That’s it. Go through this process, substitute your values, keep drilling down and recognize opportunity along the way. When you do it correctly you’ll see massive improvements for your initial outreach.
Emails go from:
We’re a new helpdesk company.
To:
We’re a new helpdesk company for customers that use Shopify and Shipstation. We help agile support teams that are looking to better automate their workflows. Our integrations also allows your support team’s interactions to be directly tied into future revenue generation.
___________
I can tell you from experience I’m visiting the url for the second email even if I’m not looking to make a change.
This is a good place to stop, we hit question 2 of 5 and we’re almost at the halfway point.
If you have more specific questions about this part just drop them in the comments and I'll respond to them.

Assets and Debts
Retirement Balance:
401K: $10,113 I have been contributing since last September. I’m currently contributing 15% with a 7% company match but once I build up my emergency fund I would like to max it out this year.
IRA: $750 as I only started contributing this year. I plan on putting $4000 from my tax refund towards my 2019 IRA then maxing it out as well as my 2020 IRA.
Savings Account Balance:
$300 in a savings account connected to my checking account which is the minimum to keep it open. $11,000 in a HYSA as my emergency fund (I’m aiming for $15,000). I aim to save $2800/month and once I finish funding my e-fund the majority of the money will go towards a grad school or house fund.
Credit Card Debt: none. I pay my full balance every month.
Student Loan Debt: none. I worked as an RA and other small jobs to cover housing and food. I had a few scholarships and a lot of support from my parents to close the gap for tuition (state school). I majored in Chemical Engineering.
Income
Monthly Take Home: $5390 after taxes and lots of deductions (so this is a little variable; explained below)
Deductions -

• $1312/month to my 401K ( I recently changed this from 15% Roth to 10% traditional and 5% Roth but I may change this to all traditional soon)
• $70/month pretax for the vanpool I take to work (I aim for 4 days a week)
• $70/month for gas. I have a gas card with a 10% employee discount that deducts automatically from my paycheck so this varies

Expenses
Rent: $1100 for my own bedroom and bathroom in a 2/2 apartment
Renters Insurance: $12
Roth IRA: I was doing $250/month but I will now be funneling my tax refund to my 2019 IRA and then set up some amount for 2020 once I settle everything.
Donations: Currently $20 to Houston Public Media. I donated $200 to various Australia organizations in January but I would like to set up more recurring donations. I’m thinking Raices and Planned Parenthood. Let me know if you have suggestions!
Electric: $40
Wifi: $26.10
Cellphone: $83 paid to my parents. I’m still paying off my phone.
Spotify: $5.40
Netflix: I use my parents.
Car Insurance: $106 paid tomy parents.
Health/Dental/Vision insurance: I’m still on my parents’ plan.
Monday
5:45 am - Rise and shine! Just kidding. I snooze for 15 more minutes. TGI...Monday? Luckily my morning routine is very fast as I’ve left myself only 20 minutes to get ready. I put in my contacts and do my morning skincare - La Roche Posay Toleraine Hydrating Gentle Cleanser, Paula’s Choice Boost 10% Azelaic Acid Booster Cream Gel, Tonymoly The Chok Chok Green Tea Watery Cream, and EltaMD UV clear facial sunscreen. I keep my makeup very simple (because I'm always rushing) - eyebrow pencil, mascara, and blush. I get dressed in an easy outfit as well - black slacks, a gray sweater and black loafers. Lunch is packed and waiting in the fridge so I quickly drink a glass of water, grab my lunchbox (just a Lululemon bag actually) and scurry out the door.
6:27 am - I take a vanpool to work (~35 minute drive/25 miles) and we meet at a lot 10 minutes from my apartment. I really do not like driving and the drive to work eats up almost 2 hours of my day so the vanpool lets me reclaim some of this time to read (news in the morning or a book in the afternoon) and prepare myself for the day. You have to be at least 25 to drive so I always ride. The van leaves at 6:30 sharp so I am always pushing it to arrive on time.
7:05 am - We make it to work and I walk to my building and settle in at my desk. I usually pack breakfast as well but I didn’t today. On Mondays, I usually prioritize my time for the week, plan out my tasks, and schedule any necessary reviews. This week I really don’t have much on my plate so I poke around to see what I can do to keep myself busy.
