Nate Matherson
@NateMatherson
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Co-founder @GoPositional (tools for content marketing & SEO) | 2-time YC founder, investor in 80+ startups
Charleston, SC
Joined May 2014
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Pinned Tweet
We made it! Today is
@GoPositional
's public launch day! Go sign-up! 📈
But in all seriousness, getting here has been a long road. We did a very hard pivot into Positional 13 months ago. We had spent two years building something that people didn’t want, and we decided to return
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One of the best things about being a
@ycombinator
company is that you get access to the YC internal software and tools. You get:
- an investor database —> honest reviews for basically every investor/angel/fund you’d want to talk with, and some that you don’t
- bookface —> YC’s
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First-time startup founder PSA: please don’t pay someone to help you raise money
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It is
@ycombinator
application week for the W24 batch. The deadline for on-time applications is October 13.
As far as the application itself goes, if I've got one piece of advice to give, I'd say this: keep your responses short and focused.
Don't use 400 words when 200 words
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My co-founder Matt and I have been working together for about 10 years. He’s also the best man at my wedding in 54 days.
Startups are hard and I got lucky. I got a fantastic co-founder, CTO, and a best friend.
Pivoting to
@GoPositional
was a big decision for us. And incredibly
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📉Real-world example of the impact of creating full blog posts/content with ChatGPT... I chatted with a company today that created blogs exclusively with generative AI, and things worked and then quickly didn't.
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My
@ycombinator
Starter Pack 🧡
We use most of these tools every day:
-
@Stripe
: billing, payments
-
@Rippling
: payroll, benefits (eg insurance)
-
@JuneDotSo
: customer analytics
-
@usepylon
: customer support, specifically Slack channel management
-
@traceloopdev
: LLM
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Throwback pic of Matt and me during
@ycombinator
W16. YC has grown a lot since then, and they have been an incredible partner to us. YC is accepting applications for their S23 batch right now. The deadline is Friday, April 7th:
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It's
@ycombinator
demo day! Go W24! 📈🧡
Throwback pic of me on stage at YC's W16 demo day. I was so nervous.
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VC: I was an operator for four years before getting into VC. Our firm has 27 years of operator experience.
Me: You mean you had a job for four years? Nice. I was an operator in the rug department at the IKEA store in East Palo Alto for three years.
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I closed the biggest transaction of my life two weeks ago.
It was a long time coming too. 10-years in the "deals expected to close" stage of the pipeline. Lots of follow-ups.
Being a startup founder's significant other is really hard. And Emma has been the best partner to me
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I’ve loved angel investing into other YC companies, especially into developer tools. And one thing that stands out in this
@ycombinator
batch is the traction on the open source side of things. Awesome work S23!
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59 out of our first 100 customers were fellow
@ycombinator
companies. 🧡
Post-pivot, the YC network/community, and bookface (YC's internal forum) were mission-critical for us.
Critical for so many reasons:
1) These companies bought our product before they should have. Shout
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I'm one year into selling software. I've done something like ~750 sales demos in the last year. Before starting Positional, I'd never done software sales. Here are a few key learnings I've had so far👇
- Ask lots of questions upfront — In the beginning, I wanted to jump into
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Submit that
@ycombinator
app! Changed my life.🧡
Throwback pic to Matt and I’s application video for the W16 batch. I still have that shirt!
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@sweatystartup
I bought a cooler from Publix for $16, super useful this time of year, getting hot here in Charleston.
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As of today, 114 Y Combinator companies have launched publicly as part of the S23 batch (on YC’s site). I was going through the list this AM, and I noticed a few things (by Industry tag):
- B2B SaaS + Services was 44% of my S21 batch, and is 80% of this S23 batch
- Fintech was
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Matt and I are thrilled to announce that
@ContainIQ
has raised a $2.5 mm seed round from Lachy Groom Fund, Y Combinator, Taurus Ventures, Pioneer Fund, ACTAI Ventures, and others.
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A couple of big announcements today. My co-founder Matt and I made the crazy/difficult decision to pivot from
@ContainIQ
. Matt and I are returning to our roots. 🧵
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Another day, another freelance writer submitted an "original article" to one of our customers. In this case, we flagged the article as 98.49% written by generative AI. 🤯
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Woah, thanks
@immad
! Your post drove a record amount of traffic / requests for the private beta 📈 just to recap, I’m one of the co-founders of
@GoPositional
(YC S21, we pivoted). We are building tools for content / SEO teams. And today, we are working with about 65+ YC cos 💪
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Hey
@anothercohen
my $500 invested in
@TheHustle
on
@SeedInvest
returned $1,000 after the acquisition.
