Gonto: What disappointed me is I saw your video… tweet that was saying like, should we do a launch week? Nah, we're shipping it all together. I loved that concept of fuck lunch weeks. We're shipping it all together. And I expected you to actually use that because I think that that could be viral. I'm disappointed that you didn't use it more.

Hank: Disappointed that I didn't go hard enough. Okay. We'll get into that. 

Hank: Alright everybody, I'm a little nervous today, cause I'm on the chopping block. I'm the one getting criticized by our little squad of two here. So, we're going through Laravel's recent launch. We had a huge launch day, tons of effort went into it. Famously, Gonto doesn't love launches, and I do love launches.

So, Gonto, right off the bat, something good, something not so good, something you're disappointed in. And then, I'll walk us through all the launch stuff. And we'll just kind of critique it and hopefully praise me a little bit as we go along. 

Gonto: What I liked the most was how coordinated the launch was and that you went into external podcasts, external extremes like the PrimaGem, you did a Reddit AMA and stuff like that, but that you leveraged other people's audiences to the launch. That was by far my favorite thing.

My least favorite thing is your pricing. I don't like your pricing. Your pricing is like, “Oh, we cost $12 a month plus usage.” But then nowhere on the pricing page, you explain the usage or how people need to think about it or why. So I don't even know how much I would need to pay for your product.

And what disappointed me is I saw your video or tweet that was saying like, “Should we do a launch week? Nah, we're shipping it all together.” I loved that concept of “fuck lunch weeks. We're shipping it all together.” And I expected you to actually use that because I think that that could be vital in multiple other places and you would leverage that brand to create virality because it goes against what everybody else is doing now with launch weeks. So I'm disappointed that you didn't use it more. 

Hank: Disappointed that I didn't go hard enough. Okay, we'll get into that. Actually, that's a great segue because that little video is in the first tweet of our main thread and a lot of times when we talk about launches, we're talking about, “Alright, what was the social post? What is it that draws attention and can pick up the algorithm a little bit?”

We did get our little trending summary bar on Twitter, of course. It did well other places. Yeah, we had that video and we did talk internally about, “Oh, should we, we have a lot of things that are coming together and we could probably force them all onto this date. And I was like, great.

Should we do a launch week? And I said, no, I don't like spreading out the attention. I like bundling things. Because if you bundle everything, then if only one of the things appeals to people, but they still like it or engage, then it amplifies the other seven things that you did, rather than just getting a few people. So, it magnifies that. 

Now, you say you're disappointed that we didn't go hard enough on that. What would that mean? What would that, how could I have gone harder on it, I guess? 

Gonto: Like to me, it's more about the video, like you talk about in the all of the podcasts, you're like ”everybody's doing launch weeks like that sucks Like you need to ship all together” and explain why and like what's your thinking on like bundling and stuff like that. That's one. 

Second one, I would have like a banner in the home for some days on “fuck launch weeks, we're launching everything today,” or something like that. A little bit more visible that could stay there only for a week or something like that, but at least it's visible and it's in one place. I would do more of an ad of sorts.

I'm with the CEO to talk about it or tweet about it or something from his Lamborghini because that helps because it's a Lamborghini as well. But I don't know. I think you could have just used that so much more in other places. Similarly, you could have used it in the blog, for example. 

Hank: Yeah. No, that's a good point.

We didn't, we didn't do much with that messaging outside of that video because that video was kind of like, uh, we kind of snuck in that message at the very start of it. That was one of our last tweaks actually was that messaging. 

Okay. I like it. We could have done more. 

Now, what did you think about, we did all the releases on one day, but then all the content was trickled out over a week, week and a half, really.

GontoL Explain a bit more first before I give my opinion, on like what type of content did you share, when, and like talk a bit about that. 

Hank: Yeah, so we published eight videos related to the launch over nine days. We had four live streams, which included a Reddit AMA. So we had like, we worked with the Laravel subreddit, which we don't control properly, but we have a great relationship with the mods, you know, as you do with Reddit.

And so we set up a proper, like, AMA. We did a stream and actually just last week we released a cut up of that stream, you know, trying to imitate like those wired videos, like Mark Cuban answers, the internet's most asked questions type of thing. You know, trying to learn from the best. So we did that. 

We also had, uh, Taylor on Primeagen's podcast, Top Shelf, and they did, it was an eight hour stream. Like Taylor told us it was like the thing he was more nervous than anything else was doing that eight hour stream and building a live app in real time with those two absolute hooligans. 

