Hank: One way to effectively give them money without exchanging cash is to give them the content so that they can do a fast follow or a deeper dive before anybody else. And then they have the opportunity to get all the views and they get their own ad money or money from their sponsors and your audience becomes their audience and you create this kind of shared destiny together. 

Hank: Happy New Year, good to see you, Ganto. So we've got one kind of main topic this week, uh, it was sparked by this tweet from Nader, Nader, gosh, I always forget how to say his name. I've met him multiple times. Sorry if you ever somehow see this. 

Gonto: You're just an asshole, basically.  

Hank: I know. He wouldn't remember my name, so it's fine.

Anyways, he had this tweet about a founder saying, I would rather have amplification than investment. And I think that's the trend right now. I think We're seeing that B2C has figured out influencer marketing. We've talked about a couple of times on the podcast, different types of influencer marketing and social media stuff.

And I think this is the year a lot of people got to figure that out. What are your thoughts? 

Gonto: I agree 100 percent and I think like everything comes to B2B after B2C. It all starts with us as humans and consumers and then it moves to the B2B world. I think Influencer has started to do that probably this past year, year and a half. As we talked about, like, with Theo, with JS Mastery, with Adrian, there's so many of them. I think founders need to think a lot more about it. 

Um, I think about influencer marketing in different, multiple ways, but I want to first hear from you on it. How have you thought about influencer marketing so far? Um, and what are the things that you want to try or do or you have done this past year?

Hank: Yeah. So in terms of trying stuff, I've done very little sponsorship of influencers. I think you can talk about that in a minute. I want to hear about that again. I've done a lot to build relationships with influential people, with content creators. One of the things I find most useful is just giving people a heads up on releases or content that we're doing.

And that gives them a chance to create content ahead of the release so they don't scramble. And then they have this advantage. You know, if someone's making a living off creating content, then one way to effectively give them money without exchanging cash is to give them the content so that they can do a fast follow or a deeper dive before anybody else.

And then they have the opportunity to get all the views and they get their own ad money or money from their sponsors and your audience becomes their audience and you create this kind of shared destiny. That's the main thing I've done and that I plan to keep doing. I have some other things, but I'd like to hear more about your experiences.

Gonto: Yeah, and I think like I've talked about this in other episodes, like I've done a lot of these pay people program. Like we pay people, we pay influencers, uh, on Youtube or YouTubers to basically do a whole video where they build an app and they use us or something like that. Or we have sometimes do the opposite.

We're like, look, if you ever use us in a video, we'll pay you. Like, it doesn't matter. And we'll just do that. And that's totally fine. So I've seen, and I've done it a lot, but I think in the future, the organic one will matter a lot more. And I think in the past founders didn't focus as much on influencers and influence. I think it would matter a lot more. 

Hank: And by organic, you mean, this is actually our first episode. We talked about Theo. He's no longer. Just taking sponsorships to talk organically about sponsors. He instead would just do ad reads and because of a lot of drama with that.

Gonto:  I would never pay Theo anymore now with that format. Like, I don't like it. I don't think it makes sense. Like, it's not like a real endorsement. I'd rather have an influencer that we actually ask them to try it out. If they don't like it and they give us feedback, we'll improve it. But if they like it, they use it. And then we pay based off of that, because it's more natural.

They're using it for an app for reality. And then I think it makes sense because then the product is something that they will like. 

Hank: Um, you're looking for ambassadors. Yes, more than people to sponsor which I like.

Gonto: Exactly and we still pay them. It's like look we'll pay you but They have to really like the product as well Or at least enjoy it and again if they don't like it, but they give you feedback and you iterate on it. They might value and appreciate that and then they will potentially use it.

So I think like finding ambassadors, but known ambassadors, I would say, because you could have a lot of ambassadors that nobody knows, but that's where paying a good amount of money to these folks, I think makes sense. 

Hank: Yeah, fair. 

Gonto: I do think that founders need to think about this a lot more than before.

Like how I think about influencer marketing is it can be done in multiple ways. Either you found these ambassadors or influencers and you build like a relationship through payments and they talked about you. The other option is you go to conferences and you create friendships, which we talked about a lot of times, like you go, you network, and then those friends will tweet your content, willl talk about you, etc. 

But there's other people that will actually get friends on Twitter and push for partnerships on Twitter more than anything else, which is something that I think is becoming more and more important. And I think there's also like two type of people. There are people that are really good in person who you can use to get friends and then build connections.

But there's people who suck in person who might actually be really good at Twitter, talking to people, connecting and stuff like that. And I think those people should use that. Like, I really like, for example, what perplexity does, like the CEO of perplexity answers tweets to every company, um, on multiple things.When the founder talks about something, he's like, Hey, I really like what you're doing, but I think with          Perplexity, it will be better because of this, or we should redo this, or we should do another thing. And I've heard about so many partnerships. That Perplexity has executed through the founder talking to others on Twitter.

I haven't met him in person, so I know how he's in person, but in Twitter, he's awesome. 

Hank: We also had two examples of people on Twitter who are employees of the company they're representing. So it's less about the like external relationships built, but the way they insert themselves into conversations on social.

And the first one was from Lee, where someone was trying to rebuild the, like, Have I Been Pwned site. And he just inserted himself with, Hey, I did this on VZero in, like, 20 minutes, and you could go do it too. And it was, you know, it got a ton of likes, and it was very, very organic, very relevant. And then the bad example we had was, Someone just piping in on a thread saying well ours is better than the product you're talking about currently.