11:30 am - I am meeting a friend from my internship for lunch! I didn’t talk with him at all during our senior year and we only recently ran into each other so this will be a fun catch-up. We decide to meet at the cafeteria but we both brought our lunch so I go microwave my food first. I packed leftover spaghetti with eggplants and mushroom and some strawberries from the farmers market! (Fun fact - I don’t cook meat at home because raw meat grosses me out. I’ll still eat meat at a meal out but this has been a really easy way to hugely cut down my meat consumption and a fun way to experiment with new recipes). My friend and I chat for an hour and 15 minutes. It’s a really good talk and we realize we’re having similar experiences in our jobs and have both picked up making things from scratch (sourdough for me, pasta for him). We decide to meet more often so I set a recurring lunch appointment when I get back to my desk. I debate for a while on the length - 2 weeks feels like not enough will have happened between meetings, 4 weeks feels like we’ll probably only meet like 5 times before one of us moves, so I settle on an awkward 3 weeks.
4:00 pm - The van leaves at 4:10 so I start packing up at 3:55 and start walking over at 4. I usually read Money Diaries and scroll Reddit for the first 10-15 minutes on the van then read a book. I’m slowly working through The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
4:45 pm - We arrive back at the parking lot. On my drive back to my apartment I get stuck behind a train for 10 minutes :( so I try to practice mindfulness.
5:15 pm - I get home a bit later than usual. I eat a slice of sourdough bread (baked fresh yesterday!) with lots of butter and raspberry jam. While I snack on that, I assemble a “Chipotle” bowl with rice, roasted veggies, beans, corn salsa, avocado, and salsa. It’s not the greatest honestly but it’s filling and I need to finish it. I decide to make a batch of lemonade soda. My ginger bug has been resting on the counter and is now room-temp so I make the lemonade and shake it up in a flip-top bottle then add some of the bug. Bug goes back in the fridge and lemonade stays on the counter. I also shake up some apple cider vinegar (really just apple scraps in fruity water right now) on the counter. Then I pack my lunch for tomorrow - leftover grits and collard greens along with more strawberries. Finally, I change clothes and get ready for my art class. I take an art class Monday nights at a local art studio near me. It’s only a 20 minute walk so I usually like to walk it over driving as I cross through Montrose and it’s a very pleasant and calming trip. However, I’m definitely running late today from all the extra stuff I did so I huff and puff it to class.
7:00 pm - I leave class mid-way to go buy an eraser at the art supply store next door. $2.73
9:30 pm - I talk with my boyfriend on the walk back. He is in Austin so we’re in a mid-distance (?) relationship. I shower when I get back then head to bed.
Daily Total: $2.73
Tuesday
6:00 am - I snooze way late but still manage to pull myself together for the vanpool.
7:05 am - After settling in at my desk, I decide to go eat breakfast since I’m really hungry and I have later lunch plans today. I walk down to the cafeteria and check emails and try to figure out what trainings I need to take. I message my boss and she messages me back as I’m in the middle of eating asking me to come to her office in response to my message. I tell her I’ll be there in 10 and rush to finish eating. $4.98
7:45 am - Ugh lots of confusion around this training but I think my boss will be able to figure out what I need.
11:30 am - I am having lunch with someone from my home church. I brought my lunch today but he asks where I want to eat and I feel awkward saying I already have food so I just go along with it and I figure he’ll probably buy my food. I run into a friend while waiting for him in the cafeteria. It turns out he knows my friend and greets her first which makes me feel awkward. We walk over to the kiosk and he waves me to order before him but then he goes over to the next kiosk so I end up having to buy even though I had food...sigh. I have a Mediterrranean bowl with falafel, rice,hummus, and veggies. $7.52
4:00 pm - The afternoon goes by very slowly so I’m excited to head out. I eat the fruit from my lunch before I leave.
4:45 pm - The van gets back to the lot. I have a cycling class at 5:45 so I have some time to kill. I head over to Buchanan’s native plants to poke around. I just planted some herbs and tomatoes in my community garden but I still have half a plot left plus I could use more house plants (only have 6 right now plus 2 newly planted cuttings). I look but don’t get anything today.
5:30 pm - I get to the studio and check-in. I rent shoes as I’ve only been cycling for a few months now and I don’t think it’s really worth it to get shoes that I’ll use once a week. $2
I normally take this class with C from work but she’s on business travel this week so I ride by myself. It’s a great workout! I really like this instructor (C. loves her and introduced me to the studio and the instructor!)
6:30 pm - Out of class so I head over to JuiceLand. I was planning this so I already have my resuable cup (with a reusable straw as well). The smoothie is $8ish but I use a gift card from my parents. I call my boyfriend while I’m waiting and we catch up on our days.
