How to Build Viral Content with Emerson Spartz Who Built a 50 Million Pageview Site at Age 12

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's edition of Growth Everywhere where we interview entrepreneurs and bring you business and personal growth tips. Today we have Emerson Spartz of Spartz Media. And Emerson is actually fairly young, born in 1987, New York Times bestselling author and CEO of Chicago-based Spartz Media like I just said. Founder of OMG Facts, and also founded the Harry Potter site MuggleNet at age 12. Also middle school dropout. So Emerson, how are you doing today?

Doing good, man.

Cool, great. So, you know, thanks for being on the show. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your, your obviously very interesting background?

Sure. So when I was 12, I convinced my parents to let me drop out of school and start homeschooling myself. So I had a super non-traditional self-education where I designed and developed my own curriculum. In the beginning, I just built stuff. Built a lot of things, websites. One of them did very well, a site called MuggleNet, which grew to become the number one Harry Potter website. To put that into a little bit of context, because people have very different ideas of what that means, the site was doing about 50 million page views a month. I had to grow up really fast because I was managing a part-paid, part-volunteer team of about 120. And MuggleNet was a collection of different properties. So we had one of the biggest forums online, one of the biggest fan fiction sites, one of the biggest interactive RPGs. We published some books, one of which became a New York Times bestseller. We used to go on tour and live like rock stars. It was pretty wild. We also had the number 1 podcast in the world, not just for Harry Potter, but for all podcasts. I learned a ton through that experience. I learned how to code, how to write, how to edit, how to lead, how to manage, how to design. As far as my curriculum, my parents pretty much stayed out of my way, but they let me study whatever I wanted. One thing they did do though that was really smart was they had me read 4 short biographies of successful people every day. And this just shattered my little 12-year-old brain into about 10,000 pieces. And I started to think really big. And I remember having this epiphany when MuggleNet was doing really well and I was reading all these biographies and I thought to myself, if I can do all this and I'm only 12, imagine what I can do when I'm 17. Of course, it felt like a very old age at the time.

Yeah.

And I decided that I wanted to change the world and I wanted to do it on a massive scale. So I began further immersing myself into the lives of people who had already changed the world to see what patterns I could extract from their experiences. In doing this research, one conclusion I came to very quickly is that people who change the world tend to be extraordinarily influential before they change the world. So I realized that influence and impact were inextricably linked, and the more influence you had, the more impact you could create. So that set in motion for me a lifelong fascination with understanding influence. And there was one particular type of influence that really captured my imagination, which was virality. I thought, if you can make things go viral, that's like the closest that you can get to having a human superpower. You could tip elections, you could overthrow dictators, you could start movements, you could revolutionize entire industries. Fast forwarding a bit, I decided to go to college just for fun. It's a stupid reason to go to college. I got bored really fast, really predictably, and I was going to drop out and start another business. But I had already had enough success with the first one that I wanted to go really big with the next one. I wanted to identify a model that would maximize my probability of getting to a billion by the time I was 30. It's a big number and it's a way to keep score. I wanted to go as broad as possible. I wanted to be able to connect dots and see patterns between different disciplines and industries. So I set a goal of reading one nonfiction book every single day until graduation. Business, politics, psychology, economics, technology, science, but with the heaviest focus being on the human mind, like neuroscience, cognitive psychology, behavioral science, etc. It wasn't just books though. It was going through SEC filings, 10-Ks, research abstracts, textbooks. It was studying thousands of individual companies looking for patterns. Like what do successful companies do differently than unsuccessful companies? It was studying industries, everything from natural gas wholesaling to drywall contracting.

Wow.

