Matt Van Swol is the Head of Subscription Growth at Wyze, a smart home technology company. He has held multiple roles at the company, including Creative Marketing Manager and Senior Growth Manager. Before Wyze, Matt was a Nuclear Scientist for the US Department of Energy, where he worked on classified and unclassified projects at the Savannah River National Laboratory. He was also a photographer and marketer for big-name companies, including Apple, United Airlines, and Hyatt Hotels.

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

• [2:44] How to generate revenue growth by listening to the customer
• [7:28] Examples of offerings that unlocked millions of dollars in revenue growth for Wyze
• [15:12] Strategies for capturing precise customer feedback
• [22:08] Evaluating and applying customer feedback to product innovation
• [27:46] Why you shouldn’t implement all customer feedback
• [31:56] How to grow your subscription business
• [35:57] Matt Van Swol’s opinion on AI’s rapid boom
• [45:26] Matt talks about his go-getter attitude
• [49:54] Why Matt was rejected from medical school three times
• [59:05] The aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Asheville, North Carolina
• [1:04:17] How to support businesses impacted by the hurricane
• [1:08:36] What is the future of solar energy?

In this episode…

Subscription-based businesses rely on consistent customer engagement and feedback to scale, yet many companies over-complicate their subscription models by integrating the latest market trends rather than what the customers want. How can you create a consistent customer feedback flywheel to build your subscriptions and generate multiple figures in revenue?

Customer-focused and versatile professional Matt Van Swol has generated nearly nine figures in revenue for a home technology brand by listening to the customers. He initiates open-ended post-purchase and cancellation surveys to generate honest feedback that influences future subscription models. However, Matt emphasizes evaluating feedback thoroughly before integrating it into subscription models to ensure alignment with business goals and customer engagement levels. Consistent and transparent communication through email or SMS is crucial in building high-performing subscription models.

In the latest episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris welcomes Matt Van Swol, the Head of Subscription Growth at Wyze, to talk about integrating customer feedback into subscriptions. Matt shares how to leverage AI intentionally, how to craft offerings tailored to the customer, and the impact of Hurricane Helene on local businesses.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• William Harris on LinkedIn
• Elumynt
• Matt Van Swol on LinkedIn | X
• Wyze
• Businesses impacted by Hurricane Helene
• Families impacted by Hurricane Helene

Quotable Moments

• "If you ask your customers what they want, they will tell you."
• "Build the things people want to buy and build the things people get excited about buying."
• "Most people understand this innately, but they don't talk to the customer like that through an email or through any marketing."
• "Growth hacking is not a bad thing. It's only bad if it's the only thing you do."
• "You're not just willy-nilly canceling ADT."

Action Steps

1. Implement an unlimited subscription plan: This strategy satisfies customers' desire for simplicity and value, reducing subscription fatigue and encouraging loyalty.
2. Create a customer feedback forum: An open platform for ranking feature requests taps into the collective voice of your customer base, driving relevant product development.
3. Use post-cancellation surveys: Understanding why customers leave helps tailor solutions to retain them, preserving revenue and enhancing service offerings.
4. Avoid over-hyping AI: Focus on AI solutions with practical use cases that address genuine customer problems, avoiding unnecessary complexity and sustaining customer trust.
5. Diversify your energy sources: Consider integrating various energy forms, like solar and nuclear, for a balanced and efficient approach.

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  0:00  

Music. 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. Hey everyone.

William Harris  0:16  

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. 100 Million and beyond, as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Joining me today is Matt Van Swol. Matt is the head of subscription growth at Wyze. He was formerly a nuclear scientist for the Department of Energy and a photographer for Apple. He is married to Erin Durham, a documentary filmmaker and a dad of three kids, as you tell by his hat, Matt is passionate about marketing, science and tech, and by his own admission, will easily talk your ear off about unique ways to save money on random stuff. Matt, I'm excited to have you here.

Matt Van Swol  0:53

Man, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

William Harris  0:56

I was thinking about how we got to know each other, and it really started on Twitter, which I will forever call Twitter. I know it's X, but now

Matt Van Swol  1:02

never stick for me. Yeah, no,

William Harris  1:06  

but the thing that really connected us was was more recently, and we've engaged on each other's stuff over time. But there is the some really interesting coverage over the Robovan, or the Robovan, and how that was being covered on Twitter. And like some people were saying such native things like this is some of the most incredible stuff. Like, in one week we had that, we had, you know, Tesla grabbing little chopstick hands for this Robin, for this rocket, incredible stuff. And there was some negative press about it. And you're just like, how can we how can we be so sad about innovation taking place right now and about

Matt Van Swol  1:37  

such cool products, yeah, like, it's like, you don't really see people launching really cool hardware as much as you used to, you know, and it's like, why be such a Debbie Downer when someone's doing something interesting in the hardware space, you know, like, we need to make engineering way more, you know, attractive to people going into school these days. So, yeah, just bum me out. But yeah, Robovan is awesome. I can't wait for it,

William Harris  2:00  

yeah. How would you pronounce it? I do want to announce our sponsor before we do, we're chatting about how Matt's insatiable appetite for customer feedback unlocked almost nine figures in growth here. But like I said, I want to announce our sponsor before we jump right into that. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing 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 ipoed recently. You can learn more on our website Elumynt.com which is spelled E, l, u, m, y, N, t.com. Okay, now unlocking nine figures of growth by listening to your customers. Wait, what? How?

Matt Van Swol  2:44  

You know, it just kind of builds the flywheel on itself. Everyone, you know, I think, over complicates any subscription that they're building. You know, some you kind of get just stuck in the weeds when you're building something. And, you know, you see other people building stuff that's cool, and you're like, Ooh, maybe I should copy what they're building and add a little bit of flair into something I saw in the AI space, into my thing. And it's like, no, no. Like, what you really need to do is go ask your customers what they want, right? If you ask your customers what they want, they will tell you they're very vocal. They're paying for it, right? So Wyze, you know, I started out in the hardware marketing space, which I still have a love for. Maybe I'll still do that one day, but I knew that eventually I would never be able to do hardware marketing again, like SaaS was taking over, and I knew, like, I had to very quickly transition into software marketing if I was going to have a job in the future. So sure. So my boss tapped me. He was like, hey, we need someone on the on the we call it the services team at Wyze. And I was like, ah, tell how to do it. It's not as fun, you know, because I love, like, taking, you know, I was a photographer, so I took photos, you know, created, like, unique videos and stuff. You can't do that with SaaS. You have to be a lot more creative, do animations and stuff like that. So I was like, Oh, I don't know if I want to do this, but I, you know, want to have a job in the future. So I better learn how. So I went over to the team, and, you know, I realized that we were kind of stuck in like, what I would call like a growth hacking mindset, which is, you take a look at every little piece of the customer interaction with the product, and you think, what can I do to move this like, one millimeter forward, to get them to convert just a little bit more like, can we add like, a new photo Here, or a new graphic here, to like, you know, speak more. And I think there's a place for that. Like, growth hacking is not a bad thing. It's only bad if it's the only thing you do, right? So I came in and I was like, Guys, look, we really need to start launching some new features. You know. I. And thankfully, Wyze has like, a very cool thing called our our Wyze forum. And in that forum, I don't know who built this is before my time, but it's been there for at least five years, where they rank the things they want Wyze to do. And I would encourage, like every company to build one of these. It's very cool. Yeah, like a red things, yeah. So you just go on, you create account with your watch account, and you can go on and anyone can say anything. It's kind of moderated by the users themselves. And you can go and say, like, look, I really wish we had this feature, or this product, or you do this particular thing with your business, and then everyone gets to vote on whether they think this is important or not. And so what we have is, like a perfectly ranked list of, like, all of the things customers have been asking for, and some of them are hardware. You know, we've been asked by customers to launch a dash cam for years. I don't know why, but you know, they've asked for us, so hopefully we'll build one in the future. But in that list is all the software stuff. And I was like, let's start here, and let's start building these things. So I have this flywheel I always talk about during presentations. When anyone at leadership, at Wyze asked me to do a presentation, I start with the flywheel. And you're like, oh, what's your marketing strategy for the services team? And, like, it's extremely simple. It's listen to customers, ask what they want, tell them you built it. Repeat. And just do that over and over and over again. And eventually you'll have a lot of revenue because you're building things people want. The tricky part is the pricing and how you want to tier those. But if you just do that, you will have a very successful SaaS business, for sure, and that's how we did it, Wyze. And, you know, it's different for Wyze, because we have both hardware and software, and you can't have the software without the hardware. So there's some nuance there. As far as, like, what are the things that you can build that affect the entire ecosystem as a whole, versus, like, you know, can I build this one little feature for this one particular camera? So you kind of have to pick and choose the winners on that but, but that's essentially how we did it at Wyze.