7:00 pm - I get home and immediately start cooking. I already cut up some carrots from the farmer’s market and they’ve been chilling in water in the fridge so I drain them and let them dry then throw them in the oven along with a sweet potato. Then I quickly throw together some chana masala with chickpeas that have been soaking since Saturday. Big mistake. They smell like a disgusting fart honestly but I for some reason decide to cook them anyway. I burp the lemonade soda (let out some of the built-up carbonation so the bottle doesn’t explode), shake up the apple water, and eat a slice of bread. I’m not super hungry so I just eat a carrot from the pan and finish my smoothie. I pack up all the food and prepare my lunch for tomorrow. I check my socials and am in bed by 10.
Daily Total: $14.50
Wednesday
6:15 am - I'm driving today because I have plans after work nearby so I sleep in a little later. I have no sense of urgency on mornings I don't vanpool so it takes me a while to get out the door. I snooze until 6:45 and don't leave until 7:30. I wear a blue Everlane sweater, wide-legged houndstooth Banana republic slacks and my black Nisolo loafers.
8:15 - I roll into work. Luckily, my job is flexible so I could arrive as late as 9 am. I really don't like staying late though which is another benefit to vanpooling. I eat my lunch from yesterday as breakfast today. (It was grits from brunch so it's not weird!)
10:30 - Pretty slow day today again but I just came out of an amazing one-on-one with my boss. He's not my day-to-day boss but helps with long-term career planning and other things like that. He is so amazingly supportive and receptive. I've been able to be very open and honest with him about my struggles in adjusting to this role and post-grad life. I've even told him about my interests in grad school! He genuinely takes an interest in me as a person and we've been exploring other roles in the company I'm interested in. He connects me with 2 contacts he has in other divisions. I leave in a really good mood.
12:00 pm - I head to a lunch and learn about plastics recycling (lunch not provided). At first, the topic really interests me as I'm very passionate about sustainability and recently started getting more invested in zero waste. However, I realize that like all things, the company only cares about money and how they can continue to exploit the consumer and convince them to consume more waste. I've had a lot of moral hang-ups about working at an O&G company. I interned here the summer before my senior year of college and accepted the return offer in September 2018. So, I sat with that decision for almost a year (I started working in August 2019) and I think I changed a lot as a person over that year. I don't know how much longer I can keep working here in good conscience :(
Also, the chickpeas from last night are disgusting and even after cooking for an hour they still smell horrible. I eat about a third of the chickpeas then eat the vegetables that didn't touch them.
2:15 pm - My plans after work get cancelled because of the weather so I drove for nothing. After a meeting with a senior engineer, I organize my notes and data then schedule a touchpoint meeting with the leader of the project tomorrow so I can keep it moving along.
5:15 pm - I leave work and stop to get gas first. I won’t see this charge for a month but I’ll add it here. $17.08
I head to HEB to grab some ingredients for tacos. I really want Piada but I convince myself to cook instead because I can probably feed myself for at least 5 meals for the same price as a wrap from Piada. I get 2 avocados, an ear of corn, a red onion, 3 jalapenos, 4 limes (4 for $1!), 2 pears, 1 apple, a pack of 10 corn tortillas, 2 cans of black beans and a jar of salsa. The total is less than the cost of a wrap so go me for saving money! $10.92
6:15 pm - I get home and immediately start cooking. This is a pretty quick recipe honestly but I still eat half a slice of bread because I'm very hungry.
7:00 pm - I eat 2 tacos and they are extremely messy but so yummy. I heat up 2 extra tortillas for lunch tomorrow and pack my bag. I also decide to make a caramel pear upside down cake as I'm craving a sweet. The cake is pretty easy to put together but it doesn't come out of the oven until 9:30 pm. (I really don't know what I was doing in between) I leave it out on a wire rack on the counter to cool.
9:45 pm - I take a shower and change into my jammies. I chat with my boyfriend for a bit and start scrolling through my phone while laying down.
Daily Total: $28
Thursday
1:45 am - I wake up with the lamp still on and teeth unbrushed. I guess I fell asleep while scrolling (an unfortunate college habit). I am groggy and disoriented. I stumble to the bathroom to pee and quickly brush my teeth then back to bed (lights off this time!).
5:40 am - First alarm goes off and I am exhausted. I snooze for 15 minutes.
