Pick and pull longview tx

For context, I’m a DLSU SHS student that applied for ADMU’s management program as my first choice then DLSU as my second. I got waitlisted for ADMU and accepted into DLSU with the program that I want. After having accepted my place as a future DLSU student, I got an email back from ADMU saying I got into an arts course called “interdisciplinary studies”. Now, I’m having trouble deciding which to pick. Here are the factors I’m considering:
DLSU Pros: - I can directly credit units already from SHS - My friends are in DLSU - I already have the course I want - closer to my house - feels like home already :((
Cons: - Lower THE Ranking - Parents disapprove - Not my dream school
ADMU Pros: - was really my dream school - parents think it would be better for my future - Higher THE ranking and I heard employers prefer ADMU grads over DLSU grads (?) - Parents approve
Cons: - I would have to go through a year in a course I don’t like, shift then take on extra subs after - I would have to dorm since its far from home
TLDR: ADMU is better for my future (?) but I wouldn’t be in the course I want. DLSU has become my home and is more convenient but my parents don’t think it’s what’s best for me. What should I do?

Hey. Guy 20. Chat or message if you are keen to play this game. Basically we take turns at picking a number and the other person answers the corresponding question. Message me with your asl (https://imgur.com/a/I4nZc2j)

Hey everybody! I’m looking to pickup a nato strap to put my King Turtle (SRPE03) on and I was not sure everything I need. Do I need spare springbars? Do I need a spring bar tool? (I’ve used a dull dentist style pick before to remove pins/straps, not sure if that’s bad for the watch) Ive never switched straps regularly so this is a little new to me. Does anybody have any recommendations on where to buy good NATO straps? Are any of the ones on Amazon good? Im looking for the modern bond (black and gray) and maybe a couple others like OD Green and Gray. Just looking for a couple pointers, thanks in advance!

I am very much tensed about pregnancy. I am literally paranoid can not sleep. Had sex with partner on 4and 5 th day of period. But i have a very irregular cycle. So can not predict ovulation. On day 7,8,9 i saw egg white discharge so i dont know was i ovulating or not as yesterday and the day before yesterday i also saw lots of ewcm. But we used condom not only condom he Didn't cum into the condom and didn cum inside of me. He pulled out the condom before ejaculation. But i am tensed may b some precum has leaked from the base of the condom. Though the condom Didn't slip neither it broke. But i am tensed as the condom was bit short for the penis. So it Didn't fully cover the penis, there was some gap in the shaft. It was may b an inch above the base but it was so tight that he was feeling pain. But the condom was very tight and when he pulled out it was in the same position. He didn’t even ejaculate. Actually i am having severe pelvic pain that's why i am very much tensed.Chances of pregnancyI? I am mainly concerned as i live in a small house, i can not test even. I am taking severe stress may b that's why i am feeling bloated. My last period was on 10 th of may.We did on 13,14 th may with condom and pull out. He never came inside of me. But i am paranoid that may b i m pregnant feeling some symptoms as well. Please help me. I am having nausea and feeling tired. Though i havr just recovered from chicken pox 2 days ago.

Guess I had to go through PPL website for tickets for Allentown on Nov 7th and I couldn't pick seats just clicked how many I needed and it randomly gave me two tickets. That was hell.

