Hank: If there's cookies, Gonto will be at your booth. That's the lesson here. 

Gonto: But they have to be soft cookies, not the fucking hard ones. I like Levain or something like that. 

Hank: Okay. Today we have three quicker topics and then a meatier topic, which actually has huge budget implications. So you'll want to watch that part. The first topic is about building while talking about building as you're building it. And so it's inspired from a little tweet. I saw a showing video from Aaron Francis talking about how, if you share what you're building as you're building it, it helps you get market feedback. It helps you know that people are interested in it, et cetera. And there's a lot to be said about building in public. What are your thoughts Gonto? 

Gonto: In general, I think people are full of shit about building in public. Everybody builds in public just so that they can market it and they can use it as a marketing strategy as a go-to-market strategy.

This video mentions that you use it mostly to get feedback from people and stuff like that. But in reality, you get so many people to talk about it that maybe the person who talks to you about what you're building in public is not exactly your target market. Or maybe they are stupid and you don't care about their opinion.

Or maybe they don't even know what they want. I think a lot about this idea of like inventing a car versus faster horses. I think if you really build in public and believe everything everybody is saying, you're just building faster horses and not a car. I think building in public as a marketing tool makes absolute sense.

But in my mind, as we said last time, you first work with design partners who are actually your target market and you care about their opinions. You build using that and then you sort of fake your building in public just as a marketing tactic to get other people to be interested instead of doing like a big bang, uh, launch, like, I think you like more, uh, Hank.

Hank: I love a big bang launch where things were secret and you put something out there. But you can only do that if you know that there's gonna be a good reception. And that's usually a faster horse rather than a new car. And like, even with something crazy like, if we think of like the iPhone launch going back, they didn't have the thing really built. It barely worked on stage famously. And that kind of was a building in public moment, if you, if you squint at it. And it helped them know when they saw the demand, they're like, “Oh, okay, we actually do have to ship a ton of these. We better build more rather than less.” If no one had reacted to it, they would have just been like, “cool that was a fun experiment. You know, forget about it.”

Gonto: And that's what they should have done with the visionpro.. 

Hank: And actually since bring that up, that's what Zuckerberg's done with his little you know vision thing the super expensive glasses that he has he's only made like 10 of them and he's showed it out,  everyone's crazy, but he's like it's not worth it yet. Like we're just building the public and he's getting a taste for it. And there's a little bit of building the market for it before trying to just go out there and say “hey everybody should buy this car.” You do have to tell everybody this is why you should give up your horse and pick up a car.

Gonto: You are making a good point on one thing, which I think is… I retract myself. I think building in public makes sense if you sell to end consumers, but if you sell to B2Bs do design partners and then building in public more as a fake thing, because all of these examples like Apple that you're mentioning, Zuckerberg, are all B2C examples.

Hank: Are there good examples? There's got to be a good example of B2B. I don't, I don't think we're going to spend the time on this episode to brainstorm it, but 

Gonto: We'd love to hear some. If you have some, tweet us with examples of great B2B, building public, trying things and seeing if it works. 

Hank: Let's move on. Uh…

Gonto: Wait, you had a great example of how you use building in public. 

Hank: Oh, that's true. I did. So I have two points here. One nice thing about building in public is if nobody cares, you can pivot. And also if nobody cares, nobody saw or will remember. And I had two personal examples. I tried to build an AISDR software.

I started development on it two years ago, and then I saw, oh, actually too many people care. There's too many competitors. There's not enough moat. I don't want to sign up to be a founder for 10 years. So I just abandoned it. Similarly, I tried to launch a cruise where I charter an entire cruise ship and go watch the 2026 eclipse.

I did get some traction, but it like wasn't enough fast enough. And luckily I had been like doing this in public enough that I was like, Oh, okay. This is an area where I don't know how to execute well enough. And I don't have the time and resources to figure it out. So I'm just going to drop that and do something else.

Gonto: And maybe it was the eclipse. I didn't even buy a ticket because I don't care about the eclipse. I don’t  know that's me. 

