Episodes

  • Goodbye for Now

    Goodbye for Now
    Jun 28 2021

    Harris and I are sad to report that we have decided to shut down the Hello Blink Show. We had an incredible time creating the episodes, sharing knowledge about sales and marketing, and meeting amazing new people. We learned a lot from our guests, and we hope you did, too.

    We discuss some of the things we could have done better if we were to go back in time and redo the show:

    • The name “Hello Blink Show” was a potential SEO miss. While it was a unique name and meant someone would land on our site when searching for that phrase, it did nothing to convey what the show was about.
    • We need to find a way to break out of the core group of listeners who either knew us personally or followed one of us on social media.
    • Find a way to build a community for technical people building or running their own companies. Chris Gammell’s Contextual Electronics Forum attracts a similar audience, and we would not want to compete with his forum.
    • We would want to ramp up our production and marketing efforts to include releasing an episode every week as well as engage people more on social media (e.g. Twitter).

    Harris is pivoting his career to go from individualized consulting to building a virtual sales assistant. This pivot grew out of his experience developing Intro CRM. He found that even though Intro CRM provided a simplified set of CRM and sales tools, people were not using it. That revelation led to the idea of creating a productized service to literally help people with sales.

    Shawn is pivoting to focus on embedded machine learning and teaching as opposed to marketing consulting. Part of this focus includes doing research with the hope of being published in academic journals or pursuing a PhD.

    Hello Blink Show will continue to exist as an archive of episodes, but for the time being, we have no plans to produce future episodes.

    Sponsor

    We want to thank Twilio for sponsoring this episode! Twilio is a cloud platform that helps developers automate phone calls, text messages, and other communications through their web API. Check out twilio.com/go/helloblink for more information about using Twilio for automated messaging and IOT applications.

    List of Resources

    Podcast - Pipeline Meeting

    Website - Intro CRM

    Host Contact Information

    shawnhymel.com

    kennyconsultinggroup.com

    LinkedIn - Shawn Hymel

    LinkedIn - Harris Kenny

    Twitter - Shawn Hymel

    Twitter - Harris Kenny

    License Information

    “Hello Blink Show” by Kenny Consulting Group, LLC and Skal Risa, LLC is licensed under CC BY 4.0

    Intro and outro song is “Routine” by Amine Maxwell is licensed under CC BY 3.0
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    34 mins
  • Experiential and Nonsense Marketing with Christine Sunu

