Hello and welcome to episode number 54 of The Shine Show and today's episode is kind of close to my heart. I'm going to share a story with you about how I got my data all wrong and gave the wrong things meaning during my online course launch and as a result of that I had to quit my day job twice. And I'm also going to share with you the ultimate guide to launching your online course with Facebook and Instagram ads today. And you can go to shineandsucceed.com/guide if you want to get that, but I'm going to talk you through it all here on the podcast today and then if you want to go and download the guide maybe to read through it again, or just make sure you solidify everything you learn in today's episode again, please go ahead and download the guide and then enjoy today's episode.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Schillack and I help online course creators launch, grow and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads, so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired to dream bigger, launch sooner and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine and this is The Shine Show. I want you to imagine that it is cart close day and you see that you just did your very first six figure launch after all that hard work and showing up so consistently for your audience for so long. After doubting if this is ever going to happen for you the way you see it happening for so many other people in the masterminds that you've been part of in the coaching groups, or in the private Facebook groups of the programs that you have bought.

After doubting for so long if you really had what it takes. You are after all in certain whatever BS your brain dishes up for you, maybe it's too old, too young, not an expert. You have an accent like me, you can't write very well. You can't go live on videos. You've had to overcome all those thoughts and now finally you crack the code, you ran the ads, you did the webinar, or the video series, or the challenge, and you see the first sales coming. And it's no big deal because you've made sales before, but this time, this time, it feels totally different. This time there's an energy in the room and you can feel it pulsating through your phone screen every morning when you wake up and you see the comments on your ads, you see the amazing messages your new students are posting in the private Facebook group you created, and you see it in the money that comes in every morning when you check Stripe, or you check PayPal, or you check Kajabi and you see you made sales during the night.

I want you to imagine that day and hold that image very closely because I'm going to tell you a secret today and this secret that I'm going to share with you is something that took me a very, very long time to figure out. And I would not have known this secret if I didn't figure it out the hard and the long way because no one talks about this and never in a single online course that I bought that should have been the thing that helped me create the mega launch. Did anyone ever mention this to me? Are you ready to hear the secret? Here's the secret. The secret is that there is no one secret to building a successful online course business and you already have enough information in your hand to build that business successfully, to build that launch successfully.

Yes, you need to have the right mindset. Yes, you need to have the webinar, or the video series, or the thing that actually sells the course and yes you need the Facebook ads. You need all those things, but when you have those things without knowing how to do them in the right sequence that's when you're doing it wrong. And doing it wrong will still get you there eventually, but you'll waste a lot of time along the way and you may even keep wondering if this is going to be something you will ever figure out. It was back in May 2017 and I had just started my day job again after taking a three year break to be home with my girls. It was during those three years that I tried so, so hard to get a business off the ground that I didn't have to go back to my day job after having my second child.

I was working as a pharmaceutical rep at the time and that gave me a lot of freedom over my time during the day, which was great until I had to travel. And that morning I dropped Milla my oldest off a daycare and I saw that all the other mommies stayed there because it was Mother's Day morning tea at school, and I had to rush off to get on an airplane to go to some obscure Australian country town to talk to the doctors there about blood pressure medication. And that day when I saw her face and I saw her waiting for me to stay, seeing all the other kids' moms stay there and have coffee and tea and biscuits and play with them at school and I had to leave, it just broke my heart. And right there I decided that I will do everything in my power to be able to quit that job and work for myself so that no one can ever tell me again what day I have to get on a plane and not be at my child's Mother's Day morning tea.

So fast forward a little bit when Elle my second girl was born, I took three years maternity leave to try to figure out how I'm going to get this business off the ground. And at first I had a coaching business and that one failed within a year and then I started video blogging and you can still see some of my first videos that I shot on my YouTube channel. No, don't go digging for them. That didn't turn into profit at all. Then I started doing regular Facebook lives and I realized that I actually quite like them. I like going live, I know for some of you that sounds bizarre, but as an ex musical theater student I love the thrill of going live. And then my energy's totally drained afterwards, but that meant that in July 2016 I was able to launch my first online course called the Facebook live superstar and in July 2016 I scraped together my last $400 to run a webinar where I sold the Facebook live superstar, and I made $2,000.