William Harris  7:17  

So give me some examples. What are some things that customers asked for that you were like, Okay, great. We're going to go ahead and do this, and this is going to unlock millions of dollars.

Matt Van Swol  7:28  

Yeah. So the biggest one for us was the unlimited plan, so if you could see it in the forum. So Wyze, before I came on, had a very easy time projecting revenue for services, because we only had a subscription where you would attach one subscription product to one camera. And we even had tiered subscription products. So you know, one was, let's just say, 499, a month, and it came with a professional agent that would watch your camera, 24/7, whereas the cheaper one would be like, no professional agent, but it's got cool AI features, right? And you can choose to, like, attach those things to your camera. But if you went and looked through the data of like, what, what the number of cameras people were attaching two subscriptions. It was always one or two cameras that were attached. Regardless of how many they had. They could have 100 but if you looked the average was like one or two. And so if you talk to customers, you're like, Well, why are you doing this? Are your other cameras not as important? And some of them are like, No, we just want to attach this subscription to the most important camera, because we hate buying more than one subscription. And I always say, like, if there's anything you want to ask someone, like, what do you hate? Like, more than subscriptions? They will say two subscriptions, right? So, so looking at the data, we're like, oh, okay, so people just hate multiple subscriptions. But I wonder if we just said unlimited and had them pay one larger fee for unlimited cameras. You know, a lot of people do this. They did this with data with like T Mobile back in the day, if they would pay, it was essentially five times as much. So we had a $1.99 cent a month plan, and then we priced unlimited at $10 right? Which would be the equivalent of having five cameras. I will tell you, like zero people were paying for five subscriptions. Yeah, like no one. But when we launched the unlimited plan, we had hundreds of 1000s of people sign up to that plan within a couple of months, right? And now it's our fastest scoring plan by a lot, right? Because we what we want is people to have a lot of cameras. That's what we want. We want you to dive deep into the ecosystem, put a camera in your kid's room, on the front door, on a floodlight, go crazy. We don't want to penalize you with subscriptions for loving us, right? So, so this was, like, one of the biggest ones that we did. We've done a couple other really cool ones. Facial recognition was a big one. And touch

William Harris  10:08  

on this before you jump on facial recognition. Yeah, there's a couple of things that I like about this one. Like you said, You don't ever want to penalize your customers for using your product. Do you want them to use as much of your product as possible? You that's where they find the most value out of it. And so you're like, Great, how do I make sure that you get as much value as possible out of this? That's good. The other thing that I like about this is it reminds me of, let's just say, upgrading to a meal at McDonald's or whatever, right? Like, you go back to when they first started this. And I don't know the story there, but there's probably a good story there that exists in some marketing textbook somewhere. But it's like, okay, you try to get somebody to say, hey, what fries with that? And it's like, okay, that helps. Well, do you also want to drink and say, well, now I'm getting three things instead of one thing. You can say, well, or you could get the meal, not just one thing. I'm just getting one thing at McDonald's. And I like that subtlety there

Matt Van Swol  10:56  

the meal. Yeah, totally. That's a really good analogy. Yeah, I'm a sucker for McDonald's, by the way.

William Harris  11:08

Yeah, so the first time, I have to tell people that, the first time, when you and I met face to face on the camera here, your wife had brought you, I think, I don't know if it was Wendy's or something, but she had brought it, and he's like, You had us sitting there for like the next 10 minutes. As we finish the break, I can just see you just salivating.

Matt Van Swol  11:26  

Like, yeah, that's great, yeah, we could get into my terrible eating habits later. It was actually like an outbreak at McDonald's. But anyways, yeah,

William Harris  11:36  

where were we talking about? Oh, facial AI. Was the Yeah? Facial recognition? Oh

Matt Van Swol  11:40  

yeah, yeah, facial recognition, I think, is the goat of camp. One of the goats of camera features. The reason being, most, let's just take ring, for example, like the very popular doorbell camera, ring will tell you, like, there's a person at your door. We will too. And you're like, okay, cool. And then it might give you a bit more information, like, ah, person with packages at the door. And you're like, oh, that's probably a delivery guy, you know. And you can kind of piece together based on the AI detections, like, what's going on at the door. But the chasm between person with package at the door and what could be going on is very large, right? So for facial recognition, the difference between generic person detected and my wife detected at the door, huge chasm, right? And what we also implemented at Wyze is unknown person. So you can have a catalog or a library of all of the people that ever come to your front door and you say, that's this person, that's this person. You name them all right? So when an unknown person shows up at the door, you know it's no one that you have tagged before, right? And now you're like, Ooh, okay, I might need to get off the Zoom call and see who's at the door, right? Because a lot of people have like, the same mailman come to the door, right? So I just like, name them, like mailman UPS guy, right? You can name like anyone that comes to your door. So I really think that getting and one of the beauties of that feature, too, that people might think is cool, is it requires effort on the customer part, so you have to go in and name all of the people that show up at your door you've done that work. So the likelihood that you're just gonna, like, unsubscribe and let all that work that you've done go is very low, right? So any feature that I can get a customer to put some skin in the game for some effort so that they know, like, if I let this lapse, like, all that effort I've put in is gone, is a really neat trick, I guess, to keeping, like, a customer subscribed.

William Harris  13:55  

But it's also true in so many things, right? Like, like, that's why magicians have you involved in whatever the trick that they're doing. That's why Betty Crocker, like, made us that way you had to add eggs and oil to the cake, so that way you're still baking it. Like this is a thing that we know about human nature, like you need to be involved. And when you are involved, you feel ownership over the success of that. 100% Yeah, 100%

Matt Van Swol  14:17  

so, you know, facial recognition is one of my favorite features. We're not quite there yet. On the 100% accuracy of it, I've got two boys, and sometimes they look real similar, and sometimes, you know, attacks one isn't the other, but we're getting there, but, but, yeah, that was one that customers really wanted, and we delivered on. So,

William Harris  14:37  

so this is, like, that's two really good things that customers have asked you for that. You were like, Yeah, let's go ahead and do this. So let me start digging a little bit deeper, then into the the nuts and bolts of this flywheel that you've said, which I really liked the way you illustrated it. And if I remember correctly what you said, it's basically ask customers what they want, build what they want. Tell them you built what they want. So it's like, okay, that's very simple in concept. Um. Yes, you've got the forum which is helping. But what are other ways, like other tools that you're using to be able to capture this feedback outside of the forum, to be able to make sure that you're getting the right feedback from the right customers?

Matt Van Swol  15:12  

Yeah, so we do post cancelation surveys for almost everyone who cancels. I think we also do post purchase surveys, which tell you a lot about why a customer chose a subscription at point of sale or not, which I we use no commerce.

William Harris  15:31

Just had Jeremiah on during a week or two ago. Yes, oh, no

Matt Van Swol  15:35  

way. Yeah. I love Jeremiah. He's He's fantastic. But so we use no commerce in that. I love digging through that, but people tell you all sorts of things, and you can really dig into those and find out, like where you need to fine tune things. AI for Wyze, is like a tricky fine tuning. You don't want to send people too many notifications, but you certainly don't want to miss one so, you know, you don't, you don't ever, you kind of want to air on the side of too many, like, person notifications, accidental ones, even, versus like, you know, none, right? Yeah. So, so we kind of get, you know, feedback in that, in that realm where we kind of tune certain things, or we see that things are, like, completely breaking down somewhere, and we have to have like, an emergency meeting to fix them. But post cancelation surveys are extremely helpful. That's one of my favorite things. Just to go in and look

William Harris  16:31  

Jeremiah Prummer and I talked about a lot of the post purchase survey stuff, but we didn't talk about post cancelation stuff. That's not something that came up. So what are some examples of good questions that you can ask people that's beyond just like, Hey, why are you canceling? And it's like, that's the obvious. But do you do you leave it open ended? Are there certain questions that you're intentionally making sure that you get feedback on? Yeah,