5:55 am - I force myself up and quickly breeze through my morning routine - put in my contacts, wash my face, apply serum, and brush my teeth. I make my bed while the serum sinks in and then put on a pair of black slacks and brown Nisolo loafers. I check the weather on my phone and it’s fairly chilly! (37F). I really only have 3 sweaters and one is dirty, I wore the second sweater Wednesday so I find my gray Everlane turtleneck on the closet floor and quickly iron it. I apply moisturizer and sunscreen, twist my hair up into a bun and tuck my eyebrow pencil and mascara in my work backpack. I grab my lunch from the kitchen and move the cake into a large tupperware and pull on a light blue long WHBM coat. Out the door by 6:18.
6:29 am - I arrive to the lot at almost the last minute. I tried to send a groupme message at a redlight but I see when I get on the van that it didn’t go through. Ugh. I’m tired of showing up late and looking like a mess. I read the Skimm and Good Morning from CNN on the ride.
7:05 am - We arrive at work. I walk to my building and put my lunch in the fridge then microwave the rest of the grits. I eat at my desk while checking emails.
9:00 am - I don’t have much to do today so I draft an email to various work friends about the cake then set it to send out later. I prepare for 2 meetings I have.
10:00 am - I have my first meeting with an older engineer who is my technical mentor. The meeting goes way over and I am late to my second meeting. I run up to the meeting room but I can’t find the man I’m supposed to meet with (M.) so I check and see he messaged 10 minutes before but isn’t online. I walk over to his desk and he’s not there either so I talk with a friend (C.) who is on his team. He comes back after about 3 minutes and I apologize and he says that it’s no problem it happens all the time. I say I’ve never done to this to anyone before and genuinely feel bad but he kind of just walks away and says over his shoulder we can reschedule. Weird. His calendar is always super packed so I’m annoyed I couldn’t fit this in today. I stop at another friend’s (A.) desk while I’m on this floor and we chat for a few minutes.
11:30 am - I eat lunch with some other young engineers on my team. The taco is not great. The tortillas are super chewy and crunchy? Like a stale chip. Bleh. It’s also a really messy meal already so not great for work but I push through.
12:45 pm - I return from lunch and cut the cake. I give some to my teammates that sit around me. Various friends that I emailed stop by to get cake throughout the afternoon. When A comes we walk down to another friend who sprained her ankle to bring her cake and chat. A has a weighted blanket and loves it so I think again about getting one. I have trouble sleeping and frequently wake up during the night.
3:40 pm - I run into a coworker in the bathroom and we chat for about 15 minutes. We decide to figure out how old our bosses are the next day lol. I leave at 4 and walk over to the garage. I read through today’s money diary in the first part of the ride and then pass out as I am exhausted.
4:45 pm - Back in the parking lot. I remember to put my work backpack in the trunk and grab my wallet then head to Target. On my list is toothpaste, mascara (long overdue - my mascara is so dried out), and a weighted blanket if I can find one. I get my toothpaste and mascara then drift into the home section. There’s so many nice baskets which I could use for plants but I resist as they’re expensive and most of my plants are already in nice pots. I next drift over to the kitchen section. I have been meaning to get a few things so I grab a medium glass container, a small rubber spatula, and medium mesh strainer. I look around but can’t find any weighted blankets.
$23.01
5:15 pm - I see an email that my Warby Parker glasses are ready (ordered prescription glasses last week) so I decide to go pick them up. There’s a Chick-Fil-A right next to this Target and I’m still craving something greasy but I resist again and head over to get the glasses.
They look great! I notice there’s an Outdoor Voices next door (not sure how I missed this last week) so I decide to check it out. I’m a big fan of Lululemon leggings and Target tops for exercise clothes but I’ve heard good things about OV and I could use a few more pieces. I try on the TechSweat Flex Shorts and MiniMesh Longsleeve shirt. I love the look and send my boyfriend a sporty pic from the dressing room. I get both pieces.
$108.25
6:15 pm - I get home and put down my bags. I decide to go to the gym while I’m still not too hungry.
I go down to my apartment gym (not amazing but free) and do shoulders and triceps. It’s a pretty good workout although I’m distracted by the Athleta leggings I’m wearing that keep slipping down bleh. I decide to sort through my clothes this evening.
