Action's Antidotes

This podcast features stories of people doing interesting things in their lives and the lessons we can all incorporate into our own pursuits. Most episodes will feature one or multiple guests and last 20-30 minutes.

Action's Antidotes is a society podcast hosted by Stephen Jaye, with 181 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Stephen Jaye hosts Action's Antidotes, a society show with 181 episodes published.

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  Action's Antidotes

  From Cybersecurity to Fashion Tech with Harish Chandramowli

  Aug 18, 2025—

  What happens when a cybersecurity engineer walks into a fashion boutique? For Harish Chandramowli, it sparked an idea that’s now helping small fashion brands save time, money, and sanity. A chance observation in a New York store became a mission to untangle problems in inventory, communication, and operations many brands struggle with. In this episode, I speak with Harish, founder of Flair Software, about how he went from working at Bloomberg and MongoDB to building a platform that fixes the messy back-office problems fashion brands face. Harish explains why seasonal inventory is a high-stakes game, how communication breakdowns can cost thousands, and why he built his solution to integrate with Shopify instead of competing against it. Tune in now to learn more. --- Listen to the podcast here: From Cybersecurity to Fashion Tech with Harish Chandramowli Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We have a lot of technological advances, a lot of digital technology, and a lot of the efforts around it have been used primarily around digital products, primarily around some of the platforms and everything else, but there’s also an aspect that I’m hopeful around that really takes some of the digital technology that we have and uses it to enhance the physical products and the actual life that we have outside of our computers in real life. My guest today, Harish Chandramowli, is the founder of Flaire Software and he has some interesting solutions for the fashion industry and other kind of inventory-related pursuits. --- Harish, welcome to the program. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for joining us. Now, first of all, kind of have your feet in both worlds, whether it be kind of our technological world as well as the world of fashion, the world of some of these in-real-life types of pursuits. Tell me a bit about your story, where you started and how you came up with the idea, what you observed that led to Flaire Software. Yeah. Just taking a step back, I am not from fashion industry. It’s all pretty new to me. I did my master’s in cyber security actually in Johns Hopkins, then I worked as security engineer in a bunch of very data-related platforms like Bloomberg, MongoDB. And MongoDB was my last gig where I primarily started as cloud security engineer but moved on to like an Atlas dedicated team where you see how lot of different people use databases. And, interestingly, there are a lot of retail companies using databases very heavily. That made me more and more curious on how software is being used in retail industry and why database is like one of the biggest line expenditures. On top of that, when I was looking into ERPs, Oracle is one of the biggest player in the ERP market, which made me even more curious on what this space is. What happens around here? Why is a database company spending so much on an ERP, on like a data workflow? Yeah. This kind of made me curious but, again, it was more like I don’t think I was into fashion or any of those things. I went to this store called ONS in Soho. It’s a great store you should check out if you are ever in like downtown area in New York. What’s the store called again? ONS. Okay. Orange, Naples, San Diego. So if you go to Soho and like downtown in the fashion districts, you will notice a lot of these small, small brands which is not your typical H&Ms or Zara. Yeah. So I was there, I was actually listening to their team meetings, talking a lot with their founder. I was looking at how they are operating in the back office. The first thing that stood out to me is that fashion as a whole uses a lot of software. One aspect of it which we are all familiar with is designing the fashion, like the threading, modeling and like the cut and everything. Another easier to relate option is like e-commerce site, where you list, sell products, and then there is a big piece of back office operation which kind of brings together your design teams to your sales team, your customer service team, which is ERP. And what I really noticed is that, especially in fashion, T-shirts are looked at size and colors, whereas a female swimwear product has cup size, torso length, color, and regular sizes. That means everyone looks at product in a very different way, and, often, people spend 100k, 200k hiring software engineers to customize the product structure on how they look at their business in the back office, how they analyze is my orange color moving faster than my red color, or is this torso length moving more than the other length? And it