Gonto: Which team are you? Are you more Team Lee or more Team Sanity?

Hank: Oh, geez. I don't know anymore. I don't know what to believe.

Gonto: Boooo…

Hi, everybody. We're back here. We have so much stuff to talk about today.

Hank last week was in AWS Re:Invent, so we'll talk a bit about that. But before that, we wanted to start with a topic that was very hot actually yesterday and the day before. And it came from Lee.

Lee posted a fantastic blog post. Lee Rob, he was at Vercel , now at Cursor. He did a fantastic blog post on how he ditched the CMS that they had in Cursor and he just spent $260 to replace the existing CMS with a homemade one.

That in his mind is much better because it's all in GitHub, it's all in Markdown, much easier to make changes. And now with vibe coding, he says any marketer, anybody can just do a new blog post, do a new landing page, do something else. He didn't mention what CMS it was, but the CMS that was the one that was changed, which was Sanity, actually also wrote a blog post pushing back on what...

I actually think they did a good job. They talked about what things Lee said correctly and then what things Lee didn't say correctly. And they share their thoughts there.

But all of Twitter has been talking now about, yes, CMS, no CMS, will the same happen to other tools? What's your feeling about that? How would you feel if you were Sanity?

How do you feel being Cursor? What's your opinion on this one?

Hank: So my biggest opinion here is everyone, both Lee Rob and Cursor and Sanity, everyone did a great job on the marketing front of this, as best they could. So why do you hire a Lee Rob? Why do you hire a DevRel?

We talk about DevRel a lot. You hire a DevRel to show people how to build great stuff with your product and why you need it and how you can use it and to expand their imagination. So Lee successfully expanded a lot of people's imaginations on how they could use Cursor.

He's also showing that he, a bona fide developer, how a bona fide developer like him vibe codes, because there's a lot of fud around do developers, like, should they do vibe coding and whatever and what kind of problems it causes. He talks about this. He talks about abstraction and vibe coding and all these requirements and like he talks about the trade-offs quite a bit.

So fantastic job by him. And then Sanity did a good job because Lee's nice. He's famously a nice guy.

He didn't name which CMS it was. He could have written it off as Contentful or whatever. Sanity said, hey, that was us and here's some stuff that, you know, Lee Rob didn't talk about that we're going to talk about.

And they had fair points. You know, they talk about certain stuff with scaling and working with other people that, you know, Lee Rob didn't get as far into. And they made all their points of like, hey, you actually need a CMS for these reasons.

And we predict they planted a little flag. They like in six months, Curser's going to regret this, whatever. And so lots of people responded really well to that tweet and to that blog post.

So I just thought everybody did a good job. And then I don't know, we can talk more about that. We can talk about actual beliefs on CMS or whatever, but those are my reactions initially.

Gonto 

I start with, I really like your first framing on how a dev rel or a dev educators job is to increase the imagination of all developers on what they can do with their platform. I just love that phrase. And I think that I agree that Lee did a fantastic job with that.

I agree also that Lee is very classy. I think you have to do that if you are him. I also really liked that he did a really good job on the blog post on it.

You could read the blog post without diving deeper into user management and content and et cetera. But if you want to dive deeper, you could expand it. That small detail I think matters a lot because that means that even people who are not developers could read this and get a vibe of what it was.

But if you are a dev, you dive deeper into each of them. So I 100% think he did a fantastic job. And he also got people, like, I'll talk first a bit more about the Sanity and then I'll move a bit on my opinion.

But on the Sanity, I agree that he did a fantastic job because they didn't call it bullshit on Lee. They said the things that Lee said right. And they also said how some of the things he said are actually fixed now.

One example was, like, Lee was saying that you can't access the content. And what they said is that's true before because it was in our platform. But now with our MCP, you can actually access it.

So I think they did a really good job as well with explaining some of the things that, yes, but, and then a really good job with what might happen at scale. With that, which team are you? Are you more Team Lee or more Team Sanity?

Hank: Oh, geez. I don't know anymore. I don't know what to believe.

I know you want me to have an opinion. So I used to be very Team CMS because I always have non-technical marketers on my team. And it's always such a pain in the butt to get content onto the site.

