Raycast launches the future while Bybit fights for survival

I love that you said let's kill Lazarus, especially because, you know, in the Bible Lazarus comes back from the dead, so you can't kill him. I didn't

even know what Lazarus was. I was going to say, yeah,

because you're Jewish, right? So Lazarus famously was brought back to life by Jesus in the Bible. So maybe they'll get him, but, you know, then he'll come back anyways. That's a dumb joke. So we're going to talk about Raycast again. They had a fun little launch we love. Then we're going to have crypto story time with Gonto, and then we're going to delay until next episode where I'll do a deep dive on Laravel's product launch. So my objective

on that one is to read everything about the launch and say the things that I love and crush the things that I hate.

There will be some stuff to love and some stuff for you to crush per usual. So with Raycast, they put out a video and they are launching, how would you describe it? How did they describe an AI extension marketplace? So developers are building AI extensions. You can now connect to right from the product.

The best way to explain the feature is it's what Apple intelligence should have been, but wasn't. Meaning you can write natural language like and connect with apps and it will automatically connect with those apps through AI extensions that developers write. And you'll be able to do a lot of things through that. Besides the launch that I love, I think the feature was great.

Yeah, the feature is good. Here's a side note before we even get started, I have a side note. I noticed their pinned tweet is an old tweet about Raycast is for Windows now, which is interesting because normally I'm very quick to pin the recent tweet to the top and try and boost it more. But in this case, I was like, huh, maybe this is a good idea because I think last time we talked about Raycast, I mentioned how, well, I'm a Windows user, so none of this, you know, is even close to me. And their pinned tweet is about how they have Raycast for Windows. So I was like, huh, it is useful to sometimes have a pinned tweet on old news.

What I like about, I didn't think about it before, I actually thought it was a bad idea, but now that you say this, shipping Windows opens a huge TAM for them. Having AI extensions doesn't open a new TAM, but rather can get existing users to pay. Like I'm an existing Raycast user and I'm, I paid to try this out and I love it. So I might continue paying on this. But Windows users and so many new users, I think it makes sense to have it pinned.

And by the way, as a side note, and we'll probably talk about this more when we talk about Laravel launch next week. It's so important with any feature launch to really just think about, hey, is this feature to grow our LTV with current users? Are we playing for our fans or are we trying to win over a new group and get new TAM? Because I think the approaches you have to take and think through are very different and the context you have to provide a very different, but just an interesting, another side note. Okay. So we've done multiple side notes already. We talked about the thing. What did you like about this? You sent me the tweet. I liked it too. But what did you like?

So what I like about it is a couple of things. One is they gave very specific examples and what I liked about it is even though Raycast can be used by any Mac users, most of their users are developers or product managers. So every example, or most of the examples that they used during the video were actually for developers. So that means that they actually thought about who their target user is. So that was thing number one. Thing number two, I really liked how Thomas and Pedro played roles. If you check the video again, Thomas played the role of, I'm going to tell you exactly what it is and show it to you. So he just showed demos, shows how things work, and he was incredible. And then Pedro recapped the demo by talking about the benefits. So I really like that play of what is benefits, what is exactly what it is. And that I think is fantastic. And if you can do that much as on the video about in landing pages, I think that's awesome.

It's your classic sales, sales engineer, product marketer, product manager. That dynamic is just tried and true. And I also noticed it and liked seeing it in video because a lot of times you get people, they're all trying to look like the expert on everything. And then it gets muddled, but there's something interesting with having the specialization and just playing into a role, even if it's not necessarily who you are, they're both very technical. They can both speak to value, but they chose a role. I like it.

I actually never saw this on a video either before on this idea of like two people playing roles and these benefits versus show me what it is. And I thought it was genius. Like I agree. Like I think a lot about like Apple Keynotes and Apple, everybody wants to look as if they are a genius and they know everything. This was a different vibe.

Yeah, I will. We did something similar with the Next.js Conf where we had Guillermo on stage and he cuts away to the technical demos. But even there, we still had those people probably speaking too long about the values and stuff. To your point, these were much more finite and specialized back and forth. So I like that. I think I can learn from that for sure.