was very expensive, and having worked at MongoDB, having seen how a schemaless database, how giving the power to user to define schema can help people, it just stood out to me that why haven’t we done that in ERP? And that’s what led to Flaire. Essentially you looked at what happens at a lot of these smaller fashion companies and figured out a way that you could really kind of simplify their operation. Yes. You didn’t originally come from the fashion industry. Does the fashion industry have a special meaning to you or is this just the industry that you happened to observe this retail issue where you’re going to be taking this to kind of other components of retail? So I was looking at different retail things. One of the things that really stood out for me in fashion industry is the season. One, even within our customers, I have seen some of our customers go bankrupt just because they had one bad season. So the need for inventory planning, the need to analyze your business comes very early in your life cycle compared to other businesses.Share on X You need to move fast. You can’t sit on a lot of inventories. At the end of every four months, you need to decide do I sell my inventory at 50 percent loss or do I sit on it for the next season? Sitting on it for the next season means your cash is locked up, you can’t buy new products for the next season, and you are not making profit on it. So, all this decision making and all the need for an ERP or need for a workflow automation platform comes very early in the cycle. That’s one of the reason I took fashion industry. Apart from that, I was always curious. Because when I grew up, I grew up in a place where all these manufacturing happens, so we used to buy clothing in kgs and pounds. You don’t go and buy a t-shirt, you buy a pound of t-shirt. Oh, yeah. Oh my gosh –– –– the factory. So I was always curious on how things have changed between factories and how you buy clothes to here. So there was a bit of curiosity. But the main reason I picked fashion is because the need for these kind of innovative solutions comes very early in your business life cycle. So you alluded to like right now or before your solution, most of these companies were essentially hiring data scientists to comb through all this data, seeing what color was moving, probably looking at factors like month of the year, trends in style and stuff like that, right? Primarily, more than that, people use engineers to push into some kind of like a data store where they can do the analysis. But then at mid-level, people are not even doing that. They are trying to handle everything in spreadsheet because they don’t have the money to hire those engineers so they were literally doing that in spreadsheets. When you looked at these organizations, what are the size? How many total employees would one of these brands that you see in Soho, one of these kind of stores have? If I look at our customer profile, various customer profile, it varies anywhere from like 6 to 7 employees to 25, 30 employees, based on the size. $30 million brands, which is like one of our lower end of the customer base would be like 5 to 10 employees, whereas the $60, $70 million brands have like 20 employees. When I think about companies around that size, there’s certain hyper-specialized positions that not necessarily being hired out unless it’s like specific to industry, so when I think about a company that’s a thousand people, say, almost every one of them is going to have data engineers, data scientists, something even for just their operations, whereas the smaller ones probably not. So, these companies, let’s say one of them has 15 employees in your end, what is that makeup of the employees? Is it just like kind of a marketing person, a CEO, and a bunch of, you know… Exactly. Most of them are tech savvy. One, they know what information they need to make decisions, but they have no idea how to get those information. That’s where they look up to us and be like, “Hey, if I have this information, I can make a better business decision on how to plan, how much inventory to buy, when to expect an inventory, when to book a marketing campaign,” whereas they have no idea how to get those information because your CRM is very decoupled from your ERP which is very decoupled from the interactions that a purchase manager is having with a factory on, “Can we produce this? Can we not produce this? When this can be produced?” So, they are looking to us and be like, “Hey, I have all these separate information, how do I bring these things together? Can you make a software that can help us and give us the detail in the simplest possible way?” Typically, if I just look at what the situation would be, a CRM would have, say, I don’t know, the number of a certain item that’s selling each day. That information would be there, right? Two things, most of often than not, CRM, especially in this industry, happens is with B2B businesses, so what would happen is that you will –– so you are sitting in July and you will be selling your winter clothes as bulk orders. So you will be negotiating with other shops on like, “Hey,...