What else did we do? We had our partner podcast. The Laravel podcast by one of our agency partners. And we had the Excel podcast was launched right before, a few days before the release, uh, with some shorts and stuff.

So we had all that. And then we had a bunch of pages, all the pages, I guess, were released, but that was all the content, a lot of videos, AMAs, that stuff, and our blog posts and email. 

Gonto: I really liked the idea that you didn't serve all of the content together and it was launched during some days and during some time.

Because then even though you're launching it all together, like there's new videos, you tweet about them, like you have things to talk about for an entire week, despite the fact that you're not launching it on one. The only thing I didn't like about that was that people didn't know what to expect. Like what I like about launch weeks is you're telling them we're shipping something for the next five days.

I think you could have had some type of schedule of like, not exactly a podcast, but like… How many videos are going to be released about this and tutorials. When, how are we..they coming and how to think about that. 

As I said in the intro, I did really like that you did a lot of planning on the reddit AMA on being the guest on the excel podcast and going to the Prieagen from Taylor, on doing the streams and stuff like that.

I think was incredible because it leverages channels where you don't have access to the people and that it increases the reach basically based, based off of that. 

Hank: So interestingly on that point, we chose to not tweet about all the content and stuff on the day one, though I think some of it we should have, to your point, amplified more.

We did have it in the email and the blog. We had basically a list of a bunch of this stuff. 

Gonto: The blog was a list. Like the blog, I think was a great opportunity for Taylor to write something about what his vision for Laravel and Laravel Cloud for the future, how he thinks about the web and stuff like that.

That was the only thing that I felt was missing from the launch. It's like, what is the CEO's view? What is the vision? How do they expect? Like the blog post seemed more like a launch release than anything else. 

Hank: Yeah, no, it's a good point because the blog post honestly was… it's a rewrite of the email. And one thing that maybe you're pointing out that we potentially lost in this was the cloud landing page before the release was a manifesto page.

You know that style where it is that like almost feels handwritten by the CEO and we put a signature on there, like our designer did a great job with that like manifesto page. It was the wait list page and now you can't find that. But so now that I think about it. I'm thinking 

Gonto: exactly, and that you could have been a blog post, you could have a link or something. But I think having the vision from the CEO on what's coming in the future, how they think about the web, even more considering they created Laravel, which is one of the most important frameworks for the web, having their thoughts, I think would be key. 

Hank: Yeah.

Gonto: For a launch like this.

Hank: So we should, I mean we should definitely like get that back up somewhere, maybe reintroduce it on the blog or something.

That's a good note. Going back to some of that point though, I didn't want to drive traffic necessarily to, as you said, all the external sources. For me, what I told my team was, “Hey, those exist to bring traffic to us, we don't exist to serve them.” So, we didn't do anything to like, pump up the Primeagen stream, or… we did pump up the Reddit AMA a little bit, but mostly those were about, “Hey, we're trying to bring people to us, not send people to other places.”

Like, we're trying to operate a funnel here, which I talked about before. 

Gonto: I agree with that. I really like that idea. We talked about it in another podcast. I didn't think about it before but I agree like you're using them to leverage the other people so you should promote your own stuff and your own things rather than something else.

A couple of other things that I have is on the home… I really liked that you have a video on the top right that while you scroll it becomes bigger because even though I'm not a video person it's like “Oh okay maybe I should watch the video,” but that's effect of as I scroll it makes bigger and then I can scroll it later on if I can. Was something that I really liked, was something that I didn't see in any other website before and something I was like “Oh, wow, like that's pretty good.”

That was I think one of my favorite things from from the whole.

Hank: I love that you love that because I actually fought against the video for a while. Like, back in December, when the head of design first showed me that concept, I was like, “Ah, I don't know.” And a lot of my resistance was just knowing the work that has to go into a video that's for the homepage.

And, you know, I, I still feel like we, we did take some shortcuts with the video. We would have loved to have our CEO be the centerpiece of the video, but he was… that guy's hands on keyboard coding up until the launch. So I was like, we're not getting him on video. Um, luckily we have some good DevRels and I think our DevRel pulled it off well.

Gonto: It was really good. I really liked the video. From the home, the only thing I don't like is that it has so much stuff. Like I didn't even know what to read, where to click, like what to do. Like there's so much stuff that I think it's harder to understand. 