    Experiential and Nonsense Marketing with Christine Sunu
    Jun 14 2021
    Nonsense marketing is the seemingly frivolous activities that marketers do that have a chance of “catching on” or “going viral.” For example, Wendy’s often provocative Twitter account is an example of nonsense marketing. It requires creativity and is often experiential.Christine gives us some other examples of nonsense marketing, such as Ford’s Home of the Future project. The purpose of these projects can be difficult to grasp sometimes if you’re not the intended audience.Shawn gives the example of Bud Light’s “Whatever, USA” campaign where the renowned beer company rented an entire town for a weekend to host a giant party for contest winners. The winners, rather than being drawn randomly, were selected based on personality and social media engagement, as the event was a targeted way to promote the brand through influencers.To make nonsense marketing work, companies need to analyze their audience(s) to determine what kinds of authentic messaging works. If the messaging is missing or the content is inauthentic (e.g. using superficial aspects of viral videos without regard to the audience), nonsense marketing will likely fail.Shawn talks about SparkFun's soldering activities as a form of nonsense marketing. The Badger Hack soldering activity performed much better at SXSW Create (correction: Shawn says “SXSW Edu” in the show, but it should be “SXSW Create”) than the Roshamglo activity at the larger SXSW conference. Christine comments that reaching a critical mass of interest is important and can be more easily achieved in a smaller group.Harris gives the example of Lulzbot manufacturing 3D printers on the CES show floor one year, which attracted a lot of attention from attendees and the press. This helped drive engagement from distributors, which was the ultimate audience of the marketing effort.Christine talks about her project of building an Alexa device inside antique telephones. She sold a few of these as a form of art, which caused a buzz among her tech audience.SponsorWe want to thank Twilio for sponsoring this episode! Twilio is a cloud platform that helps developers automate phone calls, text messages, and other communications through their web API. Check out twilio.com/go/helloblink for more information about using Twilio for automated messaging and IOT applications. List of ResourcesPodcast - Pipeline MeetingWebsite - Intro CRM Guest InformationChristine Sunu is a developer, designer, and creator who builds emotive interfaces and experiences. Though her main area of focus is the overlap between technology and human emotion, she has worked extensively in product, marketing, and design in both hardware and software. She has often worked with developer education and trending content, appearing in videos for outlets such as BuzzFeed and The Verge and helping to coordinate IoT-related content at Twilio. Among other things, Christine has created soft robots for anti-anxiety, produced trending tutorial builds about sourdough bread, levitated paramecium in giant magnetic fields, and attended half of medical school at Yale. She writes and speaks widely about human motivation and interactivity in hardware and connected interfaces, and she engages an international audience through online open-source tutorials. Guest Contact InformationWebsite - Christine SunuLinkedIn - Christine SunuTwitter - @christinesunu Host Contact Informationshawnhymel.comkennyconsultinggroup.comLinkedIn - Shawn HymelLinkedIn - Harris KennyTwitter - Shawn HymelTwitter - Harris Kenny License Information“Hello Blink Show” by Kenny Consulting Group, LLC and Skal Risa, LLC is licensed under CC BY 4.0Intro and outro song is “Routine” by Amine Maxwell is licensed under CC BY 3.0
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    39 mins
  • How to Run a Successful Livestream with Alessandro and Robert

    How to Run a Successful Livestream with Alessandro and Robert
    May 24 2021

    In this episode, we talk to Alessandro Grande and Robert Wolff, who run the Arm Innovation Coffee livestream on YouTube (which you can check out here). They tell the story about how they joined forces about a year ago to create a weekly interview video series during the pandemic.

    Alessandro and Robert use StreamYard to help manage the livestream, including green (waiting) rooms for guests, overlays, and live comment pop-ups. They also use Open Broadcaster Software Studio (OBS Studio) to stream their own personal feeds into StreamYard to manage multiple cameras and other overlays.

    Livestreams are great for making connections with audiences where people can chat and ask live questions. They offer a different form of engagement rather than a video or podcast where audience members are expected to passively watch/listen to the presenters. This helps humanize a brand by allowing customers (or potential customers) to interact directly with the presenters and each other.

    Developer evangelists (advocates, etc.) should consider adding livestreaming to their toolbox as a way to interact with customers and audiences.

    The new form of voice-only hangouts (e.g. Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces) offers something similar to livestreaming, but seems to lack many feedback features available on other platforms, such as the ability for audience members to type something into a chatbox.

    Robert talks about how to measure success with livestreams, which can be different than many common business metrics. These measurements include brand awareness and engagement compared to the amount of time to prepare and create the livestream (i.e. the return on investment). Alessandro mentions that a livestream should offer something to the audience to keep them engaged.

    Sponsor

    We want to thank Twilio for sponsoring this episode! Twilio is a cloud platform that helps developers automate phone calls, text messages, and other communications through their web API. Check out twilio.com/go/helloblink for more information about using Twilio for automated messaging and IOT applications.

    List of Resources
    Arm Innovation Coffee Livestream

    StreamYard
    Open Broadcaster Software Studio (OBS Studio)

    Guest Information

    At the time of this episode’s release, Alessandro Grande has left Arm and taken a new position as Director of Technology at Edge Impulse.

    Robert Wolff is an Ecosystem Developer Evangelist Manager at Arm.