But we've had, I don't know, like it's always a struggle with or without the CMS. Once you have a CMS set up and you get through that pain and you have it set up for certain pages, boy, it's awesome to be able to just fly with those pages. But then setting up like the next type of page is such a pain. And what's funny is if I go way back in my career to when I was at GitLab, at GitLab, any site on the page as an employee, I could scroll down and there's a little edit button and I could just edit it.

Like that was the most free I've ever felt. I could just edit any content at any time. And yeah, I've always missed that. And now I have to go through an engineer on everything. 

I feel like, so even though a CMS gives you a clear runway on certain types of pages, it still doesn't give you a clear runway on the whole site. And that's where things like, like Framer or Webflow are allegedly a little more enabling, but they're actually not.

Like then you have this whole other skill set. Like it's a pick your poison type of thing. Like no matter what you do, you're picking your poison.

I am optimistic though. I think in two years, five years max, Lee Rob's way is going to be the way. I'm not optimistic on CMSs.

Gonto: I'm team Lee for sure. I've always felt like I've always used CMS because in theory, I think CMS makes a lot of sense. It's like, okay, anybody can change the content.

Anybody can do it at any time. It works for marketers and developers and it just works for everybody. However, even before Lee wrote this, I've never lived the theory.

I love this phrase on in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. And in practice, the CMS do not work. Every time I've used the CMS for a landing page, I'll tell you what happened.

We went back because we said like, okay, we have a new feature. We want to update the content of this landing page. But then because we have a new feature, we maybe want to change a bit the page or change a bit the image and it's not just a text, or maybe we want to show two things.

So then when that happens, every time we got into that, we actually needed to change the landing page entirely. Not entirely, but at least a section. We got to make a section that was for three, make it for four.

We got to add animation, add an image and maybe the animation was a bit bigger. So any change in real life that we need to do on the landing page actually required something that couldn't be done with the CMS. So in reality, we had a CMS, we never used it. That was at first.

Then at Auth0, we ended up building something that was more custom. So we built a custom CMS for us, which is very similar to what I think Storyblock does now. So I like Sanity and Storyblock to me are the best CMS. Storyblock is a very componentized approach. Sanity is more of a page template approach, if that makes sense. At Auth0, we want like these components. And what we learned at least was the CMS was useful for shared landing pages.

So the CMS was useful when we needed to make a custom page for an AVM program. We need to do a custom page for an ad or something like that, but we will never use a CMS for product landing pages, solution landing pages and home. So I mean, in the end, the CMS was used for these disposable landing pages that we used for, I don't know, we did 100 of them for AVMs or 200 of them for different ads.

And for that specific use case that we used in the past, the CMS, I actually think that vibe coding works much better because for those cases, it's still disposable. And their argument that, okay, Sanity's biggest argument was it's hard to find all of the places you need to change something. And also like, if you change the pricing in one place, it will change it automatically in multiple places.

When you implement a CMS in real life, that never happens. When you change your pricing in one place, it's only on the pricing page. It's never in anywhere else.

So the theory of how good a CMS is in practice, I've never lived it in any company I worked at.

Hank: Yeah. I like your framing too on this, just like the theory does not match the actual practice. And we could probably talk about a lot of software that's sold to go-to-market people that fits this exact description, but let's not get into it because we still have a lot of other stuff to talk about today.

What else on this? Anything else? I think, you know, it's the Twitter game was great.

Like the debate is great.

Gonto: Everything was great. The only last comment I have is in one of the companies I work with is BrainFrost and Ornella has been doing this vibe coding thing. Like the blogs, she just vibe codes new blog posts and then has a link in Vercel for the draft.

She also vibe codes new landing pages. Like she just vibe coded a new landing page for a product that they just shipped. And she's been doing what Lee has been saying for months.

And she's so much faster and so much better than when we had a CMS in other companies. So I don't know. I even think that now your bet is in two to five years, Lee will be right.

I think Lee is right now because the dream of the CMS is a lie.

Hank: Yeah, I think you're right. Maybe it's faster for some. You're thinking in theory though, in practice, how teams build their web pages and the types of approval flows and who can approve the PR and the security of it.