Now, this is where it gets interesting. Some of you will listen to this and think wow, that is a four X return. You put $400 in, you get $2,000 out, what a bargain and some of you will listen to it and immediately know exactly how I felt that day because you've been there too. I was devastated. I cried for days and days, I was depressed and I felt such a deep disappointment in myself that after all that work, all that time that I put in, all that effort, all the sleepless nights, or the pains in my back from sitting behind my computer for too long. All I made was $2,000. My expectation was to have a five figure launch because that's the dream I bought into and that's what everyone in the Facebook groups were posting about.

I was so disappointed after this launch that I packed up my Mac, I dusted off my CV and I started applying for jobs again, and I was back working nine to five for someone who controlled my life beyond what I was comfortable with very soon, all because no one told me that even though my results weren't good enough to be featured on someone else's podcast as their biggest success story, or gave me bragging rights in their mastermind, my results were good enough that I could take the data, learn from it and do it again and this time do it better. And I still didn't figure this out until much, much later. So there I was sitting in my car with my new manager at the new pharmaceutical company I was repping at, talking to doctors all day long, but dreaming all the time about building my own freedom, building my own empire and being the person who gets to decide what my income cap should really be.

And one day when my new manager and I went out together, we had what I thought was a wonderful day of selling and having excellent conversations with many of my clients and then at the end of the day we were sitting in a McDonald's car park with the sun in our faces, where I used to pick him up, he would park his car there and then we'd go around and see the customers and at the end of the day circle back and I drop him off and he'd give me my feedback. Oh, I still get the chills just thinking about it. So here we are sitting in this McDonald's car park with the sun in our faces in the late afternoon and I'm actually just thinking can this guy hurry up please because I want to go pick up my kids. And he looks at me after what I thought was a really, really amazing day.

He looks at me and he says to me this, he says, Salome you are the most passionate rep I've ever seen, but can you please tone down the passion? I mean, what the f. I took my sunglasses that were sitting on my head and I slowly just kind of moved them down over my eyes so that he couldn't see that I was crying. In my heart, I knew that every single day I'm going to show up for this job, I will be selling my soul for a salary and I would rather have no money and be figuring out how to build a business than have money and be working for someone who told me to tone down my passion. So I started working really, really hard at night. Between 8:00 PM and midnight I would run my Facebook ads agency as a freelancer and I picked up a few clients from B-School and through Amy Porterfield's community, and Rick Mulready's community and I served them with everything I had in me.

And at the end of 2017 I finally gave that job the finger and I started my own Facebook ads agency. Finally, making money online, it worked. So I started running Facebook and Instagram ads for some of the best online course creators online. I want to call them online celebrities and personalities in the business. And in the time that I've done that, I have been so incredibly lucky to have this front row seat to so many online course launches and I've seen about a hundred different ways that it can work, and I've also seen about a hundred different things that can go wrong. I've seen every mistake there is to make and I've seen the highs and I've seen the lows. I've seen the great results that gets shared publicly and I've seen the not so great mess ups that nobody ever talks about publicly.

And the most important thing that I've learned is that there is no one thing that works for everyone and there is no one secret to getting it right. There's only a few very important phases during which a handful of things need to align in order for you to build a profitable online course launch and a scalable online courses business, and that's the secret and that is what I'm going to share with you today. So this is the five phase framework for using Facebook and Instagram ads to create a more profitable online course launch and a more scalable online course business. This is the coming together of everything I have learned in the last three years. So to help you get started with your Facebook and Instagram ads for your online course launch, I need to show you the different phases that you'll be running ads in.

Each of these phases have their own benchmarks and checkpoints in order for you to confidently move from the one phase to the next one. You cannot skip a phase, if you do, you'll pay for it later either with money because your ads will be super expensive or worse, your course won't sell, or you're going to pay for it in time because you won't have the data to know where you went wrong in order to fix it. But when you do get these five phases right, then you'll start seeing how your social media efforts come to life and you create audiences that actually engage with you in two way conversations, which means you get to reach more people with your message every single day.

