Above-The-Fold CRO: Don’t Make Users Scroll With Chase Mohseni

Chase Mohseni is the Chief Marketing Officer at Heatmap.com, which provides revenue attribution and AI insights. In his role, he constructs innovative CRO software. Chase has built various B2B SaaS companies, including Creative OS and Pencil, where he was the Head of Marketing and Growth.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

The seven core principles of above-the-fold CRO
How to structure your website to generate conversions and sales
Chase Mohseni shares the conversion rate metrics brands should track
Chase compares building software to baking a cake
What is the scarcity sandwich, and how can it boost conversions?
Leveraging nostalgia to drive conversions
Examples of detrimental CRO mistakes
Tips and tricks for building an e-commerce brand using SaaS principles
From filmmaker to CMO: Chase’s versatile career journey
What makes Chase magical?

In this episode…

If you’re trying to increase conversions, there are a few statistics you should know. 70% of your traffic will leave your website in under three seconds, and 75% of these people don’t scroll past 30% of the first page. Given these staggering facts, it’s crucial to develop engagement tactics above the fold of your website. How can you optimize conversion rates without your consumers having to scroll?

Above-the-fold engagement efforts incentivize users to take action beyond the first page. Conversion attribution frontrunner Chase Mohseni has determined seven fundamental standards for above-the-fold conversion rate optimization. 80% of website traffic originates from mobile devices, so he suggests designing your website for these first to ensure a seamless user experience. You should also include a CTA that provides value for your consumers and facilitates the next step of their journey. Similarly, any announcement pop-ups should include a hyperlinked offer, and they must appear on the page long enough to capture the user. While text blocks should never exceed three lines, the font should be at least 14 px to accommodate mobile users. Your above-the-fold page can also include social proof or testimonials, encouraging consumers to make an eventual purchase.

Join William Harris in today’s episode of the Up Arrow Podcast as he welcomes Chase Mohseni, the CMO of Heatmap.com, to talk about above-the-fold CRO. He shares the CRO metrics brands should track, why building software is like baking a cake, how nostalgia drives conversions, and the most detrimental CRO mistakes.

Resources mentioned in this episode

William Harris on LinkedIn
Elumynt
Chase Mohseni on LinkedIn | X
Chase Mohseni’s email: chase@heatmap.com
Heatmap.com
Shaun Room on LinkedIn
“Leveraging Brand Collaborations To Scale Your Business With Andrew Heddle” on the Up Arrow Podcast

‍

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now, let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:15

Hey, everyone, I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt, and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond, as well as help you apparel, your business and your personal life. Really excited about the guests that I have here today. Chase Mohseni Chase is the CMO of heatmap.com, which works with Portland leather goods, Avi and many other great DTC darlings. He was the co founder of Creative OS. Previously, he was the head of marketing at penciller AI, which was acquired and a former filmmaker. Chase, happy to have you here.

Chase Mohseni 0:50

Yeah, sound pretty awesome when you when you interview with him. I appreciate I appreciate the time been listening along and all the amazing episodes and hopefully we can kind of join the ranks of some of these great episodes you've had in the past. Nice.

William Harris 1:03

I appreciate that. And maybe instead of saying welcome to the podcast, I should say how they shall meet you today. Right? Oh,

Chase Mohseni 1:10

wow. Look at this guy. He is guys coming in. He's ready. He's ready for Persian New Year. He's ready for

William Harris 1:17

this Persian New Year. I

Chase Mohseni 1:17

don't even know it's a it's next week. It's next week on Tuesday. Oh,

William Harris 1:21

nice. Yeah. Okay. Well, there we go. I got something new to celebrate next week. There's a lot of fun to celebrate here right now. Um, I also, before I get into the meat of this, I gotta give one more shout out, Shaun Room over at Nativo. Shaun has been like my number one fan. He's given me feedback on every episode. So just so I say, Shawn, you have gotten my attention, and I appreciate the heck out of you. And so keep up the great work with what you're doing. I just had to give him a shout out here on the podcast. Um, I do want to make sure I announce our sponsor to this episode is brought to you by Elumynt Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimize the e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 That I peeled recently. You can learn more on our website elumynt.com, which is spelled elumynt.com. That said, enough of the boring stuff under the good stuff. Chase, something that you said on LinkedIn that I really appreciated is that you audited 20, high traffic websites on Heatmap.com 75% of them get the same thing wrong. And you've basically used what you've learned here to put together seven core principles of CRO and so what I wanted to talk to you about is, you know, above the fold, CRO we can go below the fold as well. But just what are the seven core principles of CRM. So

Chase Mohseni 2:44

first core principle is I guess a macro principle is you're above the fold is really the only thing that matters like in the end, because it's the only thing that will drive people to scroll anywhere, pass it or take any sort of action on your page. And so what I find, and I'll go through the seven is you see a really well designed page, but not a really well designed above the fold. So you say like, Okay, this is a really well balanced kind of consistent page, they have, you know, they have really good, they have really good content, they've written everything really well. But they haven't packed enough we call it internally like purchase velocity into that above the fold. And so like what we're trying to do is get people to take action, whether it's scroll, or click, click some sort of CTA to take action to the next page, rather than add to cart or go to a collections page, whatever, whatever kind of place you land them, what's the next step in the journey that gets them closer to handing you their credit card and putting some dollars in your bank account, which then you can pump back into ads. So I'll talk about the seven core principles of above the fold because the kind of macro one is no one focuses on they're above the fold. So here are the here are the core principles design on mobile first. So you can see how your popups chat bubbles and content interacts with each other. A lot of times you see like a cardinal sin for me is seeing content or pricing that is being covered up on my iPhone, by chat bubble or some sort of offer that comes up. Are the content isn't spaced correctly because they designed on a desktop? And it doesn't. It's not. It's not responsive, so that it's shrinking down to the right size. 80% of your traffic is coming from mobile. Why are you why are you making sure that your desktop experience is incredible. Now, some people counter our counter argument, their counter argument is well, we are able to we are able to grab we're able to grab our we're able to grab our customers and bring them in and most of them convert on desktop anyway, we'll still you need to give them incredible mobile experience because that's where most of the eyeballs are coming from. So that'd be the first thing that ever caught.

William Harris 4:53

So I want to call out on that right real quick. Because like you said, that's the first place that people experience your brand. That's the first thing that tells and whether or not your brand is trustworthy to get them the right product at the right time, if, if it's ready, but it's still not functional, you're communicating a lack of trust to these people as well to your customers that it's like, I don't know, if you can't handle serving me the products in the mobile frame that I'd like to see, how do I know that you're actually capable of getting me the product that I want, in the right color in the right size? Sent to my correct address, right? Like you've already started to devalue that similar to what I would see, Will Smith in the pursuit of happiness, right, where he shows up with no shirt on to a job interview is like doesn't mean that he's not capable of doing that job. But you do have to say, like, well, what is this communicating about you? And so I completely agree with you, that's still the first interaction people are having with you. And so you've got to nail that trust, right then in there. Yeah, that's

