Ecommerce Management Advisors
Ecommerce Management Advisors
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He Jiankui, the Chinese biophysicist whose controversial 2018 experiment led to the birth of three gene-edited children, says he’s returned to work on the concept
Braxton Manley first appeared on the podcast in 2021. As a college student, he had launched Braxley Bands, a maker of Apple Watch bands. Last year he returned with an update on that business after operational and sales challenges.
He’s back, having launched his latest company, Mystic, a direct-to-consumer maker of health-focused chewing gum. In our recent conversation, we discuss the origins of Mystic, marketing plans, early successes, and more.
The entire audio is embedded below. The transcript is edited for length and clarity.
Eric Bandholz: How’s business?
Braxton Manley: Braxley Bands, our Apple Watch band company, is surviving in a challenging climate. We’re operating from a profit-first mentality. We grow as much as possible and, based on the prior month’s profit-and-loss statement, scale back if needed. It’s multiple scale-ups, then pull-backs. My brother Zach and I run the business, working remotely. We haven’t taken a salary in a while and are focused on the business’s long-term stability.
I’m involved with three direct-to-consumer ecommerce businesses now. My fiance, Maddie, started Peace Love Hormones about three years ago. It’s a direct-to-consumer supplement brand for women’s hormone health. I have an executive role there, functioning as CEO so that Maddie can pursue her doctorate in herbal medicine and focus on the product. I focus on the marketing and operations.
Our third business, Mystic, just launched. It’s chewing gum for women made with sap from a mastic tree, which grows on a Greek island and has a ton of health benefits.
We’re trying to build a family holding company to operate multiple DTC businesses. At this point, they’re all relatively humble — six and seven figures in annual revenue.
Bandholz: Tell me about Mystic.
Manley: It’s square chunks of organic gum. It costs $38 for a can. It’s a beauty product for women and is categorized that way on TikTok. It’s different from regular gum. It’s not sweet at all. It’s palate-cleansing. It relieves indigestion and promotes oral health. You can develop an appreciation for the flavor.
The business is six months old. We’ve been fulfilling orders for just a week. The beginning stage was figuring out what the logo would look like. We did a beta test last year. We invested about $3,000 and ended up selling $20,000 worth. We realized we had a viable product.
We then raised $90,000 from friends and family. We developed custom packaging and produced 5,000 gum units — enough to make our first $200,000 in revenue.
Bandholz: How are you marketing the product?
Manley: Well, we’re a week into fulfilling orders. So it is fresh. We’ve spent much time on a TikTok Shop. We believe TikTok is a good product fit.
Affiliates are important to us too. Maddie, my finance, is an Instagram creator in the health and wellness space. She has an incredible community, which produced our first Mystic orders — about $5,000 in revenue. By Q4, we’ll be doing six figures monthly. This can scale quickly.
We sell recurring orders, but we’re not using the terms “subscribers” or “subscriptions.” Instead, we sell memberships to a gum-chewing club. We have cool hats, a club logo, and patches. The idea is to build a culture. We will charge more for our first subscription and less for renewals. It’s $38 for a one-time order or $30 to join the club for recurring shipments.
Bandholz: Where can people buy the gum and follow you?
Manley: Go to MysticGum.com. You can follow me on X, @Braxtonmanley, or LinkedIn.
Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about the non-search features that the GoogleOther crawler supports, then added a caution about the consequences of blocking GoogleOther.What Is GoogleOther?
GoogleOther is a generic crawler created by Google for the various purposes that fall outside of those of bots that specialize for Search, Ads, Video, Images, News, Desktop and Mobile. It can be used by internal teams at Google for research and development in relation to various products.
The official description of GoogleOther is:
“GoogleOther is the generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites. For example, it may be used for one-off crawls for internal research and development.”
Something that may be surprising is that there are actually three kinds of GoogleOther crawlers.
Three Kinds Of GoogleOther Crawlers
GoogleOtherGeneric crawler for public URLs
GoogleOther-ImageOptimized to crawl public image URLs
GoogleOther-VideoOptimized to crawl public video URLs
All three GoogleOther crawlers can be used for research and development purposes. That’s just one purpose that Google publicly acknowledges that all three versions of GoogleOther could be used for.
What Non-Search Features Does GoogleOther Support?
Google doesn’t say what specific non-search features GoogleOther supports, probably because it doesn’t really “support” a specific feature. It exists for research and development crawling which could be in support of a new product or an improvement in a current product, it’s a highly open and generic purpose.
This is the question asked that Gary narrated:
“What non-search features does GoogleOther crawling support?”
Gary Illyes answered:
“This is a very topical question, and I think it is a very good question. Besides what’s in the public I don’t have more to share.
GoogleOther is the generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites. For example, it may be used for one-off crawls for internal research and development.
