Next.js Conf Marketing Breakdown + Disguised DuckDB Announcement

I think that's actually a miss. They missed a moment of getting everybody to retweet or comment or something.

So I think for other companies to think about, like, what events can I do that are unique, that are creative around NextConf makes a huge difference as well.

Next.js Conf was the most different Next.js Conf this year. This is their fifth and their third one that had in person. So I think we have a lot to break down. You and I were sending a lot of comments on the fourth. I think my first take is that I think that in person was probably the most impactful on the people they had there of any of the in-person ones. And I think the online part was the least impactful. So they've kind of flipped there. And then there's a bunch of other things changed. But what's your quick take?

I agree. In general, I think they've done a really good job on NextConf, which they always do. They always change something. They always improve things and stuff like that. So overall, considering that they do one of these every year for their open source, I think it's great. One of the things that I really liked this year is that I saw a couple of tweets of people talking about the make it work, make it right, make it fast, which was their whole slogan for the conference that they even put in their own blog post, for example, as well. And I think it's ticked in people's head.

Yeah, they did it. So and that's an interesting thing. They didn't have a huge release. They actually released Next.js 15 a few days before. So I think what they did at the actual event was find a way to get a huge theme that's important to them and the company and their customers across. And it was really sticky. Like people were tweeting, make it work, make it fast, or make it work, make it right, make it fast. That's an interesting impact. But then the release was a few days before. Do you think that sucked some of the air out of the room or do you think it was a good move?

In general, I would argue that what they were doing before of releasing Next.js the same day of the conference and doing the announcement was better. Having said that, this time Next.js 15 didn't have a lot of new features or a lot of new things. I felt it was more of a stability release where caching is better, it's more stable, it scales better, etc. But it wasn't something very big. So taking that into account, I actually think it was a smart idea to release it before because then people will be less hyped at the conference and less feeling like, oh, there's not a new feature or something like that. And they spin it with this, make it work, make it right, make it fast, just for people to remember and to think about it differently. So in this case, I actually think it was really smart to release it before, but if you have something that's big and that's important, you should never do that, I think.

I think they also had to do it because they had some forward-looking releases that they demoed. So they demoed some stuff and they're like, you can't use this. Like Delba on stage actually said, don't go use this right now, but it's coming. And that was an interesting change as well. Whereas in the past, there have been some forward-looking things that were announced as betas or alphas, but it was all part of the big push. And then interestingly also, they didn't have a big Twitter thread. I think that's actually a miss. They missed a moment of getting everybody to retweet or comment or something on the big thread of the day. They didn't even have a big tweet on their theme, the make it work, make it right, make it fast. And they could have done that. It could have been really cool. And I wonder, yeah, that just felt like a straight up miss to me.

I agree. And I think if you look at the recap blog post, it was one day later, which is okay, but I would have shipped it the same day. I would do the Twitter threads. And as you said, they make it work, make it right. They should have done something around it just because of how much it sticks for everybody that was around here. What's interesting to me as well is that this NextConf looked more like a product conference, like anything else, not in the sense that they did too much for sale, but more in the sense that they are talking a lot about futuristic things, about things that are happening in the future and stuff like that, which I think was very different. The other thing that I really, really liked about what they did was that they gave the dollars they made from the tickets back to the open source community. They sponsored a lot of the people that were doing frameworks or libraries around Next.js. I think that was really, really smart because number one, people loved it and they got 2K one time. So it's not huge for Vercel and they are using the tickets to give back to the community. The other thing that I did that was great is that I saw at least six or seven tweets of people saying like, oh, I achieved something that I never thought I would. I got sponsored by Vercel and everybody put a picture of Vercel sponsorship in GitHub sponsoring their GitHub project, basically, and they put that on Twitter with the images. So I think that was really, really, really good PR because now the people who are all around Next are starting to talk and tweet about Vercel and they feel more appreciated.

Yeah, and this is a response to the pushback that's been happening. Voices have been getting louder for the last two years about vendor lock-in with Next.js to Vercel. And if you follow Lee Rob and the videos he's been putting both up personally on his own stuff and his own content and official Vercel channels, he's been pushing a lot about self-hosting Next.js, etc., so they are really trying to tamp down the vendor lock-in story and I think they're doing it in a good way. Lee actually got on stage and talked a bit about self-hosting and these donations and that's critical because if they just keep pushing the Vercel is the best and only way and if they do that at their big community conference of the year, the vendor lock-in story is just going to get more and more true and worse and worse.

I think they did two things right on this one. I think one is one week before the conference they actually published on their Next GitHub, like how to deploy it on Netlify, on Cloudflare, and a lot of other vendors with a template, with a project and everything. That I think was great. The other thing they did right was they started to talk to OpenNext and the guys from OpenNext started to tweet and talk about how Vercel has now been involved, they sent PRs, they improved the code and everything, so I think that that was great. Even more taking into account that now Cloudflare and Netlify are actually both putting money and people to work on OpenNext so that they can release it. So I think on one side it's a threat to Vercel, but on the other side I think it's really good of Vercel to show that what everybody was saying, they heard what the people was talking about, and they timed it really well to do it with the NextConf, doing the GitHub and everything.

Yeah, the strategy on that was really good. So another thing you mentioned already that there was more of a corporate vibe or a product conference vibe at this one. Part of that was I think there was a greater presence of sponsors, and I shared a tweet with you of just funny sponsor swag from Sanity, which is a great marketing side note of how it pairs with everything. They had different socks that you could pair, so like Kent C. Dodds tweeted Tailwind with Sanity as his sock pair, and that's just clever, just a clever dumb swag thing that'll get you a free press. So I love stuff like that.