Hank: Maybe that's part of it. Hey, you gotta, you gotta see one to love one is sort of the catch 22 with those. So those are some examples. And what I will say about it is you can put these weather balloons out there and if nobody sees it, if nobody cares, if nobody engages with it, you didn't really lose anything. So you can kind of move on and understand. And sometimes people are afraid to like make a post or send the email or anything. But if nobody reads it, nobody read it. Nobody remembers. Nobody cares. Go find something that people do care about.

Gonto: I'm in favor too, but just as fake building public.  

Hank: Yeah. 

Gonto: I'm in favor with. Let's switc topics. Well, this one didn't end up being so short, so sorry.

 Um, another one that we have is people picking fights in public. I don't know if you saw, but Phil Eaton from EDB, the Enterprise Database, started to talk on how Postgres Weekly actually seemed biased and stopped linking to their posts and started to post to other people.

I really liked Peter Cooper, who is the founder of Postgres Weekly, and actually of a lot of these weekly magazines responded,  Because he went in and started to mention and even quote blog posts that EDB have done recently and how they were all so fucking bad. So, I felt he crushed Phil on the response. How do you think about it, Hank?

Hank: Yeah, he had the receipts. And it's one of those things where you don't know what happened behind the scenes first. Between them, clearly their businesses are somehow intertwined. But I think the way you put it is you should really only pick fights where you know you're gonna win. Especially on the internet and especially when it comes to these things where the opinion or brand that you build could affect you a long time.

And this feels just like a loss for the one guy and a win for the guy with the newsletter. 

Gonto: Exactly. If you're not going to win, don't do the fight or at least try the fight first in public, like WordPress did, and then if you feel that it's not working, then go nuclear, if you want. But actually I've worked with Peter because he also owned JavaScript weekly.

And I remember that in the early days at Auth0, we weren't mentioned and I actually sent him a DM on like, Hey, we're not mentioned on the JavaScript weekly. Can you give us some feedback on how we can be more mentioned? And I sent him a few articles, he gave us feedback. And then after that, we started to be mentioned  a lot.

So on that, I actually really value his feedback. He was thoughtful about it. He responds and he actually shows and puts things in there that people will care about because after all, he makes money with sponsorships and if people don't read it, nobody will. So I think in this case, you should have just asked for feedback.

Hank: Yeah. Yeah. The guy could have said, Hey, why did you stop mentioning? What could I do to be better? And there's a world he did that. And the guy said, I hate you now. It's something political. And then he has the receipts and then he has the winning side of the fight. 

Gonto: You have nothing to lose by asking for feedback in private. Because then if you don't, if they don't respond, you can at least say they didn't respond, but starting in public to me is always a bad decision, even more when you want to actually be mentioned in some of these newsletters.

Hank: Yeah. I mean, he just guaranteed he's not getting mentions for awhile 

Gonto: On the next one. I want you to explain this hand, but I'm really excited. And we're finally mentioning a tweet from levelsIO. I am a big fan of him. 

Hank: Of course he has lots of great tweets, lots of great takes. So Levels tweeted out the Scooby doo, you know, masked unmasked meme of Supabase. Oh, it's just Postgres. And it was kind of meant as a knock against Supabase like and Levels is very much always a champion of that super nerd of like, just do it yourself. You can build closer to the core code and, and core infra, et cetera. So this is kind of a like, don't use Supabase, just use Postgres.

And Supabase’s reaction from their CEO was a retweet of the meme. And not only that, he had a site. That he'd already built and prepared for this, where it's got the meme, and you know, it's the two guys in space, wait, Supabase is just Postgres, and then Supabase is behind him, like “it always has been.”

And they just, he just owned it so well, as a like, yeah, Levels, that's exactly what we are, and here's how we enhance it. And then it created an interesting conversation, I thought, but you know, what else do you think about it? 