Chase Mohseni 5:50

exactly right. You hit the nail on the head. One thing that people don't think about, we talk a lot this about a lot about this in SAS is when you're onboarding people and dropping them to a dashboard. It's the only time you get 100% of eyeballs. So similarly, you're above the fold is the only time you have 100%. The minute there's some sort of scroll or Page Break, you're essentially now the you're having a decay. So similar, we talked about AD fatigue, and like those kinds of customers decaying and the efficiency, same thing, when people start scrolling, you start losing people as you go. So like, before I go to the next one, I think couple a couple data points are really important here, like 70% of your traffic will bounce in under three seconds. 80% of all brands in e-commerce come from paid ads. So like these are kind of two things is if you have, you know, people are bouncing, you know, they're coming from paid traffic. So they want to get some answers quickly, you have to do a really good job at this above the fold. And 75% of your traffic doesn't get more than 30% of your way down the page. So like these are some staggering numbers. When you start thinking about how much time you're spending on you're above the fold. That leads me to kind of the next set of core principles. One is always have a CTA that helps your customers take the most valuable action on your website. So what does that mean is that word salad Central, what I'm saying is, in your, in your above the fold, you want to have something that gets people to the next part of the process, a lot of people, what you'll see is they'll have some sort of text, they'll have a big hero image, and then they'll have nothing that hyperlinks anywhere, except if you go to the menu. So what we'll see is we'll see a huge amount of people on him app.com clicking on the on the menu bar, because there's nowhere for them to click in that above the fold. And they just want to get to a collections page and then want you to give them some sort of valuable action that they can take. So always have some sort of TT doesn't have to be a shop all button. But it has to be something that essentially routes them somewhere that you think is going to be a high impact action that they can take. So that's number two.

William Harris 7:49

So Okay, have you seen where there's one that tends to do better than another like Shabbat almost feels like pointless? It's like, show me everything right? Then you go walk into a store, like at, let's just say a physical store, the first thing you do, like you see the Walmart greeter, whatever you hate, you show me everything. There's like a thing that you're coming for. So is there something that you found in the tests, at least so far to uncover that? Like, there's okay, there's shoppable? What's at least one step in the right direction towards something better than shop? All? Yeah,

Chase Mohseni 8:22

I mean, I think there's, there's two, there's two schools of thought, I mean, there's more than two, but I'll just give my two schools of thought there is the Hey, you want to send them to the most valuable set of products, or you want to send them to the newest set of products that you know, essentially you can go and cross sell, etc. So if you don't turn over skews that often, then you want to send them to a place that you know the highest value highest conversion products are. So you could make a collection page with that you could send them to a product page directly depending on what hero image you have in there. The second one is if you have a new, you've done a new drop or something, you know, you know makeup and beauty brands just a lot fashion brands are able to do this a lot CPG brands don't, don't turn over product and skews as much as those first two examples that I gave you. So they're not able to do it as much. So they have to go kind of to the hero products a little bit more. So you'll see like a hero product be kind of part of the hero image that people can go to and then as you scroll, you get into kind of some of the extra add ons that go along with that or stuff that might be either a cross sell upsell or something for someone who's a returning customer that they can add that they can add to their basket. So TLDR either some sort of collection that you have you knows high value, or like a product page that you know has some value or the the last one being a new collection that you might have. Brilliant, I love it. Okay, number three. If you need an announcement bar, make sure it has a hyperlink to an offer. If there's no offer, there's literally no reason for it to exist. So announcement bars always take up 5% of your above the fold, maybe even seven depending on how Why'd you do it? So most people, I say this a lot, people will either have a two line announcement bar which doubles the size, they'll essentially say free shipping, at this level of this level of basket size. This is just a standard, you can have this on your product page. This is not change anyone's buying strategy. And if it does, it's not a customer, you really want to be completely honest with you if they're obsessed with free shipping. But there's an Amazon if occation of the expectations and so people think that that's still some sort of unique USP that they can give. But it's not. So if you have an announcement of something purposeful. Yeah, have something purposeful there or like kindly, your announcement bar can fuck off?

William Harris 10:43

Sure. Yeah. To your point. It's not unique anymore. That's just kind of expected. And so the only reason you would say that is if like, you don't have free shipping anymore. You're like, Oh, hey, we don't know. There's like now that's now that's newsworthy to say that it's different than it used to do that. Right. But it's just the idea that it's like, that is what we're coming into the website expecting to be status quo. Exactly.

Chase Mohseni 11:04

Exactly. Next one, no blocks of text longer than two lines. Have you ever William Have you ever gone to a website and essentially been greeted by a wall of text? And you're like, nope, not doing that. Here's the reason. Because you think, okay, if they're not able to explain something succinctly remember, this is all just very intuitive for a person, if they can't explain this succinctly, how am I supposed to experience value in a succinct manner, right? Unless there's some sort of unique like, it's, you know, it's something that's helping your gut microbiome and even then it should say like, something that you then go into some detail on a product page for, but your hero image and your hero copy, and you're above the fold, your h1 should not have anything more than two lines. And you can go read everything you want from David Ogilvy, he will he will repeat what I'm saying, This is not a unique thing that I'm saying. But you want to have those two lines, because it is essential, people can read that fast. Think of it like a tweet, you read a cut, like 344 line tweet, unless you're writing some sort of long form, the minute you go over those two, three lines, your engagement drops, because people want us to just consume these things really quickly, and then move on to the next thing. So never have lines of copy longer, in your headlines longer than two. Even in your sub headlines at the beginning, you don't want to get overly, you don't want to overly explain everything you want your story through the images through your product through what your ad has said to essentially get people to the next stage. And if they want to get really detailed, the product page should be able to do those things for you. So that's the next core principle.

William Harris 12:45

Well, and that reminds me a lot of there's two things that are going on here, right? There's one, there's the psychology aspect of somebody actually reading, like you said a word salad, right, some pleonasm. That makes it absolutely impossible for them to decipher what's actually going on here. That's not good. But there's even just the visual aspect of the overwhelm that you see, especially when you go back to designing for mobile. And it reminds me of when bro a tree became such a thing on LinkedIn years ago, where we were, you know, starting to do the basically it was like line, double space line, double space line, double space. But the reason why that became a thing on LinkedIn, and people hated it, but a lot of people hated it was because those of us who were maybe younger, reading LinkedIn on our mobile phones, if it was any more than that, then it was just like, wow, when does this end? I'm not even gonna read it. It's too long.

Chase Mohseni 13:38

Yeah, nope. 100%. I'll go to the next core principle there. This one, the shorter one, but font size should be longer larger than 1414 px. And why is this? Why is this something that I am pushing for? Think about reading something on your phone, when you're moving really quickly. And you don't have more than half a millisecond to really see if something makes sense. So think about this, two lines, plus 14 px. So imagine you do five lines at 12 No one's going to want to read that, especially based on how you're putting your page together, what if the copy is white, and the background is lighter, so it's hard to read those things. Automatic bounce, right? You have not thought about me in my in my customer experience, but if you have Bigger Bolder text, say like 2022 People can then start reading it, they can understand it more quickly, they're going to be able to hit with that purchase conversion velocity that we're talking about. So that's a really big one that I I see a lot of brands try to get cute with how they would how they put their websites together and they become an I'm not telling anyone not to be obsessed with brand. But you know, just take your brand text and double the size that's all Don't you know have good looking brand. All of those things. I'm not even gonna get into trying to tell people not to do brand. But just make it bolder so that people can read it so they can make decisions because they know what you're Selling?