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Yea, you hear a lot about big outcomes for YC companies. But the pure survival rates from batches years ago seem amazing. W16 (78%), W16 (73%), W17 (78%), S17 (82%), W18 (84%), S18 (91%). YC founders just survive.📈 (note: calculated inactive ÷ all)
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I wasn't expecting to get this much engagement on my Tweet (so many likes 🤯). Background:
@GoPositional
we are building a toolset for content marketing teams, including AutoDetect (an AI detection tool). If you'd like early access, shoot me a note nate (at) positional (dot) com
📉Real-world example of the impact of creating full blog posts/content with ChatGPT... I chatted with a company today that created blogs exclusively with generative AI, and things worked and then quickly didn't.
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Today
@ContainIQ
is presenting at
@ycombinator
's S21 demo day! So many incredible companies in our batch. It is virtual this time around... but here is a throwback pic of Matt and I at YC back in 2016 (during the W16 batch)📈
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This morning Matt and I launched
@ContainIQ
to the public on
@ProductHunt
! After months of building, we are excited to deliver our Kubernetes native monitoring solution to the world. Also pumped to announce that we are part of
@ycombinator
's S21 batch!
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“I’m a VC and I’m open for business this summer.”
You mean you have like a job?
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There are some pretty incredible companies launching in the
@ycombinator
W23 batch right now! Woah 📈
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I am launching a weekly podcast called Optimize! On the pod, we will sit down with some of the smartest minds in content marketing and SEO. Our goal is to give you perspective and insights on what is moving the needle in organic search right now.
We will discuss everything from
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One of my favorite things about
@ycombinator
... YC provided us so much structure going into our seed round.
Such a clear timeline to raising our round w/ Demo Day being a forcing function in the weeks leading up to Demo Day.
Too many early-stage founders get stuck raising for
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We picked a date!
@GoPositional
is launching publicly on 03/26/2024 🚀
54 days to go. Coincidently, it has been exactly 365 days since we did our hard pivot to Positional. Happy 1-year birthday, Positional. 🎂
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We launched
@GoPositional
exactly 1-month ago. And I'm thrilled to say that we've onboarded 35 amazing customers (from seed to Series D) to our private beta. 📈🧵
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We made a list!
@GoPositional
was included as one of
@ycombinator
's Top Marketing Startups for 2024. Excited for the year ahead! 🧡
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At
@ContainIQ
, we’ve spent much of the last year building out our blog. And over the last 18 months, we’ve published 200 articles and grown traffic to our blog from 0 to 200,000 visitors per month, with the vast majority of that traffic coming from organic search. Here is how. 🧵
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We've sponsored 10+ email newsletters over the last couple of months. It is our first time testing this channel, and we are learning a lot.
In our most recent placement on
@NealOGrady
's
@GrowthTactics
, I decided to get a little creative with our copy. We've sponsored this
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PSA: Don’t start a startup just to be cool on Twitter. You are going to burn out quick.
And PSA to angel investors.... avoid founders who are just in it for the hype, resume, popularity. The high won’t last. Same goes for chasing that hot rolling fund, not worth it.
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YC valuations are largely flat, albeit there is a bigger focus on DevTools/SaaS in S23, of which always trade higher.
I’ve invested in a # of cos in this batch and the quality is simply the best I’ve seen. I think what is most impressive in S23 is the quality of the founders.
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I’ve invested in 3 companies in the W23 YC batch. And I’ve talked to about 20 cos so far. A few thoughts.🧵💪
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#1
goal for ‘24: get to breakeven / default alive
Series A milestones change. And the bar is a lot higher right now. But for us, and a lot of other seed stage startups, getting to default alive is a much clearer bar.
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Our website just crossed 1 mm total search impressions. Of course, search impressions don't = organic search traffic. That being said, impressions are a good/early leading indicator that you are doing something right with SEO.
SEO takes time. But I'm confident that organic
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When I was in high school, I used to buy “not working” watches on eBay. They sold for 50% less than “working” used watches.
