Boring Launches & Bad Names

I think focusing more on what are the problems that a typical developer has with Node.js and how they can solve them with Deno, that I think would be more appealing. So that's number one thing I would do to make it less boring, make it more based on use cases and on specific pain points, again like we talked last time. The second thing that I think is this is a great opportunity to highlight the things that are great with Deno. They don't have to be great only in version 2, they could have been great in version 1, but it's a great time for people to remember. Hi everybody, my name is Martin Gontovnikas but everybody calls me Gonto. I'm here with Hank Taylor. Hi. Every week Hank and I boil down the most important product growth and marketing learnings from what's happening in dev tools. So in simple terms, we'll give you our thoughts on the current thing on the dev tools space, we hope you'll enjoy it. Welcome to the third episode of Code to Market. Today like every week we come to you with two main topics that we want to discuss and then some miscellaneous. I present the first topic, second topic will be presented by Hank. First of all, today we want to talk about Deno. I don't know if you've heard of Deno, but Deno is basically a runtime that competes with Node.js and they just released the version 2 right now, four years after. If you look at the tweets that they used to launch, you'll see that the first one explains that they launched a version that is now backward compatible with Node and npm and that it has long-term support. At the same time they also did a pretty cool video on this launch as well, and then we spent some time looking at the comments, looking if people reacted, how they felt about it and why, which is what we'll talk about today. Hank, I know you had some thoughts on how you ship boring stuff like this one that doesn't seem very interesting. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, especially the main tweet of just, you know, the URL is slash two, it's a very basic OG card, and the main two things they were talking about were long-term support and backwards compatibility. They're not like sexy things, they're kind of like, uh, I don't know, painkillers even is not the right term. Like there's not even a good term, that's kind of how boring it is to me. People, they did get a lot of likes and stuff. My thought is if you're gonna do, it feels like a maintenance and a quality of life ship more than anything, and if that's going to be your main version or your version bump, cool, whatever. But I think you can play it up on how, hey, this isn't, this is to improve quality of life, this is to make it easier to migrate, this is to help you finally make the jump to Deno. I think they could have leaned into those things because there's major reasons they did, they did it. It's not just people were simply asking them for, uh, oh we wish we had backwards compatibility. Like these actually, when you look deeper, it actually feels like these have long-term and serious implications for people's businesses, and they can actually build on top of them. Um, and I don't know, I think there's lots of ways to spice up um a boring launch. How would you spice this one up? I mean one, they did do a video which is nice and you, you especially like the video. I thought it was okay, I thought, you know, it's different for sure, um, you know including like the shirtless guy in the middle, but I think it starts with the floating guy and his feet. Yeah, but I think with the main tweet and the main thing they put up front, I think instead of starting with their whole history like, oh four years since blah blah blah, like get right to why it matters. And we spoke about this last week with, oh, product marketers always want to put like the value prop and it's better to show not tell. Well in this case they're showing it, um, so if you're not going to show well, you at least better tell why it's important and uh a little, at least a little bit, right? Like, you know, what what are the implications of of this? I think, I don't know, maybe I'm contradicting myself from last time. You know, maybe it is good that they just put it out there. Like what do you think?

I still do believe in show don't tell, but on this one, to me what's very interesting on the on the boring stuff is I was reading tweets about how people felt about it, and I saw a lot of people who were excited because they were talking about, oh, in version 2 they fixed all of my pain points that I had with Node and now I can finally use Deno. So I think on one side, if that's the thing, that wasn't clear in the blog post and it wasn't clear on the tweet. So I think focusing more on what are the problems that a typical developer has with Node.js and how they can solve them with Deno, that I think would be more appealing. So that's number one thing I would do to make it less boring, make it more based on use cases and on specific pain points, again like we talked last time. The second thing that I think is this is a great opportunity to highlight the things that are great with Deno. They don't have to be great only in version 2, they could have been great in version 1, but it's a great time for people to remember. Um, another tweet that I would have done is something starting to show, for example, Deno, one of the main things they have that is really good is their speed. They're much faster than Node. So potentially showing how you can do an npm install or a Node install, like a Deno install, and show how much faster it is and how much you're saving time and stuff like that. That's another opportunity to do a show don't tell, and even though it's based on Deno one thing stuff, it doesn't matter. I saw a lot of tweets from people saying like, oh, I've been trying to try Deno for three years and I've never done, I've not done it, maybe now is the time. And I think it's about giving them excuses and reminding them of why Deno is awesome even though it's not different in version 2, so then other people can start to try it out. Those are the main things I would do to make it less boring, I think.