7:00 pm - I get back and eat 2 tacos. I wash a pot I left in the sink, half unload the dishwasher and half unpack my lunchbox. ugh. I check on my propagated plants and 2 are looking good and can be transplanted this weekend. Yay baby plants! I scroll through Reddit while eating then decide to lay down and finish looking through social media. I spend way too long and realize I am exhausted again. I pull out an old duffle bag I don’t want anymore and start sorting through clothes but I am really too tired for this. I work on this Money diary until 9:30 instead then head to bed around 10:30 but don’t end up sleeping until 11:30.
Daily Total: $131.26
Friday
7:30 am - I snooze until very late and don’t feel too guilty about it. I pack some leftover veggies and beans for lunch. Not super appetizing but I have dinner plans after work so I figure it’ll work out. I’m running out of clothes and it’s still cold so I put on the same black slacks from earlier, a long-sleeved black and white striped shirt, and a long structured camel blazesweater from J Crew along with my black Nisolo loafers. I decided to wear my new glasses! They look great! I pull my hair back in a tight bun and my whole look comes out very sharp! I leave later than I wanted but oh well.
8:45 am - I roll into work veryyyy late. I settle in but I have absolutely nothing to work on. I have a meeting later on some file cleanup so I sort through a few things in advance of that.
11:30 am - The meeting turned into half gossip but it was very juicy (not people drama just company/organizational drama unfortunately). I head out to microwave my food then go eat outside with people on my team. Even though it was mid-30s this morning it is now mid-70s and I am boiling in my sweater. I take it off and roll up my sleeves but it’s still very toasty. I see 2 friends (A from yesterday and P) walk past but they didn’t see me and I don’t want to shout at work. I walk over and chat with them for a bit. We decide to go for a long walk later.
1:00 pm - I get back to my desk and I am still so hungry. The veggies were good but I think I either needed more beans or some carbs. I debate with my coworkers and decide to get Chick-Fil-A (but ONLY the sandwich). One of them walks down with me to get a lemonade. I bring a slice of cake to take to the cycling friend in another building who has back-to-back meetings after being gone on travel. I buy the sandwich and then walk over to her building. She’s on the phone but I trade her the cake for P’s girl scout cookies. Then I walk back to my building, deliver P’s cookies and get back to my desk. I feel like I’ve been gone forever. I read some random articles on energy and sustainability on the company website while waiting for the walk with A and P. $4.35 (I don’t know the exact price and I put it on a rebate card :( but it was definitely 4 something)
1:45 pm - We head out for our walk. I’ve been here before but I’m confused on where we should enter so we walk a bit out of the way. P leaves early but it still ends up being a good walk. I pick up my CSA order while we’re out since the pick-up spot is far from my building.
2:30 pm - Back at my desk again. I read another article then do some prep for a site visit next week. I also buy a 10-class pack for the cycling studio. I have a 10% discount but it only works up to a 10-pack. I do the math and I’m paying only 40 cents per class more buying a 10-pack with the discount than I would with a 40-pack with no discount so I’m fine with it. This will last me a while as I usually only take 1 class per week. $184.50
3:45 pm - I tried to last as long as possible but it was too slow. I have plans at 4 so I’m not sure why I didn’t try harder to come in earlier. I leave around 4 and drive over to Torchys for my friend R’s dog’s birthday party! Really we’re just eating tacos and she brought her dog and some gifts...I guess it is a birthday party really. I have the taco of the month (Scallywag! Delicious!) and a peach maragarita. The other girls got queso and guac which I snack on. I run into a coworker and his wife there and hug his wife but not him and then overthink it later…. I chug some water and feel ok so I head over to the Bar Louie for my next plans. $12.44
5:45 pm - I completely forgot I was catching up with a friend from college at 5:15 so I call her back in the car and chat. I park in the nearby parking garage and finish up the call as I walk up to the bar. I promise to schedule a follow-up chat and be more consistent (my biggest weakness in friendships). I spot my friends at the bar. It’s 6 amazing black girls that work at the same company. (I am black since I don’t think I really mentioned it yet!). They already have a table full of appetizers so I snack a little on those. The waiter comes up almost immediately when I sit down so I order a Blue Moon because I can’t think of anything else quickly. We all chat and laugh for a few hours. I know 4 of the girls well and just met the other 2 but it’s a mostly good conversation. I feel a bit awkward at times because they all went to HBCUs and I went to my state school and in general I feel like my opinions don’t jive perfectly with theirs but it’s still a good time. One of the girls decides to have a game night at her apartment but by then it’s 9:30 and I have an early day the next day so I head out. I call my mom on my way to the garage and we discuss the plans for tomorrow: my family is driving to Louisiana to see my grandparents. I pay for parking on the way out and it’s so expensive! I look at my receipt and see I must have taken someone else’s ticket after we all validated because it has an entry time an hour before I got there. Oh well. It makes up for their appetizers I nibbled on. $5.79 for beer. $11 for parking.