You get to build momentum with your email list building efforts, and when you're ramping up to launch your course, you'll see the signs that you're on the right track and you're using the right language to hit the right pain points, and build the right desire for people to be ready at the end of it going, here's my credit card, please can you just take it and give me what you're teaching. And that's what I want for you. So here are the five phases. Phase one is build your audience. Phase two is build your email list. Phase three is prime your audience during your launch runway. Phase four is get hot leads in your prelaunch, so that means we're looking at getting leads to opt in for our webinars, or video series, or challenge, or whatever it is.

And phase five is your launch phase, it's the phase where you say the doors are now open, come on in, I can't wait to have you, look at all these success stories my students are telling. Here's a bit of scarcity, here's a bit of exclusivity, if you're not getting in quick you're going to miss out, and they know the doors are going to close, get in, get in, and then they get in. That's an overview of the five phases and because this is quite a heavy podcast episode and quite learning heavy, I created a guide for you and you can download that when you go to shineandsucceed.com/guide. You will get everything that I'm going to talk you through now, you can get that as a free guide that you can work through little step by step. So if you want to come back to this go to shineandsucceed.com/guide and get the guide that goes with this episode.

So let's explore each phase a little bit. Have you ever felt like you're selling your soul on social media and you're still not getting anywhere? Yes, I can hear all my introverts going, yes, that's me. Yeah, that's how I felt as well because I'm a crazy introvert as well. And being on social media all day exhausts me, but it exhausts me even more when I'm being on social media and no one's talking back to me. Or maybe you master up the courage to go live on Facebook and then nobody shows up to watch your video with you. Or you get 35 views and you know that your mother watched it at least three times. So I've spoken about what Mark Zuckerberg said in January 2018 a few times on the podcast, when he announced that the algorithm is changing and that with that came the end of using free social media to build up our warm and engaged audiences.

So unless you are The Rock, which you probably are not, or Zendaya which you probably are not, like me, you have no chance of starting from scratch with social media to build up a decent following without using any ads. That is not the bad news, that is the good news because that means that the barrier to entry for using Facebook and Instagram ads to build your online courses business have dropped and is now much lower than it used to be in the past. Because if Zuckerberg says the algorithm will favor content of friends and family, what he means is can you please create content that is engaging. Content that gets clicks, that gets shares, that gets comments. That leads with value, that makes people feel something, that shares who you are, your personality, something people can associate with all those human things that makes us come back to Facebook over and over again because we need that dopamine hit when we see somebody posted something funny and we enjoy it together.

The only way the algorithm knows what's family and friends and what's good content and bad content is it judges it by engagement. And the great news is that engagement ads are super cheap. I'm talking less than one cent per engagement if you're doing it right. I've even had a student get engagement on his ad for like 0.00000004 cents. Like crazy good, viral good, it's awesome. So the key to Mark Zuckerberg's heart is engagement. And whereas if you started your business five years ago, you wouldn't even have thought about running ads until you get to the launch phase, until you're ready to get leads for your webinar and then you would be paying a fortune because you're getting conversion leads, you're paying for conversions. Conversion is a more expensive thing to pay for than engagement, but now we're smarter.

Now we start running ads earlier on in our business journey, we don't wait until we're ready to launch the day we know what our niche is, the day we know who our ideal customer is, we can start using engagement ads to build up our social media platforms to start teaching the algorithm where to find our favorite people who's going to engage with us, and to start building those warm audiences that we're going to re-target later. And the good news is you can start and get results for a cent a day. Now, do you need to spend a cent? No, please don't. I recommend you spend about $5 a day on engagement ads. So what would make a good engagement ad? If you've already started building some followers on your Facebook or Instagram account, have a look at the content you've created that got the most engagement organically. Is it funny content? Is it personal? Does it share who you are? Does it declare what you stand for? What you don't stand for.

Does it showcase results your students get, or does it show in some way, shape or form who you are and how you can help people? Those are usually the best types of engagement content. Think of it as when you walk into a bar and you want to make eye contact with your ideal customer. Your engagement content is eye contact. It's that moment in Friends when Joey says, how you doing? That's what your engagement stuff does. It says how you doing in the newsfeed in Facebook and Instagram. So what does it need to communicate? It needs to communicate who you are, what you stand for, everything you want that person who meets you for the very first time to see. It does not sell anything. It does not ask for anything other than a laugh, other than an emotional response, which when we respond emotionally to things we automatically hit the like button.