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  Action's Antidotes

  Rethinking Choices and Tech Overload with Emily Pabst

  Aug 4, 2025—

  We have more options than ever in modern life, but is that really a good thing? Digital technologies that claim to make our lives easier, like restaurant ratings and dating apps, are all around us, but they usually end up making us feel even more stressed. In this episode,I speak with Emily Pabst, the founder of Remake the Rules and a decision-making coach. Emily discusses how our lives are being shaped by "choice tech" and how to regain control. We look at the mental traps that undermine our thinking, how having too many options can lead to anxiety, and how to prevent decision fatigue. Emily explains how small business owners, corporate executives, and regular people can simplify their decisions, live more clearly, and reconsider their relationship with technology. --- Listen to the podcast here: Rethinking Choices and Tech Overload with Emily Pabst Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. In today’s world, we just have a lot of decisions to make and a lot of choices to make them from. I often make the reference to doing a Google search for something like a therapist, something that a lot of people will look for at some point in their lives, and if you ever look for a therapist, you’ll see a Google search and you may see the people who do, say, the type of therapy you’re looking for, work with the type of people, whether it’s individual, couples, family, stuff like that, whether it’s specific to addiction counseling versus just kind of trying to get a leg up on life, but it’s really hard to know what you really want because you’re going to meet the therapist and you’re going to find out more about the person and whether or not you vibe, and I think that paradigm applies to a lot of other places in life, especially in our technical world where you just have so many choices and so much information and you’re like how do I sort through it all and how do I avoid getting decision fatigue? My guest today is Emily Pabst, and she is the founder of Remake the Rules, a decision-making coaching service. --- Emily, welcome to the program. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for joining from the other side of town here in Denver. And first, to I guess orient, tell us a little bit about Remake the Rules, because I think the idea may be a little bit new to some people out there listening about someone to coach you to make decisions other than whatever, probably the four or five family members they all have giving them advice. My background is in information science and data analysis, actually, and, throughout these last few decades, what I’ve really noticed both in my professional and then also in my personal life is that the overwhelming addition to what I call choice tech tools to our lives, so those are going to be tools that are digital information tools that impact how we think, how we feel, and, most importantly, how we make decisions. That the addition of those tools, while they promise a lot, a lot of additional knowledge, a lot of additional tools, they often do not deliver and they often do the exact opposite. They create a lot of uncertainty, a lot of frustration, a lot of overwhelm. And so I essentially help people live and thrive well within this sort of overwhelming information environment that we’ve created for ourselves. So, give us an example of a choice tech tool that did overpromise, underdeliver, and essentially make things more frustrating. Sure. I think the number one for many, many people, it’s going to be online dating. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen so many videos and essays about how 90 some percent of people involved in it are frustrated with the online dating world, that there’s like this idea that there’s maybe 5 or 10 percent of people that are really thriving in it, and then the other 95, 90 percent are just fed up. Yeah. I mean, the frustration is absolutely real, and sort of the stance that I take on these information tools, regardless of if it’s online dating, I tend to focus on sort of high stakes environments. So, in many cases, a choice tech tool like online dating has now fully taken over how folks make decisions in regards to who they choose to meet and spend time with and potentially become a partner, a life partner, so this is a very high stakes choice that we are now inviting these technology tools into to be a major part of, but it can be a lot of different things. Small business ownership involves a ton of tools very similar to this that are intended to help you thrive in your business and often are confusing and overwhelming, and same with leading large organizations. Those are sort of the three realms where I work with people most frequently because they are both so inundated with these tools while also really needing the outcomes to be positive and to work productively for them. So, you talk about online dating, of course, being high stakes because, and possibly even the highest stakes because the person you choose to spend your life with ends up being one of the most important decisions, an important part of it. What would be an example of a low stakes tool that people sometimes maybe think about too much but it’s really just not that highest stakes? Interesting. Well, so part of kind of the way that I help folks to sort of reframe the frustration and the overwhelm that they’re feeling is how pervasive these tools are, and the pervasiveness of them is actually significantly altering just how we go about our patterns of day-to-day life. So one sort of example significantly lower stakes is how you feed yourself, how you choose what restaurant you go to, how you choose how to get groceries. So there are many, many more information tools that are available to us to achieve that than there were 10, 15, 20 years ago, but because of the advent of them, it kind of disrupted those old patterns, so now we are trying to relearn what really works for us again now that we have so many different options. This reminds me of a TV show from several years back. Aziz Ansari had a show called Master of None, which I kind of think of as the millennial guide to life myself, and there’s an episode of this show where he gets online and starts researching the best taco truck, I think it is, in his neighborhood, and I don’t even remember what neighborhood, this was many years ago that I watched this, but it’s a neighborhood in New York City, he’s trying to find the best taco truck, and by the time he does all the research to find out which one is, they’re out of food or they’re closed. 100 percent. And also, I think that there’s a lot to be said for the accuracy of that information. This idea that that is something that is available to us through some means, like Google mapping or what have you, these review platforms, it can be kind of accurate for some locations, for some questions, but can be just a very poor option for information in other scenarios. And I’ve seen a lot of people do this where they’re looking at Google Maps, they’re like, “Oh, there’s a Chinese restaurant at the block and it has a 4.7,” and that’s supposed to signify that it’s good, whereas some other place may have been there that has a 3.9 and maybe it’s not as good, whereas maybe the item on the Google Map with the number of dollar signs is actually a more important indicator because that tells you how much money you’re going to spend on that meal. Certainly, and it’s conversations like this that I end up having with folks is really just recontextualizing what we’re looking at, what we’re interacting with, what we’re talking about, that sort of has become so normalized and such a strong default for folks, like you want to figure out where you want to eat, the default is to look at online reviews on one, maybe two different platforms. But then there’s ideas about who is completing that information, who is providing it, how it is coming to be, whether or not they are genuine, whether or not they are from a subculture that is going to have the same food ideas and preferences that you do. So I enjoy traveling a lot and I also really enjoy sort of looking at places through the lens of some of these very large platforms because you can really tell when only a very specific population is engaging with it, and that population, if you go abroad, is unlikely to be the population that actually lives in a place. So, there, we can really see an example of how we are just sort of entrenching into a very singular viewpoint, but because it’s on the internet and there’s so much data, it feels like it’s actually really well sourced and well informed. Yeah, it feels like ground truth, and an example, it has a 4.7, 4.8 rating that almost is taken by most people as ground truth that this is a quality restaurant. Yes, yeah. So, with this example, I know this example has nothing to do with business, it’s just kind of a normal life example, where someone looks at Google reviews, they see that number and sometimes they just look at a couple reviews or whatever and then they choose the restaurant, what is the bigger issue? Is the bigger issue the fact that this information may not be reflective of what you really want or the fact that this may not be the best use of our mental and cognitive energy of, okay, this meal might be slightly less good if we don’t do all the success of research versus all the other things that we could be thinking about in life and some of the things that may have higher stakes? Yeah, certainly the latter. We have an unlimited amount of energy and information at our disposal at any given time, so making a choice and saying, good enough, and being like, “Well, I’ve had better pizza in my life but that’s okay.”Share on X So be it versus looking at those sort of higher stakes