    Guest Contact Information

    LinkedIn - Alessandro Grande

    LinkedIn - Robert Wolff

    Twitter - Alessandro Grande

    Twitter - Robert Wolff

    Host Contact Information

    shawnhymel.com

    kennyconsultinggroup.com

    LinkedIn - Shawn Hymel

    LinkedIn - Harris Kenny

    Twitter - Shawn Hymel

    Twitter - Harris Kenny

    License Information

    “Hello Blink Show” by Kenny Consulting Group, LLC and Skal Risa, LLC is licensed under CC BY 4.0

    Intro and outro song is “Routine” by Amine Maxwell is licensed under CC BY 3.0
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    36 mins
  • How to Build an Audience with Darian Johnson

    How to Build an Audience with Darian Johnson
    May 10 2021

    Darian Johnson joins the Hello Blink Show crew for a live brainstorming session. He is working on a low-power, battery-operating LCD digital assistant. He plans to fund manufacturing through a crowdfunding campaign, but he needs help figuring out how to market the device first.

    Darian starts the episode by sharing a personal story about how he encouraged his 12-year-old son to build his own TV. Rather than simply buy a TV, he gave his son a Raspberry Pi and a monitor. The son had to install the operating system, connect all the components, and load streaming services.

    One of Darian’s recent projects was a set of smart candles made with real wax, which you can read about here: https://darianmakes.com/scent-terrific-smart-candle/. These were turned into a product called the Pyllr.

    He asks Harris and Shawn for ideas on how to market his LCD digital assistant. Harris mentions that blogging or sending prototypes to beta testers is a great way to gauge product-market fit. Even if it is not open source, sharing the journey and process is a great way to build an audience. Sites like https://hackaday.io/ or https://www.hackster.io/ offer good platforms for sharing projects and journaling the process.

    Since recording this episode, Darian has started chronicling his efforts at https://hackaday.io/project/178328-always-on-low-power-digital-assistant.

    Sponsor

    We want to thank Twilio for sponsoring this episode! Twilio is a cloud platform that helps developers automate phone calls, text messages, and other communications through their web API. Check out twilio.com/go/helloblink for more information about using Twilio for automated messaging and IOT applications.

    List of Resources

    Website - Hackaday.io

    Website - Hackster

    Guest Information

    Darian Johnson is a managing director for a large technology services company, where he leads major cloud computing initiatives. Darian is also a hobbyist maker of IoT (Internet of Things) projects. His projects have been featured in numerous publications and won multiple awards. His most recent project, the Pyllr Trio Candle, is scheduled for a crowdfunding launch in the Spring of 2021.

    Guest Contact Information

    Website - darianmakes.com

    LinkedIn - Darian Johnson

    Twitter - @darianbjohson

    Host Contact Information

    shawnhymel.com

    kennyconsultinggroup.com

    LinkedIn - Shawn Hymel

    LinkedIn - Harris Kenny

    Twitter - Shawn Hymel

    Twitter - Harris Kenny

    License Information

    “Hello Blink Show” by Kenny Consulting Group, LLC and Skal Risa, LLC is licensed under CC BY 4.0

    Intro and outro song is “Routine” by Amine Maxwell is licensed under CC BY 3.0
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    50 mins
  • How to Run a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign with Julio and Sean

