The Rippling Effects of a Week Launch

I think they literally did everything wrong.

Because they're not interrelated. The ideas are all so discreet and separate. And I think you wrote in our notes that it's also during re:Invent. Welcome back. You had a baby. I've been traveling in six, so we've missed a couple of weeks. Congratulations. Everything's good, I think.

Yeah, everything is great. But if you now hear the baby crying in the background, I'm sorry. That's a bit of my new life.

They can deal with it. We don't have to be that nice to our listeners. So speaking of not being so nice, I'm scrolling on Twitter and I saw you quote tweet this. And I immediately was just fascinated and started clicking through and sharing the link with a couple of people. Rippling introduced. Let's call it a comparison page. There's a lot to digest here. So they claimed, oh, Deel put out this, you know, snake oil with false statements about rippling on their comparison page. So we're fighting back against the false statements. And it has a little snake game. And there were all sorts of reactions to this. First, I guess, what was your reaction?

Overall, I actually think Rippling overreacted a bit on the sense that there's so many companies that do these comparison pages. And of course, they're going to make their product look better than others. So in that sense, making these big blowouts to me makes no sense. On the other side, I actually thought it was fun that there was like a snake game. But I see one point. It would give you what were the facts that were wrong. What was your take?

I liked that as a way to dispute the alleged like false statements by Deel. It's kind of a fun back and forth. And it was a little creative. Sure, some people were like, oh, ramp has a snake page. And I come to as like my my TI-84 and Nokia phone had snake like don't like putting it on a comparison pages. What's creative here? And using it as a way and a reference to snake oil like that's fun. Those kind of references and games and gamification of learning. It's really engaging. What made it not so great was the CEO of Rippling. And this is like a four or 5000 person company, by the way. This is not some podunk startup. The CEO called out the head of sales from Deel because the head of sales from Deel made a rude comment to the chat that pops up on that page. And the CEO just tweeted out all his info, including his phone number and information on him and and call them out for saying this. And it's dumb on both sides. If you're the head of sales, don't don't go saying rude things. And we can put it up what what was said on your competitor's site. It's good to poke around, obviously. And then if you're the CEO of a 4000 person company, don't put people's private information onto the Internet that you got from your enrichment service. Like I thought that was insane and push it over. It did draw a lot more attention to the page, but not in a good way. I think

I agree. This is not a dev tool, but I thought it was like crazy. That's why we wanted to talk about it. But in my mind, at least doing comparison pages, even the Deel ones or the Rippling ones makes no sense. And especially doesn't make sense for a developer tool like developers. I think have a higher bullshit sniffer than any other persona. And they will know when they go to a comparison page. If the comparison page is on Product A's website, of course, they're going to say that Product A is better and they're going to be biased. So to me, it's much better to try to work with some influencers or known people in the space to have them honestly compare the two products. If you think your product is better and for them to publish the comparison, because people will believe the influencer, the comparison will be more fair because it's going to be more objective and by somebody neutral. And it will be likely something that might influence decisions. I think in this case, neither what Deel nor Rippling did might influence decisions at all.

I disagree with you on some points. There is room even for dev tools to have comparison pages and I think when you should consider it is when you know their search volume for the comparison. So like Deel versus Rippling is obvious. And when you know the current top results are either not great, you know, usually in dev tools, it'll be a Reddit post or something. And sometimes those are really factual, but often they're not. And sometimes when you click through, it's not actually useful comparison. It's some developer who made a post and they're comparing one or two things that they really care about, but don't give you the whole picture. And so what I think can be useful about a comparison page is you can paint the whole picture. And yeah, you can do it knowing that, hey, we're biased. You know it. We know it. But at least we're telling you all the things that we care about and we're showing that and where we think we win. And then you at least don't have to listen maybe to a salesperson give you that whole spiel when you bring it up and you can do a little more research on it. But to

me, even in that case, it's better if you like, if the first search result sucks, I agree you need to do something about it. But if you can get an influencer to talk about it instead of you doing it, it's much better. Of course, if you can't find an influencer, maybe. But I don't know. I just think that for DevTools, having comparison pages are tacky.

