Hank: Welcome back. We're back.

Gonto: Welcome back. Welcome back again to Code to Market. We missed for a couple of weeks because Hank ran a conference, which we'll talk about today.

We then went, we're both in SF actually recording interviews that are coming soon. So sorry we missed, but you're going to get a lot of episodes coming soon and some in a very interesting format as well. 

For today, we have, I would say two topics and a half. We have like two main topics and then a notable mention. 

But I'll start with the first one, which is actually something that Cloudflare did today. Cloudflare tweeted today and wrote a blog post, basically giving shit to Perplexity.

What they talked about was how Perplexity keeps on changing the user agent and a lot of the information from the Perplexity crawler so that they do not get blocked. And Perplexity was planning on using that as a differentiation compared to ChatGPT and others. 

I really like that Cloudflare talked bad about them because this, I think, shows them a lot of strength on “We care so much about our customers that we actually realize that Perplexity changes a lot of this stuff. And now we're going to call bullshit on them.” 

We are blocking them, even if they are dynamic and even if other vendors cannot block them, we will because we know how to do it. And they show this place where they actually protect and care about their customers. What do you think about it?

Hank: Yeah, it's great PR. It shows a few cool things. Like one, they start this article with like, “hey, some of our customers are complaining about this.” So one, they're showing “we listen to our customers.” Always great to have evidence for. 

Two, they show their clever process for testing this. So they don't just take their customer's word for it. They take their customer's word as enough evidence like, “OK, we need to go investigate properly.” And they have an investigation.

They spell that all out. So that shows some clever engineering and thinking. And that's just good.

And then, of course, they call out Perplexity. And it serves as a warning that, “Hey, if you do this to any of our customers, we're going to call you out. We're going to watch out for bad behavior.”

And it's just a good classic play. At first, when you showed me the tweet, I was like, well, why does Cloudflare care? And then, you know, after a few seconds thinking, I was like, oh, it's obvious why they care and how do they get through it.

Gonto: And they care even more because of the new product that they shipped recently. They recently, Cloudflare shipped this new product where you can charge for bots who are crawling your website. And you can have this setting that what if people want to crawl your website, they need to pay and you will charge them through Cloudflare.

So this, I think, is a fantastic PR for that feature as well. And like, we're so good at understanding what bots are crawling you, that we will actually be able at charging them as well. 

The only thing that was interesting from the blog post to me is that I did like the idea of, like, we listen to our customers and that's how we learned about it.

But isn’t it their job to figure it out without customers telling them? Like, wouldn't you expect them to figure it out? That's the only thing that I thought when I was reading the blog post.

I was like, yeah, maybe that's the only red flag. But other than that, I thought it was good.

Hank: I think in this case, it's really hard because, I mean, Perplexity was being sneaky. The only way that they could know was, like, you have to have a customer, like the customers were basically running Perplexity queries or searches or prompts and getting answers that that customer knew. OK, Perplexity can only do that if they're reading our stuff.

And that's that's something impossible for a company to do, I think. 

Gonto: That's fair.

Hank: Yeah.

Gonto: And I think the other thing I like is how they talked about their engineering process and how they thought about it and why and stuff like that. And this strategy is something that actually Cloudflare does a lot. Cloudflare, some time ago, also did a huge blog post on Okta and their outage and their vulnerabilities and their backfills and stuff like that.

And they went over Okta because they were shipping a product that would compete with them. But they do a lot of this “we call out people.”

In this case, it's not competitors. In this case, they call out the company because they want to show their new product, I think. In other cases, they call out the competitor because they want to win over them.

But I think they did it in style. Like they, as you said, they called out their customers. They showed their engineering process and how good it was. They talked about how they protected their customers and they show how they're going to continue protecting them and how they will care. So overall, fantastic job by Cloudflare.

Hank: Good job, Cloudflare. Cool.

Gonto: Let's switch topics. Topic number two, you should introduce it, but we're going to talk a bit about Laracon and how you did the conference, what you liked about it, what you didn't, what were creative or different things that you did. I'd love to hear all about that.