Gonto: I agree. I thought it was great. It's like, part of Supabase thing is it is actually just Postgres with things on top that make it even better. But I thought the reply was great after seeing the website… My main question was if it was if the tweet that they did wasn't actually just bait for Levels because Levels tweeted that after Supabase actually tweeted another meme that was like PHP best practices and it says page one use something else. Levels  is notoriously known for actually really liking PHP and using it.

So maybe it was just bait to do this whole thing. I don't know if it was just bait. It was genius, like, I'm blown away. If not, still they did a really good job with the response. Um, and to me it's interesting that Supabase also has always had these memes that are provocative to drive more engagement as well, even if they alienate people like PHP, which in their case, they don't care. Even if they think PHP is cool, because they don't target them, they don't give a shit about it. 

Hank: Yeah, no, they're good at the provocative engagement, which confirms the biases of their core users and their ICP. And something we've talked about before is. If you can do anything to confirm and grow and validate the ego of your audience, they're going to amplify you. That's what it's all about. 

Now, this was meant to be our bigger topic. We've already been talking a bit, but we'll keep going. Kent C. Dodds, he's putting on an event. You know, he's a content creator, influencer type, and he now does these events, Epic Web, he'd do them in the mountains of Utah. They look like a great time.

And he talked about how, you know, his sponsors want more than the booths. They want a guaranteed speaking slot is basically the main thing they ask for in addition to the booth because they don't feel like the booth is good enough ROI. And I think you and I both have tons of thoughts. This is like field marketing, one on one stuff. How do you get value from an event like this?  

Gonto: First of all, what I want to say is it's very different to do field marketing for developers than for a director of engineering or VP of engineering or something like that. For a director or VP level, you can do more of the regular thing of, we have a booth, we call people’s attention, we scan the leads. We do the follow ups and stuff like that. 

That doesn't work for developers. I think if you're a developer company and you're scanning leads on your booth to follow up, you're already started in a fucked up way. So if you, what you get about is developers in your booth, you should just be talking to developers, explaining and being there.

And because everybody has booths, I think being unique is key. I think a great example of this is like, I don't know.  Um, can you cook cookies, for example, in your booth? So people smell it and come, or what can you do that is very specific and unique? I remember another one that I really liked was Sumo Logic actually brought a sumo fighter to the booth who was taking pictures and saying hi to people and everybody wanted to go, and then you could have a conversation with them.

But I think. If you're going to do a booth, don't do it the regular way and try to have something unique on it. Um, what's your take?  

Hank: Wait, have you actually seen somebody baking cookies at a booth?  

Gonto: Yeah, I did. Yeah.  

Hank: That wasn't you.  

Gonto: No, it wasn't me. I saw someone else and it was so good. I saw that one on popcorn and you could just smell it from everywhere in the conference floor and you just followed the cookie smell. 

Hank: Yeah. My take is, so I had a more, we talked about this a little last week. You mentioned how, well, if you're at AWS ReInvent and you have a booth, like get a good one, invest in it, do more. But ultimately I, I guess, yeah, there's a bunch of booth tactics on how to do booths better, but I don't think you should go too hard on those.

I think you should try and think. Okay, what's beyond the booth? Yes, if you can get a speaking slot, how do you make sure your speaking slot is good? If they won't give it to you, which they're gonna do less and less because everybody wants it, so it's more competitive, saved for the upper tiers, and even then, they don't necessarily give it.

What can you do outside of it? And some of those things are, okay, Can you have a dinner where the most influential people at the event are at your dinner and the most interesting people are there? And how can you relate that dinner back to your product or your vision or something and so on? Can you have some sort of collaborative thing between the booths where you know, people need to go on a scavenger hunt.

Is your swag interesting and memorable and something that people will actually wear and, you know, want and remind them of you? These are the things you should think through. And, and I was at KubeCon a few weeks ago and, you know, someone I know there, you know, they just threw a giant party and I was like, that was how they got their leads.

They said their booth sucked, that nobody came. They were in like a bad corner of the conference center. But their party had hundreds of people come. They gave them dinner, they gave them drinks, and there was loud music, all that. And all they cared about was showing them a good time hosted by Humanitec.