This is actually a topic we're discussing internally at Laravel right now. So maybe I'll run some ideas past you after this on how we could how we could do it right, because we are thinking about certain comparison pages. Actually, I will I'll I'll say this, even though we haven't done it. The first comparison pages that we know we have to have are actually between our own products, of course,

which is a which is a different angle. I think smaller DevTools don't have to think about. But as you get larger, you might have multiple products that almost compete with each other in some ways or that represent different choices. Or you might have a self-hosted versus your hosted option. And it's good to spell those out. I think as best you can. Um, for example, at Laravel, we're going to talk about, oh, when do you choose Laravel Cloud, which is an upcoming product versus Laravel Forge, which is our old product for managing servers. Everybody's asking us this. It's going to be hard to create external resources for that as in depth as we can internally. And we win either way. So the bias doesn't super matter.

Switching topics a bit. Another thing we wanted to chat about was the idea of short hackathons. Vercel did a short hackathon with NVIDIA. They actually gave us a gift like an NVIDIA GPU, which is a pretty cool gift now in the AI days.

Not just an NVIDIA GPU, but one that was signed by Jensen.

And the idea was great because most hackathons are like 24 hours or two days or three days. The idea of this one was it's a short hackathon. It's a two, three hours hackathon. And the idea of that is that you build apps using AI platforms like v0 that allow you to build front end and design and apps a lot faster. So what was your take on it? Like, did you like it? Didn't you like it? Like, what do you think about it?

I like it. I like it for a few reasons. One, the CEO, Guillermo, had the thought, you know, of course, a CEO, when they get a gift like that signed by one of the greatest CEOs of our time, Jensen, your first thought, if you're me, is going to be I'm going to put that on a shelf behind me and display it. That's cool. His first thought is, hey, this is content. This is a motivation for people to do something interesting to help grow the company. And they made it relevant. It's a GPU. So let's do an AI hackathon. And they didn't spend too much effort on it, but it was a good effort. The results seemed good. I think it was an all around just win.

I agree. I love that Guillermo gifted it as well. What I like about it is in general, when I think about hackathons, I think it's always for the long run, because in most cases, hackathons were done during a weekend for 24 hours or for two days or something like that. So people who were working didn't want to do that on the weekend. They didn't want to do it for 24 or 48 hours. So hackathons in general, I think, are for students. So you do it to play the long game. That's something that GitHub used to do with their education program, where they knew they weren't going to get new GitHub users at that exact time. But that if they got people from universities to use GitHub in hackathons, they would love it. And then when they went to work, they would use it. So it was like a long play game. What I really like about this idea of short hackathons is that it actually does work for regular working people. I looked at it at the attendees and it's actually people who are just passionate about AI, who had two hours after work to actually hack on something, to meet with other people, to talk about v0 or some of the tools or stuff like that. So idea of number one, making it shorter. I think attractive people who can actually buy your products now, which make these type of hackathons a lot better and a lot more unique than others. The second thing that I liked is that the people who are thinking of using these AI tools are the people who are going to build the apps of the future. If we believe, as we talked in the last episode, then there's going to be teams of two or three people who can maybe ship and do things that a team of 50 were able to do that before. This is a type of hackathon for the future companies of the world. So all around, I think it was

incredibly simple idea, executed well and quickly and not overdoing it. Now, speaking of overdoing it, mega launch week is our last topic here. We said we weren't going to talk about more launches. You're always sick of launches. I love talking about launches. Now, this one, actually, I have a different take because it's just too much and the brands are all at very different levels. Some of these brands I've never heard of. Some of them are PlanetScale and Pinecone, big brands. There's something every day. I've actually never liked launch weeks because I think it's so easy to get diluted and someone's not going to come and like your tweet or your announcement or read your email every single day, three, four or five days in a row. And so I think stuff gets lost. And it's part of why, you know, if we reference a few weeks back when we talked about browser based bundling, their launch and their fundraise and their open source thing, I liked that because there's something for everyone. There is kind of something for everyone in a launch week, but I think you get lost in the sauce. I