A last thing to mention is on the launch day, Thomas had done podcasts that actually launched on the launch day. One was on Zwick's podcast on AI. And I saw two other podcasts that he did and they all launched on that day. That to me is the new way of doing PR. Before when you were doing a feature launch, you wanted TechCrunch to post about your article or New York Times or Forbes or whatever. But I think legacy media in that sense is dying and people like it when you cut the middleman. So the new PR is literally what Thomas did with it. Inserting yourself into podcasts and just talk to them and talk to people and connect with them. It was incredible.

Yeah, the coordination on multiple channels. And that's also a way to bring new audiences to you. One thing that's interesting is when you have this me more just kind of giving my advice but when you have those like external channels, a lot of times what the marketing team will do is they'll promote them from their own channels and the emails and say, hey, go watch so -and -so on someone else's podcast. And there's two ways to think about it. Sometimes it's good if they say something there that you haven't said through your owned channels or your owned media, your own YouTube channel, Twitter, whatever, then it's good to point. But a lot of times I don't actually like pointing to the other place because then you're just giving your audience somewhere else to look at when you're trying to launch your own thing. So I don't know. Just another choice to make, I think, is do you amplify the external third party content or do you try and just focus it all on yourself? I never thought about it,

but I really like the idea of not pointing to the other ones. I would only point it if it's huge, like, I don't know. You went to Joe Rogan's podcast or something like that, like, well, maybe not Joe Rogan, but some other one. But I posted to show like, look, I went to a huge podcast or something like that. But otherwise, I like your advice of focusing on yourself.

Yeah, it can be interesting. What else do you like? So one other thing I liked, he just kind of made an offhand comment about, OK, in the studio today. And that just made me think about, you know, one of my two themes for this year is learn how to do the content creator influencer marketing in B2B dev tools. And I just like seeing that these companies are they're making studios and they're thinking from the beginning about owned media and how to scale it and just make it a habit. I won't out them, but we're a customer of someone who's doing a customer story on us at Laravel. And I was like, hey, I'd love to do a video with you guys on this, too. And they're like, oh, we've never done that. And their YouTube channel has no subscribers and they're incredibly popular. If I said the name right now, I'll tell you after, like everyone knows them. And I'm like, you guys haven't done any videos with customers like that's crazy to me. So I love that Raycast is investing in that.

You told me on Twitter the other day about the customer story you react. I think it was Supabase with Browserbase or something like that. Or was it maybe a studio-prepared or something like that? It was the

Supabase with bolt.new.

That. Yes. So that's, I think, another example of great studio video being used not just for demos and product presentation, but also for customer stories.

Yeah, actually, I haven't watched that video. They they released a teaser of it. We'll put the tweet on here, too. But I think the full video is out now. So I'm curious to watch it. People are doing trailers for their marketing videos now, which I think is what a what a brave new world of content marketing we're in.

Video and studio are eating the world. It's as we talked a lot in other episodes, like it's how B2B companies are copying the B2C world where video production is everything.

Yeah. OK. That's all I had to say on that. No more side notes. I have a

Sign-off for the side notes. You wait probably next week for Laravel. But let's switch to the other topic, which I think will be more of a Gonto monologue. So I'm sorry for you about that. But I don't know if you guys saw, but there was a huge hack last week. There's a big exchange called Bybit, which got hacked. And basically, the hackers stole 1.4 billion dollars from them. It was the biggest hack and the biggest stealing of money in any crypto story in history. And I think something like this could have crashed Bybit and just made them never be able to work again. But in this case, they did such a fantastic job that I actually think they now look stronger than before. And I wanted to chat about it because it's the best disaster response I've seen in my life.