Yes, so like if we rewrote that tweet or announcement, we would probably, instead of the like, oh four years and here's the two main changes, we'd probably say X 100,000 million, I don't know how many people use Deno. It's a lot.

Maybe.

Maybe it's like, maybe it's like 5,000 people, I don't really know. You know, we'd say this many people have adopted Deno, here's what's been holding back the rest of you, like this compatibility, this type of support. Here's what you'll get if you try it now, with version 2 you'll get this, you'll get that. And these can be a mixture of new things and old things, but it's just a refresher. And this reminds me of the other day, somebody told me, I don't use OpenAI, I don't use GPT anymore because it doesn't remember your chats or something. I was like, it totally remembers your chats, like that's been a feature forever. And they just hadn't tried it for a while and that's kind of an error in marketing, right? Like they're not reminding people of what they can do and what the new features are.

Exactly. The one thing that, as you said, that I do think they did well was the video. Like even if you look at the video, they have like 2,000 retweets, which is pretty fucking good. And what I thought about it, it was very unique. Like as you said, there was a guy flying, another one that was shirtless, weird story, and it's a nice way to spice up something that's so boring. At the same time, I think more and more people care about videos, and I've been seeing a lot of companies shipping new launches, like full new launches that are huge, with new videos that are pretty good. One of the agencies that does most of these videos is called Sandwich. I don't know if it was Sandwich Video, Sandwich Board, something, but they are really fucking good. And this video looks like it was, it was done by them. I don't know if that's true, but it made me remember of the friend.com release video, because the video was cool and because the guy paid 2 million, which was his entire seed, on friend.com. But that made it actually blow up and people related to the video in part because it was creepy and people were talking about it. But it doesn't matter, I think the video adds a new way that you can engage with content, and I think more and more people, as we said last time, engage with video rather than just text, mostly because we're more impatient than before. And because of that, the video is fast, I see it and that's it, I'm done.

I might even argue with the impatience angle. I think it's just more engaging if you're scrolling through Twitter or LinkedIn, which is important. You see a video and you want to know what's going on, and and it's also more algorithmically recommendable. The the platforms all want to recommend video, so their bar for what engagement they have to see on video to start recommending it is lower because they know it keeps people on the platform longer. It gives them better chances for more engaging ads, etc, etc. So that's a way to actually align your incentive, which is to get distribution, with the platform's incentive, which is to get people to stay on the site. And it's also why you should upload video native to the platform. You should upload it to Twitter, upload it to whatever, rather than just having a YouTube or even worse, like there are people who still do like Vimeo links, and then they link to the Vimeo on all the platforms, and that's just like the the worst of it.

All agree 100%. I'm talking about popularity. Before we switch to second topic, in our first episode we talked about WordPress. WordPress is becoming even a bigger mess now, just as a short short mention. But Matt stole a plugin from WP Engine and stole the reviews and everything. Then he wrote a blog post telling DHH how he sucks because he hasn't built any project that scale, and he's not as million as him. Like he's absolutely insane. I don't have any other new comments on this, I know you do, Hank, but to me it was just mind-blowing.

My main new comment is that since we spoke about this, the implications of whatever legal battle comes out of slash Automattic taking over a plugin and actually damaging a lot of people's live sites, and they did it on a Saturday morning by the way, which is kind of a dick move, the implications for they come from this are going to be huge. People in open source at least at this scale haven't really tried such shenanigans. So it'll be weird to see because if Matt gets away with it, that's just going to be terrible. It it ruins a lot of the trust in open source licensing. I don't think he will get away with it.

If he does, it will change open source forever, similarly to how Elastic changing the license also changed I think open source. So we'll see.

Let's go on to our uh next little topic. Which, yeah, there's kind of a parallel. So that the .io domain is getting deleted. It's not clear how certain it is that it's getting deleted, and there's a rumor that Google might buy it. But it just got me thinking and I want to talk to you about naming, because so many companies have locked into the .io domain as part of the name that now .io is kind of synonymous with, oh, it's a tech company.

