Developer Marketing lacks Vision

something that gets attention on the Internet. I don't know. It's always good. I guess I don't understand even after reading it and hearing you talk about it. I still don't understand why it would be bad.

Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Code to Market. I think this is episode 16. We have a lot of topics for today. First one is about the tweet from Andrew Chen. Andrew Chen was the head of growth at Uber, now a VC at Andreessen Horowitz. He had a really long tweet that I personally really liked about what happens when you launch something and you go viral because of that launch in social media or something like that, and then you start getting spikes. And he's talking about do I get all shady users when I do a spike because I get too many looky-loos? Is it good? Should I do it? When should I do it? How do I think about this? And I really like the topic mostly because Hank is addicted to launches. I love the launch. Launches are great. Exactly. And I don't like launches that much. And I felt that this was good ammunition for my hate towards launches. But I'd love to first hear your reaction to the tweet.

Yeah. So I guess to go deeper on what he's saying is with launches, you love the term looky-loos. It makes you sound like my grandpa. That's something he would say. A bunch of looky-loos looking at your product after a viral launch. They don't stick around. Maybe they suck up resources, whatever, whatever. And so that seems to be part of the problem with some sort of viral launch. And also a truly viral launch goes beyond your target ICP and who you want in. And so you get all these wrong people in. It's a false metric, et cetera. And I have to ask, what is his argument? Don't do launches that could be viral. Like, what do you say? Now,

what he talks a lot about in the bottom is that like doing some of these viral things are really useful for some specific type of companies. For example, if you want to raise VC money, if you want to target all of the masses, if your product is designed to churn, if it's a cold start or stuff like that. So he has cases where it's useful, but he says in most it's not. And then he talks about spending the extra effort to find the high-intent users instead of looky-loos. So his argument is for a few cases, you use it for the rest, like fuck it.

Interesting. So I mean, is a viral campaign or launch worth it? To me, always yes. I'll always take that over nothing because you're going to get some good users, even if most of them are bad. The fact is most of your users aren't great users anyways. So if you can get more people, even if the percentages are worse and the conversion ratios are worse, I think it gives you more of a foothold with your good users. And I think it drives awareness, something that gets attention on the internet. I don't know. It's always good. I guess I don't understand even after reading it and hearing you talk about it. I still don't understand why it would be bad. I'll give you my thoughts on my analysis.

Like when I think about launches, doing a launch takes a shitload of work. You have to think about like the blog posts and the assets and the white papers and the correlations with products. And like you have to time all those many things, right? You have to be creative with something. You have to do something special. You have to do something for social media, but it takes so much work, like a lot of work. And if you look at it, I think 90 % of launches fail. It's the sad truth, which means that 90 % of launches, like nobody comes or there's very few people that come. And then you're like, you spend so much time for nothing. For the other 10%, it does work and you get maybe a lot of people coming. But the question is, is it really good to get all of those people? As you're saying, I think some will be good, but when you get so many users, I think it's sometimes hard to understand which one is good and which one is worse. So maybe you get worse product feedback because you're listening to people that you shouldn't. Maybe you are trying to convert users that will never convert because they are not really the high intent ones that you should get. Maybe all of the users that you're getting are starting to confuse you about your target market. So then maybe you're confused. And my question is, if you spend so much time on something like a launch and 90 % of those fail, why don't you spend all of that much, all of the time actually doing something that is targeted, where you outbound to somebody after doing research that you know it's going to be a good fit or you do different with specific YouTubers and you know that people will listen to them are a good fit or you do better messages. Why not spend the time to do the right targeting to understand their habits and just go where they are at instead of doing this whole net that you cast and you try to grab people.

Okay, you do have some great points. I can't disagree with that. First, you do have to consider the opportunity cost. A reason you brought this up is, you know, I have a massive launch at Laravel in a few weeks and the team, they're just starting to realize how the water is splashing up against their face right now as they're treading. And I even gave everybody a pep talk this week, like, hey guys, it's going to get worse up till the launch. Like it's going to get worse. And then after the launch, it's also going to be worse. Like buckle up. We even added a new buckle up emoji. So there's a fair point there. It is going to get worse. And so I think the first thing when you're considering this is really consider the opportunity cost and what your likelihood of success is going to be. I would say I'm pretty good at predicting if a launch is going to be successful or not. I guess I'm putting it out there right now. I mean, even if I don't put it out there publicly, all of my work, you have to think that the launch is going to go well. You have to think that you can execute it well. And hardest part is not the launch. The hardest part is converting after, which I think is what a lot of this post is, is the aftermath of a launch is what do we do with all these people? How do we sift them out from high intent? Does our product do that? Do we have to do it through effort? Whatever. Now I'm a guy who always prefers to do a warm inbound message than a cold outbound. So I like to create opportunities for myself to have an email address that somebody gave me and work from there rather than, you know, go and pitch them elsewhere. But it doesn't

have to be outbound. Like if you get, I don't know, 100 signups, but all are really interested in using your product compared to 1000 signups where 150 are interested in your product. Then my question is you do have 50 % more people that are interested in your product, but it's so hard to find those 150 out of the 1K that you actually maybe only get 60. Whereas if you get the 100, maybe you convert them all.