We don't have to be asked to do so, when we really love things we share it. When we really resonate with something we comment on it. So that makes the best engagement ads and that is phase one. And if you learn to do this really, really well, you're going to see your audience is going to grow so much faster, your engagement is going to be so much better. So finally you're going to feel like you're having a two way conversation with your audience and once you have that two way conversation with your audience, it's so much easier to know what you can help them with. And that brings me to phase two which is the list building phase. And in phase two you're going to type what you've learned from listening to your audience. You're going to put it into a lead magnet that's going to help them solve a problem. And I know you've heard it before, but I'll say it again, the money is in the list.

If I had a dollar for every time someone said this to me and I ignored it, I would be so rich right now that I wouldn't even need an email list. People, please build your email list. It's... my biggest regret is that I didn't start this podcast earlier and I didn't start my email list earlier, I sat on it for too long. Please learn from me, please I tell you from all the people I've worked with, I can see the money is in the list. Once you start building that email list, it's very important that you send them good quality content once a week. So speaking of this podcast, that's a great example of good quality content I'm sending my list now once a week. It doesn't have to be a podcast, you can go live on Facebook and send them the video of the live broadcast.

You can do a video blog and send that to them. You can write a blog post and send that to them. Maybe you just want to write them an email and put the value right there in the email. It doesn't matter what it is, but build a relationship with your email list that gets them to engage with you, that shares them how you can help them get them actual results, and use your lead magnets to get them onto your email list. You use ads to build that email list and then build your relationship with them through your email list. This is a critical step. I cannot begin to tell you how many course launchers have tried launching courses without a list, without ever having run a single ad on their ad account. And I will say that there are odd random unicorns who do it successfully without ever building a list, or without ever building that relationship with their audience.

Yes for sure, odd, very special unicorns do it. I am not a unicorn and I have seen very few unicorns, so please don't buy into this idea that you can launch a successful online course without building your email list first. I told you this is the slow and painful way, this is not the quick and easy way to become an instant millionaire, this is the hard work way. So once you've created your lead magnet, you run some ads, you start filling up your email list and you add value to that list every single week. And now we get to the exciting bit because now we're moving on to phase three. Phase three is the phase where you prime your audience during your launch runway. I am an absolute Marvelous Mrs Maisel fanatic. I cannot stop watching that show I think it's hilarious.

I love the music that they sing. I love that they just break out into songs spontaneously, that's one of my favorite things anytime a movie has people breaking into songs spontaneously will be a favorite movie, but I love Mrs Maisel a lot. I love it so much that I follow Mrs Maisel on Instagram and I regularly check to see if they have released the release date for the next season. And on that day that they release the new Mrs Maisel season, I am not in my office working on my clients ads, my team knows to leave me alone on that day. My husband knows, he better not ask me to do anything on that day. My kids know, mommy is in her me zone, because I am sitting in front of Netflix refreshing my profile until I can see those episodes become available or in front of Prime. Which one is it? Prime, I think it's on Prime.

It doesn't matter. One of the channels where we watch everything all the time. That is how much I love Mrs Maisel. And for months and months leading up to that release of the season, the characters of Mrs Maisel feeds me little snippets of what's coming up on Instagram. They tease me with behind the scenes photos and commentaries by the crew and they even did a Mrs Maisel treasure hunt across California with members of the crew popping up in all sorts of secret locations for weeks. Oh my goodness, do you have any idea how much torture it is for me to sit in Australia and know that Mrs Maisel and Susie is popping up somewhere at some restaurant in California and I can't be there. I love Mrs Maisel, but I love the lead up to a new season getting released almost as much because it makes me feel like a kid at Christmas time and that is what a prelaunch runway is.

It's all the work you do to warm up your audience and let them know that your course is coming soon. The purpose of the runway is to build anticipation and excitement, but more than that it's to help your students see themselves inside your course, getting the results they're dreaming of and creating the reality that your course promises they will be able to create. During this phase, you are going to share stories of your successful students who overcame the same obstacles they may be facing right now. You'll share information they need to be able to see the steps they need to take to get the result they want because if you can break down the process from where they are now to where they want to be in a few simple steps, you've already given them the map to get there. Of course, they believe you know how to get them there.