OK. Yeah. So my understanding is they got hacked. And then the CEO, Ben, started tweeting lots of updates and he talked about he had town halls. I saw he did live streams. I saw he posted his whoop data that showed his like stress levels over time, which just come on. That's great. Like leaning into that stuff of like, hey, look how stressed this what I was about this. And now I'm less stressed. So you can be less stressed to like just chef's kiss on that. So what were the I mean, you said this consumed like your Saturday and Sunday. I mean, what are the biggest lessons you took from it, I guess would be my first question. And then next, I'd want to know how could they have done even better. Aside from not getting hacked, sometimes your product's going to blow up. Like you might not care about crypto, but sometimes your product's going to blow up. There's going to be a disaster and you have to be able to coach if you're the CEO or founder, you have to know how to handle it. You have to know how to coach your co-founder through it. If you're the head of marketing or something, you have to know how to coach your team and your founders through it. What are the lessons here?

Yeah, disaster response is so hard. I actually I'll start with your second one, which is I don't have anything to improve it. I think I'm honestly blown away with how good they did. Like they were first of all, they were extremely transparent. And as you said, Ben, the CEO and the official Twitter account were constantly tweeting about it. First thing that I liked was they quickly acknowledged what happened. And while they were doing the research, they said they got hacked for 1.4 billion. Like, holy shit. Without knowing how or what happened, being able to do that and being so transparent with customers, knowing that it might blow up was incredible. After that, of course, what happened was a lot of customers wanted to get out because it's like, fuck, they're being hacked. I need to get out. So they started to get a lot of withdrawals. Other companies and when I say other companies, Binance, for example, in the past has halted withdrawals. There was actually a tweet from the CEO, the previous CEO of Binance on why they should have stopped withdrawals and then responded that he's agreed on why. And in this case, not only they continued withdrawals, but also they actually were transparent on how they were behind on their withdrawals because there were so many. And they said, wait for us, we're going to do it. And how much time it was going to take. They were also very fast at getting a loan. So they got a loan for Ethereum to actually be able to back the withdrawals, mostly because they knew they were OK and that they're making a lot of money. So they're going to get it back. So they did the loan and they were transparent with the withdrawals and why they were slow. Then they showed that they had done it before, like a compliance audit, showing that they had one on one backing on funds from every customer, which was from a third party that people trusted. At the same time, they also, after doing some research, shared how that money was not from customers, but rather from money that they had earned or revenue that they had created, which they stopped and they missed. One day later, actually, during that night, the CEO, as you said, did a space on Twitter open. Anybody could go, anybody could ask questions. He would reply to anything like mind blowing, like, holy shit. Then after that, next day, they did it so fast, a new bounty program where anybody that would help them get the money back, they would get 10 percent of what was recovered, which, holy shit, like that's a lot of money like that was really good. They also moved very fast with all of their partners to ask them that if any of the money that was hacked, if they went through their platforms to please freeze those transactions so they will get the money back. And a lot of people froze those transactions and they were already able to get some of that money back or some of the things back through those things being frozen. Every one of the teams stayed all night and they were there. A few days even later, they now know that it was Lazarus. It's a North Korean hacker that did it and actually created a new website that's special on how they are working with others to kill Lazarus and getting money from it and stuff like that. The CEO also tweeted again on how all of withdrawals were done and now it was back to normal. And then they actually shipped the full explanation maybe two days later. And they showed that the hack was actually not done through Bybit. It was safe, which, OK, the name is awesome because it was safe is the name of the product, which wasn't safe because it was hacked. But safe had a problem where actually a front end engineer account was hacked and they were able to push some other contract address for the money to be sent. But in the UI, it would look like it was the correct one. So when you were doing it, you thought they were doing the correct one. So they shipped that and then they got safe to actually publish how it was wrong and why. And they ended up explaining like what happened. And it was mostly like social engineering attacks, like everything. But I talked a lot, but they did all of that in under three days. Like, I'm mind blown. Yeah,