I think good swag is hard to come by. Like now everybody has t-shirts, everybody has anything, and I think what Capeja was saying... I'm sick of Yeti bottles.

Everybody needs to stop sending me Yeti bottles.

I should upload a picture. I have like a whole thing in my house, like a whole drawer that is just full of Yeti bottles, and it's like I don't need any more of that shit.

Yeah, everybody's got their swag of choice. VCs always send backpacks, etc.

But I think what Sanity did of combining your two socks of different tech was really, really smart. The other thing that I did really like was like NextConf starts to become such a big thing that now people who are not in Next, even who are working in Remix, still go to NextConf just because the smartest people go to NextConf, and that's something I think Vercel did great, where it's not just about Next, even though they're threat of Next. It's about meeting awesome front-end people because they all go to these events, they all care about it, they connect, and they work with each other, and I think that they've done amazingly well on that. And because of that, I see a lot of companies starting to create small events around NextConf. Like Clerk, for example, did a Stripe session, which I think was a really smart idea. Stripe invested in Clerk, so then Clerk used that investment to build a relationship and do an event, where Stripe, with calling the CEO of Clerk, did a whole talk, it was full of people, people loved it, and it was one day before NextConf. So I think for other companies to think about, like, what events can I do that are unique, that are creative around NextConf makes a huge difference as well.

Yeah, and Sanity did one of those pre-events too independently, and yeah, Sanity's pre-event was really great. They hyped it up, they had a bunch of cool people there. I saw people from the Laravel ecosystem there, and I was like, what are you doing there? They had hackathons. That was another thing that seemed to be part of Next.js Conf was actual coding. There was a lot more code, a lot more demos, and I think they did do a good job of trying to get down closer to the roots. When I was there, like obviously I have, you know, some biases here, but when I was there, the goal from on high was like, hey, make us look huge, look more Apple-like, and a lot of people loved that. There were a few people who didn't like that, and I think they've swung the other way because of how perception has changed the last few years as being the big guy, and you know, now you've got Guillermo Rauch coming out in a hoodie, and being a little more casual in his keynote, and trying to downplay it. So it's an interesting swing. I think they did a lot of new things right. I think they dropped some of the good old stuff, and I think if there are takeaways for people planning big events is one, like side events, and side events help. Who you get there helps, like if you get influential people who are going to have big Twitter followings. The registration flow, the online marketing, that type of stuff is all really important to nail. That was the thing dropped. How you tweet and talk about it the day of. So those are, that's another thing kind of dropped, and the online experience, but then having a strong theme for the event, the make it work, make it right, make it fast is just really good. That's going to stick in people's heads forever, like while they're hands on keyboard, they're going to think of that. How the sponsors actually participate is really important. The type of swag, and focusing on what you want to get out of it. I think Vercel really wanted to get out of this, hey everybody, you're not locked in. Next.js is open, we're open, like we're cool.

And the last thing to add to that is that it's not just the event, like they did a lot of work on announcing the compatibility with the other vendors one week before, doing the sponsorship a few days before as well. So it's like a whole thing where you prepare for a week and you think about it on what is the impact that this event is going to have. But overall I think they did great.

And the visual themes were really good by the way. The design was outstanding as always. Which brings up an interesting tweet you shared from DuckDB.

100%. And this is one thing, I loved this tweet. There was a tweet from somebody that is working at MotherDuck, where they were actually asking like what icon should we use for DuckDB GSheets, like for the Google Sheets version of that.

It's how we all found out that DuckDB was doing, or MotherDuck was doing GSheets competitor type of thing. So it was like, hey, give me your design opinion. That was the disguise for a feature announcement. And I thought that was awesome.

What I loved about it was that like this, because they put two icons, which is like a duck in a sheet or a sheet in the duck, they actually got a lot of engagement in there in the tweets. Having people reply which one they like more and why, etc. And as you know, because of the Twitter algorithm, if you get more engagement it shows up more. So I thought it was a fantastic way to announce a new feature because it drives engagement from people to talk and the engagement makes that tweet per se to be viewed more and more and more. So I think in that sense it was a great covered-up feature announcement that we discovered, that didn't work, and it drove engagement that got people to engage and then the tweets to become more popular. I think it was really, really smart.

Yeah, really clever. And it kind of references back to last week we talked about a design only announcement that had nothing about features from warp and you know some other stuff like this we've talked about.

One thing that this made me think of is Matías Woloski. He was the founder and CTO of Auth0. He always talked that design is a feature in his mind, and that's even more true for developers because developers really care about aesthetics and aesthetics will make them connect or not connect with something. So every time you ship a feature, you work on something thinking about the design of that, not just in the product but also in the icon, in the landing pages, and everything matters so much for an announcement. We actually had some type of checklist where we actually checked the design as part, like equally important to docs or anything else, because design is a feature.

Yeah, the icon, the button shapes, all that stuff, and just, you know, you always hear me talk about OG cards, which are the preview cards on Twitter. That all matters more than most people believe, I think.

I think that's it. Today we did a bit shorter episode but we focused a lot on NextConf. We talked a bit about this new feature from DuckDB and MotherDuck, and as always, if you have any feedback, let us know. We hope you enjoyed it. Thank you. So if you have any feedback, feel free to tweet either to Hank or to me on any feedback on this. Thank you.