This isn't meant to be a detailed analysis and review, so I'm not going to touch on the themes or more specific aspects of the story. I just wanted to throw some thoughts on here after finishing the book a couple of days ago.
I enjoyed this book after a few false starts when I got it last year. I got the book a long while back, and I'd begin it, and put it down, again and again. The first few chapters weren't bad, but they didn't hook me, and I'd end up reading something else as a result.
But, then I picked up Hendrix's newer novel "How To Sell A Haunted House" and really enjoyed it. I noticed a couple of pacing issues in that book, but enjoyed it so much, I decided to buckle down and finish Book Club.
Haunted House gave me a better feel for Hendrix's writing, who first came on my radar because of his book Paperbacks From Hell. Once I got a sense of his tone and style, it was a lot easier to get sucked into Book Club.
But now that I've read two of his novels, I think the trend between them is definitely a problem with third acts, and I was curious if anyone else felt the same way, or if this was unique to these two books in his catalog.
The central parts of the books and the rising action both get really intense and exciting, and he dumps a ton of new concepts at you and hints at larger plot points and more story to tell, then it's like he got a phone call in the middle of a discussion and he quickly "wraps things up" with "and then they have a big fight, win, and it's all resolved, the end!" And he runs off to talk to his aunt or whatever.
In Haunted House he suddenly throws all these other puppets and dolls into the battle, and he never explains how they gained sentience, and he doesn't touch on the other paranormal elements he introduced.
And in Book Club, he quickly adds in that Slick is going to possibly turn into a vampire, a possible vampire association, and only briefly touches on his central characters lives in an epilogue fashion.
I can see what he may be going for here- leaving the reader wanting more, introducing an element of mystery to his stories, chilling implications....
But I think he doesn't do a great job of having that effect. He certainly does make me wish there was more, but not in a "Oh no, what a terrifying thread left hanging!" And more in a "This feels like it was setting up for a sequel that won't ever come" way.
I think this is magnified by the fact that his endings feel truncated, so we're so suddenly thrown into the final confrontation, that I end up lingering on those under developed aspects even more. I end up feeling like, if the third act had had more time to breathe, then maybe there'd have been more satisfaction for those elements.
As for the frustration I mentioned in the title- Book Club has some pretty realistic depictions of middle class suburbia, at least from my country bumpkin perspective. I found myself disliking everyone in the novel except Ms. Greene. I sympathized with the main character, and I found myself infuriated with how she was treated.... And then the time skip happens and she's in lock step with everyone! Ahhh! Haha, it was a great example of how easily people can be pressured into conformity and a lack of empathy for people outside their circles, but man, that entire section of the book raised my blood pressure!
I know Hendrix is in the HorrorLit subreddit, not sure if he browses here, but if you end up reading this- keep up the good work! I know I had some criticisms, but I still enjoy your books a lot.
Anyone else have similar feelings, disagree?