10:00 pm - I get home finally and unpack my lunch. I think about packing my bag tonight but I’m too tired for doing things but not tired enough for sleep. I finally head to bed around midnight.
Daily Total: $218.08
Saturday
7:00 am - I try to wake up early but I am way too tired. I wanted to workout then check on my garden plus pack but I snooze for another 45 minutes.
7:45 am - I finally get up and get dressed. I only need one outfit which makes packing quick. I’m about to make breakfast when my mom calls me. They’re stopping at Panera Bread first so I ask for a sandwich. I putter around and water some of my plants and move 2 cuttings into soil. I say goodbye to my roommate who’s also going out of town this weekend.
9:15 am - My parents arrive. I settle into their car and eat my sandwich. We hit a lot of traffic trying to get out of the city. I start reading The General in His Labyrinth.
2:00 pm - We finally make it to Louisiana and head straight to lunch for my grandma’s birthday. I get stuffed soft shell crab. This is the only restaurant we ever go to here and the seafood is always delicious. My parents pay.
5:00 pm - We leave my grandma’s house and head over to my other grandparents’ house (an hour away). I hug my grandparents and settle in. We all sit around and chat and watch TV.
7:00 pm - My grandma made gumbo and candied yams. I’m still pretty full from lunch but everyone else is eating now so I have a bowl.
10:00 pm - After some talking and yelling/arguing (honestly just how my mom’s family communicates) we all start heading to bed. I dozed off on the couch at some point so I get up last and take a shower then head to bed.
Daily Total: $0
Sunday
8:00 am - My mom comes in to wake my sister and I but neither of us move for 10 minutes. We finally get up as everyone is yelling and cooking breakfast. We go to the bathroom together and brush teeth and get dressed. My grandma made grits, breakfast sausage, scrambled eggs, and biscuits for breakfast. I nibble a little but I’m not a fan of classic breakfasts. I pack up my things and spend a few minutes with my grandparents’ sweet dog.
8:45 am - We leave my grandparents’ house and stop to get some seafood on the way out. I love Louisiana for all of its amazing seafood. The drive is long and I dove and read a little. My parents always joke that they’ll make me drive but I always manage to avoid it.
1:30 pm - We make it back to Houston and I show my parents around my community garden. They think it’s really cute and my dad gives me some tips on my tomatoes. They then drop me back off at my apartment. My heart is full after all this sweet family time.
2:00 pm - I bring my bags up and I am starving so I leave right away to go to Piada (finally!). I have a gift card that covers the full cost but it’s around $11. I come back home and relax and watch Sex Education. At some point, I start “decluttering” which is just bringing out a trash bag and spreading stuff around the floor. I make a bit of progress on a small area.
8:00 pm - Have I been watching TV for this long?? I decide to go to the gym and do legs.
8:45 pm - When I get back I realize I need to pack lunch for the week. I have some kale from the CSA so I decide to make a salad. I cook some lentils for the protein and also add yellow bell pepper, radish from the CSA, leftover corn salsa from the tacos, and feta cheese. I cut an apple and pack everything into my lunchbox so it’s ready to go. Next, I decide to shower and wash my hair so I can restyle it to fit under a hard hat.
10:30 pm - Hmm time really got away from me. I get a text at some point in the night that our meeting time for work offsite tomorrow will be at 7 not 8 but it’s too late to rush my routine now.
11:45 pm - I played around on my phone for awhile then couldn’t fall asleep. Really not sure what’s going on with me but I know I am going to be exhausted tomorrow.
Daily Total: $0
Total Weekly Expenses: $394.57
Food and Drink: $46
Fun/Entertainment: $189.23
Home + Health: $23.01
Clothes + Beauty: $108.25
Transport: $28.08
Reflection: This was a little high on the spend range for me but not too crazy! I don’t usually buy clothes that often so OV purchase was a treat but I usually have higher costs on various activities such as movie tickets or things like that. The cycling pack is definitely not a regular purchase so I’m not too worried about it. I have pretty aggressive savings goals because I’m not sure how long I’ll be in such a high-paying job.I also have to have a goal for savings or I’ll just spend so shoveling it into an account (401K and IRA) that I can’t easily access is very helpful. I’m pleased overall with how I did this week as I’m trying to reduce how much I spend on eating out while also enjoying time with friends. Sorry there wasn't much to say about work as this was a slow week but if anyone has any questions I'm happy to follow up. Thanks for reading!