99% of the time they just needed a new battery. And those batteries cost $0.08 if you bought them in bulk.
From there, I actually got into the watch
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@alexiskold
@ycombinator
Not sure about the hate here. These founders have a ton going on (Ex scaling, fundraising), this is a poor cheap shot on a small number of founders, if any.
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I asked ChatGPT to analyze the W24 Y Combinator batch and pick 10 companies to invest in. Here are ChatGPT's top picks.
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@arvanaghi
@JoinMeow
Is that yield worth the dilution of an unnecessary round? (ex we haven't touched it)
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The entire Positional team is working today. We don't celebrate holidays. Too much work to do and nothing to be thankful for just yet. If you know, you know.
#grind
I spent this morning cooking up a fantastic outbound campaign. The only thing I'll be watching today is a graph of
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Parasite SEO? Niche sites? AI-generated content? Episode
#38
of the Optimize podcast is a gem and one of my favorites.
@Charles_SEO
was a great guest willing to get highly tactical for our listeners.
There are many ‘hats’ that can be worn in SEO. On the Optimize podcast, we are
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Fantastic work to all of the companies in YC W23!
Four companies stood out to me as especially interesting: 1)
@letsunifyai
2)
@BuildtAi
3)
@NumeralTax
4)
@Middleware_Labs
📈🧵
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There is that saying: always be closing
I try to reframe it as: always be helping
Learning SaaS sales as I go. And one thing that I’ve found really effective is to create a reason to followup with the prospect. A reason that isn’t “ready to sign-up”?
Instead, I try to use our
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The things we do for ⭐s -- LinkedIn just added a "Top Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Voice" badge to my LinkedIn profile. It took some effort, but getting one of these badges added to your profile is pretty straightforward.
You just need to reply to questions being asked or
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All of those professional VCs telling you to chill and stay with SVB all look pretty terrible right now.
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I’ve helped a number of founders prep for YC S23 batch interviews. Here are 8 general tips that I repeat over and over again.
1) know which founder is going to answer which type of question (Ex GTM goes Bob, eng/product goes to Sam)
2) don’t use 600 words when a 200 word reply
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Google's share of search has remained relatively steady for the last 12 months, at ~91%, down only 0.2% in the last year, despite many people saying that Google (and SEO) is dead.
I saw a note from Morgan Stanley. They highlighted that Google is also seeing positive search query
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Heyyy we did it. 100k / visitors from organic search in the last 28 days. 📈
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From an angel investor perspective, I’m most excited about the smaller number of generative AI / ChatGPT startups that are going vertical (Ex trucking, construction, etc), and not very excited about the much larger number of cos going completely horizontal.
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Founders... your quarterly reminder that you need to pitch 50-100+ investors for your pre-seed / seed rounds.
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📈
Congrats to Hoboken-based
@ContainIQ
! The computer software company recently announced a $2.5M seed round from
@lachygroom
,
@ycombinator
& others! ContainIQ plans to use the funds to grow its team.
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The first two episodes of Optimize just dropped. Optimize is my weekly content marketing and SEO podcast.
On the Optimize podcast, we go in-depth and tactical with a fantastic selection of guests ranging from in-house SEO teams, agency folks, and some of the best soloists in the
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Over the last year, we've sponsored 17 different email newsletters. One thing I've learned is that the success rate/response varies dramatically. Here are the three that have performed best for us:
-
@GrowthTactics
by
@NealOGrady
-
@mkt1cap
by
@emilykramer
-
@thegrowthmemo
by
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I spent the first 7 or so years of my career in the personal finance space, a Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) category of organic search, where building trust is incredibly important. You hear a lot about Google's E-E-A-T recommendations, and a lot of that work should be
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Woah, just learned that Calendly has an Analytics tab. I've done 1,300+ calendly scheduled meetings in the last year.🤯
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As much as I like to think that distribution > product, at my last startup we had incredible distribution (ex massive organic search presence, 200k / month), but we struggled with product and differentiation, and no matter how good our distrib got I don’t think we could have won.
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@ChrisJBakke
actually an interesting startup idea in here. Creating / marketing a custodial account for crypto + bitcoin. I think there are a lot of parents that would invest in something like this.
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At a startup, there is literally always something to do. It's wild.
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Next week we are onboarding our first new hire since we made our hard pivot 8.5 months ago. And it is a familiar face / someone we worked with for 5-6 years previously.