I remember trying to buy an .io domain and that every fucking year they were more and more expensive because everybody was using them, like .ai now.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I saw it because the the builder.io CEO retweeted this tweet and it was kind of like, uh-oh. And I was like, huh, what do you do? And builder.ai is already taken by some other company. Uh, builder.com is probably expensive. So this could have interesting implications for a lot of companies. A former company I used to work for, trade.io, rebranded a few months ago to .ai. And so maybe they're glad they did that now. But it it got me just thinking about names, and I'm curious your thoughts on names, because engineers, I mean everybody, but they have lots of different ideas on naming, and sometimes people want to name, they want to give a proper name to everything. So like I'm at Laravel now and they have a proper name for everything in the ecosystem and every package. And there's so many names, it's so hard to keep track of. When I was at Vercel, I tried to keep them from giving proper names to everything because there's so many three-letter acronyms for every little function. And they just announced, this is also kind of recent news, uh, serverless servers, which I think they say they're gonna give a proper name, but whatever that means. And and most of the tweets around that were around, uh, wait, what is this name, what does this mean, it's just memes.

I'm actually with you. I would say on naming, like I always try to name the least amount of things possible, and by that what I mean is each name adds more cognitive load to people. So if I need to understand how a product works, what it does, and I also need to learn a name, it's so much harder to do all of it rather than not picking names. Like at Auth0 we did something similar where we thought everything should have a name. I remember that multi-factor authentication at Auth0 was called Guardian, and it took us like three fucking months to come up with the name. We had like Sentinel because we like Matrix and other things and stuff like that. In the end we picked Guardian, and in the end it was very hard for people to, like, what the fuck is Guardian, what does it do? And in reality Guardian was just multi-factor. Did it have some cool stuff? Yeah, sure, it had like the push notification that you could click on it and then don't have to copy paste the code and stuff like that, but it was still multi-factor. So eventually we actually renamed it back to Auth0 Multi-Factor, which I think was a better choice. So my thinking on naming is I try to name the least amount of things possible, and if the name is for the company, I try to start with an A. That was like a great takeaway from Auth0, we were always first when there were like sponsors in conferences and stuff like that. Always like our logo was first, which I think was a good addition. But yeah, I don't know, I'm not into names. Vercel has something similar with Conformance. Now they have Conformance, it's like, what the fuck is Conformance? And I know they were changing the name to Checks, which I think makes more sense. Well, because what does it do? It checks your code. So something that I think more familiar, a lot better.

Conformance was a name inherited through Google, which loves to name things. So the Google Chrome team kind of pushed Conformance. You're also seeing that influence from the CTO. Malte is an ex-Googler, and he claims to have named v0, which, if I were there, I probably would have just named it Vercel AI or something like that, because I, you know, I also pushed for, oh, it's an analytics product, let's just call it Vercel Analytics. Oh, it optimizes images, great, let's call that Image Optimization. Maybe it's a great name but like Incremental Static Regeneration was uh, that was before me, and I don't know if I would have been able to influence that. But yeah, like Laravel is the complete offset, everything has a proper name, and I don't think I'm going to be dying on any of those hills. Names are fun, but they do, they do have implications, and they can, they can cause cost. And like you said, I think the biggest cost is cognitive load of people forgetting what the product actually does and if it's affiliated. The worst example I can think of this is I worked with a client who had one product and it has a different name than their company name, and I really tried to talk them into like, guys, just call, just call the thing your thing. Even if you use the word platform, which I hate using the word platform, just call it your platform rather than give it a totally new proper noun name. They're like, no, and it needs its own landing page and all this. I think it just causes brand confusion and it's not.

Just forgetting, it's not understanding it or not remembering it. Like we had problems with people not understanding, like, what the fuck is this? Like because if you name it differently than what it is, then there should be something else, and sometimes they're so, people expect more. And because of that as well, they sometimes get confused. But yeah, like to me, even if you're using the domain, even if you like the .io, don't make that part of your name. Like I did that mistake with my domain. Everybody calls me Gonto, and my website is gon.to, so with the Tongan island. Stop doing that. I'm fucked because it's part of my name. So I shouldn't have done it, but don't care.

Yeah, well, you're Gonto though. But yeah, now you have to worry about that these islands are giving up their domains potentially, and no, and Google's not going to step into save .to.

I was so worried when I paid my domain in .to because they didn't use HTTPS. And I remember that I paid for 20 years just because I was scared that if I was gonna get stolen my credit card if I paid multiple years. But anyway, that's that's another story. Cool, well I think.

That's it. Thanks for joining everybody. We'll see you next time.

So if you have any feedback, feel free to tweet either to Hank or to me on any feedback on this. Thank you.