I’ve seen bodies mashed, crushed, dismembered, stuffed into suitcases, blackened like meat on a grill, floating, bloating, with flies swarming their flesh and maggots wriggling out of their eyes. I have, in short, an intimacy with death.
But nothing prepared me for the horror in cabin 4044.
I stared at my own smoldering corpse, into the blackened sockets of my melted eyes, and ice raked my spine and splintered my bones, shivering all the way down to my frozen fingertips.
You knew this day would come, whispered a voice in my head. And then, as my nose wrinkled, Ugh, I smell like bacon.
Giggles. Oh dear. Not beneficial. Couldn’t I try to approach my death with some dignity? No? Well… fine. Ignoring my own bubbling hysteria, I held my napkin over my nostrils and leaned in. Cross-legged in a lotus position, hands cradled and thumbs touching, crispy me (hehe) held the pose of a meditating monk. From the liquor bottles scattered around the burnt wreckage as well as the pose, I’d started the fire myself. But what induced such madn—
Glowing white light suddenly emanated from the blackened sockets. I gasped, tumbling backwards over the coffee table.
When I sat up, the light was gone.
It did not reappear during the half hour I charged my phone, keeping one leery eye on my corpse while I used the ship’s spotty wifi for research.
A Mysterious Contagion
According to Google, the worst cruise disaster in modern times involved the partial capsizing of a vessel after a captain’s error led to a rock tearing open the hull. Of the four thousand passengers, 34 drowned.
Another ship infamously dubbed the “poop cruise” had its engines catch fire, and passengers were stranded for nearly a week on board without electricity or toilet facilities.
But the Seastar was not destined for any ocean or weather related incident, but rather, a contagion. And while coronavirus and norovirus have both afflicted cruise ships in recent years, no virus—not even rabies—could explain the self-mutilation. To say nothing of the virulence. A mortality rate of 100%? That was unheard of in nature. There should be some survivors, if only by happenstance.
Or is it because…
A terrible chill spread up the flesh of my arms, and a thought lodged like an ice pick in my skull: What if the doom of the Azure Seastar isn’t happenstance—but deliberate? Are there no survivors because someone doesn’t want there to be?
Numb at the implication, I set down my phone. But how? Why? A thousand passengers and crew… If there was someone planning such a disaster, how would I identify them? And why would anyone commit such an atrocity? My gut tightened, and I got up and ventured out to the upper decks.
Deck 9
Cold. Cold. Cold. The chill in my bones deepened with each hand I brushed. Passengers glared as I fumbled around, dismissing me as either blind or mentally feeble. The blindness was somewhat accurate—I couldn’t see under the electric lighting in the swanky interior, since my eyes were seeing six days in the future, when the Seastar would be plunged into blackout. I depended on my phone’s feeble flashlight as I navigated the sea of guests around the bar and lounge areas. But no matter how many arms and hands I bumbled into—COLD!
With no accidental survivors, I was becoming more and more convinced the Seastar’s doom must be deliberate, but I was still very much in the dark—literally and figuratively—about why.
The most useful discovery of the evening came after my collision with a heavyset older man whose drink I spilled. Noticing me sweeping around my phone’s pitiful beam and assuming I’d lost something, he offered to lend me a more powerful flashlight from his cabin.
“It’s one of those high powered ones if you want it.” He smiled, and I stared, every hair on my neck standing on end.
“Uh… Something on my face?” His smile turned into a confused frown under my phone’s light.
“N-no. Yes, a flashlight would be very helpful, thank you.”
“This way. Name’s John, by the way.” His grin returned.
Oh God—I’d recognized him. Glass chewing man. He had a name now.
I am ashamed to admit that I tried not to speak to him too much on the way to his cabin, despite his doing me a kindness. It’s so much harder to face death with names and histories attached. I remained standing outside his cabin door, looking incredibly guilty as he emerged and set into my hand the flashlight. When I turned it on, it sent a floodlight straight down the corridor one end to the other. In addition to this useful tool, the encounter brought a critical insight.
His clothes. Glass chewing involved a different outfit. So, the catastrophe would not strike tonight.
Pool deck
After brushing roughly a billion COLD hands, as the overnight crowd began thinning, I took myself out to a lounger (being unwilling to overnight in my cabin wreathed in the fumes of my own chargrilled corpse).
Voices woke me in the dead of night.
The moon and stars offered the only illumination over the pitch sea, and I shambled groggily to the rail. It struck me that the wind had died—the Seastar was stationary.
Out on the pale peaks of waves, a rescue craft bobbed up and down.
“Looks like some idiot went overboard,” complained a voice behind me.
A cluster of passengers had gathered. One—with the authority of an experienced cruiser—mentioned the possibility of a suicide jumper. “It shouldn’t affect our itinerary much,” declared the man. “These things happen at sea, you know. After the rescue, he or she—let’s call them Passenger X—will be taken to the infirmary and monitored by security…”
I didn’t hear the rest of his words, because I was too busy smacking my forehead as I burst, “The INFIRMARY!” Good fucking gracious, was my brain already barbecue? I suspected a contagion, yet hadn’t thought to search the infirmary? Snatching up my flashlight, I headed downstairs, but the lower decks were cordoned off.
A jovial crewman explained that passenger access was restricted during rescue operations.
“Also, it’s three in the morning,” he added, sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup. “The infirmary will open—I think around eight?”
“Which deck?”
“Deck two.” He gladly explained the layout when I asked. The lower decks also included crew quarters, a crew lounge, mess hall, the engine room, kitchens, food storage, the “highway” used for quickly trafficking trolleys from one end of the ship to the other, the infirmary, various machinery rooms, a brig, a morgue—“We mostly use it for like, chilling flowers and stuff like that though,” he added with a grin. There was also a third staircase near the stern of the ship—the aft stairwell—used regularly only by staff but opened to passengers in cases of emergency.
As he rattled off this list, I could feel myself plunging deeper into despair. This ship was so enormous, and so much of what lay below was off limits to passengers. Furthermore, there were no windows below! How was I going to make my way in the blackout? Even with John’s flashlight, the prospect was daunting.
But first things first, Cass, I told myself. The infirmary.
Infirmary
At 8am sharp I stepped into the infirmary. The waiting room was as ordinary as they come, complete with boring magazines and cheap office chairs and—because it was deep in the interior—pitch dark to my sleep-deprived eyes.
“Morning, Sweetie! How can I help you today?” The secretary at the front desk tipped her head toward me, revealing a glimpse of another face beneath my flashlight—mouth gaping and mangled, every tooth pulled out. Blissfully unaware that she was sharing her chair with her own corpse, the secretary smiled and gave me a clipboard of paperwork for check in.