William Harris 15:02

Yeah, yeah, it seems intuitive. It seems intuitive to some of us. But that's mainly because we see lots of websites, we see a lot of good ones, a lot of bad ones. And so we maybe take for granted what we feel already just immediately by going to a website. But I think that there's a lot of wisdom in what you're saying there. As far as just thinking about the user. That's actually on the other side of this, is this a good experience?

Chase Mohseni 15:31

I mean, you'll find that kind of all of these, if you really go over them are not novel approaches, it's more putting them together and saying, This is what I'm going to check off every single time I build something, whether it's a landing page, whether they're looking at a website, or whether we're, you know, we're auditing our website, do we hit these core principles will automatically make you perform better than 95% of brands in general, because someone, undoubtedly, in their, in their builds, will miss one to two of these things every single time and won't be the same ones. But they will mix and match all of these relatively regularly. So you know, if they make their font, the right size, they'll have chat bubbles that pop up because they haven't designed mobile first, that they get designed mobile first, then they'll you know, they'll mess up something else. So essentially finding this as a checklist, almost just what you should be doing is a really powerful tool. Yeah. Okay. So next one, if you're brand allows for this, right? I don't want to say that every brand can do this, but have some sort of social proof within that above the fold that just gets people thinking, dang, there are a lot of people who like this brand. Maybe they're right. And I'm wrong. Because you know, the general consensus for everybody is they don't want to purchase anything. Right? So how can we make them be be operating with the alligator brain, not the judge brain and social proof allows you to kind of keep in that emotional sphere, like, Okay, I love people like it, I like it. I think it's gonna be great for me, let me go do it. Versus there's not many people talking about this brand. Like, is it real? You know, this is just kind of against stock and trade parts of things that we do. But you'd be surprised how people position these things across their websites and how they hide them how they don't bring them into an area that is like a high value area visibility wise. So yes, that is, um, that would be the number number six out of our seven.

William Harris 17:30

Yeah, totally, totally agree with that as well. All right, bring us home. Number seven.

Chase Mohseni 17:35

Okay, number Lucky number seven. If you want a pop up, please do not have it. Be on a timer that's within three seconds of landing on your page, if your customer is going to bounce in three seconds, and under three seconds anyway, why are you doing a three second timer, there should be some sort of action that has been taken. Either they hold longer, like they're in, you're above the fold for seven to 10 seconds, or they've done a 30% Scroll depth. And you're like, Okay, they've taken an action that deserves this, what I see generally, and again, easy for me to say, I know it's effective, but you're really degrading the customer experience, right? People expect that. So if they're sticking around, they know that some popup is going to come up at some point, that's going to allow them to get 10% off their first purchase. It is now just part of the game. Same way that people expect some sort of free shipping, or some sort of like some sort of shipping offer, these things should not be taken as novel. So if they're, they're not novel people expect them people know to wait for them, then you can you can change the way that you have your customer flow. So it should be after seven to 10 seconds, or some sort of some sort of scroll that happens.

William Harris 18:46

Yeah, it's kind of the idea where it's like, Hey, do you wanna buy this? Maybe it's 10% off. I don't know what it is yet, though. Like, I don't know if I want to buy it even at 100%. I don't Yeah, 99%. of I don't know if I even want to pay the 1% for it yet. I haven't let me actually experienced this and fall in love with the product or the brand or whatever it is yet. 100% 100%.

Chase Mohseni 19:06

Yeah, completely agree. Completely agree. So that is the seventh. So those are

William Harris 19:10

seven really good. Yeah. And those are seven. Absolutely great. four principles for CRO above the fold. I want to date, you know, a couple of other things that you've said on LinkedIn that I think channel this same energy, but I'm just curious to hear you say them live as well. You had a hot take. The other day that I saw too much data can stop you from making impactful decisions. I see many brands over optimizing because of not knowing what metrics move the needle for their business. What does this mean and what metrics should they be actually tracking that actually matter? Yeah.

Chase Mohseni 19:48

Sometimes you just write stuff to get engagement know what this means. People I've seen this across it doesn't necessarily mean Um, it doesn't necessarily just mean I'm not talking about e-commerce brands that we serve, I'm talking about just brands in general. So a lot of people will be focused on revenue in, right, like at the bottom line that focus on revenue. And so people are gonna come back and they're gonna say, Oh, that's not what we're focused on. We're focused on EBITDA, we're focused on your net profit while up. That is not most brands, okay? Most brands are not as advanced as the people who are talking about their brands on Twitter, they don't know how to measure those things. They don't know how to keep blog of those things. And so, my general, my general rule of thumb is, you really want to understand that your margin stack and your business really well. And so what is my landed cost? And so people are gonna say, Well, this ends up being net profit. Well, how do you break it down and make it simpler? What is my what is my landed cost? What is my pick and pack so that when they get when a customer gets when they get the product? What is my what is my standard CPA? And then what is the what's leftover? And with that, what's leftover, how much goes to headcount and all the other ancillary costs that I have? How much profit do I have at the end of the day? And then what is my repeat rate? And so if you have a subscription business, and you know that you're going to get someone on the 12, a 12 month window, you're going to get them to be there for nine months. And like after q3, they fall off? What can you do leading up to that fall off to get them to keep going? What is my payback period? So this is kind of my, my biggest thing I was talking about with everyone is like, how, what, at what point can we liquidate the CAC so that we feel like we're at you know, we're at ROI kind of flat, and we can go up from here. So I think a lot of people don't think about that. They just say, oh, have a good row as and, again, people are gonna argue and say, This is not how it goes, I talked to probably more brands than most people. And I still don't think there is a huge sophistication to measurement as of yet, or they don't understand what unlike what actually leads to business impact. And so there are a lot of smart people who can share more about this than me. But I think that the other one in I'll just use SAS as an example, is there a lot of metrics you can use? Right? So if you want people to engage more, you can just send them a bunch of emails, right? That's not real engagement. Right? And so a lot for me, it comes down to what's the depth and richness of engagement or activation or you know, the revenue that you're receiving, if it's a dead client? Well, like you're kind of Doa on that eventually someone's going to get wise and that's going to churn right? And so what we want is to have act like real active engaged customers in the in the product, whether you're e-commerce you know, subscription business, or you're you're in you're in software, and so I'm always thinking about how do we get people to be active engaged in my kind of Northstar metric for all business is what is my word of mouth coefficient? So like, what does that mean? It means for every one customer I get how many customers can I can I expect them to get me. And so if you can get one to one plus, incredible, usually, it's some fraction of a person. So you get three customers, you get one customer so you can cut your CAC by 30% at that point, so like are you cut it, you know, 25% Because for me, four customers one is free. And so you paid $100 For four customers. So now your CAC is 25 bucks. So that is probably he said, What's your Northstar metric is how do I build businesses that have amazing flywheels that drive strong word of mouth coefficient, whether it's content, whether it's a product, whether it's through some sort of incentive, whatever structure your business needs, there is no one size fits all anyone who says that is a moron. But word of mouth coefficient is kind of like, like my Northstar God metric. Because if you have a strong if you have a strong word of mouth COVID, your whether your sales, lead product, lead, whatever you are, your business is going to always have some sort of pulse, no matter what kind of hurdles you're you're going through I can I can vouch for this, having been through some of those hurdles, where we kept our word of mouth coefficient strong, and kept us through and flattened out some of those valleys in a really, really meaningful way. Where if we hadn't had that if we hadn't built the system to do that, we would be in a whole world of hurt. So lean into that as much as possible. Figure out how to make your I don't want to say like a viral product because those things kind of rise and fall as what what did he say in intro a rise and fall like the winter wheat. Right? This is more about how to build sustain the sustainable ability to get your customers to talk about you recommend you and hold and be acquisition engines for you.