Matt Van Swol  16:52  

so, so for post purchase surveys, I write them myself, and one of the things I really want to dig in to people like, dig in on the questions are, one, obviously, is just, why did you leave? And I leave that pretty open ended, but I also, like, we actually do it inside the app, so you can get pretty immediate feedback. If you have an app, if you just do, like, a ABCD, like a multiple choice, like, why did you leave? And I I change up them every couple of months. But one of the ones I want to figure out is, are people leaving due to quality issues, or are they leaving due to upgrading or downgrading a plan, or a much scarier one is, are they leaving us entirely for another company, right? So you can kind of dig in, because a lot of people cancel just subscriptions because they dislike the company in general, like they're having a hardware problem, not that they're having like a service problem. And that's kind of tricky to tease out, so you kind of have to ask people, is it a camera problem? Customers don't understand. Like, when you're asking them, like, is this a camera problem? They're like, Yeah, of course it's a camera problem. But it's like, is it like, you know, is it like a hardware Do you dislike the hardware, or do you dislike the actual service, subscription service, you're paying for? So you kind of have to ask nuanced questions. Like, is person detection not working. Are your videos not being stored to the cloud? Like, those are subscription problems, versus, like, you know, is the live stream? You know, taking a while to load is a common complaint. It's like, oh, maybe that's actually a Wi Fi issue, you know, not necessarily a camera issue. And then you can kind of send them down a path. So one of my favorite things to do is based on the response that someone gets. I've even, I've got one in there as, like, too expensive, right? And I will send you right down a cancelation flow path of, like, totally get it. Here's a coupon for the next six months that can make it easier on you. Or here's a way, if you are a monthly subscriber, it's a lot more expensive. I'll send you down annual path that's a lot cheaper over time. Or even, look, you were paying a lot of money for this subscription. You probably didn't need all that, like, you only have two cameras. Like, maybe you only need one subscription instead the unlimited subscription. So I'll send everyone down like these different pathways, depending upon how they answer those cancelation flows, and they have really good success at converting people back to a subscription or just improving customer sentiment, one of the two. So I love

William Harris  19:36  

that. Yeah, one of the things that I've noticed in cancelations for other SaaS, because I actually cut my teeth on SaaS before I even got into DTC. So I'm right there with you on that, yeah. And one of the things that I remember being an issue is sometimes like pausing subscriptions, because, for whatever reason, there was a need to pause the subscription. Maybe this could be where they're like, Well, I. Only needed these six months out of the year, because the other six month of the year I'm not running my business. Oh, well, okay, got it? No, that makes sense. Yeah, you don't want to pay for this during that time. Or they need to pause because some kind of, like, financial hardship happened, and they're just like, look, I love the service. I don't want to cancel. I just need to cancel until I find a new job. Okay, got it, yeah, that makes sense. Let's just pause your subscription. Or let's do something to bridge that gap so you don't leave entirely and you can come right back and make it easy to come back. And so I think that that that exit survey is one of the most important things that any company can get, because it's one thing I hear from the people who just bought they're the most excited. The other thing that people who are leaving and why? Yeah,

Matt Van Swol  20:37

that's right. And for security subscriptions, specifically, if somebody's leaving a security subscription is a good chance that they have, like, a serious issue, like, because you're not just like, willy nilly canceling ADT, you know, like, so yeah, it usually is like, they're making a big decision to move on from you, or they're in a serious financial situation of some kind, right? Or they found a serious flaw in whatever you're trying to sell them. Now, a lot of times, you know, people will just, like, randomly pick, like, a subscription and be like, yeah, just, you know, go for it, like, when they're setting up their camera, that totally happens. In fact, that's the vast majority of our churn is people are like, get really excited. They sign up. They're like, I don't, you know, don't really want this. Don't really need this. Don't really use the camera. And they leave. And that's totally fine, you know, I'll try to get you back at some other point. I'll try to sell you some more cameras, see if we can get you deeper into the ecosystem. But it's helpful to have those cancelation flows, so you know the type of person you're dealing with, yeah, and you know, so I think that's good.

William Harris  21:47  

So okay, what outside of forums, post purchase surveys, exit surveys, what are some of the other things, cancelation surveys? What are some of the other tools or tips that you have for people that are trying to gather up enough feedback of qualified feedback to to optimize around

Matt Van Swol  22:08  

qualified feedback. I mean, one of my favorites is crazy, but, like, one of my favorite things to do is I'll see someone cancel a subscription, and I'll email them myself. And I have done this a couple of times. I've even put my personal email out in the Wyze forum once, because there was, like, a ton of issues going on with our subscriptions around the time I started and I was like, Look, I know there's a lot of problems, and I know we need to fix them quickly. And so here's my personal email, and that's probably a bad move, because I did get a lot of emails, but we did, it did cause me to move faster because I was getting inundated with emails. But I think, you know, personally talking to customers, personally calling customers, like, on a zoom call like so at Wyze, we often do like, $50 Amazon gift cards if you'll talk with, you know, someone from Wyze, especially around, like, if I read something interesting that you wrote in your post cancelation flow, for example, I'll offer you 50 bucks to come and get on a zoom call and talk about it. Because I either, like, don't understand, or I think you've hit on something really important. Because, you know, not, not everyone is, I don't have every single Wyze product that exists. Personally, I don't have them all. There's too many. And I don't have every single camera that exists either. So there could be, like, very specific things that are occurring that I want a customer's feedback on, and you just go and talk to them, but I mean, the vast majority of people are pretty reasonable people, and they're canceling just because, you know, they don't have the money, or they just don't think it's worth it, right? And then it's up to you to say, Okay, what features can we launch to make it worth it for you, right? And so you can talk to them, and based on the cancelation, you can figure out, should I build this feature? Right? You can go, rank it, put in the form and rank it output features like, you know, for example, we're working on baby mode right now, which is, like, highly anticipated. And one of those came from, like, just interviewing a customer. He was like, Yo, it would be super great if I could just turn my phone off and listen to the audio. But I was like, Yeah, that's actually a good point. I wish I could do that too, so I can just listen to the baby cry, you know, instead of, like, having to leave my phone, like, I'll just screen on all night, you know, like, I can't sleep, it's like, yeah, so, so we're working on that one too, and that came from, really an idea with the user, yeah, it's awesome. So there's

William Harris  24:37  

a lot of ideas, and you've got some good ideas coming from a lot of different sources. How do you weed through to make sure that the ones you're acting on are the right ones? And the reason, and I want to preface this by saying you could end up in like the what is Henry Ford scenario, where it's like people could be asking for a faster horse, but what they really wanted was an automobile type thing, right? So even if they rank this higher in the forum, how do you guys as a team? You. Evaluate if this is the right next feature to launch or not,

Matt Van Swol  25:04  

good question. So I think this will go back to AI eventually. But for us, I always look at how big is the target audience for the feature that has been requested. So let's say baby, notice, an example, parents are a really big audience for Wyze, right? So I know that if I launch a feature targeted at parents, is going to get is going to be well received, right? And I will have a large pool of people at which I can target to say, look, we've launched this feature. Then, after we've looked at Target, like, how big is the demographic of people who want this? It is, will that demographic pay for this? Because you can work all day long on a feature that no one will pay for. We have at Wyze, we tried to launch, you know, a subscription, like I said, where, you know, essentially, you had, like a 24/7 professional agent looking at your camera all the time. And people thought that was creepy, and we didn't really anticipate it. We kind of just thought this is a very helpful feature. It's like having your own security guard. Why wouldn't people want this? And, you know, we kind of forgot that most of our customers just kind of have cameras anywhere, you know, and it's like they think that it's kind of creepy to have a camera, like, you know, we're trying to convince people to, like, put them in your house, put them everywhere. People are, like, not gonna do that if there's somebody watching. And so, you know, it's stuff like that when we work really hard on that, you know, like making sure we got the correct security protocols in place and all of that, we're charging extra for the feature, and people just didn't want it, you know, and they told us they didn't want it, we built it anyways. So that's the kind of thinking we don't want to have at Wyze, but Right? The question is, like, you know, how big is the target audience? And will that target audience pay for the feature pairs of baby mode? 100% that's a that's a slam dunk, you know,