OK, so big themes. One, speed to response, transparency. I'm sure they couldn't be 100 percent transparent. Like, well, there's a thing like transparency doesn't mean sharing literally everything. It means sharing what you can in a way that is useful. So I think they were fast. They were transparent. They took immediate actions. And then once they started to get breathing room, they also started other actions that were a little more long term. Like, hey, let's I love that you said let's kill Lazarus, especially because, you know, in the Bible, Lazarus comes back from the dead. So you can't kill him. I

didn't even know what I was going to say, because,

yeah, because you're Jewish. Right. So Lazarus famously was brought back to life by Jesus in the Bible. So maybe they'll get him. But, you know, then he'll come back anyways. That's a dumb joke. So, yeah, those are interesting themes. I've been have you had some serious crises before? Because I funnily enough, we were talking before about how we're both long on crypto as an asset. But we're not really like blockchain fanatics, which I really came around on that after working a little bit for a blockchain company. I was like, oh, yeah, this isn't really going to like be benefit. Like, I don't really believe in this anymore. The only time I've I've had some crises, but the only like real crisis that I think could have affected people's finances was when I was at that crypto company. And I, you know, 10 p.m. in a hotel room at our offsite with the executive team talking to like some reporter who was going to leak some alleged zero day security incident. It was intense, but speed and transparency would have been, well, they were important in that case. And yeah,

I had a few different ones. Like one, I remember we had a DevRel guy that DevRel, as you know, like represent sort of represents you on Twitter, who started to talk about trans people and bash people on Twitter at night, and then we were we were starting to be bashed on Twitter ourselves to like, how can a CEO hire somebody like this and stuff like that? I remember when we were online discussing what to do, how to do it, et cetera. I remember we ended up actually fighting the guy on Twitter, like we mentioned on Twitter that we were letting go of the guy at 3 a.m. And then I met with the guy next morning, 7 a.m., to tell him he was fired before, but he saw the tweet before, for example. But it was getting to that moment of like, OK, we'll do this before he'll read the tweet. I don't fucking care. It was crazy. We had another instance where a company was saying that we were hacked and it was a lie. It was just a phishing attempt that somebody was doing on us. So we also had to explain, like do a blog post and ship it and stuff like that. And the last one I remember was somebody that we hired in Japan that had our Twitter credentials, that changed the credentials and stole our Twitter accounts and started to tweet shit from our Japanese Twitter accounts. Actually, now I remember I have three more. I won't mention them all, but there's so many of them.

Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. All the little crises. I remember at one point early in my career, I was like, people should just like, like, do they pre-draft all these like emergency things? And then as I rose the ranks and matured, I realized there's no way you can prepare. Like, you don't know what kind of crazy stuff that hackers are going to do to try and social engineer their way in, that your employees are going to do because they don't like, man, in that case of just not realizing, like, geez, they're a representative of the company. Like, you got to watch what you say, no matter what you believe. Like, there's more than you can handle.

Sun Tzu on The Art of War talks a bit about it, and I like this idea. Like he talks that you should always have plans, but once you start war, plans don't work anymore. But having the plan means that you're better at reacting and moving fast. So that's where thinking about how you would act on a disaster is great. When you're in the disaster, you won't follow the plan. But having done the plan, we give you better ideas on how to react at that exact moment.

Yeah, awesome. By the way, you remind me, you mentioned one of the books I have. I have The Art of War. It's that little blue one right there. That's a good read. Have you read it?

Oh yeah.

Yeah, I've read that one a few times. It's short. If you get the right translation. If you like crypto story time with Gonto, then you'll like this book On the Edge. That's a good one. It talks a lot about SBF and that whole disaster with FTX.

Did you see SBF tweeting about how you fire people and why like from jail? Mind blowing. That's another thing that blew my mind this weekend on Twitter.

Wow. I missed all that. I was this weekend. Not only was I preparing for the launch, I also had to finish my scuba certification. So I was either underwater or on Slack.

Well, you were underwater in both cases.

Yes. Nice.

You've you've come you've come all the way on being a dad and speaking English fantastically done. Let's wrap it there.

I made it. Anyway, thank you for listening to us today. Next week, as we said, we have a special episode where we'll do a deep dive on Hank's Laravel launch. Talk about what went well, what didn't and some learnings from it. So tune in next week. Thank you all.