Hank: A couple of fun topics today. The first one is a spoon. Doesn't that sound fun?

Gonto: Somebody says it's a spoon. I think about The Matrix, like there is no spoon, but in this case there is.

Hank: And we're back. All right. I was just at Browserbase conf. Like what did they call it? They called it Navigate, like navigate the web. I liked it. They had really cool theming. We'll talk about that on a future date because we're going to have a whole special episode on conferences, because everyone is asking us about conferences these days.

Gonto: And mention the name. The name of the episode is going to be: So your CEO wants to make a conference. What should you do? Yeah, it'll be something like that. And remember, we are going to be in SF on the week of September 27 and we're doing a developer marketing meetup. You can see the link in here in the video, but you can also see the link on Twitter and other places. Please do join us and come with us. And we'll also be on the Unprompted event that Craft is organizing, and Supabase Select. So if you're at any of those, let us know and come talk to us.

Hank: Yeah. If you're just listening, ctm.fm/meetup-26, that'll get you to the meetup. It's kind of hard to read the link. Anyways, we've got a quick couple of fun topics today. The first one is a spoon. Doesn't that sound fun?

Gonto: Every time somebody says it's a spoon, I think about The Matrix, like there is no spoon, but in this case, there is a spoon.

Hank: This time there is a spoon. So the spoon is for Granola. Not a dev tool, but just a great, fast growing tool, AI app. And they had this tweet. Well, this tweet was from someone who got the spoon and had a lovely little note, very simple piece of swag. And it talks about this is the best possible spoon. Spoon is relevant to Granola because you got to eat. If you're eating granola, it's probably cheaper to send a spoon than to send like a bag of granola. I bet they've tried that too and thought of that, but I like sending the accessory rather than the namesake. And it's just cool. It's the type of thing that someone would tweet when they get it. And to me, that's great swag.

Gonto: I like this idea of the, I call it the explanation swag, which I've seen others as well, where it's not just a swag, but it's the explanation of the swag that matters. And for Granola, there's so much competition now. There's so many recording tools. I saw everybody on YC was like shilling a new one. I think it's like Circleback or something like that, but everyone is doing what Granola was doing. So how they differentiate, if they have basically the same features, is they differentiate with their brand, their culture, and that's what this spoon is all about. It's like we are different. We put a lot more care and thought and stuff like that. Which, I'm a Granola user and I feel they're full of shit. Like I don't believe in any of that, but maybe other people do, because I will try others if they are better. I don't know. We'll see.

Hank: They're full of it in what regard? That they're better or high quality?

Gonto: I don't think that's what they said on the text. All of it is true. Like, oh, we put so much love and care and these are like, if you put so much love and care, you should have differentiated features. If you don't have differentiated features, I don't see your love.

Hank: Okay. No, that's fair.

Gonto: Having said that, I do use Granola.

Hank: I mean, Granola. I don't know. I think Granola is the best right now of these.

Gonto: I haven't tried a lot of others. I want to try the new Circleback from YC, but we'll see. But at least like the spoon didn't convince me to not try something else.

Hank: Also, hold on. I gotta check on something. I'm pretty sure I have a Granola affiliate link now. So now, now I'm going to play. If anybody listening hasn't tried Granola, there's a link in the description. Yep.

Gonto: I'm waiting. I'm ready. Or are you keeping it all? Yeah, I'll split the money.

Hank: Sure. I'm whatever, this money, this money. But I'll go straight to the editor. We'll say that.

Gonto: I know. I like the idea of the explanation one because it links a bit more to your brand. And I haven't tried the spoon, but if it's a special one, a different one, I think it's cool. I've had so much coffee and olive oil and socks and stuff like that lately. But I want different. Recently I got an Italian olive oil. I was like, oh, this is original. But then when I got the other four, I was like, okay, maybe everybody's doing the same now. But it is what it is.

Hank: There's another thing here, which is what is brand marketing? I swear this has been one of the questions I've gotten more this year than any other time. And it started, remember the first half of this year, the word taste was everywhere.

Gonto: Yes. I'm so sick of that.

Hank: I'm glad that that's died down. Taste, taste, taste. Now I'm getting asked, oh, like what do you know about brand marketing and this and blah, blah, blah. I mostly work with startups where brand marketing is not usually the concern. But when I have a startup asking me, should we hire a brand marketer? I usually ask them, what do you think that means? What are you looking to do? Because to me, brand marketing in the early stages especially is really the common thread and themes that every marketer and any customer facing person is responsible for. The ads person, they control a huge amount of the brand. Like if you're making billboards or Google ads, how you speak in those. If you're sending swag, like a spoon, that's part of your brand. And to me, this was a brand elevating exercise because, like you said, they're trying to associate themselves with the highest quality and all that stuff. What do you think on all this brand stuff?

Gonto: I agree with that. I would never hire a brand marketer early days. Like I would hire a brand marketer once we are hundreds and hundreds of people. And it's like, okay, we need somebody to make sure that we keep on brand on all of the comms and everything we say and everything we do, because we're so many people. But in the beginning, I don't think it makes sense. I don't even think it makes sense to hire comms people anymore. Like I think a lot more now it's the new media type. And I think it's the new media who sort of owns maybe a bit of the brand, because they are the ones who are on Twitter, on the podcasts and stuff like that. So that's on one side, at least.