    How to Run a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign with Julio and Sean
    Apr 26 2021
    DescriptionSean talks about launching his product, EmotiBit, on Kickstarter. EmotiBit is a wearable biometric sensor used for research, engineering, and maker projects.Julio discusses what types of products do well in crowdfunding campaigns. For the most part, business-to-consumer, physical products with a price range of $50-$300 do the best.Shawn asks if crowdfunding should be seen as a way to fund research and development or more of a pre-order system. Sean mentions that he is using Kickstarter to reach a funding goal in order to meet minimum quantity orders for manufacturing. However, Julio talks about how many companies in recent years are using crowdfunding as a launch campaign to sell pre-orders. In addition, he mentions that using it to fund research or development (without a manufacturing plan) does not generally work well.Julio talks about how small companies should build a community long before launching a crowdfunding campaign, which can involve publicly sharing the project or product being worked on.Harris sums up how well Sean has learned from and worked within the biometrics community. He mentions that it often takes years of learning and community building to create a successful product and business.Shawn and Julio provide an overview of the major crowdfunding platforms:Kickstarter - Consumer electronics, software, board gamesIndiegogo - Fashion, filmCrowdSupply - Electronics (dev boards, etc.)GroupGets - Electronics (dev boards, etc.)SponsorWe want to thank Twilio for sponsoring this episode! Twilio is a cloud platform that helps developers automate phone calls, text messages, and other communications through their web API. Check out twilio.com/go/helloblink for more information about using Twilio for automated messaging and IOT applications. List of ResourcesWebsite - Launch StudioWebsite - EmotiBitKickstarter Campaign - EmotiBit Guest InformationJulio helped build the Design and Technology Community Outreach team at Kickstarter. For several years, he led Kickstarter's efforts to search the globe for designers and entrepreneurs working on innovative and noteworthy products and help those creators successfully launch their creations. While at Kickstarter, Julio worked with hundreds of creators and developed a deep understanding of the crowdfunding ecosystem. Currently, Julio serves as the CEO of Launch Studio. Sean is the founder of EmotiBit, a wearable bio-metric sensor platform to democratize sensing signals from the body. After finishing his Ph.D. in Neuroscience, Sean created Connected Future Labs, an agile R&D engineering group utilizing research methodologies combined with emerging technology to create 21st century solutions. Guest Contact InformationLaunch StudioEmotiBitLinkedIn - Julio TerraLinkedIn - Sean MontgomeryTwitter - EmotiBitInstagram - EmotiBit Host Contact Informationshawnhymel.comkennyconsultinggroup.comLinkedIn - Shawn HymelLinkedIn - Harris KennyTwitter - Shawn HymelTwitter - Harris Kenny License Information“Hello Blink Show” by Kenny Consulting Group, LLC and Skal Risa, LLC is licensed under CC BY 4.0Intro and outro song is “Routine” by Amine Maxwell is licensed under CC BY 3.0
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    37 mins
  • Developer Advocate Marketing with Christine and Dom of Twilio

    Developer Advocate Marketing with Christine and Dom of Twilio
    Apr 12 2021
    DescriptionWe chat with Christine Sunu and Dominik Kundel from Twilio about the importance of developer advocacy in a marketing strategy and how it can help build trust with prospective customers.One of the keys of successful developer relations (DevRel) is to “meet people where they are” rather than trying to create a community out of nothing. This includes going to events and engaging developers on forums and chat rooms that already exist. However, you must make sure that your company’s offerings align with the demands of the community. Additionally, you must be an authentic participant in the community rather than attempt to sell products.Dom announces the release of Twilio Insiders, which is an early access program for developers that use Twilio products. Such early access programs can make fans feel like part of a close-knit community as well as provide feedback to product developers.DevRel is useful if your intended customers or audience are developers. If you are a solo business or find you don’t have time for full DevRel efforts (traveling to events, managing forums, etc.), you can simply blog about what you learned during development of your product. This helps connect you to potential customers as well as act as top-of-funnel marketing.SponsorWe want to thank Twilio for sponsoring this episode! Twilio is a cloud platform that helps developers automate phone calls, text messages, and other communications through their web API. Check out twilio.com/go/helloblink for more information about using Twilio for automated messaging and IoT applications. List of ResourcesVideo - OK Go Audience Phone Concert at SIGNALBook - Ask Your Developer by Jeff LawsonSite - Twilio Insiders Guest InformationChristine Sunu is a developer, designer, and creator who builds emotive interfaces and experiences. Though her main area of focus is the overlap between technology and human emotion, she has worked extensively in product, marketing, and design in both hardware and software. She has often worked with developer education and trending content, appearing in videos for outlets such as BuzzFeed and The Verge and helping to coordinate IoT-related content at Twilio. Among other things, Christine has created soft robots for anti-anxiety, produced trending tutorial builds about sourdough bread, levitated paramecium in giant magnetic fields, and attended half of medical school at Yale. She writes and speaks widely about human motivation and interactivity in hardware and connected interfaces, and she engages an international audience through online open-source tutorials. Dominik is a Developer Advocate for Twilio in San Francisco. He loves tinkering with anything that can run JavaScript, from the front-end over servers to CLIs and coffee machines. You can find him tweeting @dkundel or working on open source projects for CodeExchange and Twilio Labs. In his spare time, he's working on cocktail, food, and photography projects. Guest Contact InformationWebsite - Christine SunuWebsite - Dominik KundelLinkedIn - Christine SunuLinkedIn - Dominik KundelTwitter - @christinesunuTwitter - @DKundel Host Contact Informationshawnhymel.comkennyconsultinggroup.comLinkedIn - Shawn HymelLinkedIn - Harris KennyTwitter - Shawn HymelTwitter - Harris Kenny License Information“Hello Blink Show” by Kenny Consulting Group, LLC and Skal Risa, LLC is licensed under CC BY 4.0Intro and outro song is “Routine” by Amine Maxwell is licensed under CC BY 3.0
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    57 mins
  • Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

    Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
    Mar 22 2021
    DescriptionHarris opens the show by giving an account of his experiences with implementing good search engine optimization (SEO) practices and what he’s learned. After spending a little bit of time learning about SEO, he says that he was able to grow his organic traffic sooner than anticipated.Your goal for top-of-funnel content is to rank highly in search engine results whenever someone looks for your target topic (e.g. the topic of your blog post, podcast episode, or video). You can use SERP to measure how well your content is performing and if your SEO practices are paying off.Shawn gives an overview of 6 good SEO practices that can offer a big impact with relatively low effort:Choose the topic for your content carefully and consider the target audience. Your content needs to educate or entertain the audience. “How to,” “getting started”, or “what is” guides work very well, as those keywords are searched very often. Do not try to sell your product or service in this top-of-funnel content; your goal needs to be to entertain or help people in order to build trust with them.Your title is the most important part of your content piece. Spend some time to figure out what people are searching for. You can do this by searching Google to look at how other, similar pieces of content are titled as well as by using tools like Ubersuggest and Answer the Public to look at search volume. Try to make your title as close as possible to what people are typing into the search field.There is no hard rule when it comes to content length or word count. Look for similar content, and make your content similar length. I usually look at similar content and think “How can I do this better?” which often results in slightly longer content than those lookalike pieces. I aim for about 1200 words in my written blog posts, but that could change based on the subject, the audience, and how the search algorithms operate at any given time. Do not duplicate (copy and paste) content! It will hurt your search rankings.You should care about site speed (for both desktop and mobile browsers). Google will rank fast sites higher than slow sites. You can check your site speed on Ahrefs and Neil Patel’s SEO Analyzer. Many speed analyzer tools will offer you a list of things you can fix or tweak on your site to make it load faster.It’s OK to link out to other, relevant content. Don’t worry about trying to “keep people on your site.” Your goal with top-of-funnel content should be to build trust with your audience. You’ll often find articles (e.g. Wikipedia) or videos outside of your site domain that can help the audience in their journey while consuming your content. Link to those other content pieces, even if they are outside of your domain.Measure your success. It’s hard to improve if you don’t measure how well your content is performing. Google Analytics and Fathom Analytics are good tools for looking at page views, how long people view content, etc.There are plenty of SEO tips that were not covered as part of these 6, but we feel that the majority of them make only a small difference (which can add up, but you must be diligent about using them!). We recommend using an SEO plugin as part of your content management system (CMS), such as Rank Math for WordPress. These plugins will often give you a checklist while you’re creating content to remind you of the small tweaks you can make (e.g. adding alt text to images).SponsorWe want to thank Cyber City Circuits for sponsoring this episode! Cyber City Circuits is an electronics shop and contract manufacturer based in Augusta, GA. Use the coupon code HELLOBLINKSHOW to receive 10% off your order of electronics or mention that you heard about them on the Hello Blink Show for a 25% discount on the assembly costs of manufacturing. List of ResourcesNeil Patel - The 10 Most Important SEO Tips You Need to KnowTool - UbersuggestTool - Google Trends Tool - Answer the PublicTool - AhrefsTool - SEO AnalyzerArticle - Internet encyclopaedias go head to headTool - Google AnalyticsTool - Fathom AnalyticsTool - Rank Math SEO Tool for WordPress Host Contact Informationshawnhymel.comkennyconsultinggroup.comLinkedIn - Shawn HymelLinkedIn - Harris KennyTwitter - Shawn HymelTwitter - Harris Kenny License Information“Hello Blink Show” by Kenny Consulting Group, LLC and Skal Risa, LLC is licensed under CC BY 4.0Intro and outro song is “Routine” by Amine Maxwell is licensed under CC BY 3.0
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    49 mins
  • How to Run a Hardware Business as an Expat with Sean Hadley