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  Action's Antidotes

  Tapping into Health and Water Wellness with Cydian Kauffman

  Jul 28, 202546 min

  Most of us focus on the obvious when it comes to wellness, what we eat, how we move, and how much we rest. But there’s another daily habit that could quietly be affecting our health: the water we drink. We often think about diet, exercise, and even sleep when it comes to our health, but how often do we think about our water? In this episode, I talk with Cydian Kaufman, water quality expert CEO of Pure Water Northwest, about what’s really in your tap water and how it could be affecting your energy, skin, and long-term health. Cydian explains the difference between “legal” and “healthy” water standards and shares practical tips on improving your water at home, from reverse osmosis systems to dealing with PFAS and other hidden contaminants. Know what you drink. Tune in now. --- Listen to the podcast here: Tapping into Health and Water Wellness with Cydian Kauffman Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Growing up on Long Island, my family, we always used some form of a water filter. It was always –– it was before Brita but there was a predecessor to it, now a lot of people use Brita, or we would use bottled water. However, living in Denver, we recently had a project where we reconstructed our water pipelines to get the lead out of the water. Since then, I’ve actually drank all my water out of the tap here in Denver, Colorado. Whether that’s the right decision or not, I am not sure, so I’m going to introduce to you my guest, Cydian Kauffman, who is one of the owners of Pure Northwest Water, to tell me about water as well as whether or not I’m making the right decision with this current situation. --- Cydian, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate being here. It’s Pure Water Northwest, by the way, just so you know. I love talking about water. I’d be happy to jump right in and talk about Denver specifically, if you like, however you want to approach it. Yeah, I mean, I didn’t know. All I do remember is that a few years ago, they reconstructed the pipelines here in Denver and they said the project was to get the lead out of the water and that, since then, I’ve, at least, in my head, felt like just drinking the water out of the tap was perfectly fine. It might be. What zip code are you in? What, if you don’t mind saying that? Oh, wow. Yeah, we’re getting fine-tuned here. I’m in 80205. Right. Let’s get specific. So, you’re on the Denver Water Board, water quality –– Yeah, but I’m not elected to any water position here. I just –– Yeah, I know. I mean, you’re on the main water in Denver, Colorado, Yeah, I assume. I mean, I’m only like a mile and a half east of downtown. All right, so if you look up, and most people in the country can do this, you can actually go look up water quality reports for whatever water quality you’re on, and there’s two ways to go about this. One is to just literally look up the water quality report for your municipality, which I’ve got right in front of me, two seconds of doing a Google search, I got the Denver Water Quality Report. Yeah, that’s going to bring you to a page with a bunch of lists of what they do and how they do it and, eventually, you’re going to get to exact contaminants that they test for and their results. If you don’t want to just take their word for it, though, you can go to a website called the EWG, the Environmental Working Group, then go to their tap water database, type in your zip code and find your municipality that way, and then you can kind of compare those two. Now, unfortunately for most people, this is going to be more annoying than good experience because there’s so much confusion in these lists, like what does it mean to have eight parts per billion of bromodichloromethane, which happens to be in Denver water. If you talk to someone like myself, we will know right away, bromodichloromethane, it’s a chlorine byproduct. It happens when you put chlorine in the water and it’s one of the total trihalomethanes, which is basically a category of chlorine byproduct that can be in the water. At really, really high amounts, you can have cancer from that. At the amounts that tend to be in municipalities, you would have to be very susceptible in order to get cancer from the amount of bromodichloromethane that happens to be in most municipalities. Some municipalities, though, have it at extremely high amounts. So, the particular water that you’re dealing with, it’s so much about your susceptibility to it and it’s so much about the amount that’s in the water, and it does require some expertise to interpret it and understand it, but doing that is definitely worthwhile. There’s a lot of solutions to get you there too. You mentioned certain chemicals, and I don’t think it’s going to be that easy for anyone listening to follow bromodimethyl –– I’m probably –– Bromodichloromethane, yeah. You know what I mean? To follow all those chemicals. What