William Harris 24:41

Right, yeah, beautifully said that's a whole bunch of the best metrics. Like the throwing out row as I wrote a long article about what I called the row as death spiral because I think yeah, over over emphasis of row as just causes you to kill your business and the sophistication of getting it Do these metrics like you said they're difficult sometimes to get into but you know, even like, you know, months to pay back your months to break even? Yeah, it's it's it's a wild, different shift for a lot of businesses in how they think about their business. Aside from metrics, something else you said that I really appreciated, which was letting people bake the cake hierarchy of needs. What does this mean? What do you mean by letting people bake the cake?

Chase Mohseni 25:26

So I am an AI oh, gee, what does that mean? I was an AI before it was cool. We were in all the channels when open Ai no knew what the hell it was in Slack working with them on GBT one and two. And so what does that mean? I remember when GPT three came out, and it was incredible. We tried to automate everything when we were at pencil. And what we found was people didn't like it. And what I've looked at is when I go in either advise companies I go and study companies, there is a certain amount of desire to actualize and realize value created yourself. And so you want to get to a certain threshold. And so I was called, like, it's the 8020 rule, we always talk about if you can get people 80% of the way there, and you give them 80% of fidelity with what they were some somehow expecting. They'll take the last 20% and they'll love you for saving them that 80 minutes out of 100 that they were going to spend on on something, but they still want to be involved. And anyone who says they don't go use jet GBT, you're not plugging and playing that you're looking at, you're like, Okay, this is good enough. I'm now going to you know, I'm gonna play around. I'm gonna I'm gonna do a little bit of a dance that has you know, the the catheter William magic or the Chase magic or whoever. And so, what does that mean? Whatever your product is, you want your customer so why does Why does e-commerce have such an incredible? have such an incredible power? Well, I'm wearing this red shirt. It's from a company called Vince. I'm wearing sweats right now with it. These like sweats that I bought that are really comfortable. There's probably been 10,000 of these shirts sold, maybe even more. Every person wears them differently. That's making the cake, right. Every person takes their athletic greens in some sort of device, a human's like a squeeze some squeeze some lemon in it, right? I put MCT oil in mine for baking a cake a different way. But it's done. It's handed there it is gut health in a bag, right? Similarly, when you have software products, for instance, which is what I'm what I what I'm what I've been peddling for years now, you need to let people feel that they have some sort of agency. And so that's really what we're talking about here is people no matter what, no matter how far, how far, technology has come, people want agency and a great a great parable for this is that movie Wally where everyone is on that ship, and they're all laying there and have jelly because they they have no agency. And the minute their eyes open, that there's agency, they all get excited because they don't realize that they've been asleep at the wheel. And so similarly, I think every single person was agency. It's what like what a lot of the depression in this country feels like, I'm not trying to get political on this whole thing. But a lot of people don't feel like they have the ability to change their lives and fix it the way they want. Just because they see certain things on the internet, I can never get to this level because they don't understand that you can bake the cake the way you want. You have all the tools that you need. It's a simple, how do I get there? And so why do people go to universities, I have a master's degree if you go because they essentially have put guardrails on so that you can go bake the cake you want to make, but you know that at the end of that you will have some semblance of agency to take control of your life. And so breaking that down to the micro it really comes down to products it is how do you take the customer or user to the farthest point, the local maximum that you can and then let them go the rest of the way so that they're crossing the finish line themselves, so they get the glory, because it's all their story at the end. Bringing it back to filmmaking there for you. It's all their story.

William Harris 29:14

Well, you want them to be the hero of the story. And I think sometimes if you're the hero, it's not as exciting to them as letting them be the hero of their own story and you're just gonna get you want to be there. Robin not their Batman, right? So it's like how do you Robin, it's like showing up you're helping them. I love that you caught up Wally. That's a movie I hadn't heard in a long time, and I've heard it twice in the same day. Oh, that's really funny. So earlier today, scrolling through tick tock this morning, and I saw somebody was on I don't even know like a Segway basically with their Apple vision Pro. And they were at like a movie theater. They ordered popcorn and then it's like no hands. They're just they have their popcorn and their drink and they just zoomed off and they're like this guy's living Wally right now. In his own little world. 200

Chase Mohseni 30:00

person, that's terrifying.

William Harris 30:03

But it is a little terrifying. Although I do like the vision Pro, it's a lot of coins pretty

Chase Mohseni 30:07

sweet. I use the buddy tried it, I use the buddy of mine, it's a little heavy still. But that just takes time. I don't think like, if you think about the original iPhone, how much of a brick it was and how like useless, it feels now and it was so novel at the time, I think, you know, within two to three generations of this, they'll get the front hardware so that it's not so heavy, and it doesn't hurt around the years. But I went and had, I had a pretty interesting, like, look around the top of the Himalayas. And I felt like I was there legitimately, he's like, Hey, let's go you want you want to go to Everest and I'm like, absolutely. And I kind of I did a 270 I was like this, legitimately like I had one of those, okay, I'm gonna put my hand out because it feels like I am there. And the pixel perfection was brilliant, was wild. It was absolutely wild, they did some of the other like, you know, like played around with the the allo app, just to look at kind of like how you I just didn't like, I think it's gonna be pretty incredible. As they put in avatars or like different things where you can kind of see yourself, I'm sure there'll be some sort of like spatial computing, where they will look at your body in that moment and kind of be able to superimpose it into there, so you can see it. So I think I'm excited to I want to kind of watch Napoleon or something from Apple on it to just see how that see how that works. Kind of seeing something in cinema scope, like the old days, we only have one in LA we have one Cinerama theater where it's essentially like, it's current. It's like a curved screen past your eyes. And it is a wild experience to see movies on that. So I think this will have something similar that you can have a real like proper dome experience with with movies. So I think it's great. Yeah, I've

William Harris 31:49

been very impressed with the aloe yoga app, actually, I reviewed that same app. And so like, there's a lot of things that I'm excited about for it. And I have a, I haven't met a quest to I never got the three, but I haven't picked it up. Literally, since I got the apple vision Pro, I haven't even picked it up. There's just so much more gapping richness that's in the vision Pro. But this is a tangent, there is another thing that I want to get back to for those who are listening for CRO stuff. Um, you talked about a scarcity sandwich, which I really liked this technique. And and you talked about it in relationship to VIOME, which I think is a nice time because you're talking about gut health a little bit as well. Yeah. But when you talk about scarcity sandwich and how that improves CRO, what is the scarcity sandwich? And how have you seen it applied in a way that really helps to improve conversion?