That's hard to change. That's what's hard to change. It's not the tech.

Gonto: I agree with that.

Hank: They always say that the law always lags behind the tech, right? It's the same with the laws of your startup or your software company. Like your rules and security stuff always lags behind what's possible.

Gonto: I agree. And by the way, I want to be called bullshit on this. So if you're the founder or you work at a CMS company and you think I should have, there's a way that I could have implemented this correctly and that the practice works similar to theory, please tweet at us.

I want to learn it. I've never been successful, but maybe it's a me problem and not a CMS problem.

Hank: Yeah, well, it could be both. Let's not be narrow-minded. Could be Gonto and the CMSs.

I will say they have a chance though. In theory, they can make this easier. One tool I was playing around with last month was a tool that there's a few of these, but it just looks at your pages and your components.

It pulls in your components and then you can kind of have a quasi CMS, like a vibe CMS type of thing. So maybe there's a future for CMSs if they figure it out, but I don't know. I think it'll be so easy to build your own CMS. It'll be interesting.

Gonto: Let's switch topics. Let's do our AWS game.

Hank: Okay. We've got two more topics. One is AWS Re:invent and we've got a little game and then we're going to talk about all the Spotify wrapped madness, which we thoroughly enjoyed.

Okay. So we're going to try, first off, I hope you're watching video audience because we're going to try a little screen share here. Let's see if this works.

Gonto: Yeah. And if you don't, you should skip to the third topic, maybe.

Hank: No, jump over on YouTube or Spotify. We've got the video, subscribe, comment, like, please all of that. All of the above.

So Gonto, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a picture. I'm going to explain what it is. And then you're just going to tell me quickly if you think worth it or not worth it.

Gonto: Let's do it. 

Hank: Okay. First thing, or this is Clickhouse.

They had a chain smokers concert. Now, apparently last year, our mutual friend, Angelica, she joined in the last year and the CEO was like, there weren't enough people there last year. It was embarrassing.

Please get people there. They had 6,000 people registered for this. I think they could only fit not even 600 people in this.

It was packed. They were turning away people. People were fighting the security to try to get in.

It was absolute madness. This is it. I didn't take a picture of the ChainSmokers like an idiot, but it was packed, obviously massively expensive.

Even though ChainSmokers are investors, you still have to pay through the nose to get them to come. Worth, not worth.

Gonto: This one, I think it's worth it, mostly because so many people subscribed and even though they couldn't fit, they learned about it. And I heard from Angelica how much they paid and they didn't pay that much, mostly because they're an investor. So it wasn't a crazy spend.

The only bad vibe of this is that people subscribe and they couldn't get in. So maybe they hate it, but at least they remember it. So this one, I like it.

And people will remember at Clickhouse did this.

Hank: I also have to tell you, I wasn't, so when we got there, I think it was at the wind, the line was crazy and I had been given a fast pass, but the fast pass line was massive too. It did move fast and I was able to get in, but it was, it was insane. Okay.

Oh, that's another picture of the house party. Okay. WorkOS, they told me they didn't know what to do with their booth until like right before.

And then they just set up a podcast videocast studio. So they recorded these live and then I didn't take a picture, but on the table in front of me are over ear headphones. So if you're walking by, you could put on the headphones and listen into what was being said.

And so I listened for a bit. I saw some people listen and basically Michael, the CEO on the left there, he was just interviewing CEOs and people of interest all day, every day. And sometimes they'd be five minute interviews.

This one was like 40 minutes worth, not worth.

Gonto: I like this one too. I think it's worth it. And I'll tell you why it's very hard to find leaders and CEOs and everybody goes to Re:Invent.

So to me, it doesn't matter if people are listening live, it doesn't matter at all. It's more about when you're in Re:Invent, it's a fantastic opportunity to get to actually talk to these people and record it. And then you can use those recordings in multiple other ways, either in Twitter or reposting your podcast or whatever.

But I think it's a great way to use the people that are there and also show something as well.

Hank: I agree. Like after this podcast was done, I asked Michael, who else are you interviewing? I was like, oh, you should interview Paul from BrowserBase because he's here too.

And he's like, oh, I'd love to. I'll text him right now. Didn't even, you know, think about it.