are the general dangers that, say, the average person in any city across North America can face by drinking their city’s tap water on a daily basis? Well, they can face radium. They can face arsenic. They can face hexavalent chromium, which is that Aaron Brockovich chemical, nitrates, pesticides, PFAs, forever chemicals, pharmaceuticals, all of those things are in city water. Some of them are not properly or fully, let’s say, restricted by the Environmental Protection Agency. So, all of these things can be in city water. Additionally, the infrastructure of the city that you’re in may have wood pipes, may have old metal pipes that have lead in them. They can have over-chlorination, they can have under-chlorination. They can have any of these problems, and it becomes so burdensome to people that they just use a shorthand, “My water is good,” or, “My water is bad,” or, “The water in our city is good,” “The water in our city is bad.” The water in Denver is considered pretty good. And it is considered pretty good despite the fact that it has a little bit of radium in it, and that’s known by the municipality, and radium is radioactive. It’s got a ton of chlorine and chlorine byproducts, and it’s got some other volatile organic compounds, some metals, some herbicides, hexavalent chromium is in the water at very low amounts. Now, the reason why this doesn’t get reported or have anything done about it is because the human body is incredible at filtering. So, the EPA sets two standards for drinking water. They set a legal level, which is called the maximum contaminant level, and then they set a health level, which is called the maximum contaminant level goal, so it’s the MCL versus the MCLG. The MCL is less restrictive than the MCLG, so the legal level is less restrictive than the health level, meaning you can get water that is exceeding the EPA’s own health level but it’s legal, so the municipalities are allowed to have that be in the water. And the reason is, is because the cost of those municipalities actually removing it down to the levels that are healthy is virtually impossible for some of them. So then a choice is made. The EPA had to make a choice. They were like do we insist that they get us to the health level and risk that municipalities literally have to close their doors and hundreds of thousands of people don’t get water or do we allow some water through and put it on the homeowner to treat their own water if it’s over that level? So, obviously, they chose to not bankrupt these municipalities. Right. Now, if there is some contaminants, okay, I would say, I’m assuming that the EPA legal level, the relatively looser standard, if a municipality exceeds that, then it’s likely a really, really extreme health risk that people can encounter. But for the ones that are in between those two levels, in between the gold level and the standard level, what kind of health risks can occur, say, someone decides to drink that water and how effective is things like using a Brita filter or buying bottled water on preventing some of those? Great questions. How likely are those things to have an effect on people? Very unlikely. That is why they are at that level, because the majority of people do not feel effects from it. What effects have I seen? I’ve seen people have miscarriages because of it. I’ve seen people be sick, consistently sick, and not know why. I’ve seen my own daughter actually got eczema from very low levels of hardness in the water. And so the actual effects are very person based. These are rare occurrences that I’m noticing because I am in water treatment so I have customers talking to me and telling me what they’re dealing with, then I test their water and then I have to research outliers and kind of help them figure out what the cause is and then help them fix it. As far as standard solutions, like the simple solutions that you buy off the shelf, like Brita, that’s helpful a little bit with some things. The tricky part of that is this is science so we can’t just throw one thing at everything and have it work. Brita is carbon. It’s called granulated activated carbon and all it is is literally really finely chopped-up pieces of carbon. And carbon is amazing because a single gram of carbon, if spread out, the surface area of it is spread out, it would cover three tennis courts. That is how much filtration capacity it has. It’s incredible at filtering, but it’s not incredible at filtering everything. EPA level of arsenic, for the legal level of arsenic is 0.01 parts per million. If you’ve got 0.005 parts per million in your municipality, which I’ve seen a lot, carbon may remove it or it may not. You may be drinking arsenic, you may not be. If, on the other hand, you have chlorinated water, like you do from a municipality, it will convert the arsenic into a form that’s easier to bond with and then carbon

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  Action's Antidotes

  How to Get Your Business Noticed Without Losing Yourself in the Noise with Reed Hansen