We haven't practiced this or talked about this before, so I would not be spoiled. And actually, I have real honest questions based on what he shares.

Hank: Yeah, Laracon was great. Last year, I went basically as an attendee. It was my second week full-time when I went last year.

This year, it's pretty much all on me and my team to make it happen. I even found out through a podcast a couple months ago from my CEO. He said on a podcast when someone asked him, “how's Laracon planning going?” He said, “I don't really know. I kind of decided to step back and see how the team does without me and kind of as a test.”

So the pressure was on for sure, but we managed to sell a couple hundred, few hundred more tickets than last year. It's primarily a live event, although the live streams, it's a two-day event that the live streams got, you know, tens of thousands of views each, which is really good.

And yeah, we did some crazy stuff. I guess I'll kind of run you through the schedule. Interrupt me with questions, but I'll just tell you some of the stuff I was happy with. 

Oh, first off, we made these, which is really funny. I guess if you're just listening to this, I'm holding a little, it's like a stress ball foam material of a Lamborghini, and it has a license plate that says dollar sign PHP.

So I thought we had to create something, something that was fun, that was a reference to the community.

Gonto: I think even people who don't know about PHP, they know that the CEO owns a Lambo and they drive it. Like that's the only thing they knew about the CEO and about Laravel probably.

Hank: Yep. So I figured that's something I think it's worth leaning into when people know something about you. And when there's like these rumors of PHP money, I want to lean into that.

And part of making PHP, you know, “cool again,” if it ever was, is leaning into stuff like that, you know, that the people outside of the community already like.

Gonto: I have an idea. Don't walk me through the agenda.

Gonto: I'll ask you some questions. What's the thing that you're the most proud of in this conference?

Hank: So the thing I'm most proud of is actually our day zero content. So we have day one or two, and then day zero is the day before, where we usually do some sort of social thing. So first through a series of strange events, I ended up putting on a golf tournament.

And that was unusual. Last year we had a basketball game with the Terminal guys. It was like a 5v5 basketball game.

That's not too hard to put on. We rented a basketball court. You know, I threw on a referee shirt.

People didn't even know who I was. I showed up the next day at the conference and they're like, wait, “I thought you were a referee.” And I was like, “no, I'm actually an employee.”

But this year we ended up renting an entire golf course and we made this the speaker and sponsor like appreciation event. And then we also had, I told you a few months ago how we were selling these community bundle tickets. They were more expensive tickets.

And basically it meant we'd throw in a couple extra experiences and swag for those people. So last minute we told those people, “Hey, you can actually come to this golf tournament. We have room.”

So I had about 150 engineers and sponsors on a golf course. And that was wild because, you know, I had to make it accessible. Most of those people have never even golfed.

So me and my employees, we're watching Mr. Beast videos. We're watching the Taskmaster show. We're trying to come up with things that aren't golf that you can do on a golf course that make it accessible.

So we had a few holes of golf and then we had these other random games to give you an idea. Like one of the games was, hey, skip the drive, go straight to the green. We're going to ask you trivia questions about Laravel and the community, and you're going to be blindfolded.

And if you answer three questions correctly, you get to take three steps forward and take off the blindfold. Every question you get wrong, you take a step backwards. And if you don't get all three questions, you keep the blindfold on for two putts. And then that's how you scored. 

So, and that was kind of a tie-in. That was the Nightwatch hole. So we have this product called Nightwatch. So we were like, okay, there's kind of a tie-in if we blindfold you, you know. And the trivia questions were all somehow related to the company or something.

We had a bunch of other fun games like this. We had some of our sponsors sponsor holes.

Gonto: Did you do like the race of the carts that you told me you were going to do?

Hank: We didn't do a cart race, but we did do some like running type of stuff. Well, there were, I guess there was sort of a cart race. So for example, we had one where, you know, how it was related to the product for that hole, that was the Cloud and Forge holes.