But it was actually a 3-part process. There was reading, reviewing, and rehearsing. Because it's not enough to just learn the information. You have to remember it and you have to be able to apply it to get value out of it. As far as being able to remember the information, I spent the first 6 months doing a really deep dive into the neuroscience of learning and memory. Because learning how to learn is literally the most important skill you can possibly develop. It's like the closest that we can get to wishing for more wishes. It provides an exponential return on the time you invest in it. I ended up building out a variety of different spaced repetition schedules where I would review everything that I wanted to remember on a schedule of a day later, A week later, a month later, and then every 6 months in perpetuity. So I have a very, very good memory for certain types of things, not because I have a photographic memory, just because I've reviewed it extensively and I can pull obscure facts out of my ass like you wouldn't believe. And the third part of the process was rehearsal, the idea being you have to practice applying this information to be able to apply it in a situation where it's relevant. So think of like, how do you get your 10,000 hours of practice in? So I organized all the information into frameworks to contextualize it. So I'd have a persuasion framework, a negotiation framework, an innovation framework, etc. Take something like innovation. The way that I would practice innovation is I'd compile a series of acronyms that encapsulated every different type of business model. And then I'd go from— I'd go to Walmart and go from product to product to product on the shelves. I would take every product and apply every model to it to come up with new products. So when you're systematic about innovation like this, it becomes really easy to generate ideas. So take something like dry erase marker. Luxury, long tail, unused capacity, etc. Luxury. Could I just sell a more expensive dry erase marker to sell status to people who have disposable income? Luxury. Could I let people customize their own dry erase markers? So using this, I came up with thousands of billion-dollar ideas and I got really interested in the notion of which of these has the highest probability of becoming a billion-dollar business. So I got really obsessed with this idea of probability of success. So when I started studying virality, it was that combination of thoughts, viral potential and probability of success, that led to my big aha moment, which was the kind of insight that if I was an academic, I would have started publishing papers on. But I'm not an academic. I'm an entrepreneur. So I just started doing it right away and seeing if I could make money off it. So I used Facebook as my first petri dish, developed a series of algorithms designed to get Facebook pages to go viral, created dozens of pages that went from zero to millions of fans over a period of a few hours to a few days. And what I was basically doing was I was testing hundreds of different variables and seeing which variables correlated positively to virality. And then I just kept shortening the viral loop until I could tell within 20 seconds if a page was going to go viral. I was having a blast. These are all network-level insights. Nodes, hubs, things like that. So I was able to take the same ideas from Facebook to Twitter, get millions of followers on Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, websites, apps, worked on every platform, although some platforms are vastly more conducive than other platforms. In any event, started the company about 4 and a half years ago, not really intending it to be a company at all. It was just me using Facebook as this sandbox of experimentation. And then just started hiring people, and then one day we were actually a company. Now, based in Chicago, we're about 45 people. I bootstrapped it for the first 3 years or so, and then I've raised about $10 million since then. What we basically do is take that body of— that foundation of knowledge of virality, and we've been expanding the types of products that we can create and viral challenges that we can solve. Now, we've got a network of websites and apps that generates— we've got a— We're in the ballpark of 20 million monthly users right now.

OK.

The more well-known ones would be like OMG Facts, which is the number one fact site. We've got— what was it— Funny iPhone Autocracks that went super viral a couple of years ago, a variety of meme sites. Our newest one, our fastest growing site ever actually, is a site called Dose. It's dose.com, D-O-S-E dot com. It's just putting out high quality content that has a high probability of going viral. Got it.

So if you had to describe the ultimate mission of Sparse Media, I mean, what would it be?

Cracking the code of virality.

Okay.

That's this underlying theme of everything that we're doing is building out this technology infrastructure. We're a tech company that's masquerading as a media company right now. Like, our ratio of developers to writers is absurdly imbalanced, and the machine that you need to build to be able to create virality systematically is not a trivial undertaking. And there's not very many companies who've been able to accomplish— who've made a lot of progress here. BuzzFeed being obviously the most notable of companies that's been successful with that.

Got it. Okay. So one thing that really sticks out to me, I mean, you're 12 years old and you're managing 120 people. I mean, even right now, you're age— you're 27 right now. And I mean, at age 12, when you're managing 120 people, I mean, what's the reaction you're getting? I mean, how do you go about doing that?

I kept my age a fiercely guarded secret for a long time because I thought that if they knew how young I was, that they wouldn't be interested in working for a kid. And then eventually I just decided that— I decided to come clean about my age and people weren't that surprised. I was younger than everyone expected, but they kind of suspected that I was young and just very mature for my age. But I just had to grow up really, really fast.

Wow. I mean, age 12, I'm only a year older than you. At that time I was playing freaking MMORPGs. I wasn't even— I don't even know how to build a website. Okay, anyway, so—

A lot of free time.

Yeah, in terms of the reading 4 biographies a day, I mean, how did your— that part really sticks out to me too, and I think that's a parenting tip maybe everyone on the show should probably take on at least once in their life. But how do they go about finding 4 biographies for you to read each day? What's the process?

So what happened was my dad, he just printed off thousands and thousands of pages of biographies. And so these were like magazine-length biographies.