There are loads of different ads you can choose to run during this pre launch runway phase to achieve this purpose. But the most important ad we run all the time in prelaunch is list building ads. You want to flood your email list with new life and bring all those new leads into your world during this period of high energy and anticipation. You might also want to run some video testimonial ads, or run some ads to your blog to stimulate website visitors and get people thinking and add value to them, or you could run ads to podcast episodes that's going to help people get a small win, which will make it easier for them to say yes to your course. So I want you to think about how you can use Facebook and Instagram ads to do what Mrs Maisel does for me, to let me know it's coming and you better be ready because you are in for the ride of your life.

And to use students' stories to show them what amazing results your students have had, and to allow them to see themselves in those stories so that they can start picturing a future the way they want it, thanks to your course. And then once they're picturing this that's when you move to phase four and this is where you're going to get hot leads into your pre-launch phase. This is where we start cooking. This is the phase where you're doing everything you possibly can to get as many people as possible to opt in for your webinar, or your three part video series, or your challenge, whatever that sales tool is that you use to convert them to new students, this is called the pre-launch phase.

And your main objective here is to get as many people as you can to register for this event and then as many people as you can to either show up live for the webinar, or to watch the videos if it's a video series, or to engage and join in if it's a challenge that you're using, or to join you on Facebook live if it's a Facebook live launch you're doing. It really is important and it matters that you get as many people as possible to register for the event, but it's almost even more important that you get people to show up live. Some of the people who are going to register for your event will have been on your email list for ages and we want to make sure that we run ads to them so that they definitely see that we're hosting an event in case they miss the email. If your emails have been going to their spam, they might not get your email.

If the algorithm has kicked you off their newsfeed, they might not see your social media posts. So it's important that you run ads to your warm audiences, even if they are on your email list, even if they follow you on social, they still have to see it with ads and ads is the best way to guarantee that your message gets in front of your warm audience. But you're also going to want to target your social media followers and any other warm retargeting audiences that you have that are filled with the right kind of people who want the opportunity to become your student. So here are some suggestions for ads you could run to get people to register for your launch event and then to show up for your event. You can run conversion ads so that they register for the event. This is normal, straightforward webinar registration ads.

You can run retargeting ads to bring people who went to your landing page but didn't register back to your landing page in the hope that the second time they land there they actually register because you don't know why they left the page. Could be because the baby started crying, or the doorbell rang. It doesn't necessarily mean that if they've been to your landing page and they didn't register that they don't want to register. If you have some kind of a workbook or a guide that goes along with your event, you can re-target people who opted in to remind them to download the workbook and get it printed out and ready so that you can go through it with them when they're live on the class with you. You can run an ad to remind people to show up live.

If you get in front of them in their newsfeed 24 hours before the live event and you remind them about it, that does increase your chances of having them show up live. You can start putting other students stories in front of them as soon as they register for your event because that way you're starting to overcome objections even before you've given them the sales pitch. Or you could do something like creating a quiz that leads up to your event so that they can see if they're ready for your course, if they check the right boxes in order to get the results that you promise. So there's a lot of ideas and ways you can get people to register and then encourage them to sign up for your event. And then finally we get to phase five and this is the launch phase and this is the crescendo, everything builds up to this because this is where the money starts hitting the bank account.

And this is where you usually have a feeling about how your launch is going pretty soon, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that this is the most important process because it's actually not. It's the finale, but it's not the most important. All that work that you did for months and months and months and months that have built up to this, that was the important piece and this is just where the energy comes together. This is where the work pays off in the emails you send and in how you show up on social media and yes, also in the ads that you run, but the ads compliment everything else you've done and are doing and they help you get even more people over the line. Your job as the marketer in this phase is to market your little sweet course creators heart out.

That means you are telling lots and lots and lots of stories of successful students. You're interviewing them, you're posting it on socials, you're doing live broadcasts where you bring your students in, you're answering questions, you're overcoming objections. You are creating scarcity and you're using bonuses that disappear so that people will grab them and jump on board. You're building a sense of urgency so the people know they only have a short window of opportunity to sign up and then it all goes away and they have to wait another year before the doors open, and this is where I go, do I really have to wait another year for another episode of Mrs Maisel? That is marketing. It's creating desire and ads compliment what you do in your marketing. Ads will not save you if your marketing is not converting people to sales, truth bomb, hashtag sorry not sorry.