William Harris  27:14  

um, is there, is there a cautionary tale where you listened to the wrong advice? So, like, that one may have, I don't know if that one was it maybe even two, because maybe that came from somebody. Somebody was like, Hey, you guys should do this. And you're like, Yeah, that's great idea. But if that wasn't, uh, coming from a customer, if that one was internal, is there any examples where you can think of where you listen to the customer? It rose up really high in the forums. It seemed like it had the right idea. And you don't even have to show the idea if you don't want but is there, is there an idea that you could think idea that you could think of where you're like, Yeah, this one's

Matt Van Swol  27:44  

backfired. So I don't think we've that's a the one I mentioned before was a good one. We have, like, started work on a few of them, and then kind of thought better of it. There are a ton of ideas in the forum that I know people really want that it is very unlikely we will ever do. Gosh, they're probably gonna get pissed at me one time to share them if you don't want no. So it's kind of goes back to like, you know, the revenue idea, like the feature can be fantastic. It can be also, you know, available, and people want it really badly to a wide audience of people. But if it doesn't make money, then you shouldn't launch it, you know, especially if it's going to, like, lose you money. So a great example of this for Wyze is people have been begging us to launch a home kit camera, an Apple home kit camera. Now I love Apple home kit I think is super cool. I've tried it a couple of times, but if we launched an Apple home kit camera, we would lose the only thing keeping the business alive, which is our subscription revenue, right? So the question then becomes, how much, if we were to implement like a home kit camera, we would have to charge an extraordinary amount for it to make up for the loss of subscription revenue. So, you know, it's like you can have these sorts of discussions where, you know, this is a great idea, it goes to a large swath of people, but when you actually implement it, and it turns out that, you know, they wanted a $35 home kit camera, and you launched a $150 home kit camera, it wasn't the thing they actually wanted. They wanted the Wyze cam for $35 that worked this way. And it's like, I don't think we can do that so. And there's, like, a myriad of those that exist, or very niche, like smart home ideas like connect to Samsung smart things, for example. It's like, Yeah, but like, doing that doesn't boost us in revenue in any way, you know, like, and I would hate to attack. It to a subscription and make you pay for it, you know. So I think there are just like kind of a balance you need to take to implementing features and listening to customers. I think most people get it, you know,

William Harris  30:12  

well, and this is important for them. And what I love that you just shared this idea, because I feel like it doesn't get talked about enough if you are going to launch this, even though it's maybe what a lot of people want, like you said they want the $35 Wyze camera with the home kit. They don't want $150 one like I like this, where, if you launch this though some other product, and it ends up causing you to lose revenue. So let's say you did still do it for $35 Sure, the issue is that they lose. They don't gain a benefit. They lose all the other benefits. Because as a company, you're just gonna sync and you go out. And so all the other features that they have that they love, they lose. And so if customers understand that there's this balance where you're like, I can launch that. I can give you that for six months before we go bankrupt, and then you don't have any of this stuff. You know, which do you prefer? 100%

Matt Van Swol  31:04  

Yeah, 100% then they

William Harris  31:05  

would decide with you on that, yeah, you're right. Let's, let's not launch that feature. I'd rather have things you can't have

Matt Van Swol  31:10

this internal, you know, job with the customer, you know, it'd be great. Yeah? They'd be like, oh, yeah, I totally get it now. And sometimes we do, you, you know, sometimes we do have, like, those sorts of discussions, but yeah, that's exactly right. Instead on,

William Harris  31:26  

yeah, what? What other things have you found to be in the subscription business side of things, especially with what you guys are doing, there to be incredibly helpful for growth in general. You know, let's just say, like, this doesn't have to be necessarily how you're approaching subscriptions, but if you are going to share out your viral tweet on D to C Twitter about, you know, how to grow subscription business, what would what else are we not talking about? The like, oh, you know, we should also talk about this. Yes.

Matt Van Swol  31:56  

So I have a extremely strong stance on the cadence of subscriptions. So I think, I yeah, I think most subscription cancelations have to do with either one product or just two money. And I think the money part is not often talked about. And so, you know, like, I write viral tweets, I write viral emails. That's like, what I do for the subscription side, for Wyze. And the most viral one I've ever written was just a letter to the customer talking about how badly inflation sucks. And it was just like a heartfelt letter from me saying, like, inflation sucks right now. You know you are paying a monthly bill of x. I emailed all the monthly people and said, This is your monthly bill today. If you switch it to an annual plan, and I know it costs more right now you will save I'm going to send this one out tomorrow. Actually, you will save 30 bucks. Go spend that 30 bucks on anything, but a Wyze subscription doesn't matter what it is, but please go spend it. This is just a PSA from me to you, and that one crushed it the app. I mean, we made a lot of money. But, I mean, that's just, I feel like most people understand this innate, like, innately, but they just don't talk to the customer like that through an email or through any like marketing. But most people are just really concerned about money. You know, I'm no different, like we said in the intro, like, I'll talk your ear off about, like, you know, charging my Tesla at the angles while I run to the gym across the street. Yeah, I save like 20 cents on charging. But like, you know, I think monthly subscriptions are great to get people in the door, especially when it's like a free trial offer. But once you start charging them monthly, I think they hate you. Like I really think they hate you very. Few people hate their Costco subscription. Costco subscriptions are all annual. There's zero monthly Costco subscriptions, right? So I do everything I possibly can to move people off monthly as fast as humanly possible, because I do think that that, you know, them seeing that Bill show up in, you know, their bank account every month makes them hate you right, versus and I think, you know, just in general, people hate subscriptions. So if you can make it seem less like a subscription more, that's a good thing, you know. So just billing them, you know, I've even thought about launching a five year subscription, right? So it only bills you once every five years or two years, something where it's like, I bought this and now I have it, and I don't need to think about it, because people hate thinking about it, you know, they don't want to look through their bank account and think, oh, what subscription do I need to cancel now? Yeah, like, what? What streaming service do I want to cancel this month and then sign up for Disney plus the next month? Like, people hate that, like it takes up so much brain space, so I try to eliminate that as much as possible.

William Harris  35:13  

It works for domain names. I've got some domain names that are registered, like, 10 year deals or whatever, right? Because he was like, Oh, I'm gonna use this one day smart. That's even make it seem like that's a good thing. It's like, oh, because it's been registered for so long, this is why this is good for you. And you're like, Yeah, I don't know, but I don't want to think about it, right? You're just like, I don't know. I don't want it to expire. I don't want to just, yeah, put me on the 10 year plan, and so I can see where there's some value in that for a lot of things.

Matt Van Swol  35:38

Yeah, yeah.

William Harris  35:42  

What about, I think? What about AI? You told me before about how you think the usefulness of AI has gotten, I don't know, out of hand in the way people are talking about using it lately, products, brands, etc.

Matt Van Swol  35:57

Yeah, it bothers me so much. We just had a meeting about that this last night. Yeah, I just think that. You know, I'm from North Carolina, so I'm not in the tech bubble, right? I'm completely outside the tech bubble. I live up in the mountains of North Carolina. All of my neighbors have, like, tractors and trucks like, that's, that's the area I live in. If you talk to those people, zero of them are excited about AI. No one, no one in middle America seems stoked about AI. But as soon as I hop on a plane and I get over to Seattle or I go to LA it's just like, everyone's so excited, and you're like, but why? And this, this kind of goes back to my point of, like, build the things people want to buy and build the things people get excited about buying. I have, you know, yet to see someone from my neighborhood go out and spend their hard earned money on an AI product, like the ones I'm seeing come out like a generative AI product, right? No one I know in my immediate area spends money for chat, GPT, and, you know, they just don't. That's fine. So, you know, I and it's even more apparent when it comes to security, because people are very take security very personally. If you start adding AI into this mix of security, people start getting freaked out. They start getting a little weird. So you need to make sure that you know whatever AI tool you're building it. It's extremely specific to solve a very specific problem that cannot be solved any other way. So, like Weisz, we're working on a few AI tools that I think are going to be great, but we worked on some, you know, really dumb ones in the past. You know that I think are just like blowing money because AI is not cheap. Like to develop it and to implement it is extraordinarily expensive, and I feel like a lot of people step over the like list of what people want to go build the AI thing nobody wants, and they just end up alienating their customer base, because they all live in a bubble, and everyone's really excited about this one thing and that that is my like, I feel like I have to hammer this home all the time, and I'm sure people, Wyze will be upset for me saying it, but I've said it over and over and over, like, just build the things people want. Don't get caught up in the like, AI excitement. And if you're going to build an AI tool, make sure it fits those category of like, does this apply to a wide audience, and would they pay for it? Right? I think the would they pay for it? Question people just, like, kind of skip over that one. When it comes to AI, they're like, Yeah, this will work for everybody. But it's like, are they going to pay extra for that? Like, extra because it costs more to do your AI thing? It's not like you developed a feature and, you know, it's just out there now, and it doesn't actually cost you reoccurring revenue, because it does, like any AI feature that's running through a model is going to cost you, like, continuously. It's like the company itself has signed up for a subscription that it's selling to customers, right? So it's not like a one and done thing. So I think, like, you have to be very cautious if you're going to be building something that's going to charge you in perpetuity as a company. So anyways, that's just my hot take. It's