Okay.

And then if I was interested in reading more, then I would read a full-length book autobiography or biography. But I got to choose whatever biographies I wanted to read. So in the beginning, I literally only read athlete biographies because I wanted to be the next Michael Jordan at the time or the next Tiger Woods. I went through a phase at some point in my life where I played every sport competitively.

Mm-hmm.

In his wisdom, he realized that the important thing was that I was reading those biographies and then eventually I moved on to other professions and other topics. The value that you get from this, you get to spend— one of my favorite quotes ever is that a man who reads lives 1,000 lives. A man who doesn't lives only one. By getting to walk in the shoes of the most successful people of all time, you start to think more like them. They become your friends in some way and they influence you and your life choices. And that was the primary value that I got out of that experience.

Wow. That's incredible. I mean, because there's this group called Entrepreneurs Organization where pretty much you take from the experience of others, and that's what you're doing. You're taking— 4 biographies a day is just insane. I think I might make my kid read 8 a day when they pop one out. But anyway, so obviously you've grown these different types of businesses. I mean, let's go back to the Harry Potter site, MuggleNet. What's one big struggle you faced while growing that business?

There was a few struggles. First of all, I didn't even consider it to be a business. I didn't even want to make money off it. I just wanted to make the best Harry Potter website in the entire world. Then I got a bill for $200 and even though I was never going to put ads on it because the perfect Harry Potter website could not have ads on it, of course. But $200 when you're that age may as well be like $2 billion. I was like, okay, I'll put up one ad just long enough to pay the server bill. Then the ads started making so much money that I was like, okay, I'll let it— just one ad for one month. That's it.

Yeah.

Not going to end the site. I ended up making about $6,000 off that one ad. I swear I've never felt so wealthy in my entire life as I did when I got that check. But biggest challenges were— one was managing people. It was a huge pain in the ass. It's hard. People— especially because most of the 120, most of them are volunteers. Volunteers, you get a very short shelf life. You get them for up to at most That means you're always hiring new people, always hiring new people. You're always training new people, and you've got to find ways of keeping them motivated, and it's hard. I would do things like I would go and post pictures of football stadiums full of people, and I'd remind them, hey, this is how many people are seeing the work that you're doing every day, so it doesn't feel so lonely. I had to deal with staff issues. I had one member of my team very early on try to perform a mutiny on me, and he failed because no one else backed him. But he still had— he stole the website, and it took me 3 weeks to get it back, and the website was shut down for 3 weeks. Wow. Huge, huge, huge pain in the ass. It almost killed MuggleNet before it even really got going. So many things.

How did you deal with that struggle? I mean, your site's off for 3 weeks. How do you deal with a mutiny like that? Because people don't often talk about things like this, but they do exist.

Yeah. So what happened was, the rest of the staff was on my side, and we tried everything we could think of to persuade him to give the site back. And eventually, we just had to start digging We dug into his background and found some really, really, really dark stuff. That information was what we needed to get the site back.

Wow. Okay. Well, we'll just leave it at that then.

Yes.

Okay, cool. So, in terms— I mean, is MuggleNet the site that you got the 160 million page views per month? Is that the one? Or is that OMG Facts?

The network in total, 160 million.

Got it. Okay, cool. So, what are some, I guess, You've built— we'll call these publishers. What are some big things you learned while scaling these sites to massive amounts of page views?