Hank: Yeah. Well, this is actually a good segue into the Devin video. And I want to talk about an interesting, like there's kind of a conflict in devtools on brand. And so there's this video, we'll show a little bit of it on screen or something. You have to watch it. It's silly, honestly, a little bit, but like in a good fun way. It's got a plushy Devin the otter from Cognition talking to a girl on the phone about ordering boba or whatever. And it's explaining some technical concepts along the way. And it's really just to launch Devin Voice. So I guess first I should ask you what you thought of the video. And then I want to continue the meta discussion on brand.

Gonto: I liked the video a lot, mostly because it's fun and it's different and it's unique. Everybody's now doing video, both where everybody's doing launch videos on Twitter and everywhere. Everybody's doing like YouTubers and influencers there. So everybody's doing video. And I think part of video is dying. Part of it I think will stay. But yeah, that's my take at least.

Hank: So here are my thoughts. And this was a conversation I had with a couple marketers while I was at the Browserbase conference last week, because a couple marketers complimented Browserbase on like, I like that they have color. It's red. And the design of the conference was really cool. Maybe I'll throw up a picture and you'll see it's very different than your typical we-are-black serious developer brand. And some of the marketers were like, oh, I hate, like my designers are really fighting me on having any color or anything interesting or different. And what I told them was, you have to remind designers at developer companies that, especially early, you have to establish the silly, quirky, odd things that your brand allows. Because if you establish them early, they're not abnormal or weird later. And the two best examples of this are GitHub, with the Octocat, one of the weirdest, freakiest things that there is. Reddit, not a developer brand, but you know, developers are on Reddit, with their Snoo, their weird little alien thing. These are the types of things that if some serious brand or designer person had come in too early to the company, those would have been immediately deleted.

Gonto: And I think it's more than that as well. Like if you think about some of that brand, it's also around like, okay, once you grow, companies are like, okay, we can't be playful because we're selling to enterprise. But after all, I don't think that's true, because if you're selling to enterprise, you're still selling to humans, and humans like fun stuff more than boring stuff. So you can be fun, but still serious. Like we're secure or private, but we're fun. And I think you can do both. I agree with you. And linking this to the entertainment side, like something that to me is fascinating is we talked so much in go-to-market about videos. Video launch, video influencer, video everything. And I think part of videos are dying. I've been doing a lot of like YouTuber influencers in the past, where either you do organic or you pay people to do a tutorial, and in the tutorial they basically use your tech as part of doing a tutorial to build something or to do something. That worked really well, maybe for the past 30 years, I would say. But now every company that I work with, I see that going down. And as we start doing some digging and interviews, the answers are now, in hindsight, obvious. Everybody has been telling us, I don't watch YouTube videos to learn anymore, because Claude or Codex will do it for me. So why should I watch the video to learn how to do something? Claude can learn it for me and watch the video, and that's it. So with that, I'm thinking more and more about video in a different way, which is video, I think, now should be entertaining. So we should find that entertaining way to talk to developers, where maybe it's more of a developer tech show or something like that. And it's less of something that is more of a tutorial. I think that those will start winning now and very soon. We're going to try to do some of that with Supabase. I'm working now with Supabase, so we'll see how it works. But I think in general, entertainment and fun is what's going to start working more. And I think this Devin video is a great example of that.

Hank: Education, like pure education, and walking you through the things, like a code tutorial, is useless now.

Gonto: Exactly.

Hank: You put that in video. So video, to put a fine point on what you're saying, when you have attention, the way you keep attention is by entertaining. It might be by...

Gonto: It's entertaining or learning something, but it's not how to code something. It's something else.

Hank: Yeah, it's kind of the ask your agent. You know, remember Twilio had one of the greatest campaigns, ask your developer. You see people still imitating this today, ten years later. They had these billboards back in like 2013, 2014, and it would just say Twilio for SMS. Ask your developer. And so anyone who needed SMS would ask their developer about Twilio. We're kind of in the same phase of, well, now every developer needs to ask their agent. So what you really want is anything to entertain. Any sort of education is really about telling you how to go work with your agent in a different way, rather than your code base.

Gonto: Exactly.

Hank: Yeah. But yeah, so tying this all together. I mean, I love that Cognition is leaning in to the whimsical, silly, fun parts of their brand. And by the way, they were a sponsor at Browserbase Navigate, and they were giving away those plushies of the otters. That's awesome. They're fantastic. I grabbed a couple and my daughters freaking love them. And they were carrying around, like, Devin. Devin's helping me get ready for school today. And I was like, all right, these are going to crush. They actually do better in the enterprise, because who has kids? A bunch of enterprise execs. So I think, and you know, being on the inside of Cognition, I know they're working on a bunch of like ABM stuff with those plushies, where they're putting logos on all that stuff, and it'll be cool. But yeah, I like it. And that's brand marketing for a startup.

Gonto: I 100% agree. The other one that I think was fun was MotherDuck doing a different rubber duck per conference. So everybody wanted to go talk to them again, because they had unique rubber duck versions at each, similar to GitHub with the Octocat and different stickers at each. I think if you can dress them up differently, it helps and makes a difference too.

Hank: Yeah. Or Laracon, we do a different patch at every Laracon. Anything collectible, pins, all this little collectible stuff is fun.

Gonto: Yeah. And with that, I think that's the episode today. I don't know if we'll record next week, but if not, we'll see you in SF. Remember, we're doing the meetup, we're doing Supabase Select, we're doing Unprompted. Come to at least one of them so we can meet in person.

Hank: Beautiful. Thank you. See you everybody.