ZAG HARDER while others ZIG

I think the principle for anyone listening here is find the way to zag and it I don't think it hurts to go really hard. I think lots of people are really scared to zag really really hard but guess what like if you zag really hard in your conversions tank you'll just do it again. Okay, PostHog launched a beautiful website this week although I saw in the notes something I disagree with. We'll get to that. I disagree with you Gonto because you said Planet Scale was much better. I agree. Okay, we'll get to that but I love this so for the listener and maybe we'll put some stuff on screen if you're on YouTube. Oh, we also put video on Spotify so you should be able to see it anywhere but their site is like a desktop and it's got a little window labeled home.mdx and first off the first thing that I really loved about this is the use of color to help you quickly see different features that you can explore and so this thing is very interactive. You can click you know startup side project growth or scale so you've got your plans you can click the different features included in those plans like you can click product analytics and then explore and then a little window pops up and you can explore there. So all of this to me it's a great example of show don't tell maybe the best I've ever seen on a website. Now PostHog has an advantage because they're very visual product. They are you know data visualization at their core but they're leaning into that in the exact right way and then they have lots of fun visuals in the background. Their legally required cookie banner which is how they label it you know has a fun little image of some politician giving a thumbs up. It's a very fun very different refreshing take on how to do a home page. So hopefully I've painted a picture and I guess I'll also say one more thing like this desktop motif skeuomorphism whatever you would call it when you're putting a desktop looking thing inside a browser. They've got all these little like files and folders you can open on the side you know like the company handbook, why PostHog, roadmap, product os like it's very interesting enough from me hopefully people get the picture. What are your thoughts Gonto?

I didn't like it actually. I liked that it was creative so I agree with that like it's a desktop there's multiple categories you can click on things like that I think is cool and they have some really nice easter eggs and copy like I actually want to hire the copywriter from PostHog because of the cookie that you mentioned because if you go to more it says like sexy legal documents or things that spark joy or like crazy shit then if you go to trash you can see picture of feats from the employees which I thought was pretty good and you can even interact with some of the things they also have like the white paper. A picture of what what did you say? Employee feats. Employee feet. Where is this? Yeah go to trash. You'll see that there's multiple feats there. The other thing I liked is that they actually have their main white paper in the trash showing like we don't care about white papers and it's and the name is copy of white paper 2 final final. So they have these little quirks and details that I personally loved so I thought it was a really fun very fun website. What I didn't like about it is it has too much content like I really like I had fun because I know what PostHog is but I don't really understand the product at all. Like if I go to product and just click on product to see them there's like so many categories there's six customer data infrastructure five product engineers ten like what the fuck does this product do? So what's interesting to me about this is if you understand the product it's a fun website because you really like the things that basically are are toys but if you don't know what the product is I think you land here and you have no fucking idea what it is. There's so many pages of content so many things to pick and there's nothing that gives me like a one short tagline of what it is and maybe it's because most people know what PostHog is I don't know but it's very hard to get the differentiation on it. I have one more comment but before that Hank did you like you already know what PostHog did but did you try to read the content like did you really understand what they do?

So I did already understand what they do and I'm reflecting on what you're saying here. What I like is almost the exact opposite of what you're saying which is I feel like this central window is very effective at drawing people to the actual features and how to get started and I think all that stuff on the side all like yes as I click around that there's way too much information. This is like someone's messy desktop they did maybe they took the metaphor too far but maybe that stuff is just for people like you who actually know the product and want to dig around. For the new people I think this does a very good job of just helping you understand okay what's in here like I didn't know that PostHog does feature flags and that's really easy and simple to see in this and this is so much I mean think about the alternative the standard right now you have your standard viewport you get a highlight maybe two or three things that your product does and then people have to scroll down and sift through hundreds of words of text to understand what's going on. I'm really curious if we can get a follow-up from it because when they posted it they said we're worried we took this too far I don't remember what the exact tweet said but the designer was like I'm worried we went overboard and I hope our conversions don't tank and I get fired and I'm really curious I hope that they do that follow-up I hope they tell us how their conversions did how this went and I hope they give us the window outside of the initial just like interest from people like you and me.