Chase Mohseni 32:35

So very great question. First reason I talked about gut health, I have Crohn's disease. So it's on top of my mind at all times. A scarcity sandwich is essentially, you hit them with two offers, between this like a you have this offer whatever it is at the top of your screen in your announcement bar. And this is when you actually do one that that drives value as some sort of linkage to an offer. And then you have some sort of like, offer that's leaving, or, or you have some sort of time based outcome. So to say like, you can have this and seven like this outcome and seven days, and then you put the product in between that. And the idea is, you're going to miss out on this product that I have, you're going to miss out on this product experience that you're going to have. And you're going to miss out on this opportunity to feel a certain way. And so you're building a sandwich of scarcity, which then your product is essentially the meat or the piece the resistance in the middle. And so you're essentially trying to drive people to to order so why why it has to be sandwich or why sandwich works so well is, you know, an open faced hybrid says like an open faced bagel with lox is great. But when you drop that other piece on top, it is a complete kind of sandwich and meal. Here, let's just say you only have the top one. Essentially, people can drop off and forget. And they're not going to take action and keep scrolling and like then you have to win them back with some sort of intensity or, or or like, again, purchase intent velocity. When you sandwich them. Well, they have to make a decision. Do I want to lose out on set offer and set opportunity now? Do I keep scrolling? Do I go to the product page? Do I go to checkout page and like read some FAQs, I now have to make a really strong decision. But I'm feeling really good about this because I really liked the product. I think the story from the ad that came with a story that's there and I know that these great things are gonna happen. So I want to take more action. So it's just another opportunity to essentially drive people to take action. It's a bit of gaming the system, I wouldn't do it all the time. But if you want to throw it in twice a quarter, right and get essentially say like, Alright, I gotta pop my numbers. This is like a hack you can do one week at a time twice a quarter. So like just a two out of my 13 Three out of my 13 weeks. I'm gonna have a scarcity sandwich that I know will pop revenue, but it's not a great always a great user experience to be Real?

William Harris 35:01

Yeah. And that's fair, right. Like, think there's such a balance I think about it is, you know, two sides of the same thing I've heard that phrase before. And I really like it. Because it's like if you pull on one side that you pull the other, and if you pull that side that you're pulling that way. And so there is that element of something that's going to increase conversions might not necessarily feel like it's the best user experience either. And something that's just purely based on user experience might not increase conversions. And so there is that that necessary level of friction that finds that happy, sweet spot between the two of them.

Chase Mohseni 35:39

Yes, perfection. Absolutely, completely agree with you. Um,

William Harris 35:44

the other thing you said that I appreciate it is nostalgia is powerful. And I love nostalgia. We all do. Like when you think about nostalgia, from a CRO standpoint, why do you think nostalgia has the effect that it does? And what are ways that brands can use nostalgia more to do their benefit?

Chase Mohseni 36:07

So every generation has good old days for them. I'm curious to a Gen Z calls the good old days, but like, Why does like use blink 182 As an example, blink 182 Does a reunion tour sells out like crazy. Everyone's losing their mind. They out they asked to see that show, right? Because it's reminds you the good old days. Why do they run out? Harrison Ford and again, I love Indiana Jones. But why did they run them out a fifth time? 15 years after the last one came out that no one liked or wanted again. Nostalgia hits in and they make hundreds of million dollars. Can people like it's Indy I gotta go see Indy, right? at a micro level, you can do this with brands that people grew up with. So when you know you have you have essentially a segmentation of who are my buyers today? So let's just say they are 28 to 40. Well, what did they experience in their childhood that they're interested in? So like, let's just use an example of, I don't know, since we talked, we talked about them often, like, let's use obvious collagen. Well, they have a bunch of these intimates, ones they've like but they could do a collagen for millennials, that is based on fruit roll ups, or gusher, sir, or Dunkaroos or something. And automatically, you remember being a kid, and the joy you felt in opening that wrapper. And through osmosis now you're like, well, 100%, if I'll be has it. Like, I want to have that because I want to bring back that feeling that I had plus have all the benefits that I know this product has for me in my life. So now I get to have fun and be healthy sold. And so a lot of brands have done a good job of this, I would say this is don't just do it to do it. Like there should be some sort of actual, like product symbiosis between what you're trying to leverage for with like that nostalgia, and then your and then your product and what you're selling. But there are some, there are some kinds of categories that can do a really good job of this. So your fashion can do really fun, really fun. collabs, like I have had this company called 11 Paris. And they do a lot of fun, interesting t shirt collabs. I have have one that I have a bunch of Star Wars ones. And it is a picture of a lightsaber, just coming up on like, straight up the chest. And my son now is like, why are you wearing a Star Wars shirt, because he knows what a lightsaber is for. Right? So I'm sure thing, but every time I put that on, I'm like, Man, this is cool, because I know the material is really nice. And I'd like the brand in and of itself. But oh, I'm wearing my Jedi shirt. And it says Jedi on the back. And it's a 77 for when Star Wars was created. Those kinds of things have a huge impact. But you need to know where the symbiosis and synergy lies. Don't just do it to do it. Because there are so many. There are so many examples of people doing a terrible job of this. And so it's almost more worth your time if you're willing to have a more willing to dig into what actually works for your brand rather than just doing it to do it.

William Harris 39:24

Yeah, we had another guest on the show before Andy Hetal. And he did a lot of brand collaborations. And one of the examples that he gave one being done very poorly was Arby's and Warby Parker. And when you hear that, even in and of itself, you're just like, wait, what, like there's some explanation that needs to be done. In that one, that one bombed and failed, I think for the most part to it, it just it really didn't have the effect that either one of them wanted on it. And so to your point, yes, you need to do this. Well, but I would say that brand collaborations are things that a lot of companies are sleeping on and the collet that I want to bring up that Andy brought up there as well is, just because you're a smaller brand doesn't mean you don't have something amazing to offer to a larger brand. Because very likely you have a very good tight niche follower group, like a very that they're trying to reach. And being able to have that brand collaboration could be exactly what they're looking for. So don't write yourself off from being able to work with a big giant brand. From a collaboration standpoint, you have what they don't have, and they have what you don't. That's what makes it beautiful.

Chase Mohseni 40:29

Yeah, 100 100%. I completely agree.

William Harris 40:32

So we've talked about a few brands that have done CRO Well, what's an example of a brand that you think is just destroyed, they're above the fold or, or like some type of CRO thing that you're like, don't do this, like I've seen this, and it's going to kill it. Please don't be like this company. Oh, oh,

Chase Mohseni 40:55

oh, God, I hate flaming people. I'm like the anti flamer. Online, I looked at this brand. And we actually I, we just shipped the newsletter. There's a company called rain, so they got more fashion brand. But they had, I actually really liked something. And then right after they essentially did a version of what they had done on my explained a little bit, and it completely ruined, like what the how they had set the table. So you go to a collections page on reigns. And they have this really beautiful navigation at the top before you get the products, new new arrivals, bestsellers, Bebo. And I thought, wow, this is really slick, it works really well with the brand aesthetic, which is super important. But then, on the website, you can go to us.rains.com and go to collections page, and you'll see this exact thing. They have a filter button that's just sitting in the middle of the bottom third of both products in the middle, and it's covering some of the product names, and it's covering one of the prices, like well, but you just you have a filter at the top, like why can't you just hide this filter in the top? If they want to really get detailed with the filtering, just have them like there, the expectation is that it's going to sit in that area. But you're trying to get too cute with how you have this filtering. And then there's a chat bubble right next to it. So essentially, there is this like three fourths kind of CTA that's not a real CTA, just sitting in the middle of the page, right where you're seeing pricing. So I was very frustrated when I saw that. And I wrote that in my do not like section of the newsletter. Because I had some stuff that was really nice. But that was that is just top of mind like faux pa absolute football. Yeah, that's