You cannot save bad marketing by running more ads to it, it doesn't work that way. So here are some marketing things you can run, ads you can run during this phase. You can run ads to announce that registration is now open and maybe you want to run that ad to your entire warm audience, or maybe you just want to run into people who registered for your webinar, or your three part video series. Kind of depends. I've been getting a few doors are now open ads from people I have never in my life heard of before and I always find it so strange that someone would put a message in my news feed thinking I'm going to go and buy something if I don't even know who they are.

And maybe I've been on their Instagram feed, maybe I have been on their Facebook page, maybe I'm supposed to know who they are, but clearly I'm being re-targeted because somewhere some time I clicked on something, but does that mean we have the type of relationship where you can ask me to buy something? I don't think so. So we tend to like putting these doors open ads in the news feeds of people who have engaged with us fairly recently, or who have registered for our event. So they're fairly hot. They know who we are, they know what we're about and they know that we're selling something. You can also run ads to let them know that there's an early bird bonus. I have had messages from people who bought the course and they say I just saw the early bird bonus, can I get in on that? And I'm like, you are in on that because you already bought.

But because they bought on the webinar, they didn't even hear about the early bird bonus, they just got it as a surprise. So you can do that to help increase sales. You can share more video testimonials. That's one way of putting the stories of your students in their newsfeed. You can do a live stream and interview students that you then turn into an ad and put it in front of everyone who registered for your event. You can announce that there are mid cart bonuses. So anything you have during your cart open phase that's going to create desire, that's going to build desire for them and entice them to buy faster or sooner. You can run ads to let them know about that. You can run messenger ads to let them know their final burning questions can answered if they just send you a message. You can run ads to announce that the doors are closing and if they don't sign up they're going to miss out.

Or you can run ads that re-targets everyone who went to the sales page but didn't buy your course with testimonial ads, or stories, or more opportunities to engage with you and to learn if this course that you're selling is right for them. So what are you going to do once you have hit that first or next six figure launch, what becomes possible for you? Launching an online course must be one of the most exciting and rewarding things we can do. And I'm the first person to tell you that even though the road to six figure launches can be long, it will require you to be your best self. And on the way there you will discover what you are truly made of, that you are persistent and smart and creative and that you can overcome anything, learn anything and handle every challenge that comes your way.

How do I know that? I know that because I've been there and I've seen many, many of our clients go through the same journey and it is not the journey that gets sold to you as quick and easy way to make lots of money online. What I can tell you is that on the other end of this hard work, successful launch is this, you get to say goodbye to that boss who doesn't understand that passion is all that matters. You get to decide your work hours so you never have to miss another event at school because your boss told you to be somewhere else. You get to be in control of how much money you make. No one gets to tell you, well, the company didn't perform so you only get a 1% increase. You get to see the impact you have on other people's lives when they send you letters in the mail telling you how grateful are that you showed up when you did.

You get to pay off your debt and buy that dream house. You get to take that vacation you've been wanting for so long and you get to say no to that client who always wants more and then argues with you over the invoice. You get all that and more and my biggest wish for you is that you will know that it's not a pipe dream. There are thousands of people doing this every single day and you can too. And I am here for you and I'm hungry to teach you how to implement everything you've just learned in this episode to your next launch. So do me a favor, write down one thing you commit to doing that'll get you closer to launching your profitable online course this year. Maybe your one thing is to start running an engagement ad so you can start having a two way conversation with people on social media.

Maybe your one thing is to start building your email list and send them a valuable content once a week. Maybe your one thing is to start committing to a date when you're going to do your webinar, or your three part video series, or your challenge, or your Facebook live. Once you have that date scribbled on paper, let me know because I want to be here to cheer you on. And then I would love it if you would come and join us inside The Shine Show podcast posse Facebook group, where we take everything we've learned today, we dig a little deeper, we look at examples, we show each other our work, we keep each other accountable and you can do that by going to shineandsucceed.com/podcast group. That's shineandsucceed.com/podcast group.

This my dear friend is your time to shine and I consider it my personal mission to help you create the most profitable online course launch you possibly can using the right Facebook and Instagram ad strategies in the right order. So I hope you'll join me inside the podcast posse Facebook group and I will see you again next week, bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.