I think on that you did a better job on the cloud page. Like I really like the cloud where you actually have pictures for most of the stuff where you're showing and not telling on the auto scaling on how to deploy it or how to have a link to a report or something like that. So the cloud page, I think was really good. The home to me was just too much and it's like, I'm overloading.

Hank: Give me, okay, let's do, maybe this is an ad for Hypergrowth partners. Be my Hypergrowth advisor for a second. Because we did struggle with the homepage, just the amount of information, and the breadth of our community and ecosystem, the number of packages. I mean, this thing's over, like Laravel's almost 15 years old.

There's so much we packed in there. This is the first rewrite of that page in years. And before you couldn't find half of that information anywhere. So this time we're like, look, we're going to have to iterate this, but let's cram it all in. Give me your advice. How could we do this better? 

Gonto: To me, like the questions I would have myself when I'm asking about the home is like, okay, “how much of the home do I want to focus on the open source product and what Laravel is?”

How much do I want to focus actually on our new products or the products that we charge for, like cloud or forge or something like that. Like one of my questions here is… I think most people already know Laravel from a PHP framework perspective and you want to sell them on Cloud. It's not like, “Oh, what is Laravel? I'll go find out.”

So if I were you, I would likely sort of split the home into two homes. I will have one home for the open source framework where you explain about Laravel. You have all of the info on how to code with Laravel, how to use it and blah, blah, blah. The other one is more like the Laravel product, which is the Cloud, the Forge, and the things that you do on top that you charge for.

I think your main page in here could be one of the two or potentially like a fork where you explain a bit about Laravel open source, what it is and some examples of that. A bit of Laravel cloud, what it is and why you should go. And then you click on one or the other, depending on what you want to learn for.

So then the home is a summary of your paid products, a summary of the open source, and you go to two different new homepages. There are microsites for the open source and the cloud. I feel in this case, you're trying to put the product, the paid part, the open source, and everything all in once, and it's just too much.

Considering that, I think, most people that will use Laravel Cloud on their paid services already use Laravel. So the people that you want to convince to use Laravel Cloud already know what Laravel is. The people who don't know what Laravel is, don't want to know about Laravel Cloud. They first want to learn about what the open source framework is.

Hank: Yeah, I think some good points there. And I think largely we could probably treat it a little more like a disambiguation page.  And it could probably be more, “hey, this is the open source and the ecosystem.” And we can siphon off the paid products more. 

Gonto: Exactly. 

Hank: You need to, you need that foundation. And if you're, if you have the foundation, you know, to click out very quickly.

Gonto: I think you have two types of users that will come to Laravel. You have the users who don't know anything about Laravel and should always first learn about open source. The users who come to Laravel to, because they already know the open source and they want to know how to deploy it and what to do. I think it's very, very unlikely that somebody wants to learn about Laravel open source and at the same time, think out where to deploy it.

Hank: Yeah, so splitting out, yeah, thinking more about that segmentation of audiences and how to help them sort themselves into the correct page, information, product, whatever. 

Gonto: And then one of your pages would be like the Laravel platform or however you want to call it that explains a bit about Cloud, a bit about Forge, a bit about Vapor and stuff like that.

But you have altogether, which could merge your Cloud versus Forge and stuff like that. And then the other one is more, what's the open source framework about, um, and how to learn about it. I think about it similarly to what Vercel does, even though both are not called Vercel, but Next.js and Vercel, you have the Next.js website that explains all the open source. And if you want to learn how to deploy it or next years for the enterprise, it goes to Vercel. But otherwise you learn one or the other. 

Hank: Yeah, that's good stuff. More on the website. We've talked in a previous podcast about comparison pages. And I even told you then, we're going to do an interesting type of comparison page.

So what we did was we did comparison pages of our new product, cloud versus forge and cloud versus vapor, two of our older products that are still supported and we like, and we view them as you know, interesting alternatives depending on your use case and your preferences. 

So we made these because we already saw so many questions, you know, from the day we announced Forge, what's the difference between cloud and Forge? What's the difference between cloud and vapor? Can I still use Forge? Can I still use this? Are you going to push us? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So even though like it kind of felt weird to make comparison pages for our own products, I demanded that we had them and we did videos and we released those videos the day before, and I'm very satisfied that I got the SEO results I wanted, but I'm sure you have more thoughts. 