At our first company (in ‘15-17), our first 6-7 employees were friends from college. We were 21 and didn’t
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February was a good month for us, largely due to a drop in month-2 and month-3 churn.
Month-2 churn is down 7% (relatively) in the last three months, versus the prior three month period.
Month-3 churn is down 8% (relatively) in the last three months, versus the prior three
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I got my first “let’s circle back in 2025” response today.
Just scheduled the follow up. ✅
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As a 2x startup founder, I've worked with about ~60 investors in our companies.
I've found that the best / most helpful investors on our cap table are either really large or really small checks. It is the middle ground check that tends to be the least helpful. The middle ground
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Don't pay $400 to someone to review your pitch deck. Tons of awesome founders (including myself) will help you for free.
First-time startup founder PSA: please don’t pay someone to help you raise money
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A little part of me dies every time I talk to an early-stage startup that just spent 2 months with an SEO agency doing a technical SEO audit (note: this last one had 12 pages on their website).
Controversial take --> SEOs / SEO agencies like to waste time on tasks that won't
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Best birthday card an SEO could get. At 30, I’m definitely searching for “best vacuums for pet hair”, and would love to be searching for “beachside rentals” sometime soon. 🥳
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In early 2015, my co-founder Matt and I applied to Y Combinator for the first time. We were juniors in college at UD. We got an in-person interview and flew to CA.
The interview went OK. They liked our idea, but we had almost zero traction. And for a marketplace business,
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We are about 6 weeks into our private beta launch of
@GoPositional
, and we've onboarded 53 customers (thank you to all of our early customers ☺️). Here are 9 insights/things I've learned over these last 6 weeks. 🧵
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We are excited to announce that
@ContainIQ
received SOC 2 Type II certification from Johanson Group LLP. In this blog post, we explain what it means for our current and future customers.
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Consider me a huge fan of
@BrianEDean
. The man puts out some of the most helpful and tactical content in the SEO space. And on episode
#28
of the Optimize podcast, Brian and I had a fantastic conversation about Google's ranking factors, SGE, his
#1
marketing strategy for '24, and
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@GregChalmersPGA
Tbh if you haven’t upgraded your driver in more than a 3 year period you are missing out.
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Zapier is often credited as having one of the best programmic SEO channels. Simply put, I love their page design and their site structure. I took some notes on Zapier's approach this AM and figured to share.
Programmatic SEO (pSEO) is the process of creating a very large number
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Lots of talk about Series A being the place to invest right now. Valuations have come down at the A, and you are investing in a substantially de-risked business.
I think this is true.
But I’m also seeing a number of opportunities in the post-seed zone right before Series A (ex
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Finding a co-founder is tough. You need to know what to look for. People who will build you up.
You need to find a co-founder like Matt.
As just a quick example, he always finds my LinkedIn contributions “insightful.” Thanks, Matt. 💙
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Working our booth SU 67 for
@ContainIQ
at KubeCon today! Would love to say hey if you are here!
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Over the past 18 months, we published 200 articles on
@ContainIQ
(my prev co) and grew our blog’s traffic from 0 to 200,000 per month, with the vast majority of that coming from organic search. I just published this blog post recapping how we did it. ✍️📈
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I just published this article, Google’s Guidelines on AI-Generated Content (as of April 2023). I recap Google’s most recent statements on AI content and help to provide context on how to follow these guidelines. Key takeaways in this quick 🧵
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Wednesday starting off strong. Today one of our users was able to diagnose and resolve a recurring ephemeral storage issue with
@ContainIQ
. Our platform helped by providing the historical data (ex k8s events feed) needed to identify when and how this was happening.
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Episode
#23
of the Optimize podcast just dropped, and it is one of our best.
@Kevin_Indig
was kind enough to sit with me for this highly tactical and jam-packed 50-minute episode. Buckle up. 🔥
If you don't already know Kevin, know that he is a growth advisor, angel investor,
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I just wrote this blog post on
#Postgres
Performance Monitoring for
@HydrasCo
. In the article, I explore some best practices and tools to use, including
@ContainIQ
. It is always great to collaborate with other
@ycombinator
companies!
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I really enjoyed the opportunity to talk about student loan debt with
@FoxNews
! My first time on television, learned a lot in the process.
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