So it was originally going to be something about deploy your code. What it ended up being after several iterations of the metaphor getting lost was each team had a cup of water and the team that delivered the most water in their cup to the green or deployed it, I guess was the metaphor we were going for originally. The most water to the green delivered got a better golf score and the other team would take the worst score.

But the first team there, so the fastest team would get extra water that was held at the green. And so you had, you know, my CEO was running full sprint across the golf course, holding a cup of water. The other team drove a cart and they were pouring their like, they had ice water from their drinks. They poured in, they tried to cheat. So we got there I was like, “how is there ice in yours and whatever.” 

And on top of all this for my CEO's team, you always had two teams playing together, so you had like a competitor. For the team that my CEO was on I stacked both teams with a bunch of content creators and well-known people in the community. And I had a documentary crew follow them around. So we're going to have a full on video about this event. I hope it turns out well.

Gonto: Are you doing the mockumentary? Like the Office style for the conference or not really?

Hank: We also have that for the conference. We had that documentary crew, they did a golf day and we're going to do a video just for that. And then for days one and two, because I've always wanted a behind the scenes documentary of these things.

Like when I was doing Next.js Conf, I always thought, man, if people could see some of these conversations and how ridiculous they are behind the scenes, it would just be fun to watch and interesting.

Gonto: And I love the idea of a documentary to show like how people are running around, how like some is scripted, some is not. Like the fuck ups, stuff like that, like doing a documentary. I think it's a smart idea. Like I'm looking forward to seeing it. I love it. 

I love the idea of the golf course. The main thing that's interesting to me as well on that is in most cases, you don't have sponsors sponsoring a speaker dinner. You just have speakers. So you did something weird where you actually got sponsors there and you also have sponsor holes.

Did speakers not care? Like did they have fun?

Hank: Yeah, it was fun. Like we wanted the sponsors… when I first invited the sponsors to contribute and say like, “hey, if you want to sponsor a hole, you can.” I told them, you just need an idea.

And we were just looking, mainly I was trying to get out of the work of coming up with the ideas. Frankly, only two of the sponsors had good ideas out of the several that sponsored holes. And I had to come up with the ideas for the other ones.

But then they at least had staff that could help and stuff like that. A little bit of cash is also nice, you know. And these were, I mean, this group of 150 people, they were, they're influential people.

They're, you know, we invited some enterprise people, they're our speakers, they're the content creators. And then we had dinner after that at the course that was really just us hosting that.

Gonto: That's cool. And I was gonna ask, like, I always talk about this, like it's better to be different than better. But I think your goal of your documentary are the creative different things.

Do you have anything else that you've done differently to other days or other conferences?

Hank: Yeah. So one thing we did, I guess it's not that different. We changed some things from last year.

You know, we did the Expo hall differently. There's a lot of little details that I felt really good about. So for example, with the Expo hall, we made an expo hall map and we also put a key on it.

And we told everybody, hey, here's the list of sponsors. Here's the swag they have at their booths. We called that out immediately.

So if all you care about is swag, just go straight to it. We also called out what type of company they are. So if they're an agency or a dev tool or some cloud service.

And the way you got these Lambos, the little stress toy ones, was we gave you a punch card and we said, you don't have to visit all the sponsors, but you have to go get a punch from five sponsors. So five sponsors equals a Lambo. And that way you could pick the five you wanted to go to most.

We also highlighted if they were hiring someone. So we did a lot of help on the pre-research on helping point people to the right sponsors that they'd want to go to.

Gonto: I like that you thought of the sponsor experience. We talked about it in the past, but I think most conferences never think of the sponsor experience. And because of that, a lot of those sponsors never come back or they just send people to the event and that's it.

But actually encouraging people to talk to sponsors and thinking of the sponsor experience means that I think it's easier to get more sponsors in the future as well.

Hank: Yeah, exactly. And they had a good time golfing for the most part. We treated them really well.