While I filled out the forms by flashlight, footsteps shuffled near the desk, and the secretary struck up a conversation with someone I assumed was a nurse. My ears pricked when they gossiped about last night.
“… did you hear about the rescue? When they pulled him out of the water, he wasn’t breathing...”
I pretended to be engrossed in the forms.
“… As soon as they revived him, he started screaming and screaming.”
“Oh my god… seriously?”
“Yeah, and he was like, super aggressive. They had to sedate him.”
“Oh my god…”
“It’s really weird… they’re saying he might have come from another ship, and it might’ve been, like… days… that he was out on the water!”
So this Passenger X who was pulled in last night had just been drifting out on the ocean? He wasn’t a jumper? And he was “screaming and screaming”—like, perhaps, someone maddened? I was about to abandon my forms and search for this Passenger X when the secretary all but gave me a heart attack by materializing in front of me out of the dark. She took the paperwork and informed me the nurse was ready. I was directed to a small examination room—one of three, I noted as I swept my beam around the infirmary. Examining tables, chairs, computers. No sign of any screaming passenger. Where would they have brought him?
The nurse, a young woman in a hijab, asked me the typical questions, typing my responses into a computer with a cracked, dead screen.
“Is he all right? The man who was rescued?” I asked. “Was he drifting long?”
She responded pertly, “We’re still trying to ascertain. But don’t worry, he’s being helped—um….” Her brow scrunched as she shone a light into each of my eyes.
Of course. I forgot to warn her.
“That’s so strange…” she murmured. “Are you wearing contact lenses?”
“No. My eyes are very black. Even under a flashlight they don’t reflect any light. They’ve been that way since I was four years old. I was dead for nearly an hour from drowning, but revived, and everything came back normal except for my eyes.” I’d always believed my horrific visions were the result of my near-death experience, as if I wasn’t supposed to come back, and brought a little bit of death with me, just in my eyes.
“Wow! What a wild story!” The nurse exclaimed.
“You have no idea,” I replied, looking at her corpse peering out at me from under the examination table, all jammed around the base.
A knock on the door cut our exam short before I could warn her (not that it would make any difference). She asked me to wait for a few moments and stepped out.
When she did not immediately return, I slipped away in search of Passenger X.
Highway
The moment I stepped out of the infirmary and away from the nearby elevator lounge, it became evident I’d left the passenger areas. All veneer of luxury was stripped away, leaving bare walls interrupted only by occasional stacks of boxes. The flashlight’s wide beam swept along the massive corridor that I was guessing was the “highway.” My footsteps resounded on concrete. Nothing but sterile, windowless white—or at least it had been white, once.
I tried not to look too closely at the crimson streaking the walls or the corpses I stepped over. The origin of the contagion was definitely down here. Even through the napkin held over my nose, I could taste death here—
Hello? What was this?
In one section of the corridor, the walls and floor had rippled. Almost as if a shockwave had left indentations, bending and shattering the concrete. But what could have done that?
The lights flickered.
I froze.
It wasn’t my flashlight’s beam. That remained steady. The lights—the overhead lights—flickered, casting the hall in blinking flashes of crimson streaks and white walls.
Then the lights came on.
All the bodies vanished.
“Oh,” I said, blinking against the sudden brightness. “Oh.” The smell was gone, too. No scent of death. Though there was something else. A strangely metallic, tangy smell. Like lightning and copper.
I shut off my flashlight, turning a slow circle as I gawked at the stark white walls, the flat gray floor, the dazzling fluorescent lighting so bright it almost blinded me. It struck me that I was seeing the ship right now. Not six days in the future, but NOW, before the blackout, before the outbreak. The same whitewashed hallway as all the other passengers saw.
Why? What had happened to my vision? Had I lost my special sight? Or—
Someone was standing in the corridor.
I froze.
The hairs on my neck prickled, and a knot of dread twisted my gut.
The man stood halfway down the highway, slouched and bedraggled. His clothes were crushed and faded, hanging off him like from hangers of bone. His limp hair draped in messy curls around his unshaven face. And his eyes—those eyes! The same eyes I’d seen looking at me from the deep end of a public swimming pool when I was just a child. The same eyes I’d seen staring emptily from John’s glass-chewing corpse, and from the mangled nurse under the table. All the dead have the exact same look in their eyes. One glance at those pale blue orbs—
This man was dead. I was certain of it.
Yet he was standing.
“You,” I said. “You… are you the passenger who—”
The dead man’s lips spread, baring teeth in what might have been a sick imitation of a grin, or a grimace.
“HEY!!!”
I jumped as a voice called out behind me.
An officer in a security uniform strode out from an unmarked door, eyes on the dead man. The security officer said, “Ma’am, stay back.” His gaze never left the dead man. “Sir, if you could please come with me—”
“No!” I cried. “Don’t!”
But the security officer was already marching forward, and the dead man’s hands lifted in stiff parody of surrender. He turned and began shuffling away under the officer’s escort. And then—his teeth bared. Suddenly the dead man had his arm around the officer, mouth clamping on his ear as the officer howled. He was eating him—no, tongue wriggling—licking him?
—whispering?
The officer shoved the dead man aside and collapsed against the wall. I rushed forward, but skidded to a halt as the dead man’s grinning face turned toward me. Terror seized me at the sudden revelation that I was next. He took a wobbly step—
The lights shut off.
Swearing, I fumbled for my flashlight. Switched on the beam. Shrieked when it fell across a hand—but it was just the security officer reaching for me, asking, “Hey—hey, are you all right, Ma’am?” He winced, rubbing at his ear like a dog bothered by a whistle only it could hear. Then he said into his phone, “He assaulted me and got away. I’ve got another passenger here—”
The stench wafted back. Gore once again splattered the walls. I was once more seeing six days into the future, and clapped my napkin to my mouth to stop myself from retching at the return of the smell. But I wasn’t really thinking about all that.
No, because my heart slammed my ribs and my breath ripped ragged from my throat, and every hair stood on end as if I’d been struck by lightning. Whatever it was the crew of the Seastar had hauled from the ocean, it certainly hadn’t been living when they “rescued” it. And the proof was in those overhead lights. Merely being in proximity to Passenger X, my vision had been pulled into the present. Like he was a magnet drawing my sight into his field. But if death was the thing my black, lightless eyes usually glimpsed, then what exactly was Passenger X? And if he could affect my vision, not to mention animating a dead man’s corpse… how was I going to have any hope of stopping him?
[Part 1] [Part 2]