Learned tons of things. I'm not even sure where to start. In general, when it comes to content, there's two— talking a little bit about virality for a second. There's two different types of virality. There's incentivized virality. I like to call it bribery. There's bribery where if you share this, I'll give you a coupon, I'll give you a discount, I'll give you A one-for-one, etc. And then there's emotional virality, which is where people share it because they feel so much emotion, the right kind of emotion, that they want to share with their friend. If I had to summarize everything I've learned about virality into one key idea, it's that the more incentive you give people to share, the more likely they are to share. Again, you can incentivize them through helping create a lot of emotion or giving them something of value that incentivizes them to go tell their friends. So for most businesses, incentivized virality is way easier than emotional virality. And that's why I recommend more like traditional word-of-mouth marketing programs and things like that are, for most businesses, going to be the most effective way to generate virality. The other kind of emotional virality, you have to create a ton of emotion. Things only go viral when they create a ton of emotion. Because think about it like this. You sit at your computer all day, click, click, click, click, click, article, article, article, picture, picture, photo, photo, video, video, and you almost never share. To get you to share, you're sitting back in your chair, to get you to lean forward and say, I want to go tell everyone in my entire network on Facebook about this, it's got to really, really move you. And that means it has to be remarkable. And most content is boring. If your content doesn't go viral, it's because your content doesn't create enough emotion. And there are some kinds of emotions that are better than other emotions. For example, anger is a very powerful viral emotion because it motivates you to act. Like, I'm angry right now at this injustice in the world, and my way of Helping to solve this problem is to share it with my friends. Bam, click. Anger can obviously backfire for businesses, but it can also get people motivated. In general, though, I should say positive emotions work much better than negative emotions. Humor, nostalgia, cute animals— these are things that create a lot of positive emotion, which you are likely to want to share. Ultimately, identity is at the core of most sharing. So if I share something, it's telling the world a little bit about me and we want to put our image out there. We want to put the best possible image of ourselves into the world. So this is the reason why nobody shares porn. Also, this is why people share New Yorker articles extensively because New Yorker is the serious journalistic, well-represented institution and you seem really smart by sharing a New Yorker article even if you didn't read it.

Yeah.

There's a really interesting study that showed that Only 25% of people who share a New Yorker article actually read the article. But your friend assumes that you read it if you shared it.

Mm-hmm.

So there's that. Current events, you know, a lot of emotion in the atmosphere. So if you can, you know, ride on a current event of any kind, you're much more likely to get virality than if you don't. So these are just a few things that we keep in mind as we're thinking through the content creation process. But another thing that when it comes to like content creation in general, one school of thought that we've always adhered strongly to is this notion of It's really hard to create virality from scratch, and there's a lot of content that already has proven viral potential. And you're much better off emulating the success of things that are already proven to be viral rather than trying to go into a laboratory for 10 years and come up with something that's perfect at the end of it.

Got it. Okay. So you touched upon an interesting point. It's really hard to manufacture virality, which is why there's There's those naysayers that say you can't just make things go viral. What do you say to those people? Because I'm sure you've had to deal with them before. It's like, I know you're cracking the code for virality, but people are just like, you can't do it. You can't do it. What's your response to them?

Well, they're right and they're wrong depending on how extreme they are in their assumptions of that. It's very hard to do with one piece of content to be able to say, yes, this content will go viral. What's easier to do is you can create a system that maximizes the probability of creating virality, and then you can still get a lot of things to go viral even if you get a lot of duds. So our mantra is hit more home runs. So like a home run is something that goes super viral. So you've got the top of the pyramid, you've got hit more home runs is the goal. And then the 2 kind of sub-goals there are to increase your batting average or get more at-bats.

Mm-hmm.

So that means that if you produce 1,000 articles a day and you have a 1% chance for any one of them to go viral, you know, you can— getting 1,000 at-bats a day is a lot different than getting 100 at-bats a day or 1 at-bat a day. Most people just don't get enough at-bats. And then you increase your batting average by increasing the quality of your content.

Right.

And the amount of emotion that you create with respect to that content.

Huh, I like that. You should do like an ebook on that or something. I'd download it. Okay, so, you know, the— in terms of— I mean, you've had these other— you know, there's MuggleNet, there's Sparks Media, and I mean, there's all these different websites you've had. I mean, you know, could you tell me about a point in time where you were just completely on the brink of failure, like any one of your companies?

I mean, I think every company has been through a point where you're pulling money. I mean, every entrepreneur who's ever bootstrapped has been through a point where they're pulling money out of their IRAs and they're looking in couch cushions to make payroll and things like that. This company is no different. I've always been the kind of entrepreneur who puts every penny that I've ever earned right back into the company. So inevitably, when you do that, you don't have a big safety cushion for when things go wrong and you just have to— And this is the reason why The only people who make it as entrepreneurs are people who have enormous self-confidence.

Uh huh.

Because you're gonna go through those rocky periods where you're putting everything on the line and you have to believe in yourself so strongly that even if the odds are tilted against you, that it's still worth the risk. So you have to be almost like a degenerate risk seeker because this game is just impossible to play otherwise. You have to be present to win. You have to keep staying in the game. And you have to be slightly delusional because only people who are slightly delusional would be willing to take that kind of risk. Or people who don't care about money as much and they're willing to just go all in on something that is inspiring to them even if it can kill their personal finances. So I would say that in general, because we didn't really start off as a company, we haven't had as many of those as maybe some companies have.