Gonto: I like the idea that you compare them because I think it's hard for people to understand them. What I would have done is probably instead of doing a Cloud versus Forge and Cloud versus Vapor, I would have created like Laravel platform or something like that, where you explain what each of them is best used for. What I think is best from each of your comparison pages is just a phrase and it says like “Laravel Vapor is the best if you have spiky traffic patterns and need the peace of mind of infinite scaling with areas lambda.” Like that is incredible.

So I think I would have had something where you start with like, “Okay, What are your needs?” if you have spiky traffic, use that. If you have this use that. If you have this other thing use this. And then in the bottom, you could have a comparison, like the columns and stuff like that. But I just think that I wouldn't even make the font bigger on that stuff.

Like I think the copy on that and how direct it is, how specific it is, how clear it is, is incredible. And I don't think you're leveraging that enough. 

Hank: Okay. So that phrase, thank you for the compliment on the copy. I'll take that every day. That was mostly, uh, Cynthia, I think. Yeah, we need to blow that up and make it really clear.

Because what's great is, especially with Cloud vs Forge, we don't care what they choose. 

Gonto: Exactly! 

Hank: We're the best of both worlds. What? There's like no company like…I didn't have that at Vercel, where I could say “yeah, you could go build your own stuff or you can just buy it and we'll handle it.” You know churn your own butter or buy it off the shelf.

We win either way and hopefully you win either way.

Gonto: Exactly, I would leverage, I would create one page for all. I do like the idea that you have the SEO and I think answering these…Because people will ask the question makes absolute sense. I would just leverage a lot more of that copy just because it's so clear.

Like if you read it and I get it for which use case I have to use one and for which use case I have to use another. You could even create like a sort of a joke, like a decision tree. I think most developers will know what a decision tree is and potentially have some type of UI that is like, if you need this, this way, else, else if, or something like that, where you joke a bit and you write it in PHP.

So you have some type of like jokey developer lingo that explains which way you should go. 

Hank: Yeah, actually, that's a fun idea. That could be good. Are you a hobbyist? Are you, are you poor? 

Gonto: Do you need like spikes? You don't like, I think thinking about that decision tree, I think would be fun. 

Hank: Are you really scared if your app goes viral, that you're going to have a huge Lambda bill or do you need like auto like…

Gonto: Exactly. 

Hank: Caps or whatever. Yeah, that could be really fun. 

Okay. Now speaking of which, I think my team's already anticipated a bunch of what you'll say about the pricing page and we're working on it. I just had an update right before this call on some stuff we're working on, but tear me apart. How can we make this pricing page better? What's wrong with it? What's it missing? 

Gonto: I think the main thing that's wrong with it is it's not transparent. I think anything that focus on developers needs to be transparent. This is one of the least transparent pricing pages I've seen for developers. $20 per month plus usage. Okay? I scroll. Where are you telling me about usage?

I don't know. Like, I see a quote. I see some table and comparisons. But like, where's my usage? Then if I scroll a lot, I start seeing, “Oh, there's a compute rate that I can click on. Oh, there's a Postgres compute rate that I can click on.” I need to click on each of them and then I go to a docs page where it's hard to understand like, okay, which is exactly this.

So to me, it's more about anything that's usage based should be more clear on how I would pay, what I would pay and stuff like that. I would think about examples, like what are like sample type of applications, like, I don't know, a B2B with this number of customers, a B2C with this type of scale or something like that.

And what would approximately would pay in these cases and why? And I just think all of the usage stuff needs to be part of this landing page and or a real landing page and not a doc page link. 

Hank: Yeah. No, I like it. That's good feedback. You're absolutely right. And it's one of the main three reasons that people haven't been like making their first deployment is “I don't know what this will cost.”

So one of the things we're going to do as a, a fast follow it's, you know, taking us a few weeks to build this out. But we're close on a pricing calculator. And one of the ideas you just gave me that's gonna scope creep my engineer working on this is… I wanna have different examples that you could toggle at the top.

Because I, the thing I hate about pricing calculators personally when I'm like I've got to like guess and I've got to like fill in three things. So I bet we could find a way to like autofill like four different scenarios at the top. 

Gonto: Exactly. And that I think makes a difference. Like, “Oh, I have a B2B SaaS app and I'm a CDSL stage.” “I have a B2C app that has gone viral and I have this number like.” 

And you could even ask some simple things like, I don't know, are you B2C? How many unique visitors do you have? And then you can think a bit of like, okay, what is the typical conversion, right? How much database does it has or stuff like that.

But I think the samples actually make a lot easier for people to get a baseline. And then they choose based off of that. 