For those who want to experiment with langchain-kind-of-capabilities in .Net, Ms introduced the semantic-kernel library which is very easy to get yours hands on and works great, with an integrated planner, prompt based semantic functions, and decoration based native functions.
I have spent the last couple of days adding a oobabooga connector to that lib, as proposed in the following PR. Both blocking and streaming API are supported. Hopefully it will get merged soon and be part of the next Nuget package release.

For instance, if the Big Ten wanted to reach 24 teams at that point and utilize a six-team, four pods system, I could see these schools as their ideal targets: California, Duke, North Carolina, Notre Dame, Oregon, Stanford, Virginia, and Washington (give or take one or two of them and only if some don't go the SEC).
In a scenario where the SEC wants to reach 20+ schools and the Big 12 wants to reach 24 schools, all current Power 5 teams could feasibly get picked up by one of these three conferences.

As someone who has been on medication for decades for ADHD, I hate seeing posts that glorify ADHD as this personality trait that makes people just the right amount of quirky. I hate the posts that talk about how to turn ADHD into a superpower! I absolutely detest when people use ADHD as a an excuse or explaination for things it has nothing to do with. No, Susan, you not flushing the toilet isn't because you have ADHD. It's because you don't wanna touch the dirty flusher and you are selfish. You don't have ADHD just because you don't understand math.
You know how I was sent to a psychiatrist to get diagnosed? Because at school, my parents were told I have "behavioral" problems. That I am bored in classes, and the school doesn't know how I do well because I'm not any smarter than the average kid, but since I am so bored I decide to pull pranks or start drawing on things and damaging school property or idk cause a disturbance somehow.
So I was taken to a psychiatrist to see what the issue is with me. You know what my school principal told me? "You are a good kid, but it seems like you wanna be bad. You get good grades, so why don't you let your classmates pay attention in class?"
I've only ever been punished for ADHD. It's never been a cute thing. It doesn't make me quirky. It just makes me annoying to others. It isn't a superpower, it has literally only hurt me. Without medication, I'm a disaster. With medication, I'm dysfunctional because I'm now the same as everyone but I've never learned how to be the same as everyone. So now I can't do the normal things even if I'm Normal. The struggle never ends.
Stop acting like it's trendy to have ADHD.