I'm 19 years out and have tried everything under the sun. I've found a lot of things that work well, and wanted to share some of what I've learned in case it could help anyone else:) I split it into medical treatments/therapies, supplements/nutrition, self led therapies, and apps and technology.
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Medical Treatments and Therapies:

• LENS Neurofeedback- This was a huge part of my recovery. It ended my rage/anger problems, vastly improved my motor skills and reaction times, stabilised my mood, cleared my mental fog, improved my sleep and focus, and is ultimately the key that led to me being able to be independent. I worked with Dr Corey Hammond in Salt Lake at the University of Utah, and Dr Carolyn Robertson at Center for Advanced Neurotherapy in Walnut Creek, CA.
• DBT Therapy- Although it is technically intended for treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, I've found that DBT helped me improve how I reacted to the world around me, instead of being controlled by my emotions and poor brain function.
• Acupuncture- Acupuncture helped a lot with the health problems that came with my TBI- low energy, hormone imbalances, respiratory issues, etc.
• Naturopathic Medicine- I know natural medicine has kind of a bad rep, but this was huge as well. It really helped solve a lot of the small, but annoying issues, like my muscles tiring out too quickly, digestive problems, some of my aphasia, and poor sensory processing.

Supplements/Nutrition:

• Q96 Max and Q Amino Acids- This one was a massive game changer. It is formulated for bipolar and other mental illness, but really it's just a pretty heavy dose of vitamins that help keep the brain stable. They are very potent, and I can tell within a couple of hours if I've skipped a dose. My partner jokes that they're my "crazy pills" because they are the difference between crazy, TBI me and my normal, laid back self. When I take them, I am damn near anxiety and depression free, I have no racing or intrusive thoughts, I am focused, energized and productive, and I feel like I'm totally in control of my body and brain. They are the difference in me holding down a job and managing my relationship and everything falling apart. I know that it's an MLM, and a lot of people have mixed feelings on that, but I don't sell them or have any affiliation with the company- I only recommend it because it's been such a huge part of my recovery.
• Gluten/Dairy/Sugar free diet- I know, I know. Easier said than done. And full disclosure: I don't follow it very closely. It's too much work, and I like ice cream. But when I was more unstable and struggling with more parts of my recovery, this was big in helping balance out a lot of my problems.
• High protein/high fat diet- I wouldn't recommend Keto, but I do notice that my brain function is much, much better when I increase my protein and fat intake. Lots of healthy fats like coconut oil, avocado, grass fed butter, and high quality mayo are great!

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Self Led Therapies/Exercise:

• HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training)- I actually do HIIRT (High Intensity Interval Resistance Training) but HIIT is more common and very similar. I've found that while it's very difficult, it pushes my body enough that it's constantly improving my control of it, and how well it functions. Also, intense exercise is just great for brain chemicals yo. I do this one 4-6 days a week.
• Yoga- The flexibility and stretching is great for helping to keep my body and brain working together well, and the mindfulness/meditation portion helps keep the mental stuff under control. I do this for about 15 min, 6 days a week.
• Swimming- Great for low impact exercise when my brain decides it's not up for working properly. I only do this when my body is too stiff/tired/worn out for my go- tos.
• Meditation- SO good for keeping my brain in a happier, calmer place instead of the anxious party of chaos it likes to become when it goes, in my neuropsychologist's words "full TBI". Guided meditation is the best, and I love the ones on the app Headspace, or a lot of the ones on YouTube.

Apps and Technology:

• Tile- Tiles are a great little square bluetooth device that you can attach to your keys, wallet, purse, pets, partners, and anything else you have a hard time keeping track of! I've been through about 4 or 5, and it's been a life saver so many times. You set it off from an app on your phone, and it makes a loud noise so you can find them even undein/behind things. If you left them somewhere and don't know where, it will tell you the last place it connected to them, or you can "share it with the community" and if it gets located by anyone else with the tile app nearby, it will let you know.