That's awesome. OK, this one, just some random booth I came across. I had to give him a shout because I'll tell you, it was worth it.

I just freaking love this little dinosaur. My daughters have been fighting over this like every day. I don't really know what this does or anything.

They've just made a giant stuffed toy and a bunch of little stuffed toys. So I just thought it was fun. What do you think?

Gonto: Not worth it.

Hank: Not worth it.

Gonto: No, this one, I don't like it because like people remember more of the dinosaur than whatever the fuck they do. They can't use this in the future. And then you have a dinosaur.

It probably says nothing, maybe says the brand, but maybe nothing. So then your kids will have it, but you will not remember it. Your kids will not remember it.

So this investment, not worth it.

Hank: I think that's actually fair. I really did just like it for the dino.

Gonto: Exactly.

Hank: I think they got a lot of certain type of people. Oh, and you have to remind me, there are two side events I have to tell you about that I don't have pictures of. We'll get to those at the end.

This one, this is just like a vending machine. Quick take. Worth, not worth.

That's it. What was the swag inside? I don't even know.

I mean, can we even see it? No. It was something dumb.

Gonto: I don't think it's worth it. The thing that I like is that I've always, like when I was a kid, at least I went to arcades and I never played this because it was too expensive and my parents didn't want to pay for me. So maybe if I went to Re:Invent, I could now do it.

So that would be the good part. But the other side is, I don't know that people would like, you can't use it afterwards. The swag that you get, maybe it's like meh swag.

So not many people participate and you get nothing out of the company. So I'm against. What's your take?

Hank: Yeah. I don't think worth it. It looked complicated.

Like, you know, you're going to lose. I see these things that I think these are scams built to scam kids out of money.

Gonto: I agree.

Hank: And I didn't think they were utilizing it well.

All right, let's keep going. Okay. This is just like a racetrack. I don't know. I just thought it was funny.

Worth, not worth. Would you set one of these up at your booth?

Gonto: No, I don't think it's worth it because people spend too much time playing a Skelectric. I think Skelectric is fantastic. But what you want in your booth is for people to cycle through and then talk a bit, look at it and then go somewhere else.

With these, I think you get a lot of people to stay here, but they get nothing out of it. Like they don't get a swag, they don't get anything specific out of it. So I think you get people in.

The only advantage, the only thing that I like is your booth might look bad because people are playing the Skelectric.

Hank: What's your I didn't see anybody playing it. So I went, I went during like a packed moment of the thing.

Gonto: Yeah. So maybe we, we nerds don't like Skelectric.

Hank: This is just my buddy, Kelvin, who's at Launch Darkly. He told me that I asked him what his favorite piece of swag was. He told me it was this, uh, this bag.

I hate bags. Everybody's always trying to give me bags, but he's like, no, I'll actually use this. And the brand groundcover is very like demure.

Gonto: This one sucks. Sucks. And you can't say it.

And I do the only bags that I like, there's a brand that's called Peak Design that has one of these, but it's waterproof because if I'm taking my bag to the beach and it's waterproof and with a zipper, maybe, but if not, fuck it. But these to me, worse, it is the worst so far.

Hank: Well, Kelvin will disagree with you. Get in the comments, Kelvin. Okay.

First off, do you know who these are from? You can, I guess you can see the logo on one of them.

Gonto: The logo looks like Adidas, but it's not really Adidas. No, what are they? 

Hank: This is Century.

Gonto: Oh, okay.

Hank: So this is a Century log. Get it. And this is their new AI thing.

The overseer, these are little toys. I'm telling you, like, if you can give a dad a plush, like a little plush stuffed toy to bring home.

Gonto: I agree with that. The best one that the toys was Motherduck, because in each conference, they gave a different rubber duck. That was a special one for each conference.

So then you have to go to oil to check it out. And then you saw it multiple times. This one, again, like you have the dinosaurs, this is more of the same.

So it's not something unique. I'm team unique. So not worth it.

Hank: I'll tell you this. I didn't want these because I don't want that creepy overseer in my house or a log. It's a log that's on fire.

Okay. Now we're getting into some more generic stuff. So this is just like your basic booth set up.