First of all it's interesting enough that people are talking about it so if we have listeners that don't know what PostHog is then they are learning about it so that I think it works. I got a reply actually from the designer because I put my feedback maybe we can invite him to some episode here once they get some data so they can talk about it but one last comment that I had it's actually a comment that is not mine but I really like it's from Andy he's the CMO at Neon Turso database now Databricks and what he said is that this is a classic example of ZAG and his take is when everybody is doing ZIG you do ZAG to get attention and he thinks that PlanetScale is another example of ZAG and the idea of doing a ZAG is not to increase conversion but rather to increase awareness it's to get more people to see it and to talk about it just because it's different like we are talking about it and we're talking and sharing it with people so in that sense they did a really good job of ZAG. The other thing I think that the PlanetScale is better because for example the PlanetScale is pure text very specific very clear very to the point and I talked to Andy and what and he agreed in this with me that PlanetScale was better and what he was saying is that some of these ZAG's when they are really good and people really like them they become the new ZIG like doing black websites was a ZAG at some point in time now everybody does black websites because they work so the question to me is will PostHog will PlanetScale become the new ZIGs I don't know that was my thinking process my thought process on this.

This one's too hard to imitate I think and too I mean the controversy that you'd have between teams on being able to launch this I don't think people can imitate this one in the same way that people have imitated for example the next.js conf tickets or you know everybody using the basic you know first viewport of h1 two line subheader two ctas and something beautiful but let's compare this real quick we didn't have this in the notes but go to tempo.xyz real quick that's the new stripe one yes so this is a site where they hit you in the face with their cool design and it is different and they have this fun little thing that you can play with the design of the site you can change the zoom and the twist and then when you scroll down you know it's different but this site is terrible because all of the ZAG all of the effort on the ZAG which is this pretty design thing it does nothing to help guide the user into better education understanding or actually converting to the product right it's basically a designer's play thing is how I feel whereas the PostHog thing actually the elements I think combine well to drive user understanding I like the PostHog one better than the planet scale which we talked about before planet scale did this very like they've got you know a more mono space looking font it's very text heavy that their first image you see is actually ascii art it's like a diagram but I'd love to hear you say

on tempo I agree because the problem with the tempo website is that I'm actually watching on the right and on the left like I'm watching this very cool animation and moving it I'm zooming it in zooming it out and just looking at it and seeing what it says and that's honestly the only usage that I care about the site and then the designers it's a designer's portfolio site that's what I felt like I 100% agree and the problem to me is that the rest is literally only text and there's nothing to call attention to you to the text it's like I'm scrolling my attention goes to the right I look at the left it's like oh there's too much text I don't even know what it is I go back to the right so that's why on this one I agree I didn't like it because it's a world of texts what's different to me in planet scale is I start I could read if I want the first two paragraphs and literally just understand what planet scale is but then if I scroll I see this chart that talks to me about bytes bytes with the byte gate the primary and just looking at the chart and reading a bit on top I understand a bit more on how bytes is their main differentiation and it's what they did and how they implemented then I scroll more and if I look at performance I see their data on p99 p35 and they have numbers so in this like I can only literally just read the first two paragraphs look at the logos of company using it look at the the diagram look at the image of the chart on performance and that's it like with that I almost got everything that I needed without having to pay too much attention to text and without getting something distracting like in tempo so that's why I like it more.

That's true and you know it does drive the curiosity in the right way it's exactly they have the validation from the companies across the board large new small big or old old new small big they have enough of a technical explanation that you'll be like okay we should evaluate this deeper I do like that both of these I think the principle for anyone listening here is find the way to zag and it I don't think it hurts to go really hard I think lots of people are really scared to zag really really hard but guess what like if you zag really hard and your conversions tank you'll just do it again and you lose a couple months but your home page is it's the most important storefront of your website.

I 100% agree and I think what's important is you zag but still being specific being clear and putting focus on your differentiation new features and what you do you don't zag by at least my take but making something flashy on the right like tempo or you don't zag as much as dropping everybody with so much info the only thing that I can say about PostHog is there's no marketer that I know that doesn't know what PostHog is so with that in mind maybe that's why this is fun and it just helps them bring more awareness but I don't know I'd love to hear people's thoughts if you have any and you're listening to the podcast tag us on twitter with your thoughts and I'll change topic a bit I saw tweets from browser base from Erica actually from browser base and they mentioned how they did custom legos of people and they basically gave those legos to specific people in different companies first of all I love the gift because when I saw that they did custom legos the first my first thought was I want the custom legos as well yes but then I looked at this and she's sharing like in this tweet she shared that they spent 1500 on personalized legos and packaging they did 30 microsites with custom demos they booked 12 meetings and they got 250k in pipeline so the ROI is more than 8 000 and what they did is they built these custom legos and literally walked to people's offices in SF to give it to them what's your take do you like it not like it what's your take on direct mail or giving it to people in general okay I mean