William Harris  39:33  

Wyze words. No, I love it. And I think the thing that I like about Apple positioned it well. I think everybody loves to hate on Apple, and it's easy to hate on, you know, a company's favorite example, but the idea of AI for the rest of us, or, you know, Festivus for the rest of us kind of thing. But the idea behind that is, it really was like, how do we just make this more simple? So it's just, here's the things you want to do, oh, you want to do this. Well, we just do that. And they kind of touched on it being AI, because you'd have to touch. Done it. That is the marketing term that matters a little bit. But it was less about the AI. It was more about just like, here you could do these things, you know. Okay, great. The use case problem, yeah, the use cases, yes,

Matt Van Swol  40:10  

is the use cases. It always is the use cases. Like the, I'll tell you a little story so it's not about AI, but we were getting so many complaints from our customers that our notifications were stupid, like that the Notifications we were sending them was like, you know, it would say, like, complete motion capture, and then below it would be, like, you know, some weird like, time stamp and like, it just wasn't making any sense. So I was like, let's just overhaul the notifications to be like normal notifications, like person detected the first line on the front door at this time, second line, we'll just redo it. So I took all the subscribers and I, you know, I went through like, every notification they could possibly receive from all of our devices, and just rewrote all the notifications they received. And I sent them an email and saying, Look, we, you know, we redid all your notifications because they sucked. And it was one of the biggest subscription sign up days we've ever had. And it wasn't even a subscription product, you know, it was just, you know, like, Oh, they're working on something. They're listening to me. Here it goes, right, but yeah, back to your point. I do. I do think Apple did AI well, because they're focused mainly on the use cases, and someone like Google is focused mostly on the AI part. Like, even during the Olympics, I think Google got blow back from launching a commercial where the dad was like, right? He was like, writing a letter to the Olympian, and he asked, you know, Google, Gemini to do it, and people like, Yo, that's not cool. Like this. If this is a personal letter coming from your daughter, you should, you know, have it come from your daughter? And I think you know, the use cases that Google and other people are like imagining are just not real. Like they're not something people will pay for, so or they just find it creepy. I'm with

William Harris  42:05  

you. I can't think of anybody else that I know that actually has a subscription to any generative AI tools outside of like my bubble of marketers and all of us. And you know, I've got so many subscriptions to a lot of different ones, done, testing them all out, using them all out, using them all in as many ways as I possibly can, to make sure that we stay on the cutting edge of what's going on there. But I will say one of the there are two good use cases that I have for this that I'll share, that I like for people that are listening. One, Google Gemini, Gmail is my favorite inbox, and so Google Gemini is genuinely helpful in your inbox as well as Google Sheets and some other things. But on the inbox, the one that I found, if you're a parent like me, I have one in high school, one in middle school and one in Lower School, and the amount of emails that you get from your those schools is absolutely insane. So I can just ask Gemini, I'm just like, can you look through this emails from blank, blank, blank.com, and let me know over the last seven days let me know if there's anything important that I need to do or anything that I need to make sure. And it genuinely it summarizes it pretty well. I still might miss a few things, but it's a lot better than reading 30 emails. That's one. Yeah, that's

Matt Van Swol  43:12  

a good one.

William Harris  43:13

The other one that I've been enjoying is chatgpt is remarkably helpful for tutoring. Let's say I love math. And there are some times, though, when I'm busy, or I've got, you know, dinner with a client or whatever's going on. And so I can't help, necessarily, my daughter with math that night. She can ask chat GPT. And the thing that I like about is it's not just going to tell her how to solve it, it will, but it's going to teach her how and why, etc. And so, you know, she could be like, Hey, I don't understand this problem in my textbook. Take a picture of it, and it will, it will walk her through, and it's like, oh, that's this, and here's how you saw this. And then she could go, Okay, I got the right answer, but I'm not sure why I got the right answer. Like, what am I doing right? And so it's like, it can re explain it in different ways. And so it's genuinely like, like, having a very good tutor that can be patient and walk you through that problem from five different approaches with, you know, illustrations. It's it's really helpful. I want a family plan. I'm like, chat GPT. Please come out with a family plan so I can have everybody

Matt Van Swol  44:15  

on this. That's great. Yeah, I will say, one of the things I use chat GPT for, specifically, is when I'm writing a tweet as too long, I will tell chat GPT to shorten it, and then I'll get, like, some ideas of like, okay, how do I make this? You know, the same tweet be a lot shorter, which is nice.

William Harris  44:35

This is a good time for me to call out too, that this entire episode is not actually real. It's all AI generated. Matt's not here. I'm not here. I just coming at you alive. I'm just kidding. Um, but I do want to get to know the very real human being. Matt Van Swol, a little bit more, um, because this is one of my favorite parts that we dig into, like who you are, and one of the things you and I were talking about. Uh, a little bit before are, let's just say quirks. Are things that make us unique, and one of the things that makes you unique, and let's say especially gifted at what you do, is you, you do have, I mentioned insatiable appetite. You do have, let's say, more or less an insatiable appetite towards whatever it is that you decide you're going to dig into that leads to some very good things, at least some some challenging things, but take me through a little bit more of like your insatiable app that,

Matt Van Swol  45:26

yeah? So you could also just redefine that as addictive personality. Yes.

William Harris  45:30

I figured I thought you say that for me say that. Okay, okay, yeah. Fair

Matt Van Swol  45:33  

enough, yeah. So, yeah. I think a lot of just go getters in general, like people who are doers have this, you know, energy where they find something they really love, and they're just go down that rabbit hole until they, like, come back up on the other side with something to show for it. You know, I don't think I'm any different in that respect. So, you know, for for me, it kind of changes all the time. So in some of the ways that's good, it's, you know, for example, like trying to figure out what things people will pay for subscriptions, it'll be, you know, I get really into lifting weights, and it's like, run down the rabbit hole. Of like, Okay, do I do creatine? How much protein should I do? You run down that rabbit hole and then you fail. You forget about it in hurricane hits, or, you

William Harris  46:26  

know, we're gonna talk about that, that's a precursor to something we're gonna talk about.

Matt Van Swol  46:32  

Or it's, how do you like? I think failure, like, over and over, failure is just like a very strong motivator. So, like, I wrote a tweet, it flopped. Let me go find other people's tweets that have done well. Why are they doing well? How can I copy the cadence that with which they're writing? How do you take something mundane and make it interesting? I think these are all like, just in general, like great marketing tips is like, how do you find something mundane and make it like, whoa, that's essentially Twitter in a nutshell. But you know, for one of the bad ways that works out is, you know, I'm an alcoholic. So you know, for drinking, I can't touch this stuff, you know, but I will drink Diet Cokes all day long. You know, you replace, like, one bad habit with a good habit. For me, that's milkshakes. So I have like, a milkshake every single night. I used to have a beer every single night. Now I have a milkshake every single night. Mischeck is my personal favorite. But yeah, so, you know, I definitely have addicted personality. You know, you can kind of see it through my weird career path, you know, going from like, you know, I guess we could talk about this now, but like, you know, I dropped out of medical school. Did? I was a nuclear scientist. I was a photographer. Before that, I valued cars. You know, I've been through the works of the of the career path, for sure, but there's always, like, something interesting to like, run down and you come out on the other side of like, oh, okay, this is, you know, makes me a more well rounded person and can understand, you know, other people better. But I guess we can. You wanna hop into my back story? Or no? Yeah? Well, I

William Harris  48:18

mean, it is a good transition into that. I think the thing that I like about that is, to your point, I would even say that it makes you more empathetic towards a lot of different customers that you have. So that way, when you're looking through the feedback that you have, you can look at it from a lot of different perspectives. Because you're like, Well, I've dug into a lot of these different areas and vastly different things, and come at it with a lot of different perspectives. And so I don't know somebody who maybe shares some similarities there. My ADHD definitely makes it that way for me, where it's like, I will run down a lot of very interesting rabbit trails. And there are things where I'm like, I am all in on this, until I'm not, and then once I'm not, I'm just not right? So it's allowed me to learn a lot of different things, which I think is I don't know it's a superpower in and of itself, as long as you learn to see the good part of that. And I would say maybe, if I was going to share anything more heartfelt there, it would be to those who feel that way as well. Don't beat yourself up too much about it either, because that is, it can be used for so many good things as well, if that makes sense. And you can spiral out of control in a downward spell very easily, if you allow yourself to feel defeated every time that you really do move on to something new. And that's okay,

Matt Van Swol  49:31

totally, okay, yeah, yeah, I've quit so many things, yeah, so many things that I knew were, were, you know, not right for me. So, yeah, totally, you know, I, I took the MCAT four times. So I, you know, and I was rejected for medical school three times. So I totally get it.