You can see they have, they have like a little setup here where they gave people headphones and they have their presenter. But like, there's a couple of booths like this. We'll see another one where people will do these like scheduled demo presentations.

What do you think of those?

Gonto: I don't think people watch any scheduled demo presentations.

Hank: Well, only look at this guy. He's got like, that's what I was gonna say.

Gonto: The only time I had success with scheduled demo presentations was when I needed more scrappy. Instead of headphones, you had like a sound system and you spoke and then people would hear it. You maybe made it funny or something like that.

So in those cases, maybe somebody would come, but I think like the headphones is the worst choice. And also the colors here, like I like booths that have weird colors like violet or fluorescent pink or some shit like that, which holds people's attention.

Hank: We were in a sea of violet and pink. So actually everybody's violet and pink right now. So to stand out, I think the opposite.

Also a difference between like, this is like pretty sure this is like an engineer and here's a sales guy. Of course. Okay.

Okay. This is like ski ball or something. I'll just jump to it.

I think not worth, I don't even know what this is. I saw nobody playing. Well, I guess this lady was playing it, but any other thoughts?

Gonto: No, this one sucks. No, sucks.

Hank: All right, next. Okay. This one is wild.

I'm walking along and I see, wait, this is a two story booth and there's a woman just eating lunch in there. Like they built a little office on the second floor. Isn't that wild?

Gonto: To me, it's crazy that they use it for somebody eating lunch, but I do like the idea. It makes me remember of Mark Zuckerberg. Like if you go to Meta office, 

Hank: His fishbowl office?

Gonto: his office is exactly, I fucking love it.

Like you can see him and he can see you from everywhere. So you could do, if you could do something like that for the booth, I think fantastic idea.

Hank: I mean, if you're using it for meetings or something, I guess, but like, nah, you have to do something more flashy.

Gonto: Like, I don't know. I would use it as an installation. Like, I don't know.

Hank: Yeah. Like the ramp thing or the, I like where your head goes with that. Cause for me, I was just like, okay, did they build that so that they had an office?

Cause really there was just the lady eating lunch up there. And I was like, what a waste. If you have something like that, you have to like book it out 24/7.

Next. I only got a back photo. This is like an ugly mascot.

I hated it. I should have taken a photo of the front of it, but there is a human inside of this thing. What do you think of mascots?

Gonto: If they can be creepy or weird or something, maybe. If they are just standing there, I don't think people care.

Hank: This one was pretty bland. Have you ever been to Dreamforce? Have you seen all their mascots?

Gonto: Yeah.

Hank: They're actually, they're fun. They're fun with it.

Gonto: I went to a Google IO where the Android was a fucking asshole. Like he went to people and like punched them a bit. That fantastic mascot.

Hank: Gonto just wants to see people get harassed. Okay. Okay.

Here's this. Do you see this? This is like, it's like a spaceship.

You could go in there and there was some sort of VR experience and it's by Eon.

Gonto: That's pretty sweet. I like the vibe of this just because I think it's Instagramable. Like people maybe want to go in to share a picture on Instagram.

It's the only problem to me is that the Eon is too high. I will put the Eon in the spaceship. So when people take a picture, they would see it because now you don't.

Hank: Yeah. Like I took this weird perspective photo cause I wanted to capture the whole thing.

Gonto: Exactly. But if you just do the spaceship, you don't see it. So you have a fantastic place to take Instagram pictures, but nobody sees your brand.

Good point. Okay.

Hank: Oh, Code Rabbit. I got to tell you about Code Rabbit. They had, so first off.

Gonto: I love the Vibe code cleanup specialist. Like the, how they are dressing up and they're like that fantastic.

Hank: The jumpsuit, like the branding of this, they're like, here's our, like, this is what we're doing for re-invent. They're not just slapping, they're not just slapping their like homepage on their background. It's got an interesting like color and design.

And also they were advertising in the airport. So when you got off the plane, they said like, you know, it was something like, it was like vibe code, vibe code cleanup specialist at booth, whatever. And like they told, they kind of prepared you to find them and it's really good.

And yeah, the guy in the jumpsuit, I thought Code Rabbit did a fantastic job.