so first I mean thank you for the overview I didn't look into it as deeply as you second off for any listener who's sick of us talking about browser base every week tough beans they're they're zagging every week show us someone else who every week is kind of dominating our brains this way because they're always doing something new and interesting you know yeah we like Paul and that gang but there's a lot of other people we really like and they're not bringing the heat like this so very interesting lesson on that so then three on the actual campaign here physical stuff can always do well if it's thoughtful people don't like stuff people like good stuff right isn't that the whole point of the industry is you're always trying to create something that's 10x better and so on and when you send basic stuff like if you send another yeti bottle to me I'm gonna think okay this company is just like everybody else but if you sent me a custom lego thing or you know I'm the stuff I'm trying to do with Laravel I'm trying to do custom patches for events and like stuff that I just haven't seen before people will pay attention they'll remember it better and so on I just think the the physical stuff is often overlooked and with all the ai stuff it is very in person right now you know there's lots of talk about the 996 we're in the great lock-in of September to December and so if you know great all the ai companies are here they all want something and I've seen you know instead of offering them all a coffee meeting offer them a custom lego they're gonna answer that email that dm so yeah another call two out of two on this on this uh podcast for hey everybody wake up and get more creative and it's

not just the creative part but also what I liked is number one I was a big fan of direct mail like I did so many direct mail at Auth0 we've done one that was similar to these legos which was transformers where we gave special transformers to different people in the company and then we told them if your kid likes another transformer better you need to talk to them and exchange it as a way of getting all of our all of the people that were making the decision so the champion influencers blockers actually talking out to each other about our project so we did that especially for big enterprise companies we've done like newspapers like fake new york times saying your company got hacked but the competition didn't because they were using Auth0 and the most successful one we did was a locked box which was literally a locked box that was transparent so you could see inside and if people wanted to get what's inside they needed to get a code from us or throw it to the floor in which case they typically recorded it and we got something out of it we stopped them because of covid but now that people are back to the office i think doing direct mail again makes a lot of sense and what i especially like about this which i've never heard before is you can actually just walk and go into people's offices that's the mind-blowing thing like in sf there's a lot of ai companies so if you're selling to ai don't ship them a direct mail like don't not like just literally just walk and give it to them and i was thinking about what if you do the same in texas but for oil companies can you actually just walk in into a no i don't know that was my other question but i love this concept of it's not just direct mail because if you can actually go deliver it in person actually talk to them through a microsite to them or whatever i think it has a bigger bigger impact even more yes 100 agree okay confession

i got a little distracted because i've got the PostHog site pulled up here did you know they have a screen saver if you idle on the site what no is it good yeah it just has it's got the you know classic like dvd bouncing thing except instead of like the dvd logo it's it's an animation going through their different feature icons so it's got like the database and the bar graph and the pie chart and the play button very fun well done PostHog you stole even more attention yeah to your point i mean plus one on everything you said the ability to do stuff in person now it's back uh people who take advantage of that and like creating the human connection because now people know her they know browser base they have something that's on their desk that they will never get rid of and it will constantly remind them of browser base very clever i've never done a direct mail campaign and now i'm feeling like you should i gotta try it i gotta do it direct we got so much pipelines through

direct mail like our most i don't see our most popular like our most pipeline generating activities on outbound were all direct mail like literally all of them so i'm a big believer like i'm sad we had to stop during kobe but now i think everybody's back as you're saying like on the great lock-in but that's if you sell to sf if you sell to other places they don't even know what lock-in is.

That's true i referenced it on a stand-up call today and nobody had any idea what i was talking about so

they didn't but they don't use twitter i guess not that team what what are they in marketing if they're in marketing and they are selling to dev tools you should fire them on just for not knowing what locked in is they have to spend more time on twitter it's their job.

To be honest i haven't seen it that much on twitter myself i've only seen what i've only seen it a couple places i see it a lot i could i feel like i could miss it i feel like you wouldn't miss it but i feel like i could have missed it.

Interesting i don't know i i'm a big believer that for working on dev tools you have to be on twitter which is why we talk about twitter weekly here in part it's true it's true

you're right i'll bring some linkedin posts next week for uh people i'm down like let's do a special

episode linkedin posts actually actually that's where i saw the PostHog thing i saw the PostHog thing on linkedin.