Actually, something else we did, if you are a gold or platinum sponsor, we made custom shirts for you. So it would say, for example, Titan or Curatech or WorkOS and Laravel. And so they all had this custom shirt and it looked very similar to the crew shirt, to our staff shirts.

And we made them a shirt for both days so they could wear A and B and they kind of match the staff. We think it elevated them and it made them feel really cool to have that uniform. So that was another thing. The sponsor experience was very important for me this year, especially because now that I'm on the scene, we charge a lot more for sponsorships and we deliver a lot more. 

Likewise, we also had, if you were in an upper tier of sponsorship, you had tickets to the enterprise dinner, which is another thing I'm proud of. We had about a hundred plus people at our enterprise dinner.

I don't do the sit down dinners. We've talked about this before. I like to do standing up only dinners. So high top tables.

Gonto: You booked entire restaurants and you invited prospects and customers enterprise basically?

Hank: Yeah, basically we invited everybody enterprise who wanted to come. We actually put out a tweet. We've talked about this type of tweet before where we said, “hey, if you're spending more than 50K on Amazon or AWS, then DM at the Hank Taylor and you'll get an invite to this dinner.”

We also invited a lot of our, you know, the bigger names in the community. So it's kind of a thank you for them, but it's also an incentive for the enterprise people to come because they want to mingle and meet those people. And then I always get up at the start of these type of dinners and I give people a checklist to run through.

So I, you know, I stood up on a table and I was like, hey, everybody, thanks for coming. And we had our engineering leads there for each product. So I said, those are the Eng leads.

They have their laptops. Go ask them anything you want to know. I pointed out our sales team and our COO.

I was like, these guys, they'll talk to you about if you want to like, you know, lock in or security questions or get discounts. Those are your guys. I pointed out a couple of our sponsors who helped pay for the dinner. And then of course…

Gonto: You told people what was there, but then it was up to them if they wanted to talk to sales or to an engineer or whatever they wanted to do.

Hank: Exactly. But then they kind of have this. So that's why I hate the sit down dinner, because if you have a sit down dinner, you're just stuck with, you know, the five people around you.

And this I'm giving people like a checklist, like almost a scavenger hunt. Like, hey, go like these are all the people to talk to. And there's always something.

And those people are all I've prepared them and trained them. They're all ready to like talk all night. So by the end of the night, all my team's voices are gone.

Gonto: That's awesome. Last question on this. Is there something that you didn't like or that you think you should have done better for next year?

Hank: Yes, the biggest. I mean, there's a few things. One thing I'll say that I was happy I did was I started a thread the day before the conference in a public marketing channel just about feedback of the conference.

And then I did a general message to the team. And I said, hey, if there's something happening that we can fix in the moment, go to like the Laracon channel and tag me or the other people on my team. If it's something we can't change right now, go to this thread and tag it there, because there's nothing more annoying as a conference organizer than like somebody saying, “Man, we really should have fixed this this year.:

And you're like, “yeah, well, I can't do anything about it. And I have 100 other things going on.” So that felt good.

One of my top things in there for myself is our our content and our social content. Specifically, we were just not prepared for we didn't pre draft the tweets. The keynote changed too much in the last few days.

And then our keynote was massive. So that's like another thing that me and the CEO are talking about. How do we fix this?

Because the keynote we covered, we covered open source, we covered AI, we covered Forge, Nightwatch and Cloud. And we had a speaker for each people up there. Our head of design got inserted in there too.

So it was a two and a half hour keynote with a whole cast of characters. And I'm like, we got to fix that. We got to get the socials right. And those are our biggest things for next year.

Gonto: I love it. I like that you did a lot of creative things. What I'm mostly looking forward from it is the documentary.

I'm excited to see the behind the scenes on like what went right, what was a rush, why and stuff like that. Like looking forward to it.

Hank: I have to tell you one other swag thing that I'm proud of. In fact, I'm going to run and get the jacket real quick. Hold on.

So months ago, I had this idea to create a jacket, but a really nice jacket. So we made this. It's got all our open source logos and product.