William Harris 42:39

good, it's good to stay away from certain things, like you said, again, it all comes back to think putting yourself in the shoes of the human being that's on the other side of this thing. That's all this good. And I think sometimes we just need to, yeah, we just need to step back and actually go sit in those shoes. Um, something else that I wanted to talk about this isn't e-commerce, necessarily, but I'm a big fan of lateral thinking. And that ability to think about things that are outside of your, necessarily your core, and seeing how you can bring that into something that you can use. You have a good Sass background. And so there's a few things I wanted to pull from your SAS mind here as well. And part of the reason why I'm a big fan of this is you mentioned this up above as well, some of the metrics that you called out, those are more typically SAS metrics that are created making some adoption in e-commerce but haven't made his full adoption. I remember when I started doing a lot of e-commerce, we talked a lot about LTV to CAC ratios, that was a very, very SAS thing. And e-commerce has come around to it. But I would still say if you're talking about e-commerce has come around to it. I'm saying maybe some of the top e-commerce brands look at that a whole bunch of e-commerce brands still don't have that even remotely in their vernacular. But what else would you say if you're building a SaaS business from the ground up? Has in you've done this now what what has enabled you to be successful in that, that you think might translate into e-commerce? Maybe it doesn't, but we can just talk about it and see how it does.

Chase Mohseni 44:13

Such a loaded and beautiful question. So I'll step back and say what I think SAS has learned from e-comm and what I think e-comm has learned from SAS so I think e-comm has learned measurement from SAS and how to think about their business in a much more meaningful way so that they can understand what actual like leading indicators because the key performance indicators forget that like what are the upstream things I can be looking at that allow me to have downstream success. SAS is incredible at this and I think e-comm is starting to get really really strong at this. What is SAS learn? Well, SAS is learn about brand building. And so before it was like look, you have product, you have this you have some money, you're just gonna go advertise on channels and you're gonna go to conferences and you know, you have salespeople and you'll sell. Now you actually have to own a brand there are Companies use air for example, the browser company that launched our that have merch stores, right, like getting a fast hoodie was a big deal. And so I always say, and I'll get into kind of the second part of this question, what they can do. But you know, I always tell people in SAS, like, you know, you have two products, you have your brand, and you have your, you have your actual product that people use, both things need to run parallel to each other. But the brand is always going to help smooth out the rough edges of the product, where if you just one product alone, you'd be graded on product alone. And I've seen this happen time and time again, where people just focus only on building their product and like, more power to you. But you will always be only as good as the last as the last metric report that came out or the last time that they use your product. And if God forbid, you had some sort of bug that day, that was, you know, platform level, not just for one user. And they said, Well, you know what, I'm coming up for renewal. Fuck these guys, you don't have anything that essentially smooths out those curves, right? And so like, Why do you have for instance, use Customer Success people or salespeople or customer support people, that is when someone has a bad experience or need something your allow them to smooth out that experience, that's kind of expensive, and isn't going to be scalable if you have certain cost bases that you need to hit. So what allows you to do that brand does, right, it is another customer support person, I'm actually never articulated that way I'm having kind of a riff, right, and like thinking about it. And I kind of I kind of liked that idea, as well as like your brand is another customer support person, because there's a certain inherent trust that comes around from a brand that has put their planted their flag in the ground said we do these things for you, we're going to provide value when we don't have to, we're not going to charge for those things. I'll give you one example we do this, we've been starting with how we buy series for CRO and we get a bunch of good brands that come in agency owners, etc. And we just break down pages, we don't sell anything on it, we don't like there's no hard pitches, it's just hey, we're gonna break down some big time pages, and then anyone who's on this can submit and we will do a quick audit of CRO and everyone's gonna give an opinion. Everyone loses their shit when they're in there. Because it is just free value that you would pay $10,000 To get from all the mines that are in there, right? Like we have a really cool guests coming up on the next one. And everyone's gonna go bananas for it. And I get weeks after people emailing me, can I get the recording? I didn't get to make it. Oh, I heard about the event. Can I get the recording link? No, I'm not messaging people about I don't post that many clips about it. But the idea is we built this brand equity from this to say, Wow, this amazing content that you're putting out is so useful. So this is the key, right useful. For that, I really want to be a part of it. And so like a lot of I love some of the companies that are doing this, where they'll, for instance, we use like alio with they'll have live yoga classes on their Instagram, right? What value it provides, I can go take what would cost me 50 bucks to go and do a yoga session with a professional, like a high end professional and feel like I'm part of the community. Right? And it's free, what brand like incredible brand value that they're creating by doing something like that. And so people say like, well, this is expensive. We're a small SAS company, and we're bringing in people, and we're using relationships. And so the amount you invest in your community and some of these other places that you can use, you can go and amortize the cost of that by creating these events that then bring you deal flow downstream. Yeah, right. I have a friend, I helped him get a newsletter started for his agency. That thing now prints him money every single time because he has an angle that he's working on. He like he hits it all the time. He created a podcast that flows into that so he's able to, he's able to put more into it specifically so what I'm saying is those two things work together and that's essentially what I've seen SAS take from e-commerce brand building what I've seen is metric like learning your metrics. And I cuz I always find it funny when someone in e-comm says they're a growth marketer I'm like dude, United growth marketer like your performance marketer it's cool. You're learning growth marketing. Like don't tell SAS person your growth marketer that like they'll literally run circles around you with the way that they think about data and are able to synthesize data that's not me shitting on anybody, but like it's just I agree with never tell SAS person to say that they're amazing at brand when you go talk to someone who's building branded Lululemon, like, you know, absolutely, yeah, go take a hike. So those are kind of the things I think about. Between the two between the two disciplines or the two categories, I guess.

William Harris 49:44

Who's the guest? You can't say you've got a really cool guest and I say it is

Chase Mohseni 49:52

sorry, oh, he's a person. You know, who has a newsletter that you know Who his name might be Schmidt Sharma. So yeah, a little little slip. If anyone gets to the gets this episode before the event, they'll know they'll know who the secret guest is. So this little easter egg for everybody.

William Harris 50:21

That's perfect. That's what I wanted. Yeah. Um, okay, I want to get into also your backstory, I love talking about all of the work stuff, but also like talking about like, who is Chase Mohseni you have an interesting backstory, and there's a lot we could get into. And I'm gonna leave it up to you, as far as I'm gonna leave it that broad. There's a lot that we get into. But what basically, you want to share about where you've started getting you to where you are now, as CMO of a really awesome company?