Uh-oh. Was that me?

I don't know. Sorry about that.

No worries. I think it happens to all of us. Okay, so we left off—

Yes, I was talking about struggles. So let me give you a couple examples of specific rough periods.

Okay.

So we went through a period a couple years ago where we started growing. When you're dealing with virality, you have to be accustomed and willing to deal with extreme volatility in traffic. Because one month you'll have something go nuts and your traffic will be through the roof, and the next month it'll all come crashing down.

Right.

So we went through a period where we had 3— we used to be launching sites more regularly, like independent sites. We had 3 sites in a row that were big hits. Our traffic just skyrocketed. We went from, I think, probably 70 million to 140 million page views over a period of a couple of months.

Wow.

Then we were riding 3 trends that kind of hit at the exact same time, and that traffic just evaporated in the few months that followed it. So I started hiring and having all this traffic not Totally assuming that the traffic would evaporate that quickly. But traffic went from— we were losing like 20, 30 million pages a month. It was rough.

Wow.

And when that kind of thing happens, you gotta really believe in yourself. And you gotta really believe that you're building something that is fundamentally strong on its foundation so that you can deal with the turbulence of viral growth spikes.

Wow. Okay. So, I mean, when you're losing 30 to 40 million pages, did you have to deal with any layoffs or things like that where you're pretty much pulling your hair out every day?

No, but that is where you're most— that's the period of time when you start looking at couch cushions to make payroll because you assume that we're good at this game. We're going to get back on our feet. Just don't overbuild in the periods when you're booming because you don't know when that can get taken— you don't know when that can get ripped away from you and you're going to have to rebuild again from a smaller high.

I hear you on that. I know exactly how that feels.

The best companies do is they build in I love Jim— I forgot— Jim Collins, his metaphor of using oxygen canisters where you assume that there are so many things that can go wrong that you build in— like if you're climbing Everest, that you bring enough extra oxygen canisters with you because you have to plan for more contingencies. That's one thing I think that I've done well enough is that even if maybe during some periods we did grow a little too fast, we didn't bring ourselves below the death line where we ran out of oxygen and died. I think that's one thing that some entrepreneurs do intrinsically well. There's a risk, there's a perfect risk threshold in which you're taking on as much risk as you can stomach to grow, but at the same time not too much risk that you risk actually just dying.

Got it. Okay, that makes perfect sense. I mean, you can call it a cushion, we can call it oxygen canisters, adding more runway, but I think ultimately same concept, and it's really important for entrepreneurs especially watching to understand that. Your backboard right there, can you explain what's going on?

I have no idea what's going on in this.

Oh, I thought it was yours.

That's the tech team.

I was like, something crazy you put together. Okay, so what's one piece of advice you'd give to your— not too far, you're 27. What's one piece of advice you'd give to your 25-year-old self?

I would have raised money earlier. I bootstrapped for longer than I should. I think I wasted like a year not having raised money, but not having enough cash to really be able to take full advantage of the opportunities that were in front of us. As a result, we kind of treaded water for a period of time that we didn't have to. If I would have had the growth capital in earlier, we could have started growing faster.

Okay. That actually brings up an interesting question. When you're pitching the concept of cracking the code of virality to investors, there's got to be— it's It's got to be a little interesting to pitch, so to speak, to put it lightly. Did you experience any struggles when you had to pitch this concept to investors?

Yeah. It's something that everybody's interested in, but the wide degrees of understanding about what that means made it such that I almost had to have different pitches depending on who I was pitching. Because if I'm meeting with the Silicon Valley VCs who understand the space really well, then I can explain it almost as if I was explaining it to my team. But if I'm meeting with a different investor who doesn't really understand the space that well, I've got to just find a completely different way of explaining it.

Got it. Okay, cool. And how much did Spartz end up raising?

We raised about $10 million so far.

Got it. Okay, cool. And that's, I mean, it's, I think, you know, for most people, I mean, you know, When you raise money, it's like rocket fuel. Can you say it's more like rocket fuel? I mean, how else has it helped you guys?

Rocket fuel. I mean, the biggest thing is just hiring. We've been able to hire more good people because of having that cash cushion. We've also been able to experiment more, trying things with testing, using Facebook and paid acquisition, and things that we otherwise didn't have the cash available to be able to go and do.