think a launch week works, as we talked in the past, when you have partners or you have VCs that are doing this with you or customers where every day each feature is announced together with a customer, with a partner or with somebody else, because then you don't have just your users, but every day you have users of others. The idea of this mega launch week was to do the same. The idea was that if 15 companies work together on doing this launch week, if you know of Pinecone, you're going to go and see what the mega launch week was. And you won't just learn about Pinecone, but also about all of the other launches. However, I think they fucked up this time. Cause they're

not interrelated. The ideas are all so discreet and separate. And I think you wrote in our notes that it's also during re:Invent. So a lot of their targets are busy all day, every day getting like drinking from the AWS fire hose.

I think they literally did everything wrong. Like there's no connection from one feature that they launched to another. They did it on the same week as re:Invent. They joined multiple companies together that have nothing to do with each other, with different sizes and everything. So I actually don't think it was ever going to work in this way. I also think about it as re:Invent, like a lot of companies ask me, should I go to re:Invent? And what I always tell them is, if you're going to have the typical 10 by 10 booth, do not go to re:Invent because re:Invent has 100 companies. And if you are one of the other companies that has this 10 by 10 booth, nobody will remember. Go to re:Invent when you can have a 20 by 20 booth or bigger, because then it's like, Holy shit, this company is huge. They can actually spend the 500K that it costs to have this big booth in here. So they should come. And I think it's the same for this launch week. Like if you build a mega launch week and then your launch is bigger than the rest, then for sure do it. Because it's like, look, I built this mega launch week. These 20 companies joined me. My launch is the biggest one and the best, but when they are all the same, nobody gives a shit about any of them and they all get diluted even more when there's no connection, one to each other.

Yeah. And I don't know quite enough about this mega launch week, except I think the planet, I think Paul from PlanetScale, oh no, Paul from Supabase, oops, is, you know, part of it. And they have a history of launch weeks and I think, so I think people are circling around them and I don't know how much coordination there was intended to be, or if it's just a coincidence for some of these companies where they were like, oh yeah, we're doing a launch week too. Yeah. Add us to the list. Sure. So I'm curious.

Supabase is the creator of launch weeks. Like, to be honest, like everybody's copying Supabase, so it would make sense if they are the ones. I think in the past, Supabase has done excellent because they've done everything well on launch weeks. If they've done this one, I don't think it was the great fit. I do know that for this launch week, they had simultaneous meetups around the world for Supabase, which is also very smart because if you can actually, at launch week, do 20 meetups that all talk about what you are shipping in local communities, then the local communities will talk to each other online. And that honestly was the only thing that I think was good about this mega launch week. That again, it was something that Supabase specifically did for their own things.

Yes. I saw that tweet from Paul at Supabase of all the meetups around the world that are simultaneous. And I love it. I did something similar to that with like two other meetups at a Next.js Conf, like back in 2022, but not to this scale. I'm really jealous and admiring of that scale of physical meetups. And it's something I definitely want to try and replicate.

I agree. I've seen something similar with Docker. I've done something similar with Angular at scale as well, but not as much with the company. I think, again, on that they did fantastic, but other than that, like mega launch week, like stop doing everything launch week. And as I say that, I don't know if you saw, but Sam Altman tweeted that tomorrow for the next 10 days, they are doing a launch 10 days where they ship new features every day at 10 AM. So if you're OpenAI, of course you can do it because everybody wants to see what's going on and they will tune in at 10 AM to see it. But if you are company two, three, four, five, which were the ones that were part of the mega launch week, nobody will give a shit.

Yeah. There's always something about if you own your own channel, if you own your own brand to the extent OpenAI does, you can do, you can do it. People had a nickname already for it. I forgot what it was.

Thank you for tuning in today. We'll start weekly again. Maybe we change it up a bit like we did this time, but we're back. And we'd love for your feedback again. And thank you for waiting. Thanks everybody.