Okay so speaking of maybe firing everybody because they don't they're not on twitter enough you and i were talking about interview questions and specifically we're talking about this and we're like oh we should put this we should put some of our thoughts in the pod because we're talking about how there are some people who are really good at interviewing and they're really good at telling you what they think you need to hear to hire them and to think they're qualified and i think especially for technical founders or early heads of marketing it's easy to fall for those interview answers because you don't know what exactly the person's going to do there's so many different types of roles in marketing and just interviewing marketers is especially tricky so you and i started getting into the tactics of like okay how do you tease out the good marketers and i thought we'd just share a couple let's just spend a couple minutes sharing our best tips for interviewing people

you had a great one i thought main things that i care about is number one is ask them questions until they are very specific on what they did exactly i'm i'm obsessed on specificity and everything and i think it's very interesting because if somebody cannot be specific on what they did and how they did it they did not do it so either give me the specifics or make them up if you can make them up something credible on the spots and i'm getting too because that means you're smart enough to actually make it up so if you can make it up on the spot and it's smart and i buy it or if you can talk about the specifics i'm happy if you cannot talk about the specifics i think it's the wrong person and sometimes people feel intimidated because i listen to the answer and maybe spend four questions on that answer just asking more deeply that's one thing i always do second one i always do is tell just to build on it

like you can you can warn people like hey i want to know you know something you're proud of or or whatever but i want you to tell me the really specifics like we could spend you can tell them we could spend 10 or 15 minutes talking about this one thing because it's really important for me to understand like how you get into the weeds and i'm happy to hear the details and then like you said keep asking questions until you're satisfied that you either know one they actually did it or two they're faking it they're lying they didn't actually do it they're taking credit for something someone else did or you know they just kind of mindlessly did work.

Exactly that's i think one of the ones that i care about the most like very specific i always ask questions about like what's the most creative experiment you've done that you like and then another one on what's the experiment or thing that you need that failed miserably but you learned a lot from it and what did you do based on that those always have them always the questions and then i have two more interesting things one is i always push back even if i agree on their answer i'll push back in one thing calling them like they are full of shits just to see how they respond to see if they double down on it and discuss with me or if they say oh you're right something like that like i want somebody who calls bullshit on me so if i call bullshit on you and you don't reply back you don't have the conviction that i need for somebody to be on my team.

Are you a hostile interviewer gonto have you heard of these interviews have you heard of these interviews where people try to just like piss off the person getting interviewed and see how they handle a tough situation?

It's similar but i think they need to be able to push back on me like if i say something and i don't agree they don't have to agree with me like you could if you're sure of yourself you can't tell me something else and i think that's key on any startup so i do that a lot and the last thing i'll mention is i ask them tell me one thing that you learned this month that you liked and explain it to me whatever it is i don't care what it is so that to me tells me did they learn something this month because if they didn't that sucks and can they actually explain me something in simple words that i know nothing about i got once somebody had explained me something about physics or plants or whatever but if you can really explain me something i know nothing about and get me to understand it

that's a really good skill i think that's good i like all of those great interview tips i don't know that i have too many to add i mean i really like asking people a question that they should be ready for you know like something like what are you most proud of you know what's what was a big success you have and then i ask the inverse afterwards which you do a similar thing so i say yeah what was what was the biggest failure your biggest embarrassment like what happened with that and you know people should be trying things that they got embarrassed by or whatever if they struggle to answer that question because sometimes they need a little thinking you can try different angles like what area is the most friction at with your type of work like which which team or department or person even you know is usually fighting against your type of work or is there friction or it always takes extra time or you always have them in the back of your head of like how am i going to persuade this person or whatever you know it could be a sales person it could be a designer it could be an engineer it could be another marketer but yeah i think my biggest tip is don't allow yourself to hear and buy into the answers that the person being interviewed wants to give you you should always uh here's the theme of the episode you should zig in your interview it should be unlike any interview they've ever had and then you know that you're talking to a more real genuine version of themselves and of course you know try to always end on a positive note so that they actually want to work for you because sometimes people zig in interviews but they take it too far and then you're like in love with the candidate and they run away so that's the other side of it too

agree but yeah i think that's it for today thank you for joining us for our zigzag episode and thank you andy for our zigzag theme because i think that's going to be the title of the episode and i think we'll release some of the interviews that we did shortly as well thank you all my