Chase Mohseni 50:53

Yeah, 100% How did I start? So I, I started as a filmmaker, and how I started as filmmaker is I dropped out of school because I was doing too much drugs, and I needed to take care of that. Back in college, I went home. And I just fell in love. Like I'd always love movies. But essentially, it was like a form of therapy where I was like, Alright, I get to go hang out in these worlds, I don't have to think about my own shit that I don't like thinking about on a day to day basis. And then as one does you get interested in like, how did these things made? Like, how do you make these things? And so I looked into screenwriting and started looking at reading, reading screenwriting books, and started thinking like, Oh, I could I could do this, which is just folly. But I started writing screenplays. And some of them, not the first few, but some of them started getting decent. And I was like, oh, I should go to school for this. And my parents were just excited that I wanted to go to school, because they thought like, Man, this kid completely fucked it up. And so they were excited that I was excited. And so I I went I went to school for screenwriting, I went to then I went to get my masters for filming up filmmaking because you know, writing filmmaker, I wanted to be writer, director. Then I made a movie for my graduate thesis film. And so you know, they said they make a short film, like, I'll fuck off. I'll make I'll make a feature film. I'll raise a bunch of money for it. And we'll go get some actual, like, proper actors. So it did that it had

William Harris 52:32

you did you guys, real actors in that? Yeah, we got like,

Chase Mohseni 52:36

we got some proper we got some proper actors in it. And we got it got bought by a distributor. It got released in New York and LA had a little run, did a couple festivals, you know, the whole thing people talk about, not at the level that you know, you saw Vinnie Chase do back in the day and entourage with Sundance and Khan and all of that, but you know, respectable second time you try to over optimize, and you try to make a new movie. Like any I'm sure any entrepreneur would say they the second time around, you know, all the things you did wrong. And so you're trying to make everything perfect, rather than using that same kind of chutzpah that you had the first time around. And like that naivete, that actually drove momentum. And I had a bunch of opportunities come my way that I said no to because I was an art tour. And you know, I was smarter than everybody. And I very quickly learned, like, you know, people stop offering and they feel like you're an asshole when you act like that. So I had a movie fall apart a few times. And final time, I was like, Dude, fuck this. Now, that whole time, indie filmmaking doesn't pay and I didn't want to do anything that would degrade the fact that I was an art tour. All the things that actually pay you money like directing commercials and writing scripts for people and being you know, writer on TV show. So I worked at a I worked at a fashion company making content for them. And then they asked me like, Hey, so what do we do with this content? A muscle that's that is above my paygrade brother. I'm like, Well, you know, we need to run ads, you know how to run ads out there like we'll pay you more money. That sounds very interesting YouTube, you and I are gonna have a fun weekend. And I essentially did like a crash course in media buying ran some ads for them they were more successful than what they had been having which was kind of impossible for it not to be because the person didn't even watch videos that random the last time they just clicked a few buttons. And this was before I mean, I you I know you go back to the day when this shit was not failure proof. Right? Like you had to be a proper scientist back in the day like

William Harris 54:43

our parties to

Chase Mohseni 54:44

get an ad launch you spent an hour clicking buttons and then you're like, Okay, I have this husk I will now only be duplicating this. And then make sure nothing got unclipped So did that. That was successful, felt like it was time to move on. move to an agency found I didn't love. I didn't love client work for huge, huge clients, we were dealing like multinationals, all Fortune 50 companies, it just moved really slow. And this is like a recurrent theme I'm pretty impatient son of a bitch about this, I want to move really fast. Um, I went to a tech company did did like did marketplace and did all the ads for them and then move to pencil after that. Like the whole pencil story is you know, very serendipitous was that pencil was there for three plus years, we got acquired. And here we are heatmap Matt Dillon really dug what he was doing felt like Sarah was the kind of next frontier for e-commerce, businesses and all businesses online to actually really pump up their efficiency, not that ads aren't the place to do that. But I saw that that was that space was saturated, and kind of the thinking around that had not really evolved so much. And there was still so much blue ocean within CRO and websites that was willing to ready to be untapped. And in having you know, a CEO that you work with that is a domain expert. It's a bit of a cheat code on both for me and my my learning, and then also for our ability to build things that people actually want. So that's how we got here. And in the meantime, I had started a company with some friends called credible s which has gone pretty well. So

William Harris 56:30

like I said, there's what I love about this as your your, your background isn't exactly the path that I think most people would say like, oh, that's the obvious path towards becoming the CMO of a data company heatmap.com or whatever, right? My background isn't very linear either. And most of the people that I talked to have significantly interesting, varied backgrounds that led them to where they are. And so I love that one of the things that you brought up to me in our pre call is just this idea of like, what makes you magical, like, what's your magic? And so you hinted at these, but it's like, what are those? What's that one or two things that is your magic?

Chase Mohseni 57:11

What am I so I for a while, really resented the fact that I spent so much time money on a on a filmmaking. And what I've learned is actually the study of people. And the study of stories. Plus, my being forced to learn data. Because that was one of the writing's on the wall I saw pretty early on in my career was like, okay, all the people that people listen to and calls, know how to read a spreadsheet and know how to control that, that conversation through data, I gotta go learn that. And that is not something that comes naturally to me. So what has become a magical ability is I know the customer story, and I know the data story. And because of my ability to communicate, I can tell that story in a really meaningful way that people will rally behind. And so that has become something magical. And so it's like I always called storytelling through data. The second one is I'm uh, you know, me at this point, I'm pretty gregarious person. And so I'm a was a good connector with an of people. And that has been, that has been hugely impactful. For me, both and just the personal, I love doing it. I love being with people, I love learning new stories, learning from people being able to help them as much as I possibly can. Because I said this to you, I think in our pre call, I'm a big believer in send the elevator back down when you can, even if it's someone who is better than you at something, but maybe you have a leg up in something else, if you can just help them get to where they need to go, like you've done, you've done your part. And I've had I've been the bent, I've been the beneficiary of like two, three different times, this has happened, and had huge kind of fork in the road, like positive outcomes for me. And so for mentors, finding new people and new companies, etc. And so I I really, really, I really, really believe in that. I think the other the other one is because I always have felt like I'm not the smartest person in the room, which is good. I always want to be the least intelligent person in every room that I'm in because that means I'm in a place where I'm strange strive and have to push myself. I'm obsessed you my wife would complain about how much I spend time reading, trying to find new things, new angles, new ways of thinking, forget like different business, like how do I expand my mind so that I'm not locked in the same infrastructure? And the same and the same web that I've created for myself, like what's going to pop me out? I'm reading a book right now by this guy who started Maxim and he's talking about business and like some of the stuff he says just punches you right in the nose. No, like, okay, like I would not have phrased it that way. But like that is exactly what I needed to hear today. Um, so I think those are kind of the three things that I would give you. I didn't give you a TLDR. But I don't do TLDR. So

William Harris 1:00:10

I'm not much I was sorry, either. Yeah,

Chase Mohseni 1:00:13

I would say TLDR at the end, like the TLDR is for the beginning of the explanation, not at the end. This is this is the ABCs of me, baby. Yeah,

William Harris 1:00:23

I'm not much of a TLDR person either. In fact, I can remember, I believe it was my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Hall, we were trying to do something like, you know, she would say put it in a nutshell, like, that was the thing. It's like summaries, okay, put it in a nutshell. And she was like, that's not even remotely close to a nutshell. She was like, you have zero ability to put anything into a nutshell, don't you? And that's when I learned, I used to read the dictionary. And so I learned the word pleonasm. And it became one of my favorite words around that time, which is basically using more words than necessary to describe something. And so it's like, yep, pleonasm we're friends. I love that not much of the TLDR person. Um, I also like talking about so I don't know if you and I even talked about this, but up arrow is a mathematical notation. So there's Knuth, up arrow. When you want numbers that are way bigger than exponents, you use up arrow notation. And so it's just the idea is like, well, how are we approaching business? But also how are we up narrowing our personal lives? Something you told me about that you use to up arrow, your personal life, besides just reading is being passionate about momentum? What do you mean by being passionate about momentum?