But the biggest thing has just been hiring.

Okay, cool.

What's one hiring tactic or process or trick or whatever you want to call it that you can share with the audience? Because you've been doing this since you were 12 years old.

So let me think. Hiring trick. Okay, so one thing that has worked out well in hiring so far has been I have a tendency to run for certain types of product positions where they need to be able to think very similar to what I do, because I'm a very heavy product-focused CEO. So I've run all these guys through this gauntlet. They tend to come out of school, they don't have a ton of experience, they're hungry, they're super smart, and I'll have them read— if they're interested in working for us, this is known as being one of the best places to work if you're an aspiring growth hacker or an internet marketer, product person, etc. I'll have them read 20 books on the topics of Neuroscience, behavioral science, things of that nature, persuasion, negotiation, things like that. I do that to see if they're a hustler. I do that because it's super valuable information that's just valuable for them to know, period, and that they'll be better at their jobs if I do hire them at the end of that.

How long does this gauntlet— how many days? Is there a deadline or anything?

Yes, I usually pick the deadline depending on how much time I think that person realistically has to be able to accomplish it. If they're fresh out of school and they have no other commitments, then It'll be a short deadline, more like 25 days or so, maybe 30 days. But if they're already working a full-time job, I'll obviously be understanding of that fact.

Okay. So if they're working a full-time job, give or take 60, 70 days?

Yeah, maybe more like 45.

45. Yeah, man, that's rough. It's a tough gauntlet right there. Do you— I mean, you know, we can talk about this after.

I got so far 100% hit rate on that though. Anyone who goes through that gauntlet has been proven to be an effective hire.

What's the retention rate on that?

On the team members?

Yeah, so let's say they get through the gauntlet, you know, what's it?

100%.

100%, wow. That's a smoking gun right there. Do you mind sharing those 20 books after? You know, I'll send you like an email, but I would love to share that book with the audience. You know, because we talk about hiring a lot. All right, final 2 questions here. So what's one productivity hack? And I know you have a ton of these. You know, what's one productivity hack you can share with the audience?

Hmm, okay. So something that would be useful. I'm a little crazy when it comes to productivity. I try to squeeze productivity out of literally every second of every day. I turn everything into a game where I try to figure out if I can do any part of my routine 1 second faster, a millisecond faster. Oh, I figured out a way to cross city streets 5 to 8% faster by keeping a 45-degree angle between myself and my destination, and that saves over the course of my life maybe 3 weeks of time. Little things like that. I've got a bunch of little ones like that that are good. As far as something that would probably be useful and hasn't been said a million times as far as productivity hacking— I'm trying to think of what hasn't been said a million times already. Most of the best practices of productivity are actually really, really good.

Uh-huh.

I would say the biggest thing that most people just totally suck at is this notion of locking yourself away when you have work that you have to get done. You have got to be completely ruthless about eliminating all distractions. When I was going through a book a day when I was in college, I would literally lock myself in this tiny room in the basement of my dorm with no windows. I would face the wall. Even though it was really quiet, even people walking by was enough of a distraction. I'd put in headphones, I'd put white noise on, I would ensure that the room window was blocked so nobody could see me and peek in and interrupt me in the middle of whatever I was doing.

Mm-hmm.

And it's hard for me to express how many little things like that are just horrendous for productivity. Most people just say, oh, I'll just sit there at my desk and I'll try to get things done. No, no. You need to block out hours and you need to go to a separate room and you shut off your internet, you shut off any distraction, put your phone down, don't, don't Face the window, nothing. You have to cut out every distraction.

Okay, got it. That's super helpful. I think it's something I struggle with too. You know, you think, you feel that, hey, you know, I'm just gonna leave the computer on, I'm gonna shut off push notifications, but it's really not enough. And I totally agree. And you know, every second that your flow is disrupted, you know, everything gets thrown off track. So final question for you, what's one must-read book you recommend to the audience? And you know, I know it's hard to narrow it down to one, but if you had to pick one, what would it be?

For this audience, I would say it's Lean Analytics. Okay, cool.

Who wrote that one, by the way?

I don't remember the names.

Okay, got it.

But it's part of the Lean series.

Okay, got it. Perfect. So Emerson Spartz, everyone. Obviously a ton to learn from you. I need to have you on the show again sometime soon because I'm sure there's a lot of different hacks we can learn from you. But thanks again for being on the show.

Thank you.

Take care.