I (25f) fell in love with a man (25m) who is in a relationship. I think he's into me too. What to do? He is also my best friend.
6 months ago I finished university abroad and returned to my home country. I was abroad for almost 5 years, before leaving I became friends with let's call him H. We have known each other for a long time but we became very close after my return. For the last 6 months before my return, we were in daily contact, and he kept telling me that he couldn't wait for me to return, he even picked me up at the airport on my return. Since my return, we started hanging out often, on a daily basis. I didn't notice that we had boundaries in our relationship or that he had a girlfriend. From time to time I saw that some Mary was sending him messages, but when he was with me, he didn't reply, he didn't call her either. He was cooming to my workplace, hugging me, called me in the middle of the day and night, sent me good morning and good night messages. On a weekly basis, we are together 4/5 times for a longer period of time (several hours each time).
I have to admit that I fell in love with him, but I said we were best friends when he asked me what we were, because I didn't want to lose him. He told me that he adored me, that I was his sunshine, joy and wind at his back. He brought me home, took me to dinners, we drove in the car and sang. In general, we had a relationship without boundaries.
Until a week ago when Mary attacked me on the street. She was screaming at me to back off, to not touch her boyfriend and that they've been together for 7 fucking months. I didnt eaven know who she is. He saw me, called her to attack her and yelled at her for what she told me and did. I didn't answer him that day and he called me 150 times, sent 50 messages. He called me in the middle of the night and begged me to answer, to talk to him and that he just wanted me to talk to him. To be angry, curse but just to talk. I answered, we talked for an hour.
The next day he called me, we had a fight. I asked him why he didn't tell me that he has a girlfriend, because we are often together, and he said: she is not important to me, I don't love her, I didn't know how and when he would say it. That's where we argued again, because if you don't love her, why are you with her?
He was upset and I asked him if he is afraid of losing me because of the project we are working together soon or because he loves me? He says that he loves me and that everything should be clear to me from that. We should have talked about it, but we didn't have the chance. He says that it scared him a lot and that he was confused as to how much it scared him that I didn't call him and never call him again. We kissed on one occasion.
When he's with me, the girl doesn't exist, he doesn't respond to her, he doesn't mention her and he doesn't call her. His friends eaven l ask him if I know that he has a girlfriend and he lied that I knew.
I must mention that I became this good with him after he found a girlfriend.
He says that he is calling me, that he loves me, that he has pulled himself together. But I still don't know what to do.. I don't want to be the one to ruin the relationship but I think that every decision I make will lead to that.

What happened:

I paid £20 for the Argos removers to take away my old fridge. 2 men came and essentially tore my kitchen floor to shreds and now I have to get my entire kitchen floor laminate replaced.
One of the men was extremely aggressive.
Instead of moving the new fridge out of the way gently (it was already moved out of his way but he wanted it moved more) and instead of asking his coworker for help to move it carefully, or asking me to help him, he suddenly and violently shouldered the new fridge which caused several rips on the kitchen floor. They took the old fridge, and left yet another rip in the laminate while doing this.
He then shouted at my 67 year old mother to put "washing up liquid in the holes to cover them up" before leaving.
They had no tools with them - no hand truck, no mats, they dragged the fridge across the floor and left several rips. If they had the correct tools it wouldn't have happened.
I have proof they were in my property that day (the collection slip), photographs of the damage they caused and a character witness who was there when it happened.

Update: I contacted Argos head office in Milton Keynes via CEO Simon Roberts with a full set of photos and 2 invoices with quotes of how much it will cost to replace as they requested. They said the invoices must include the floor dimensions, materials used and a breakdown of the labour needed so I got 2 from 2 companies. And my "claim was declined."
They said the removal men are denying the damage they caused and that they take no responsibility and at most, they will offer £200 as a goodwill gesture. The replacement of the entire kitchen floor will cost around £350-£400.
Here's images of the damage they caused: https://imgur.com/a/ur9YHOu
They said they're declining my claim because the drivers said they left no damage. The drivers have straight up lied and Argos have sided with them. I wouldn't go through all this hassle but the entire vinyl will now have to be pulled up and replaced due to the rips.
What are my options here? Small claims court?