• Touchpoints- Touchpoints are two watch-like devices you wear on both wrists that vibrate at a frequency that calms your brain quickly and effectively. You use an app on your phone to set them at frequencies for different situations (anger, anxiety, sleep, focus, etc). I usually use mine when I have to go into an environment I know is stressful (high traffic, loud areas), when I'm having difficulty sleeping, when I'm angry and can't seem to calm down, or when I'm having a panic/anxiety attack. I find that they work well in 5-10 minutes, and generally calm me down enough to deal with whatever situation is at hand.
• Daylio- It's an app that asks you to rate your mood and activities daily, so you can track patterns in moods and behaviors. It's very useful for watching trends in recovery and stability.
• Habitica- Habitica is a habit app that is built similar to a video game- you can earn points, coins, and manna by completing tasks, daily habits, and to do lists. You can spend your coins and manna on rewards you write for yourself, or clothes and accessories for your character. You get penalties for not completing things. You can also form guilds and compete against each other. I find that this aspect of it helps me stay more on top of things I may have otherwise put off.
• Smart Watch- Hear me out on this one. I have an apple watch that I did not buy, or ask for. It was a Christmas gift, and I was actually disappointed initially. But it's actually been a big help. Instead of needing to keep specific track of my phone, I can make notes, lists, and reminders of what I need to do right on my watch. It has an app that gives me a short breathing meditation whenever my heart rate goes too high. It has my medical info on it, in case I have a seizure in public and someone were to need that info. I can track my Tile from it. I can use it to find my phone. It has a calculator (one of the results of my injury is an incapability to do math). It can notify me of texts or calls I would have otherwise missed and forgotten to return. It reminds me of calendar events. It tracks my sleep patterns. I can use it to pay for things (because I NEVER have my wallet on me).

These are most of the things that have helped me the most in my recovery. I'm happy to answer any questions, or if you have things that have helped you, please comment with those!!
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I responded to a user yesterday with doubts about VET's valuation, and I thought it merited a post and a bit of an expansion on the point. VET will overtake Ethereum, and here is a very small example of why.
Ethereum this year is averaging about 750k transactions a day. The vast majority of these transactions are for trading and ICOs, DAPP usage is very low. To give you a perspective on this, the top 100 Dapps running on ETH have less than 200k monthly active users, Snapchat alone has 200 million. Nothing but respect for Ethereum, but it has fundamental design problems that make adoption difficult if not impossible for a business. And this is the point, VeChain has analyzed, dissected, and solved these problems by doing what successful tech companies do, leading with the use case, not the tech.
Now, why will VET overtake ETH, and why is this effectively a certainty in my book? Let's look at one small example. I could model this properly, but I am going to keep this very simple because I want everyone to truly see the sheer scale of what we are talking about with what is coming with VeChain, we are going to be very conservative and look at just one partner China Tobacco.
China Tobacco had 172 Billion in sales last year. Let's say their average sale price was $4 per unit. This comes out to 43 billion units. Let's go cheap, let's say it cost 1 cent to track each product. 43 billion units times $.01 times 25% adoption rate, that comes out to $107MM. Let's keep it simple and ignore cyclic elements, cash flow discounts, etc. and say this is normalized on a daily basis. That is $294k a day in usage on about 120MM products a day x # of touchpoints.
Possible Touchpoints:
1) Rolling Paper Origination
2) Filter Origination
3) Tobacco Origination
4) Day of Product Creation
5) Day of Product Shipment
6) Transportation Data (counting as 1 data point, likely many)
7) Delivery Confirmation
8) Box Confirmation, Carton Confirmation, Pack Confirmation at arrival.
9) Point of sale confirmation.
That is ~1.1mm transactions per day, 9 x 120mm. At a conservative estimate of China Tobacco's product line. This means, China Tobacco alone could easily account for a million transactions a day, at these highly conservative estimations, compared to 750k total transactions a day on Ethereum . China Tobacco alone could overtake Ethereum's usage.
When I tell people about VeChain, I don't do so because I want to hype or shill a coin. I tell people about VeChain, because I have modeled them (BI EngineeData Scientist) 20 different ways, and there is absolutely no way I see them failing. I see VET as a transformational technological force about to be unleashed on the world, and I truly want people to be able to take advantage of what I believe is about to unfold.
When you hear FUD, consider asking OP to show you their math. VeChain has the most legitimate chance of taking blockchain mainstream in this entire space, in terms of usage, and I include bitcoin in this. VET is going to overtake ETH, it is not a matter of if, but a matter of when. We examined one use case, from one partner, at highly conservative levels. Ask yourself, do you really think this represents their potential?
My 2 VET.
edit: Typo of $170 to $107