William Harris  49:51  

Okay, so backstory, like you said, All right, let's dig into some of this.

Matt Van Swol  49:54  

Yeah, so I guess I could, um, I grew up in rural South Carolina. Very poor. One of the worst educated parts of the whole country is where I grew up. So I was homeschooled, and that allowed me to do all sorts of cool things. One of them was go to a technical college at a really young age. So I was going to like a small technical college at 15. So I ended up getting a welding degree while I was at the Technical College, which was fun. So I always tell my wife, like, you know, if everything goes to crap, yeah, go out and become a welder one day. You know, though I haven't done it in like a decade. But anyway, so I went through that whole process. Went to college, a very intent my my dad's a doctor, and all of my siblings look like they're going down the doctor path, or are doctors. So I was very convinced, like the doctor path is for me. And one of the funny things I think about now is like one of the reasons for that was, you know, I lived in a very poor town, so the only people that were crushing it were doctors. Those were the only ones I knew. So for me, it was like, you know, the only way to question in life is to become a doctor. So I was hell bent on, like, Doctor, is it right? But I think the awkward part is that, you know, I never really considered, you know, am I actually going to be good at this, or is this something I want to do. But anyway, so I went through college, got a biology degree and a chemistry degree, and was like, Yo, I'm just gonna head right into medical school. And, like I said, I took the MCAT. I did do awesome. I got pretty almost immediately rejected for medical school. And I was like, Oh no, what am I gonna do now? Like, that was the plan, right? There was no plan other than that. So I was living in a house with nine other guides. Is like 1100 square feet of valet and cars. I remember my dad. My dad still had access to my bank account at this time, and he he like, pulled me aside once, like, later on in life, and he was like, I remember looking at your bank account and thinking, How in the hell is he making it? I don't even know. I, like, bought this like, giant bag of rice. It was, like a 30 pound bag of rice. And I had had this like little pieces of chicken. I would essentially, like, just make rice and chicken, and that's how I made it, yeah. But anyways, so I was like, I have no idea what I'm going to do. So I sent out my resume to everyone, like, literally everyone is like, indeed.com or something, just like, in the hopes I could get something back. And I waited for months, and I never did, and then I got this email from the department of energy that was like, we'd love to have you interview for this nuclear scientist position. And I deleted it immediately. I was like, Yeah, this is a fraud. Yeah, right. Can't be real. And then thankfully, they they had my phone number, I guess I put it on my application, they called me and left a voicemail, and they're like, Yo, we actually really like you to come interview for this. So I was like, Okay, I guess I'm gonna go do that. So, so I went down there, I interviewed. Turns out they're looking for someone with, like, a background in metallurgy and, like, I just said, like, I kind of had one, like, I did welding, and I had a chemistry degree, and they thought that was cool. So I got the job, which was really surprising, and ended up working as a nuclear science, associate nuclear scientist for the Department of Energy at the Savannah River site for almost four years. I did a lot of nuclear waste stuff. I got a Q clearance. That's like the top secret clearance for the Department of Energy. My work was focused on, like, nuclear waste and stuff, but I did do some weapon stuff, which was fun. When I left, they were, like, the only places you can't go are China and Russia. It's like, cool. What's the plan in all the anyways. But so I did that for a while, and then I, like, I said, I was taking the MCAT during like this time period and still not getting into medical school. But eventually I got into one of the medical master's programs that was essentially just like you get through the program and you're shooting to medical school. So I left the savannah Riverside after getting that that program, and I started there, started working there, and during that time I had done a lot of photography work. I had started like, this big Instagram account, which is so funny, because I'm not on Instagram anymore, but I saw this big Instagram account where I was doing landscape photography. This will come in later in the story, but essentially, I was at a master's program in medical school, and I hated it. I hated it so much with a passion. And I should have known this going in, right? But I was like, you know, I was like, I was doing okay, but I was like, I cannot. Like, I went and shadowed every doctor at the hospital, like as many like, you know. Emergency Room, vascular surgeons, oncologists, you know, all of them. And you know, none of them seem that happy to me. And that that was just like, kind of this turning point where it's like, you know, why are these guys, like, not like, they're making a lot of money, and they'll tell you they are making a lot of money, they don't really seem that happy. And that was, like, a real big turning point for me, because I was already unhappy and I knew, like, okay, and some of these guys will even tell you, like, don't go into my field and you're like, Whoa. What? That's a crazy thing to say. So at this at this time, I was sitting in anatomy class, and I got an email on my computer from someone at Apple that said, hey, look, we saw one of your photos that you shot on your iPhone. We'd love to sponsor you. And I was like, Okay, I'm doing this. And I dropped out of that, that program, the MediCal program, and during that time period, I kind of met my wife, and I was like, Hey, we're just gonna do this thing. So transition,

William Harris  56:07  

yeah, I'm dropping out of med school to become an Instagram, you don't even know, influencer, and

Matt Van Swol  56:12

go off with this girl that you know I met, like, a couple of months ago. It was insane, yeah, so that's crazy and rightfully so well deserved. But it worked out. Yeah, so my wife and I essentially started a company where, you know, she was a documentary filmmaker, I was a photographer, and we did marketing campaigns. And that's where I kind of got into, like, the whole marketing side of things. I was like, this is really cool. So I really started out on the content creation side, and then, you know, we did a lot of travel photography or work for United. We had contracted the United and with Hyatt Hotels would go around and travel to them, shoot like, you know, they would open up a new hotel, or, you know, open up, you know, a new airway, going to new location. We film it, you know, photograph it, all of that, and submit the content. Is super fun. And then COVID hit, and there was no travel photography to be done, right? So, so my wife ended up getting this really fantastic contract with discovery. Plus during that time period where they were doing, like, design rebuild shows, which were like, basically the only shows you could shoot during COVID, because they were like, you know, it's an empty house. They're just rebuilding it. And she was like, Well, I'm going to leave our company to go do this. And I was like, Well, I guess I should find something else to do. So I applied to Wyze and got it. And started out as a, you know, just launching products, you know. So I'd shoot the photos and, like, write the scripts, you know, and do all that stuff, and then, like, I said, like, I transitioned into the services side, and that's what I'm doing now. So your

William Harris  57:47  

story is the epitome of one of my favorite Bible verses. I hope that's okay if I share a Bible verse. Yeah, totally. Um, Proverbs, 16 nine, which basically says, in a man's heart, he plans his paths, but the Lord directs his steps. It's like you had like, this planning. I'm going here, I'm going here, I'm going here. It's like, oh the God, just directing your steps through all these random different things that lead you to where you start

Matt Van Swol  58:08  

to, yeah, that's totally accurate.

William Harris  58:13  

I wanted to, there's so much there, but I'm going to leave that be, because there's one other thing that I want to make sure that we really get to, which is, let's say you some of the stuff that you're talking about with nuclear science. You this morning saw some nuclear waste. I think was this morning that the tweet went out. Maybe

Matt Van Swol  58:35  

it was, yeah, nuclear waste is slowing down to me, yeah, because

William Harris  58:39  

you are okay, you're you're right there in the heart of Asheville, North Carolina, and everything that just took place there. And I want to call out some of the attention of some of the things, because you, you were doing well on Twitter before your stuff is absolutely blowing up now, because you're calling out a lot of what's happening down there, I think that is not being covered well enough by a lot of the mainstream media. And so, what, like, what is the actual situation like, what's going on there?