This analysis is based o Senja's growth story from their buildinginpublic posts and published in SaaS strategy newsletter: https://decodingvirality.substack.com/
What’s the point of building another testimonial tool when Endorsal, Testimonial, Vocal Video, and Shoutout existed and were quite popular?
Especially since the product targets small businesses and solo founder niche with following market constraints: - Customers have a small budget for software tools - Success requires audience building as low pricing doesn’t allow for ad spend to work - Conventional sales tactics barely work in this market and word-of-mouth is often the core growth feature

Finding a niche

According to Senja’s founder, the popular tools to collect and manage testimonials back then were either slow, expensive, or ugly.
He wanted to do things in a more fun and exciting way than the competition. As we have discussed in other posts, if the same solution is working monetarily for a different niche, it’s already proven that it’s a repeatable problem to solve. All you’re left to do is find a new niche and make sure there’s enough demand for this product in that niche.
Before getting into Senja’s niche let’s understand how niches work for SaaS as it’s a recurring theme of our discussions.
Niche is a combination of 4 things:
Businesses often use one or more of the following characteristics to carve out their niches. - Specialization- most niches are an occupation in case of B2C and a category in case of B2B. B2C specializations are: authors, coaches, doctors, architects etc. B2B specializations are industry specific like retail, manufacturing, agriculture, finance etc. - Stage of growth - usually depends on revenue/income and experience/years in business. Basically, products targeting seed stage, bootstrapped or small businesses are very different from ones targeting mid-size and those for large corporations. - Platform/channel/geography/sub-specialization - this is to going one level deeper to carve out a niche from an existing specialization because it has some unique needs. Like building for doctors in a specific country because of some unique health regulations or building for realtors who specialize in commercial real estate etc. - Preferences- even within a certain sub-specialization and growth stage customers may have different preferences. Some may prefer better designs, lower price, ease of use, community, real time support and so on. This is the niche for many bootstrappers who begin by solving a specific problem very well. In case of Senja, it went for the customers with a preference for better design for testimonials within the small business niche.

Betting on one core customer preference

For many tools solving for the ‘user experience before purchase’, like website builders, testimonial tools, forms, chatbots etc. there is almost always a tradeoff between different competing functions like design, ease-of-use, speed etc. Tools that offer great design choices are either too expensive or slow or have some other limitation.
So Senja’s strategy was to carve out a design-conscious+ ease-of-use segment from the existing small business audience as a niche. As there were hardly any competitors focusing on these functions, Senja had a clear differentiation.

Execution is the key

6 months of dilemma

Once the differentiator was clear, Senja’s solo founder built the MVP.
But building a faster or more beautiful product usually isn’t enough to get people to pick you over the competition. You need to have:
Product-market fit in a niche (multiple purchases where users share a common reason for purchase)
A vision to build the product beyond initial product-market fit
The initial 6 months were rough for Senja.
Its journey started with “scratching your own itch” for its founder as he solved his own problem with embedding a fast wall of love on his website, and he didn’t know what else the market wanted and the direction the product should take.
This is a typical issue with founders who come up with an idea to solve their own problem and then struggle to grow the product when that specific problem is solved for.
It didn’t have any clear roadmap and was replicating features from its competitors which was a mistake because of 2 reasons:
You can’t differentiate yourself with features offered by existing players- building a niche requires features that are exclusive for the niche
Absence of a roadmap often confuses the builders as they start picking up any feature request that comes their way but this makes the product like a boat without a sail
Senja got 100 sign ups during this initial 6 months period but a very few repeated users or paying customers - the 2 key criteria of vision and a product-market fit were not satisfied by Senja.
During the first 6 months Senja made only 2 LTD sales for $350 in total and $0 MRR.
What Senja lacked was a clear value proposition, product roadmap and business model to attain its desired level of adoption.