Chase Mohseni 1:01:39

So I can feel myself drag. And I can feel what it does to my brain. And I can feel fog kind of coming in. If I don't move fast. And so I There's a saying by John Wooden, which is, be quick, but don't hurry. And so I was joking with you. Before we started the call that I slept through a bunch of alarms, I woke up at eight o'clock. So like, I am absolutely living the opposite of my, my entire, like this entire thing that I'm saying some days you need actually like a little reset. But what I what I tried to do is say like, okay, what can I do today to move with a pace that feels a little scary for me. And different parts of your day do different things for you. So like, for instance, you get up in the morning, I was playing, I get up, usually get up at five, well, I want to get up I want to read I want to write I want to work out, I want to set up the house so that you know by seven when everyone is awake, there's nothing left to be done. And I have kind of like gotten my mind right. At night, everyone goes to sleep, my wife usually passes out like nine. So I have like nine to 11. And I can go pace again. Right? Okay, I'm gonna get everything cleaned, and I'm gonna just kill it that last bit. Is there some little left on a project? Is there something that like, set up the day for the next day? Like, what is that thing that I can do to move fast? Okay, during the day, what are the time blocks that I can do? And there are different things you have kids, it's like, sometimes you have this three hour block, and you're just not gonna get anything done. But what can I do in that to build relationship momentum with them? Right? So I started maybe three months ago, I started buying all these little experiment things that I could do with my son two to three nights a week. Right? Now he's asking me about them. Right? So we now have a relationship momentum. That's exciting. So like, tomorrow, I'm going to take him on a hike. I haven't done that. My mom is that with us all the time. And I just kind of been indoors, you know, mentally, I don't know why. But the idea is, what can you do? I took my wife out to lunch last week, right? So you know, you haven't been at night we fall asleep. And then on the weekends, we're doing stuff with the kids, we haven't spent enough time together. And it shouldn't just be, hey, we're going out for Valentine's Day or our anniversary or my birthday. And let's just go do something silly, right? Let's go, Oh, you want to go shopping? I'll walk around with you. And I'll go to the office, hold your clothes at the dressing room and go fuck. So like momentum doesn't have to be just, hey, work, how do I move really quickly? It is in my life? How do I make sure that I build enough inertia that like we're just moving across everything, and I can feel when I'm not doing a good job of it. And so that's why I try to keep myself moving. I always ask them you know, this is kind of like the word I say over and over to myself as pace. I just keep saying pace pace. What's your pace? What's your pace? What's your pace? And I find myself when I'm not pushing myself on that. I just let things slip. Mainly myself, to be honest with you, like you kind of have to do the other things. But I think like, if you're trying to up arrow yourself across the entire gamut, you're almost never gonna let business slip like almost never. You're just it's kind of it's always in your face. You're always going to be trying to be intense about work and delivering for your team for yourself and for the business. yada yada. Yep, what you like slip is. So the relationship with your kids relationship with your wife, your relationship with yourself. Right? Forget friends and siblings and parents outside of that. And I think, at the end, like business is awesome. But you don't, you don't take it with you. And like, you know, I was thinking my, my grandfather was a very well respected attorney in in Iran. And when he was passing away, I was sitting by his bedtime as a hey, man, like, you know, you have all these books that you've written and this kind of stuff that's in Iran, like, it's, you know, your legacy is secure. And he's like, I don't give a shit about any of that. Like, you guys are all here. That's the legacy. Right? Like, everyone is here, I'm dying, and everyone is hanging out, like, you know, my brother, no one showed up at his thing except me. Right, he had four other siblings, by the way, outside of my grandfather. And so I think there's, you have to just recalibrate a lot. And like, I want to win, I want to win big I want to do all the things that everyone talks about writes about everything that we revere, in business 100% tattooed on my heart, but there's a deeper tattoo down there, which is my family is actually my business, I might like, my life is my business. And I got to take care of that. The problem is because it's so deep and embedded, you take care of the one that's outside a little bit more. And so that's the thing that I think I if I said, What do I struggle with, is, I want to keep momentum, I want to keep pace, but I want to keep it across kind of both matrix, the entire matrix of my life, and figure out how to do that. But I don't believe like anyone who talks about, I don't wanna pause after this, but anyone who talks about balance, and all of this, I don't think that exists, I think your life is an ocean, and the waves fall, and like they rise and crest, you know, they crest and then they fall, it's like an undulating ocean, some days, you have a little bit more time, take advantage of it, don't be an asshole, and like, try to get more shit done. If you have a moment. Go spend it somewhere that's valuable outside of that, because there'll be a day where you got to work till 1am. What are you going to do then? Right? Oh, man, I wish I had made the time to do that. And so that's something I have to force myself to do, or like, put in my calendar, we're going to do this, etc. So like that. That's how I think about momentum. In general. For practical, people are trying to do that, like if you're trying to get learning momentum. So you can uplevel your business, just set time on your calendar every day that you're going to spend time reading, get an app, what's this app I have on my phone, this app called mater where you can put newsletters in, and it will, it will turn it into like a podcast for you. And the voices are actually pretty good. So if you want to read something, but you don't have time, but you're walking, or you can do something like that, and you can listen, audio, do that you can find ways to do it. But you have to essentially try to fit your these things into your life, rather than trying to fit your life into these things, if that makes sense as a framework.

William Harris 1:07:59

Makes complete sense. Um, you know, those oxygen masks that they'll have deployed in, in an airplane, yeah, you know, going down or whatever. And they always tell you, you know, put it on yours first, then put it on your child or something like that. And there's something in us and for some reason, that feels selfish. But when you actually think about what's necessary, if you don't put yours on, you're likely going to just pass out. So now you can't put theirs on, and they can't reach it. And so, like what was more selfish, was you not doing what needed to happen in the order that it needed to happen, because now they're, they're not, they don't have you, right. And I think about that, oftentimes, with what you were just saying to of writing those different waves, getting that time to recharge when that time is afforded to you. So that way, you can hit it hard when you need to hit it hard. In the idea of fitting things in, it reminds me a lot about EOS framework. And I don't know if you're familiar with EOS traction. But there's this the analogy of rocks and pebbles and sand and water. And if you take this vase, and you try to put the sand in first, and then the pebbles and then the rocks, it won't fit. It'll be too much. You can't get those those rocks in there. If you put the rocks in first, then the pebbles fill in those gaps. And the sand fills in those gaps and the water fills in Yeah, you can fit everything in there. And I think that's a beautiful way of looking at exactly what you're talking about. If a relationship with your kids is important. Your relationship with your wife is important. Put those in his rock, set those times up. This is date night, this is time for warehouse to hang out for whatever this might be. And then you can allow business to be able to fit into the space between there but you've said this is important and has to happen. For me for them for us for just balance in the world. So yeah, man. Spot on. Spot on. Chase. This has been absolutely a fantastic conversation. I don't want to end it here but I have to admit here if people wanted to work with you or get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to reach out? Or stay in touch?

Chase Mohseni 1:10:07

You can email me pretty easy to find our hearth name is easy to remember. So you can do chase@heatmap.com My twitter is @iamchasemohseni I think my LinkedIn is Chase Mohseni I'm sure you'll put it in, in the show notes. If you DM me, I always respond. Don't try to sell me anything. Just Just say you want to chat and always down to help where I can. But yeah, like you said, incredible conversation made me think about some things I haven't thought about in a while. So thank you for making me put put words to some things that were inside, my friend. I really appreciate it.

William Harris 1:10:45

Same thing Chase really appreciate you being here sharing your knowledge sharing your wisdom and time with us. Thank you everyone for tuning in. Have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:10:56

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

‍