Matt Van Swol  59:05  

So terrible. I, you know, I wasn't, you know, I mean, you can see my Twitter. I left Twitter for like, seven months, you know, I was like, I got other things to do. But, you know, Helene hit, you know, I live in western North Carolina, and Helene hit, and it was like a bomb went off, like, right where we live. And, you know, for a while there's a lot of media attention, like, everyone is here, Biden was here, like, Trump was here, everybody was here. And then, you know, the election kind of like, took over the news cycle. And I was like, Yeah, I kind of get it, you know. But then it was just like, crickets, you know, for a while, and you will have, like, these guys that are just like, the only thing they're doing, they've, like, left their jobs, and the only thing they're doing are, like, driving mobile homes in because people have no homes, like, all day. Like, that's all they're doing. And you're like. Like, why is this not getting a lot more news coverage than a ship? Like, I was driving my son. This is a great like, segue, but like, driving my son to school this morning, and, you know, the highways are kind of clogged because all of the roads that people normally take to places are washed out. So like, this one main highway is just super clocked. So I was like, I'm just gonna go, like, a different route. So we went down a route close to the river, and just like, on either side are buildings where, like, I used to go eat, like, I think I posted this on Twitter, but like, had my first date, like, a park that I used to, like, walk my kids at, and it is unrecognizable. Like the buildings have caved in completely. You know, there's like, I think one of the most shocking parts is like, you're driving by, and there's like, these trees that are now, like, dead because they've had so much water just rushing by them, but they're still standing and at the very top of the tree will be like a bike, you know, or like a sheet from somebody's bed. And it's that way for miles, like, miles and miles and miles. And it's like, I couldn't get a ladder tall enough to get that out of the tree, and that's where the water was, you know. And you're just looking at this, and you're like, how long is this going to take to clean up, you know, like, years, like, years and years and years. And then you'll just keep on driving, and all of a sudden you'll see, like, people in tents, just like, you know, down by the river is 39 degrees this morning, they're in a tent. It's, it's cold, you know. And then, you know, I was like, I said, like, I was not political before this, and I had to get political because it was so infuriating to see, just like, you know, people in these tents, and we're sending money overseas, and you're like, Yo, this doesn't make a lot of sense. Like, just doesn't make a lot of sense. So I think, I think that's probably, you know, why I got so vocal on on Twitter, is, you know, I was just getting really upset, you know, just seeing, like so many people having to endure so much hardship for no reason, like there's a FEMA camp, like an encampment for the FEMA workers, like, 10 miles that way, and they've got, like, over 50 of these trailers, just kind of like sitting there, you know, and it's like, Hey, I drove by someone today that probably could use one of those, and they've been sitting there for like, two and a half weeks. You're like, can we get, you know, like, can we get these to people? You know, I met up with a guy. His name is Sean Hendrix. He's been, like, driving RVs down for people single handedly, just handing out, like, homes. And he's handed out, like, 22 RVs to people who have lost their homes. Is like, how is that dude doing more than this? You know, multi billion dollar agency, because you either have an agency that's doing something, or you just don't have the agency. Like, it should be that simple, yeah,

William Harris  1:02:56  

if I remember Prickly, you said that he had, like, brought down 12 before, if he would deliver their first one. This is for something like that, yeah, which is

Matt Van Swol  1:03:03  

wild, you know, that's insanity. So it's like, you know, I don't even know where to start with with that one, but, yeah, what I've what I've seen, is like, more citizens doing things for citizens than government doing things for citizens.

William Harris  1:03:21

So why I wanted to bring this up here today? Because I wasn't even sure if we were gonna still record this today. And you're like, No, we gotta do this. And so I'm glad that we did, because I want to make sure that people have something that they can do. One I want them to realize the situation down there, that it is as grave as anything that anybody has seen, like it's, that's what it is right now, like, it is still an absolute mess. And two that there are things that they can do to help. And one of the things that you tweeted out that I was like, this is a very easy way for people to get involved in help, which was, you posted a tweet, and I'll link to it, of a bunch of local businesses that are still able to take orders, maybe they're, you know, online, or things like that. And so it's like, Look, if you're not down there, you can't do anything, or maybe you don't have homes, you can deliver down there. You can support these businesses who are just barely trying to survive. I'll share that tweet.

Matt Van Swol  1:04:17  

Yeah, that'd be great. Thank you for doing that. Yeah? So like, foot traffic, you know, Asheville is a city where it's basically almost entirely dependent upon tourism. And obviously nobody's coming like, you know, I totally get it. Like it just went through like, a horrific period. The city's trying to bring people back into people like, Yo, it looks terrible. Totally get it, you know. So foot traffic is down like 95% the downtown area, tourism is down like 90% across, like the whole area. So you're having these stores that have, like nobody in them, their workers have lost their homes, right? They they're just leaving like, you know? And I'm very concerned that the city itself will become a ghost. Town after the winter is over, because fall, summer, fall area is like the boom time, and then winter is like the drought. It's like the boom time never happened, and the drought is now here. So, so yeah, please do share that tweet. That would be great. But you know, when you're thinking about buying Christmas presents, you know, we totally buy them from Amazon. I'm a second for that too, but there are local businesses that could use that money too. So that would be, that'd be super great. But, yeah, things are, things are rough, you know, I think the biggest part is, you know, there's just no clean water yet in the city of in city of Asheville, which is, you know, mind boggling, like I was reading, I'll probably tweet this out later today, but I was reading that they finally got the chlorine of the water down to under eight parts per million. So if you don't know, like, a swimming pool is like 1.5 parts per million, the maximum, like legal safety limit for like drinkable water, is three. So, you know, they finally, like, got it under eight. So it was above eight before that. So it's just like, yeah, like, this is gonna take a while. And, you know, they have this thing where they come on the radio and just talking about, like, you know, when are we gonna have clean water? And the city was like, I think mid December. And everyone was like, whoa. And then the Army Corps of Engineers gets on and was like, I don't think it's going to be December. I think it's going to take longer than than December. Feel like 2025 like no clean water. And what people don't understand about that is clean water is how you cook and it's how you clean. So if you own a restaurant you're not open right now, like in the city of Asheville, so 100% of the restaurants that rely on the city's water, which is a lot of people those those restaurants are closed, or they're paying out the wazoo for a tanker truck to come and fill up. You know, just sit outside their business and, you know, fill it up with water. And that's not going to work forever, because it's about to get really cold. So, you know, it's not going to be practical to have these things outside. So anyways, that's a very long tangent, but all that to say, Yes, please, you know, and if you do want to come, you know, we'd love to have you. God, do we need it? Yeah, so like, my wife and I have decided to not take any vacations out of the, like, WNC area. We'll just, like, go to Airbnbs. They're local, or hotels, they're local, and kind of do, like a staycation here, just to keep the money, you know, in the city.

William Harris  1:07:36  

So I don't know how to help with the water situation. They're smarter people than me working on that, but I want to bring awareness to it, if I can. And I want to at least make sure that in some way, again, encourage people like go check out the list. Except it will be in the show notes, the list of the businesses that you can buy from, if you're not down there and you're just all spread out all over. But try to support them in some way would be awesome. I don't want to end on that note, though, because there's things that you and I have talked about that I want to I want to bring this back up just a little bit, even though that's important that I don't want to make light of that at all. No, no, totally. But you were a tech geek, and so we talked about passions in your technique, and you were talking about solar energy research, and kind of where solar energy is going take me through, let's just say, All right, we get through all the craziness of what's going on now we're looking to the bright future and where the future is going with solar. What's the bright future here with solar?

Matt Van Swol  1:08:36  

Well, I think everyone in the city of Asheville will have solar panels and Tesla batteries. By the time this is nowhere, I've, I've spent an ungodly amount of money on on batteries and and solar panels, like, in the past month or so. But, yeah, so, I mean, I just, I kind of geek out. That's how I'm yeah, I've got, like, a giant battery down here. I've just decided to, like, just power this whole little system here with a solar panel that's outside in a battery. Anyone can do that. If you're just like, how do I get started in solar? I don't want to spend like 20 grand. It's like, yeah, just, just buy a little battery and put like a 200 watt panel outside. You can pretty much tower anything like a computer or something. So

William Harris  1:09:16  

DIY setup, or just go buy a kit or super

Matt Van Swol  1:09:19  

DIY is it running through the window? Dude, like, here's the cord is running right out the window.