  Jul 21, 202542 min

  You’ve got the skills, the service, maybe even a killer website, but how do you actually get people to notice? In a world flooded with content and AI-generated everything, standing out feels harder than ever. So, what do you do? In this episode of Action Antidote, we’re joined by Reed Hansen, Chief Growth Officer at Market Surge, to break it all down. From finding your true audience to navigating tech overwhelm (hello, AI everything), Reed shares practical tips on marketing smarter, not louder. He also drops insights on how to stay human in your message, even as the internet gets noisier by the minute. If you’re running a business, building a brand, or just trying to get traction in a crowded world, this one's for you. --- Listen to the podcast here: How to Get Your Business Noticed Without Losing Yourself in the Noise with Reed Hansen Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about getting a business noticed, and this conversation may even get into this broader concept of getting noticed in general, because anyone that starts a business, your product could be amazing but you would need to actually get that product noticed. But, increasingly, in the traditional job market, we’re also seeing people need to find a way to get noticed, in the sense of every single job you apply for online now has 700 or whatever resumes, all kind of pointing in and it’s just a pretty crowded world out there in general with the internet having kind of connected everything with everything, everyone with everyone, and we’ll talk a little bit about whether or not AI tools have the potential to change that. But here to talk about just what you need to do to get your business noticed, I would like to invite my guest, Reed Hansen, the chief growth officer of MarketSurge and owner. --- Thank you. I’m really glad to be here. Oh, thank you for coming on. And so, I’m envisioning a situation a lot of people have where, okay, you’ve developed a product or a service, let’s just say someone just decides to go freelance because they got laid off or their job didn’t really work out well, it wasn’t what they wanted to do and someone just has a skill, say, you’re even like a graphic designer or something like that and this is a great skill set for a freelance option. So, if someone’s doing something along those lines, what do they need to be thinking about as far as, “Okay, I have this great skill set but now I need to get customers. Now, I need to get people to buy it,” essentially? Yeah, no, that’s a great question, and I think really the essential question is you’re going into business for yourself. Obviously, you will have a certain set of skills from previous experience and attributes and talents but you want to be super hyper-focused on the needs of the customers you want to work with. And that is tricky because you want to understand both where are they located? Where are they found? Where is their attention focused on? And we talk about social media platforms. Is your audience more of a Facebook audience or more of a Discord or Reddit audience? And you need to understand those things and put yourself in the shoe, because you are not your customer. You don’t just instinctively have all the same interests and likes as your customer. You have to understand where they are and that’s the first thing. Where are they? And then you want to think about what do they need, what do they value. Some roles might be a little easier, like if you are an expert plumber, you kind of know what is needed and what they need, but if you come in as a creative, you have a wide, broad range of things that you need to tailor your offering. An example, the plumber, right? I mean, your customer is a homeowner who had some sort of plumbing problem happen to their home. That’s just great, like 100 percent clear example. I think it’s well established what those kinds of needs are, but I think a lot of us get into businesses that could work across a wide variety of different use cases and we need to decide which of those use cases we want to work on. It’s like you don’t start by saying, like, “I really like to blog and, therefore, I’m gonna sell blogs,” or, “I’m going to sell writing.” That’s just not enough. You have to make it more tailored and actually understand a group or a cluster of customers to take that to market. And what goes into the understanding of the customers? Because a lot of people have traditionally talked about customers as in, okay, your customers tend to be upper middle class, age 35 to 50 something like that, right? But that’s not really a deep understanding of someone. I think what you’re talking about is understanding the customer’s needs, their pain points, what they’re going through when they’re going to see your service, and why they’re going to want to buy your service. Right, exactly. And so if you have previous experience in this role, it’s helpful to understand the people that you’ve worked with previously, and you want to look at motivations. You want to look at what are their needs.Share on X And even I think people might do the surface level of what are their needs and kind of cherry pick like, well, they need photographs, and I’m a photographer, so that’s what they need. It’s like, no, no, you need to go one or two more levels deep. Why do they need photographs? Do they see a visual medium is really important to preserving their memories and relationship with family? Do they have family that’s far away? Do they like to send out Christmas cards or holiday cards? Understanding what drives that need is really important. Say they really want to preserve the memories of their family. Okay, well, what’s important about their family to them? Is this an activity to create closeness or is this something –– do they just like wearing nice clothes or is this –– think about the depth to that and know the other products that might be part of this scenario as well, like, oh, they’re shopping for new clothes, or they really like to spend a lot around the holidays or –– like knowing the timing and all those things will affect what you go to market with. And is there a possibility of going too deep? Certainly, yeah, because you can definitely go too deep and be too focused on too small of a group. I like to use the customer persona approach and create usually it’s like a one page sheet and you’ve described your customer demographically, age, maybe gender, but also some like range of like incomes and kind of housing or maybe family status and maybe even occupation. But then you add little snippets of like frames of like if they were speaking their thoughts out loud, what would be some bullet points you jot out? And you can even give this person a name. You can create multiple of these personas, but that helps you identify your approach to messaging, any of the content you create or the platforms you focus on, are they primarily looking at the mobile website or the desktop website, and understanding those things through your persona. Yeah. And how often do those things change? Because platforms seem to always be really fluid and I have some ideas about who’s on what platforms, but it seems like that’s something that like every year could be different. Yeah, and I agree. I think yearly is a good –– that’s a good exercise to revisit your ideal customer profiles or personas every year, and maybe even more often, as our technology landscape has changed and big events happen, like the COVID shutdowns and that disruption, things like that can really affect buying processes for people and decision making. So, I’d say revisit it when there are major events that affect your ideal customers and annually. Yeah, and I can’t speak to anyone listening any of your specific businesses but I know one kind of big event that’s happening right now that I think everyone is thinking about is AI and how AI is unfolding and how it has a potential to transform, I guess, everything about how businesses get themselves noticed. I’m following this closely because I use a lot of AI tools for the work I do, but also I’ve just become aware that it’s a disruptor, it could replace things that I do, it could help accelerate things that I do, but also that it’s like changing at a logarithmic pace, like it seems to be even accelerating the rate of change within the AI world. And it’s a little intimidating because it’s hard to stay on top of all of it and I think, unlike some of the previous big leaps forward in technology, it’s like really cheap for consumers and businesses to use. At first, there was high barriers to entry with like phones or personal computers or things like that. It required some setup. But with AI, people that just try it, you can kind of take off right from when you start with ChatGPT. All of a sudden, you’re really using it and getting a lot of value out of it. So many factors kind of combine that make it concerning, and, of course, we’ve all seen the horror movies, the Terminators, the Matrix movies, and we fear this major cultural collapse or societal disruption. Doesn’t seem to have happened yet but I think it’s something to be attentive to. Yeah. How attentive? I mean, because we’re thinking about, obviously, how AI has potential to disrupt industries, and when I think about historic disruptions, I think of disruptions that just kind of changed the way we do things. So, for example, the car kind of put the horse and buggy business out because it changed how we get around but it wasn’t a catastrophe, unless someone had invested their entire life savings in a blacksmith shop or something like that, kind of became a different way in which we get around. So how much should we be paying attention to AI as a potential disrupter on that level of how it might