And so you remember the name and you'll remember them when they send a follow up, like, you know, Hey, here's the follow up on the after party. This is what we actually do. Whatever. That's their marketing moment. 

Gonto:I think all of the surrounding things are key. Like Clerk had another good example where. When they went to nextconf, they did an event the day before with Stripe, which they leverage somebody that is bigger than them to go to the event.

And they did similarly, they did like a big party that people wanted to go when it was a huge success. So as you're saying, I think. It doesn't mean that you have to do the booth and those, to be honest. Maybe you don't do the booth, like, fuck the booth, and you do some of these more creative things, like the Clerk van that they take to meetups.

Because they don't sponsor the meetups, but if you go outside, they actually have cookies, in this case, in the Clerk van, and sometimes you can eat them, or they can bring something. I think, thinking about there's cookies, 

Hank: If there's cookies, Ganto will be at your booth. That's the lesson here. 

Gonto: But they have to be soft cookies, not the fucking hard ones. I like Levain or something like that. 

But one that thing I want to say about this is what Kent was saying on the tweet is people care about not the booth, but actually speaking slots. And they care about the speaking slot because people will see what they're talking about. I actually think speaker slots are useful for another thing, which is to meet with the other speakers.

I think it's more important to meet and have a relationship with the other speakers than the people who will actually listen to you on the events. Because then if you build a relationship with the other speakers and they can learn from you, they will start, uh, retweeting you or share some of your content or stuff like that.

And you're amplifying your audience online using some of these offline relationships that you're building. So thinking about that, I think for your conference is key and not just the people who are listening and seeing you, um, at that specific time. 

Hank: Yeah. One of the most important aspects of this is if, if content creators and influencers like you, then before they tweet something mean about you, they'll tell you in private.

And you'll get that. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier, fighting in public, these content creators and influencers, there's a reason they have influence. It's because they know how to pick fights. And so often when they pick a fight, in public, they're not picking one that they think they're going to lose or that's going to be a bad take. They're picking one that they think will drive engagement and so on.

 And if they like you, they're going to give you the courtesy of giving you a heads up and having a conversation with you and giving you a chance to fix whatever they see as an issue or sometimes they'll just ignore it. And that's pretty valuable, pretty hard to measure, but it's one of the huge benefits of these types of events.

Gonto: And it's in both lights. Either they will change the fight or help you fix it, or if they really like what you're doing, talk about it more because you also know them and maybe you're giving them special access to features, or to special things and stuff like that. But that, I think, is the most important thing in conferences.

I always say that every time I go to a conference… I never go to listen to any talk. So I'm sorry, speakers. Because I think that most of the speakers do not go to any talk either. Most of the influencers and speakers are outside just talking to each other. And that's what the conference is valuable for.

It's not for listening to people who then I can listen in YouTube in one month. It's for building relationships that can only be built in person and talking to others, connecting. That's to me what a conference is about. 

Hank: Yeah, I'll tell you one really out there thing that we did as a side event at Laracon, we had, uh, an, basically an influencer basketball tournament.

So we had a full on five on five game and it was spons… we got Century to help sponsor it. We rented out a full court, everyone at the conference and in the area was invited to come spectate. And we gave them like food vouchers so they could watch. And it was a straightup like intense basketball game.

One of the content creators, Prime, actually streamed it. So there were like 3,000 people watching the stream of a basketball game and that stream actually got as many concurrent views as the actual LaraconUS got, which is crazy. Just kind of silly and wild but it also not only did it get spectators and people saying like wait “You know is PHP cool again?”

It also got stronger relationships with all those influencers and they got relationships with each other which they value the most and also with us and with Sentry. And so yeah, you can really get out there with Some of the ideas. 

Gonto: That's it for today. Thank you for joining us. And we'll be back next week hopefully with some other new topics. As usual if you have any feedback or thoughts, please tweet at us. Thank you.  

Hank: Thanks