William Harris  1:09:25  

I don't know if anybody can go do that. Then, Matt, you might need to provide some kind of direction. This was very

Matt Van Swol  1:09:30  

simple. It's like a cord that runs from the solar panel to the batteries, just a really long cord. But, yeah, I mean, you'll lose some efficiency, right? What Gage is that? Yeah, I have no idea. It's

William Harris  1:09:44  

not biggest cord you can get.

Matt Van Swol  1:09:47  

No, not quite, but yeah, so I do plan on, like, building a ground solar array in the backyard at some point I'm like, a really big one, because it require you, you have to get a. Permit to put it on your house, which sucks, obviously, government sucks. So avoid that and just put it on the ground. And you can just, you know, you can put it on your driveway if you want. It doesn't matter, but if you put on your house, the government gets involved. So, so I'm going to build, like, this giant solar array in the backyard, and then have a hook up to, I love eco flow, by the way, not affiliated with that brand in any way, but they are so good at just plug and play batteries and solar panels and stuff like that. But yeah,

William Harris  1:10:31  

you can say, you said you could do ground arrays. Like, what about, like, a carport? I mean, like, it's not on the ground, but like, that could work too, right? So it's like, your whole driveway there. You can still use your driveway, though, yeah,

Matt Van Swol  1:10:44  

totally, you do that. I've seen people like, I got a friend at Wyze who puts his he's got, like, a balcony at his apartment, and they sell like, you know, balcony mounted solar panels. You can just like, you know, hang them out the balcony, which is cool. So you do that too. So, yeah.

William Harris  1:11:01  

So why solar? Um, you know, you were in nuclear a little bit, so you've seen some of the nuclear scientists. So, okay, so, yeah, take me through where, what's the future of energy, then, in general? Well, the

Matt Van Swol  1:11:13  

reason nuclear is not as, you know, proliferated, as it has been, is it's just really over regulated. Like, in fact, like, one of, like, the core tenants of the Department of Energy is, like, we make our money by holding the keys to the nuclear stuff. You wouldn't think, like government agency, like, oh, their core tenant is to make money totally. Is, like, that is their core tent. Like, how do we keep the revenue flowing to us. And so, you know, they basically hold the keys to all of the nuclear stuff. So if you want to go build any nuclear reactor, you got to come through the Department of Energy. And, you know, there's just a ton of very unnecessary regulation and people involved in that sort of process. So I hope that goes away. Not all of it, of course, but like, you know, quite a bit of it, because I do think nuclear, like you cannot talk about clean energy and not talk about nuclear. Otherwise you're not going to have it. There's too much energy that needs to be produced, especially with AI totally. And I think Microsoft is even building like their own nuclear reactor. So yeah,

William Harris  1:12:19  

in Google as well, right? Like a few of them have basically committed to building, gonna

Matt Van Swol  1:12:22  

have to, yeah, gonna have to. The biggest part is what to do with the waste. And that was obviously, like, what I spent a lot of my career working on is, like, the solutions are terrible. Like, literally, the solution I worked on was put it in the ground. That was, like, the solution, you know, and what you would end up having are these football field sized tanks with nuclear waste from the 70s and 60s, and it was just in a stainless steel tank, you know, like cybertruck stainless steel tank, and it had eaten through the Tank and was leaking out. And they're like, Oh, what do we do? And they're like, uh, I don't know. Maybe we should put some chemicals in it to, like, try to neutralize it. So to need more holes in the gym, they're like, so that's what I worked on at the Department of Energy. Was like, how do we neutralize this some more? And it's like, that's actually not solving the problem. So they're like, but those tanks exist, like in Hanford National Lab in Washington and in South Carolina. But, I mean, if someone can come up with a better way to get rid of the was, like, we almost had Yucca Mountain, where it's basically, you know, it's a very cool process where you essentially turn nuclear liquid into glass. It's called Glass. And you, you put it in this stainless steel container, you put it in water for, I don't know, a couple years for it to, like, you know, fizzle off the material, and then you store it long term. I mean, you have to bury it at this point, like, unless there's another solution, you have to just bury it somewhere in a mountain where no one will ever find it and try to get to it. So that's, like the big problem. Like nuclear energy is fantastic, it's what do you do with the byproducts that people are like, I don't know. So I hope a lot more work is done on that. But solar is it is like magic like that. You can just take something that comes in the mail and just stick it outside in the sun, and all of a sudden your laptop is being powered. It feels magical, you know? And it's like, why is this not happening more and, you know, solar used to be a lot more expensive than it is now, you know, it's dramatically dropped in price I get. I try to tell people this as often as I can, but like, you can buy enough solar panels used. Used solar panels used to power your house for the cost of an iPhone. Really,

William Harris  1:14:53

I didn't even know used solar panels were a thing. I thought they kind of like up. They've used up their life. They're done. Yeah. No,

Matt Van Swol  1:15:00

So you can buy used solar panels that have like 80 85% of their efficiency left, which is quite a bit at like 80% the cost, sure you know you get, yeah, so like, the 200 watt panel I have outside was $42 Wow. And, that's powering the whole system here. So you can imagine just buying like 20 of those, you know, and building an array, and all of a sudden you've got, like, backup power for your house, at least for the essentials. For where do we buy these? What do you mean? I bought mine from a place called sand tan solar. That's okay, I bought mine, but

William Harris  1:15:38  

just look online.

Matt Van Swol  1:15:41  

Yeah. But yeah, it's, it's, it's crazy. You can, you can totally build, like, a solar array. And, you know, it's, it's obviously nice to, like, you know, not spend a lot of money on electricity, but like, totally comes in handy if like, the grid comes out, you know, like we were out of power for 16 days when? I think it's more of a question of when, so, but yeah, especially if you live in California, you know, your their grid tends to go out a lot. Even Texas had its grid go out in the cold, you know. So, so it does happen, rare as it may be, but does but yeah, so a huge fan of solar and all things Apple, so I'm sucker there too.

William Harris  1:16:24  

Yeah. Well, you've got me with the All Things Apple too. So I like where you're going with solar. I completely agree with you about nuclear. I think that we're going to see some radical improvement there over the next couple of years, partly because Google, you know, Microsoft, getting into it, like they're just going to find ways that they have to make it it will be imperative for them not to figure out how to make it better and more efficient. I remember my daughter coming home from school one day or whatever. It's like, gas is bad. It's like, well, no, like. And here's the one thing that I wanted to call out that like, this is my take, right? So I'm going to say right now, this is my opinion. I am not a scientist. If you power the entire world with wind power, you will destroy the world. You will disrupt so many like, let's just say like, you know, B patterns, bird patterns, other things like you will, you will destroy the world. If we try to generate all of our power needs through that, same thing is true. If you try to do everything through geothermal, same, like we will implode the world. Same thing is true if you do it all through solar the same thing is true if you do it all of any one particular type outside of probably nuclear. It's the only one that you could probably do it all with nuclear intervention, once we have that down. But for the most part, we need all of the different sources to work together. And so it's like, how do we find the balance of using the right amounts in the right ways and be able to regenerate as much as we possibly can. That's my take on it as a generalization. No, totally.

Matt Van Swol  1:17:44  

That's, that's 100% accurate. And, you know, one of the biggest impediments right now is our electric grid is one way, you know. So, you know, it's basically just like a light switch turned on constantly. You can't ever feed electricity back in, you know, into the grid, which is a huge problem. And people have been talking about for a while, there's nothing new, but, you know, I think if, if we could just, y'all get solar on our roofs, and have, you know, a two way grid, that would be, that would

William Harris  1:18:13  

be lovely. I like where your head's at, Matt, maybe that'll be the next thing that you dive into here. When you you get

Matt Van Swol  1:18:21  

into it. Yeah.

William Harris  1:18:24  

Fun talking to you. I feel like we've heard a lot of really interesting and fun topics, as well as very important ones for growing businesses. If people wanted to work with you or follow you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Matt Van Swol  1:18:35  

Only way is Twitter at the moment. Yeah, that's the only way.

William Harris  1:18:39  

Yeah, what's your handle?

Matt Van Swol  1:18:41  

Just Matt_vanswol

William Harris  1:18:48  

So Matt, I really appreciate you taking your time out of your day to talk to us, share your knowledge, share your wisdom

Matt Van Swol  1:18:53  

with thanks for having me on.

William Harris  1:18:56  

Yeah, yeah. Thank you and everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Hope you have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:19:00  

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.

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