    How to Run a Hardware Business as an Expat with Sean Hadley
    Mar 8 2021

    Description

    Sean gives his reasons for moving to New Zealand and starting his company, MagicDAQ. He was inspired to create the MagicDAQ after working for companies where many hours of labor were spent on manual testing. The MagicDAQ automates the testing and data acquisition process by allowing users to script the process with Python.

    Sean had success making early sales by cold-calling potential customers on LinkedIn. Specifically, he sought out junior to medium-level design engineers to contact. After selling the first few, he talked to other hardware entrepreneurs to learn how to scale. Specifically, he had success sending free samples to influencers and periodicals, like the Embedded Muse.

    The MagicDAQ relies on Python for scripting, and Sean chose that language to make it easier to use.

    Harris asks Sean about distribution back into the United States, which is one of Sean’s target markets. Sean says that it’s been pretty simple to sell back into the United States, which involves some extra paperwork. Harris talks about what is required to have the “Made in the USA” label.

    Sean discusses what the startup and electronics community looks like in Christchurch, New Zealand. He mentions that the community is small but friendly and collaborative.

    Sean talks about pricing his product. Specifically, he mentions that many companies have a threshold of $500-$1000 when it comes to purchasing equipment. Anything above that threshold often requires lots of approvals from management. So, Sean prices his product under that amount to make it easier for his B2B customers to buy.

    Being listed with recognized distributors, such as Digi-Key, works as social proof according to Sean. He mentions that sells more directly, but being listed on distributors helps with brand recognition.

    Sponsor

    We want to thank Cyber City Circuits for sponsoring this episode! Cyber City Circuits is an electronics shop and contract manufacturer based in Augusta, GA. Use the coupon code HELLOBLINKSHOW to receive 10% off your order of electronics or mention that you heard about them on the Hello Blink Show for a 25% discount on the assembly costs of manufacturing.

    List of Resources

    Website - MagicDAQ

    Newsletter - The Embedded Muse

    Guest Information

    Sean Hadley is a New Zealand based entrepreneur and design engineer. He has extensive experience in the medical device industry and has launched products in the US, NZ, and the UK. He is the founder of MagicDAQ, a firm that offers radically simple testing solutions for hardware engineers.

    Guest Contact Information

    LinkedIn - Sean Hadley

    Host Contact Information

    shawnhymel.com

    kennyconsultinggroup.com

    LinkedIn - Shawn Hymel

    LinkedIn - Harris Kenny

    Twitter - Shawn Hymel

    Twitter - Harris Kenny

    License Information

    “Hello Blink Show” by Kenny Consulting Group, LLC and Skal Risa, LLC is licensed under CC BY 4.0

    Intro and outro song is “Routine” by Amine Maxwell is licensed under CC BY 3.0
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    36 mins