Okay. GitLab.This is another presentation. There were like a lot of people sitting around for this, which I think it surprises both you and me that so many people will hang out and like watch these things. Okay.

Gonto: What else?

Hank: Oh, this one I took from my friends at Builder. I wanted to show you this one anyways, excuse the selfie, but they have just like the tiniest booth. Apparently the earlier you book these tiny booths, the better location you get.

Cause I had some friends in a terrible spa with the same size of booth.

Gonto: I would prefer not to have a booth and to have a small one because the small one signals that I'm a shitty startup and nobody knows me and I have no money. So it's better not have it than having it.

Hank: Here's what's funny about that. Literally across. So like right in front of me, basically where my camera is, was Notion's tiny booth.

I feel like Notion showing up is good, but them having a small booth represents like, yeah, you're not our ICP, but we're going to let you know we exist.

Gonto: Exactly.

Hank: And I think because people like Notion do that, Asana was another one. They had a medium sized booth in a worse location, but I think those kind of signal that like, like if enough big companies do that, you don't know who the small companies are unless you just don't know the brand. So I don't know.

It's kind of interesting. Anyways, let's keep moving. Oh yeah.

There's the Notion one. 180 degrees. Very small.

Yeah.

Gonto: Yeah. They're not the ICP. I wouldn't even go probably.

Hank: Resolve. They're a smaller company. They went all out and they were like packed.

Gonto: This looks good. This was designed by our, by our friends at Litebox, by the way.

Hank: Oh, Litebox designed this. Amazing. You know, we know Liz Corsi who, who like ran this thing and they were, man, they were bumping, they were busy the whole time because they had a really good activation, you know, is the word where you like go in and you customize something and you get swag or whatever.

Gonto: And this looks futuristic. It looks cool. So I thought it was good.

Hank: Okay. There were a couple of these like coffee machine things, which were always popular with people. People you know, wanted to get coffee.

Can't go wrong with that. And then all throughout the venue, I didn't take enough photos of these, but like, so Anthropic, I was actually a little upset because this is one of my favorite restaurants at the Venetian. They have my favorite eggs Benedict.

Gonto: Which one is it?

Hank: I don't remember the name.

Gonto: It's a Lux. It's the Lux cafe or not.

Hank: I don't remember the name. I just know where it is. 

Gonto: It's right next to the entrance.

Hank: It's close. It's close to the entrance, but it's kind of like, uh.

Gonto: I like Lux cafe. I actually wanted to, I talked to BrainTrust, but we couldn't do it because it was done before, but I couldn't with BrainTrust. We wanted to buy the whole Lux cafe to do an installation there for them. That's what we wanted to do.

So I think similar vibes to this.

Hank: Yeah. So a few companies like just booked out entire restaurants and they used them the whole time, but I notably, so I think I missed Anthropic’s booth in the expo. I also missed Vercel’s booth.

Apparently they were like right in the one spot that I walked around. So I missed those, which is bummer. 

Two other things to mention. One was BrainTrust’s Morgane. This is a very, if you know Morgane Palomeras, this is a very Morgane coded idea, but she did an event at like a perfumery. I don't even know what you call it.

A place where they have perfumes and everybody got a custom perfume. And it was only like 30 executives, very small, but basically she took care of Christmas for a bunch of engineering and execs and it was genius. A unique gift that you can bring home.

Fantastic.

Gonto: I think people will love her because she does this perfume that people can give back. And it's like, Oh, I travel near Christmas. So I gave this Morgane has really good ideas like this.

Hank: Yeah. BrainTrust and Modal and Browser Base and llama index also teamed up for like a big party at a bar near the end. That was good and well attended, great crowds. And so like that, I also think I'm not asking you worth, not worth on these anymore.

I'm just telling you that one was worth it. They had good people there. It's good vibes.

There you go. That was Re:Invent.

Gonto 

That's awesome. I don't think we have time for more topics today because we went a bit over, but we hope you like these different style. I actually never saw the pictures that come shared before, so we could make it a bit more fun for all of us as well.

But thank you for listening. And we'll have a wrapped version of our podcast soon as well. All right.

Hank: See ya everybody.