I would take the extra 50 every time. I would take the extra 50 if you gave me 10 ,000 and it only gave me 50 more.

The problem is maybe you don't get them because you can't find them. That's the problem to me. It's hard to find them. And it takes so much time sometimes to see who got the high moment of attention, where if you didn't reach out before something happened or whatever, maybe it got fucked.

Maybe. I don't know. I think I think the state of automation just makes it a no-brainer that you can do it, but maybe that's a thing that just a lot of people struggle with. I don't know. I guess I would always take it every single time. If you told me I could do a campaign tomorrow and a million people would see it and it means like 50 % more or whatever, like I would do it. Now there would have to be, there is danger of like, oh, will your product team get distracted? That's a problem. Will your customer support team get inundated? That's a problem. And those are problems that I think about. I run the customer, like the customer support team, like reports into me. So I have to be concerned about it.

I'm a big believer in targeted marketing, whether that's inbound or outbound, it's you understand the habits of your buyers. You understand exactly who they are and where they are at. And you try to show up there. If you are already doing the launch, because I don't know, because you're you and you like it. So you're already doing the launch. Then my question is, how can you make the launch more targeted so you can at least decrease the likelihood that you get too many looky-loos? Have you thought about it in the past?

Oh yeah, actually that's a great question. Maybe, and maybe after the launch I could give a full breakdown and we could really dissect what I think we did well or not. And, you know, you could criticize me, that'd be fun. But, you know, so I think like one thing is, yeah, we're being very strategic with who we give early access to. They're all members of the community. We're not giving it to randos outside of our community and hoping that it draws in, you know, like JavaScript people. And, you know, and I didn't mean for this to become about my launch, but, you know, all of this is on my mind. And I think going back to something else you said, most launches do fail. And so I think the most important takeaway for people listening would be, you should really pick your launches. Like, I know people who are trying to do every time they have something, they're like, let's do a launch week. And I'm like, you know, we've talked about launch weeks and that, and they're trying to go viral with every single thing. And I think it's a lot of extra effort and they don't even get the benefit of the looky loos. They don't even have new awareness. They're mostly just shouting into the void.

It's time. And that's what I meant. Like 90 % I think is that style. But I agree with this advice. Like at least if you are going to do launches, do one a year, two maybe at most, but don't do once a quarter or once a month. It makes no fucking sense.

I think this is where we would be most in agreement on this. Launches are great if you have something really great to share or say, and most people try to force launches. Most people haven't innovated their product in a significant way to where they even have the chance of going viral. And then I think also sometimes people come up with some sort of viral marketing campaign that doesn't have to do with some new product or feature or value prop. And that also just perhaps generates a disproportionate amount of looky loos.

This actually relates to another topic that we wanted to chat today that I let you introduce it. But there was a great tweet with a thought on how story beats anything. And I think great launches have great stories. If you don't have a good story for your launch, I think your launch is fucked. But tell us a bit about like, what was the tweet? What did we like about it? Like share a bit of your thoughts.

Yeah, it was good. I mean, it's basically got a read on these images, but it's worth it's worth the read. You know, I made you wait to start the podcast a little bit so I could read through it. The main essence of what I read was narrative is a very important thing for everybody trying to sell something or just survive as

a company. Before, it was the time of growth hacking and everybody was trying everything, etc. Now, I think if you don't have a good narrative, if you don't have a good story, people are not going to try it out. And it comes from this idea of the world now believes in influencers and in humans. And because of that, they believe in people who are extroverted and with a good story, a good narrative and stuff like that, which sometimes, as we talked last episode, can bite you in the ass like with Devin. But in others, I think it's fantastic.

Yeah. And he had this great I think one of the most poignant parts of the writing was when he talked about Elon, when he said when the Model 3 started doing well, Elon's talking about Cybertruck. When the Falcon 9 launch happened, he starts talking about Starlink. When Starlink starts succeeding, he's talking about the GDP of Mars. And he's always setting the vision higher and elevating the thoughts. I think this is a Frank Slootman, the former CEO of Snowflake, quote, every interaction is an opportunity to raise the bar. And that's how these people with great narrative and vision treat it. And I think startup founders, and as you're thinking of your campaigns for dev tools and everything, you should be thinking of, well, what's the narrative? What's the key thing? I remember when you advised me in the early days of Vercel, you talked a lot about themes and that type of stuff. And I'm curious some of your thoughts on that and how how you would implement that.