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  Action's Antidotes

  Your Message Doesn’t Matter If No One Hears It with Joshua Altman

  Jul 17, 202551 min

  Ever feel like you're putting your message out there and... nothing? No response, no engagement, just silence. In today’s world of nonstop content and ever-changing algorithms, just showing up isn’t enough. You have to show up the right way. On this episode of Action Antidote, we're joined by Joshua Altman, Chief Marketing Officer at Beltway Media, to talk about what it really takes to get your message to land. With a background in journalism and social media strategy, Joshua knows how attention works and how to earn it. He shares why a message often needs more than one shot to stick, how to find the signal in all the digital noise, and why staying human is your greatest advantage in a crowded space. If you’re tired of guessing what works and ready to start communicating with clarity and impact, this episode is your cheat code. --- Listen to the podcast here: Your Message Doesn’t Matter If No One Hears It with Joshua Altman Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about getting your message out and about all the different ways that we have available to get our messages out and even how this landscape is changing quite a bit. I’m sure you’ve all heard a little bit about AI and the hype around where AI might be taking some things, but there are plenty of other progressions and other trends taking place. To stay updated on that and to give us some information about all the different platforms, all the different methods, all the different places we can go and also the ways we can craft our messages to our audience, I would like to bring on my guest today, Joshua Altman, who is the chief marketing officer of beltway.media, a company that provides fractional services to small- to medium-sized businesses. --- Joshua, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me so. So, yeah, let’s start out by talking about your story. Has marketing, getting crafting messages, getting messages out, has that always been part of your path? In a way. I did not start in corporate or in marketing or anything along those lines. I went to journalism school and started as a journalist, and then went from being a congressional news producer and reporter to being a corporate communications person. I left my job, I was with The Hill newspaper for about five years and I left that to what I thought would be freelance reporting and producing. I was a cameraman, I was an editor, I was a producer, so very hands-on technical side of things in addition to the reporting, doing the interviews, the research. All the things people associate with print reporting, I was doing that plus video. That’s what I went to college for. I did my masters while I was a reporter. I was all in DC. I did that in something called communications, culture and technology and I thought I’d spend my career as a journalist. That wasn’t what ultimately happened. I left my job as a journalist, thinking, like I said, I’d be freelance, and then I kind of just fell into the corporate work, which is kind of what I’ve been doing since. So what made you leave your job? What was the –– was there an event that made you leave it? A certain realization? No. I mean, in terms of an event or a realization, I’ve been there just, like I said, for five years. I was kind of looking to grow and do something a little different than what I had been doing. I had great experiences where I was, was just looking to do more, again, as a reporter. I ended up doing something entirely different. So, when you were on the path of being a reporter, it seems like you had your hand in a lot of the areas of content creation or what we would call content creation now,. You talked about filming the video, video editing, doing everything. Was there certain aspects of it that started to intrigue you more, because you talk now quite a bit about how our messages are crafted, how are we actually reaching an audience? So in addition to doing video with The Hill newspaper, I also did a lot of their social media, not for my whole time there but for about the last 18 months or so, I was doing their social media as well. So, what I did a lot of was pooling things and making it fit how we wanted to communicate that story. So, sometimes, it was a longer three- to five-minute piece, sometimes it was just a sound bite. Sometimes, we have an interactive map. Sometimes, it was, primarily a social post. One thing we did a lot of there were vote counts, who’s going to vote for or against this bill that’s coming up. And a lot of that was literally on the website, it was a list. How can we make that list more engaging? That was a lot of things on social media, that was regular updates through different channels. At that point, it was Twitter, Twitter posts, Twitter accounts so if it was an energy bill, we had special ones for