Historically Googlebot was used for this, but that kind of makes things murky and less transparent, so we launched GoogleOther so you have better controls over what your site is crawled for.
That said GoogleOther is not tied to a single product, so opting out of GoogleOther crawling might affect a wide range of things across the Google universe; alas, not Search, search is only Googlebot.”
It Might Affect A Wide Range Of Things
Gary is clear that blocking GoogleOther wouldn’t have an affect on Google Search because Googlebot is the crawler used for indexing content. So if blocking any of the three versions of GoogleOther is something a site owner wants to do, then it should be okay to do that without a negative effect on search rankings.
But Gary also cautioned about the outcome that blocking GoogleOther, saying that it would have an effect on other products and services across Google. He didn’t state which other products it could affect nor did he elaborate on the pros or cons of blocking GoogleOther.
Pros And Cons Of Blocking GoogleOther
Whether or not to block GoogleOther doesn’t necessarily have a straightforward answer. There are several considerations to whether doing that makes sense.
Pros
Inclusion in research for a future Google product that’s related to search (maps, shopping, images, a new feature in search) could be useful. It might be helpful to have a site included in that kind of research because it might be used for testing something good for a site and be one of the few sites chosen to test a feature that could increase earnings for a site.
Another consideration is that blocking GoogleOther to save on server resources is not necessarily a valid reason because GoogleOther doesn’t seem to crawl so often that it makes a noticeable impact.
If blocking Google from using site content for AI is a concern then blocking GoogleOther will have no impact on that at all. GoogleOther has nothing to do with crawling for Google Gemini apps or Vertex AI, including any future products that will be used for training associated language models. The bot for that specific use case is Google-Extended.
Cons
On the other hand it might not be helpful to allow GoogleOther if it’s being used to test something related to fighting spam and there’s something the site has to hide.
It’s possible that a site owner might not want to participate if GoogleOther comes crawling for market research or for training machine learning models (for internal purposes) that are unrelated to public-facing products like Gemini and Vertex.
Allowing GoogleOther to crawl a site for unknown purposes is like giving Google a blank check to use your site data in any way they see fit outside of training public-facing LLMs or purposes related to named bots like GoogleBot.
Takeaway
Should you block GoogleOther? It’s a coin toss. There are possible potential benefits but in general there isn’t enough information to make an informed decision.
Listen to the Google SEO Office Hours podcast at the 1:30 minute mark:
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Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
Reddit has recently tightened its grip on who can access its content, blocking major search engines from indexing recent posts and comments.This move has sparked discussions in the SEO and digital marketing communities about the future of content accessibility and AI training data.
What’s Happening?
First reported by 404 Media, Reddit updated its robots.txt file, preventing most web crawlers from accessing its latest content.
Google, however, remains an exception, likely due to a $60 million deal that allows the search giant to use Reddit’s content for AI training.
Brent Csutoras, founder of Search Engine Journal, offers some context:
“Since taking on new investors and starting their pathway to IPO, Reddit has moved away from being open-source and allowing anyone to scrape their content and use their APIs without paying.”
The Google Exception
Currently, Google is the only major search engine able to display recent Reddit results when users search with “site:reddit.com.”
This exclusive access sets Google apart from competitors like Bing and DuckDuckGo.
Why This Matters
For users who rely on appending “Reddit” to their searches to find human-generated answers, this change means they’ll be limited to using Google or search engines that pull from Google’s index.
It presents new challenges for SEO professionals and marketers in monitoring and analyzing discussions on one of the internet’s largest platforms.
The Bigger Picture
Reddit’s move aligns with a broader trend of content creators and platforms seeking compensation for using their data in AI training.
As Csutoras points out:
“Publications, artists, and entertainers have been suing OpenAI and other AI companies, blocking AI companies, and fighting to avoid using public content for AI training.”
What’s Next?
While this development may seem surprising, Csutoras suggests it’s a logical step for Reddit.
He notes:
“It seems smart on Reddit’s part, especially since similar moves in the past have allowed them to IPO and see strong growth for their valuation over the last two years.”
FAQ
What is the recent change Reddit has made regarding content accessibility?
Reddit has updated its robots.txt file to block major search engines from indexing its latest posts and comments. This change exempts Google due to a $60 million deal, allowing Google to use Reddit’s content for AI training purposes.
Why does Google have exclusive access to Reddit’s latest content?
Google has exclusive access to Reddit’s latest content because of a $60 million deal that allows Google to use Reddit’s content for AI training. This agreement sets Google apart from other search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo, which are unable to index new Reddit posts and comments.
What broader trend does Reddit’s recent move reflect?
Reddit’s decision to limit search engine access aligns with a larger trend where content creators and platforms seek compensation for the use of their data in AI training. Many publications, artists, and entertainers are taking similar actions to either block or demand compensation from AI companies using their content.
Featured Image: Mamun sheikh K/Shutterstock