I'm a big believer in narratives. Personally, I've always been like, I think humans, because we are emotional, we do things because of these narratives. So first of all, what you said on Elon, I agree and I love it. And I think what's fantastic about it is Elon has made a lot of promises for the future. Probably half has failed. But because the other half did fantastic, though, that's what people remember. Holy shit, this guy did this. But I don't remember of the other three promises he made that were shit. So as long as one works, I think you'll be fine. And I think we leave it on themes, on this idea of like, OK, for one year, we're going to spend the entire fucking year talking about two things. Mostly one always, I think, should be linked to your product, your differentiation or something. The other theme should be based on the markets. What's going on in the markets? What is your opinion on that and stuff like that? I think people in general, I think a lot of founders who are engineers specifically, who are very scared to say the future will look like this or like that because they are scared of being wrong. And the reality is that if you're wrong, but then eventually you're right, nobody will give a shit. And it's more important to have a stance on things because that's what people care about. Engagement is created through people with controversial opinions like the present is fucked because of this. And this is how the future should look like. That's what your themes should somehow be linked to. And I think once you have the themes, I think for each theme, you create a lot of assets like you create things like white papers and blog posts and messaging and potential booth copy, potential talks, potential webinar abstracts, potential abstracts for conferences. And then with all of that, you start disseminating to all of the teams in your marketing team. So they all have examples and know how to continually talk about the theme all the time. But creating the theme is what I think you either need a visionary founder. And if you don't have a visionary founder, that's where a product marketing style CMO helps because your CMO should be the person that's responsible of creating the narrative. If your founder is not good at that, which, to be honest, happens in most cases.

True. I'm going to flip one thing you said, which is that controversy creates engagement. I would say a more optimistic way of thinking about it is a strong vision creates engagement. Some of which will always be controversy because some people will never buy into your narrative or your vision. And that's okay. People do need to be less worried about that. People need to be less worried about being wrong in the longterm, because what's interesting about a lot of these founders who I've seen, who maybe are scared to put, you know, what they believe out there and actually even more scared to put it out there without all the nuance that dilutes the message. You know, when you mix in all the nuance and it dilutes your vision, it dilutes your message and you're just trying to be right rather than trying to inspire. And yeah, so those are those are some of my thoughts on that.

I think it's okay if in some of the things you're wrong or you're not like look at Elon's tweet. Elon is the richest person in the world. It's I think the best entrepreneur of our time who has achieved so many things. And he has so many opinions that are wrong or things that he talks about that he doesn't know shit about or launches that will never happen. And I don't think he gives a shit about it. And people don't give a shit about it either, because eventually you can create great things. And that's to me the best message to engineers that are founders of DevTools. Like, don't be scared to be wrong. Rather talk about the future like this post talk about this that make America great again from Trump, which I think is a fantastic slogan just because you can always make it better. And if you can always make it better in the future, it just works all the time. Just the present is not right. Let's make it better in the future. That has to be the main thing about your vision.

Yeah, and great, great vision, even great slogans. One that I was really proud of at Vercel was Make the Web. Period. Faster. Which is like a fun double entendre. But these type of things, when you put it out there, it also attracts the right people to come and help you build. And there's an interesting thing that I've told whenever I'm early days at a company, and I'm trying to recruit people to a tiny startup that hasn't done anything that it said it's going to do. I always explain to people like, well, the way we're going to do it is if we get people like you to buy in the vision and you got to come on board and it kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And even if it feels like a lie right now, like that's an impossible goal, it'll never happen. If you tell the lies become truths, you know, that's a totally crass, weird way to put it, but it's an interesting way to think about it.

It's the I always think about fake it until you make it. I remember that I was working from Argentina and I wanted to work for a US startup. I wanted to work with AngularJS, which was popular back then. And I didn't know shit about AngularJS and it was for like a senior AngularJS. So I remember I read the book Angular in Action on the weekend. And then for the tests, I was so fucking good because I actually had really good memory. So it was really good. And then I got the job and it's like, OK, I need to learn how to do this now. And eventually created a big open source project that became the most popular REST client for Angular. And I couldn't have done it if I didn't fake it first until I made it eventually.

Yeah. I mean, all of this, any type of startup activity, any sort of campaign or launch is an act of faith. Though you should place your faith, calling back, you should place your faith in things that have reason to receive it.

Agree. But this week I also imagine you all saw the launch of the first supersonic airplane. The dude worked at Groupon before. And I read today a thread about how he he was doing the math on supersonic is better for airlines. But he did that after spending a year on sabbatical, just learning about physics and planes and organization and everything like he was so fucking obsessed with it that even though he's not an aerospace engineer, he has done a supersonic flight twenty three years later after Concorde. It's insane.

Wild stuff.

Thank you for listening to us today. And yeah, we'll see you soon.

We'll see you soon. Bye.