energy. How can we profile things? If this person’s likely going to vote for this but here was their past voting record on similar things. What groups could we make of people? So, when you’re looking at crafting this content, what was the process that came to mind? Was there a certain amount of analytics around who you’re trying to reach, how you’re trying to reach them as well as what you want them to get out of the engagement in your platform? A lot of is what do we want them to get out of it. Yeah. And some things are just, like I said, better suited for a forty-second clip, a sound bite versus that five-minute long to sit down interviews, longer piece, and we would look at things like this story did well on this platform, this got a lot of social media engagement. What made that happen? Was it a particular topic? Was it time of day? Was it people –– there was nothing else going on on that Tuesday and it just happened to be that Tuesday was really good, which happens more often than people would like to admit that, that is just a day people were paying attention to you. I think the phrase slow news day comes to mind. Yeah, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. It could be a fast news day and they’re paying attention to something else on your website and that got collateral traffic, which is great and, of course, any website is going to plan for that. That’s why you see related stories on everything. It’s to get people to click again and they’re related, they’re based on your interests, based on that story. So, we’re always looking at those sorts of things and I wish that was some sort of great secret but you could see it on every website, news website you go to, you see related stories, you see you might also be interested in. It’s to keep you on the website. It’s to keep you clicking and reading. So, is there an actual way to determine why any particular story or any particular thing that anyone posts anywhere on the internet gets engagement or doesn’t get engagement? I would love that to be yes. Other than asking people directly, “Why did you click on this?” pretty much no, unfortunately, because there are so many factors. I mean, sometimes you can make good, reasonable assumptions. A picture was particularly compelling, the headline was good, or it got picked up by an influencer, sorts of things, but, at the same time, unless someone tells you, “I clicked this because of that,” it’s very hard to know with 100 percent certainty. Yeah, so if anyone’s like looking at their posts or something and say, “Oh, this one got a lot more traction than that one,” but they keep scratching their head as to like why because the one that got less traction maybe was even the post they were more proud of for some reason. Yeah. In that case, you look at what was different. It could be time of day, if you’re doing your corporate posts, it could be time of day. Your audience is a lunchtime audience and you posted that around breakfast. Well, okay, you’ll know that if you do five more posts and the lunch ones do better than the breakfast time ones, that’s a way that you can start figuring that out. It could be the topic. I worked with one company and they did email newsletters, among other, they had their social channels and books as well, other things like that. What we found was posts, if we use pictures, if the pictures show people who were more real looking as opposed to supermodel looking, the real people got a lot more engagement. Really? Well, these were stock photo models, all of them, ultimately, but people who kind of looked like you, your friend, your neighbors, the guy in your office, those got more engagement. Could I say that was 100 percent the reason why? Probably not, but it was a trend over enough posts of trying different things that it made a difference when we kind of stuck with it. And you saw that, and it makes me wonder if the same is true for AI where a lot of people say they can tell if something’s an AI-generated image and if that also kind of handicaps people in that way? Sometimes, the tells are really easy. Someone has seven fingers, three hands, things like that, all your people are cross-eyed in a photo of six people, the odds of having that, six people in your photo cross-eyed are relatively slim in real, so those are kind of more obvious tells in AI. Sometimes, it does pretty good when you’re trying to get something that looks like a person but I’ve noticed, been doing this for however many years it’s been, humans have a natural ability to tell a real face from a fake one. It’s just an evolutionary trait we have is we can tell genuine expression from fake expression. We all kind of see that in our normal, everyday, going about our lives. Okay, that person’s really not as happy as they’re pretending to be. We see that every day. We can just tell when a face isn’t real. There’s just –– often, I’ll just say,...

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