Hank: Yeah, I think, um, it'd be really cool. There's no way we'll do this anytime soon, but  eventually if we could have uh, a multi product pricing calculator. We, we could actually do the comparison of “here's what you'll pay on Forge, here's what you pay on Cloud. Here's the time we would expect you to spend on Forge in addition to save that money.”

Gonto: One thing we had like an Auth0, for example, we charged per active user and we did a pricing calculator that did checks. And the one that worked was because, we're asking people like, what, uh, what do you have?

You have a B2C. Okay, are you FinTech, health tech? What are you? And then if they were telling us FinTech B2C, we would tell them, okay, on average, for most of the FinTech B2Cs, that we have, 17% of the signups are active user. So then, that allows you to think about, like, okay, if I have this many signups, this is how many I should think about, and this is how I would potentially pay, and I think it makes a difference.

Hank: Yeah, I mean, the easy, the easy ways for us to segment, okay, if you're a site that serves a lot of video or images. Great. We got to think about your bandwidth heaviness. If you're some simple SaaS app, it's going to be lower, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I like it. 

Gonto: I have a question for you. Um, to end this special episode, if you have to give yourself and your team a rating from 1 to 10 on this launch. What number would that be? 

Hank: Well, if I'm allowed to weight it for our team's size, you know, cause I'm working with a pretty small team, then I give us like a 9, 9 or a 10. Because I think, I think for our size, the amount we pulled off was pretty massive.

For a company that, you know, they hired their first marketer full time six months ago.  

Gonto: How big is your team now? 

Hank: So I have two marketers one was Mostly busy during this time selling Laracon sponsorships and going to events. We've got three DevRels. We've got one RevOps person. Shoot, I hope I didn't forget anybody on my team.

Um, but as far as, as far as people doing the marketing stuff, that was them. We had, oh man, we had to get all those pages developed. We had to beg borrow and steal from, uh, the, uh, open source and cloud teams, and they did a great job in the time that they had. The design did a good job too. But yeah, so I think given that, overall, like, I would still say, even if you don't wait for size, I'm still very proud of this launch.

I think we did well above average, the normal launch that you see on the internet and… but you had lots of valid criticisms. I have some criticisms that I won't share you know publicly and that we've discussed internally. Um, you know, some about me, some about others, and what's great about this team, I think the number one thing with any team is just working with people who can take and give feedback well and are hungry for that type of success, that's how you get a good launch.

And we're planning, we're planning for the next ones already, so, yeah. 

How would you rate it? 

Gonto: I would put an 8. I think it's above average. It pisses me off that you didn't do the fuck the launch page. 

Hank: Well, you always want me to be more vulgar and in people's face, so…

Gonto: Yeah. And the only, to be honest, the main thing that I think would give it an eight is the pricing page. Like I think the pricing page is a big miss. 

Hank: And I mean, yeah, that is like, there are three reasons people didn't adopt chiefly. Number one was, well, I don't know what this is gonna cost me. I don't know what I'm signing up for. You didn't bring up our credit card gate again, but I think I, I had shared some stats with you privately that like, no, most, most people still went through the credit card gate happily, but there was a way around it.

And most of the people who went around it, they're like, I just don't know what this is going to cost, even on the sandbox plan. The second reason was people said they just didn't have time to make their first deployment yet. And then the third reason was a missing feature. So they're like, “Oh, it's not, it's not ready for me yet.”

Which you know, that's just like a matter of time type of thing and we're working on it. But it was good. I was happy with my team also behind the scenes that we were doing that research like immediately understanding. Alright, all these people who didn't make their first deployment… Hey, tell us why? 

We actually sent an email from our CEO and read every response to everyone who didn't make their first deployment.

Gonto: That I love it. That's the type of doing things that don't scale that I think can help you improve a launch, like understanding why what happened and doing it better next time, I think is incredible.  

Um, we'll end like… it's a bit longer than our typical episode, but we'd love to get some feedback on how would you feel about it? Do you like it? Do you not like it? And why? 

Um, most of the feedback and thoughts that I gave to Hank today, we haven't talked about before just because we thought it was fun, um, to do it live and on the spot. So yeah, we'd love to get some feedback, some thoughts on this and, uh, we're coming back to our regular programming in the next episode.

Hank: Yeah, sorry, we missed a couple. I was, I was out. 

Gonto: No problem. We're back. We're coming back stronger than ever. 

Hank: Yes. Alright. Thanks everybody.

Gonto: Thank you.