Need for a team

After the initial period of confusion Senja brought in a co-founder and things started turning the corner.
The things that stand out in most of Senja’s current reviews are - Design and - Ease of use
So let’s backtrack Senja’s journey and see how they reached this point after the initial turmoil.
Senja’s phase of fast growth- 24x growth in 8 months
After the new co-founder joined two important things happened
Senja started focusing on onboarding that was missing from its initial roadmap A handful of features were prioritized as the new co-founder had first hand experience with this problem
We talked about 2 USPs (design and ease of use) that helped Senja standout and here’s the onboarding and product roadmap that got them to this point.
Onboarding
Earlier Senja’s onboarding plan was to drop users into an app, and expect them to figure out the rest.
Senja was getting 1.5K- 3K visitors to the site every single month but activation rate was close to 0. Activation is when the user starts using a product and get the value after signing up.
So they knew that onboarding was something they needed to fix to deal with this situation.
The essence of onboarding is to give users direction (and nudges) and keep them engaged from the point they visit a landing page until they reach that aha moment when they have attained a desired a goal using your tool.
Here’s what Senja did to fix their onboarding

• They made sure that the users completed one primary action (creating a form) when they signed up, making those users to invest on the product from the get-go.
• They artificially reduced the time to magical moments with dummy data and automation.
• They cut out the dead ends in the app to engage users with some action on each screen. For example, when they first visit the testimonials page, instead of having an empty state, they’re prompted to import their existing testimonials.
• They improved the playfulness of their onboarding process.

Feature prioritization

In order to achieve its goal of better design an ease of use, Senja needed a clear feature roadmap. And this couldn’t happen by copying features from competitors but by understanding the needs of its users.
In the second phase of its Journey Senja achieved ease of use by features like - Richer review management - Multiple forms for collecting different kinds of testimonials. - More ways to embed and customize testimonials.
It’s design goals were attained by features like automatic image generation from testimonials.

New acquisition channels

With all the above Senja was already on its path to better conversion and retention. Now it had to bring in more users on its platform by expanding its acquisition sources.
Its initial users came from Twitter (about 70%) but for building a sustainable business it’s important to focus on SEO and expand the acquisition sources.
Senja focused on repackaging its Twitter content for other channels like Linkedin and reddit and started focusing on Cold Email as a channel to spread the word.
It started paying dividends as within 6 months its search traffic increased 4x and stable search traffic growth is an indicator of a stellar word of mouth (coming via backlink and social mentions)

Risks in Senja’s business:

Finally, let’s look into the risks faced by a product like Senja. The biggest risk that I’ve seen for SaaS in a competitive niche is to stay relevant and reinvent constantly. Senja was able to take away business from its competitors by focusing on certain offerings.
But with buildinginpublic there is always a chance that a copycat will emerge with similar features and a better marketing strategy.
Currently, it’s signup to purchase rate is 6% (based on April data of 526 signups and 32 customers ).
It has practically $0 acquisition cost with customer acquisition via social platforms, cold emails and SEO.
But as time passes, if social traction or SEO gets disrupted due to platform policies, the acquisition costs may go up and then the 2.5% monthly attrition will become a real threat to the business.
Sources: https://senja.io/blog

Picked up this bladeshow special ultratech and a ramlock stitch from blade, and I just like the stitch more.
This ultratech has the modified Bayonet blade in magnacut with a frag pattern G10 top. I think I carried this guy once over the weekend and it shows absolutely no signs of carry.
https://imgur.com/a/PMb9WDD
I'm full transparency, I paid $180 for this. I'm asking $205 PPFF to help cover shipping and tiny bit of the gas I used getting down there. Feel free to message me any offers.

I am still fairly new- taking my own cases for about 6 months. Things are picking up, I’m getting more cases, and I find myself struggling to keep track of all the moving pieces. My boss is extremely unorganized so I can’t go to him for advice.
Do you all use any sort of spreadsheet or other type of organization system? I really like having all of my data in one place, but haven’t figured out a good way to make an efficient spreadsheet of my cases or anything like that. Any idea that I have to put into excel ends up growing and it’s like 27 columns wide. Any organizational advice is welcomed and appreciated :)

Any word on when/if Barnes and Noble will sell this set? Seems like it's been available elsewhere for a while now. I've held off on picking it up because I have a B&N gift card 🙃