I'm out of breath from grabbing this. One thing that's important to me at a conference is to build a community identity. And this community already has the artisan identity.

So we put on the back crafted by artisans and then every Laracon we're producing a unique patch. So if you buy the jacket, we give you the patch no matter what. So everybody got the patch, but then every Laracon you go to, if you have the jacket, we have an iron press there.

And so people press them on. I pressed it on my sleeve. Most people put it like, you know, on the right side.

But what's cool is now you can imagine five years from now, if we have four Laracons a year, which we do, there are people who might have like 15 patches and they'll look like a Top Gun pilot with this jacket on. And that's something I'm really excited about. I like it's going to take years to pay off, but I'm excited to see somebody who's been to like 20 Laracons and has like all the evidence.

We might do other special patches, whatever, but we gave the jacket to all the speakers, to all the employees and the people who paid for the community bundle. And then you could also just buy the jacket and it's quite expensive. It's an aspirational item for sure.

But yeah, the patches are free and some people were putting them on other stuff like hats.

Gonto: I love the idea that you'll be able to collect them and collect the patches for multiple of them and stuff like that. The jacket looks like an alpha jacket. I don't know if you know what alpha is, but I love the alpha jackets.

They are the official makers of the NASA jacket and stuff like that.

Hank: It's very smart. We actually modeled it. I have to return this, but we modeled it after this Apple jacket, which they made for WWDC 2019.

So I kind of went all out on it. That was one of my biggest risks. A few of the risks at the conference were the little Lamborghinis, the jacket and the golf were probably like the three craziest things where people were like, what are you doing, Hank?

But they all worked out.

Gonto: That's awesome. That's cool. So congratulations for a great conference. Now you need to make it better for the next year.

Hank: I know. Pressure's on actually. I don't know how to top that golf thing. The golf thing was so crazy.

Gonto: Exactly. You need to do something creative. 

For our last topic, we were out, but we had to talk about Astronomer.

And what's mind-blowing about Astronomer is that even though they are a dev tool, everybody knows about Astronomer. My mom knew about what happened with Astronomer. My dad, they know nothing about dev tools.

They know nothing about what's going on on Twitter, but they always knew what happened with Astronomer and all of it. So it blew up. I knew from the past that Astronomer was struggling.

They were growing, but not so fast. I heard through the vines that they tried to do PLG, but they were more like a sales company. So to me, what's interesting is if this attention will actually make them be more popular or not.

What I will say is, I don't know if he was the head of marketing or not, but whoever picked Gwyneth Paltrow, who was the ex of Chris Martin to do the video, I don't know how much money they spent, but it was worth it. Everybody on Twitter was talking about it. She did a great job.

It seemed like an FAQ, but they didn't answer any of the questions they just talked about Astronomer. And the fact that he was based on the ex of Chris Martin was just absolutely incredible. I don't know how they approved it.

Hank: Maybe she did it for free just out of her own petty revenge or something, but who knows? It was very clever, that choice of celebrity for it, the way they would show the questions and then she would just ignore them. And yeah, I told you this before the call.

I mean, yeah, go figure they weren't growing well. If you've got two executives who are having an affair and skipping off to concerts together, yeah, your company's probably not doing great.

Gonto: 100% agree. But at least they took the right call. And even without the CEO, they made this decision. I read a tweet and their theory was that this is like the music industry and Hollywood trying to help a company that they fucked up.

So they said that actually Coldplay helped them find Gwyneth Paltrow and do this all for free or very cheap. So they fixed the situation that they fucked up. I don't know if that's true or not, but if it is, hats off to Coldplay as well.

Hank: Yeah. Yeah. What a great clip though. 

Gonto: It was absolutely incredible.

But anyway, thank you for joining us today. We're back on our weekly basis. We are going to have some interesting interviews coming soon. We're editing them now. And yeah, thank you for listening.

Hank: Yeah. Really exciting stuff coming up. Thanks everybody.