I mean nobody likes someone just saying it's kind of like a “well actually” energy of like well “Mine's better at one shot blah blah blah”. It's poorly done, and that's another thing I think think founders should be thinking about is how do you engage on social? How do you insert yourself into conversations?

Well, how do you make sure your employees can do that tactfully and usefully? And, you know, going back to show, don't tell, and like all these things kind of come together on social media. 

Gonto: And I think. What was good about Lee's response is he invested time. And that's something that people appreciated. Like he spent 20 minutes literally trying from screenshots and modifying it to build a working version.

And I've seen Lee, a lot of cases, like put a link on GitHub on what they published or what they've done. It's like they spent the time to actually build a useful response to add value to the other person. Like that.  

Hank: Hey, if you're still listening, we could use a favor. We could use a five star review or two on Apple Podcasts.

Gonto: That's what you're saying! I think it is important to have coordinated response. Like I've seen a lot of cases where employees answer something to somebody, the employee does it wrong without wanting to do so. And then people think like, what the fuck this company is doing. And that's where I think like there should be somehow, even though people don't know they represent the company, people represent a company.

So there should be guidance on it. Do not reply anything that is Vercel related. For example, if it's Vercel or whatever company related,  unless we are doing this or doing that. So I think that guidance is important. And I think we're always allowed, like Lee, who is fantastic. I think at answering. 

Hank: Yeah. And you can have, you can have internal channels with streams of your mentions.

And you can have a thread on like, all right, who's replying to this? Is this a CS team reply? Is this a dev rel team reply? Does this get escalated to the CEO? Is it a PR person? Whoever. You can all have your combos and coordinate and document the responses as well. 

Gonto: 100%. And I think it's Coordination and work and people working on it together, what helps.

But at the same time, I think if too many people work on a tweet and an answer, it might look not genuine and then be worse. So it's as always something in the middle, which is a hard thing to do. 

Hank: Tricky balance, tricky balance. 

So you asked me what I'm working on. One thing I'm considering is building out a proper affiliate program. So at Laravel, we're going to launch multiple products this year and there's, yeah, there's one I can't even talk about yet. So it's very exciting and the interrelatedness of the products. means I feel like there's a really strong opportunity for affiliate marketing maybe halfway or in the latter half of the year after we've gotten the big launches done. And I'm considering paying people for referrals or maybe just paying like creating a paid ambassador program.

These are things I'm exploring. So, you know follow follow code to market I'll give you updates on how that all goes I don't know. Have you, have you done much of that? Or I think you mentioned Raycast has a good program. 

Hank: I've done some and I really like others like Raycast. I don't know if you used it.

It's an app launcher. So it's a B2C product, but in reality, it's mostly developers and product managers who use it. So I would argue, even though it's a B2C, it looks like a dev tool because after all they are B2B2C. Um, and I think what Raycast does really well is they give it for free, like all of the plans that they have to influential people, and they also give them the features before they are released.

And if any of those people have any feedback, they actually act on the feedback. And I think that's a really weird way to do affiliate program, because in this case, the affiliates don't get any money. What they get is the service for free, which they actually really like. All of the features, and then they actually have the potential to influence features and get access to features early.

And by doing that, they get a lot of people who are founders that are very well known in the space. They're actually tweeting about Raycast, saying how they use it and why. I've seen so many founders from different DevTools, uh, using it. And that influences then developers and PMs from other companies, like, Oh, the founder of the company that I admire is using Raycast, like, I should use it as well.

So that one, I really, really liked the other way I've, I've seen these. It's not a dev tool, but one of the companies that I work with. Um, what we've done is we're doing like a webinar program, for example, and what we're doing is trying to find the influential people or known people in the space to a webinar with them. Where what they get is two things is one, we train their team on something that is AI related that is related to the product and to any customer that comes from a webinar that they've given, even if they don't close it is if somebody goes to the webinar and then eventually they close they get 20 to 30 percent of the revenue from that. 

So then they are really motivated to do this. And then if they like it and they make good money, they might then send it to other friends, which they've done. And like, Hey, I've done this webinar. It was incredible. I'm getting so much money. You should try it out as well.

So that type of affiliate program, which is also weird because it's not like a link affiliate, it's more people that are coming from the webinar, um, was also very successful. 

Hank: Yeah. By the way, you spark a realization that's useful to share, which is partners and agencies and implementers, people who might use your technology, but aren't necessarily big on social media.

These are the types of companies, startups, consultants that can get a lot of revenue. for you in a very direct way, but they might not have a lot of like content creation or influence. And they've been absolutely critical to our design partner program at Laravel. They've given the most useful feedback because they're the people in the field who, they're not just making a YouTube video talking about your tech and they use it.

You know, an inch deep. They're the ones actually thinking, how are we actually going to implement this at scale for enterprises we deal with? And so we've genuinely changed our roadmap because of those type of relationships. And it was from doing what you're saying. Like, we just said, Hey, this is free for you until launch.

We want your feedback. We think it'll be good for your customers. You tell us. And a few partners have really jumped in. And then on the other side, the more like, indie creators as they've tweeted about their early access to Laravel cloud. It's created a lot of buzz and hype and a lot of people like begging for early access too.

And we've kind of used it to like trickle other people in and get other pings. It's kind of a, it's a thing we haven't pushed too hard yet because we can't convert it to money yet. It's all early access, more design partner stuff, but I think it will transition nicely. 

Gonto: That's what I was going to say. Like, I think about it as a scaled design partner program because a typical design partner program, you get five, six customers working with you. In this way, you can potentially get tens of people who are influential, but you don't work with them as closely. But if you really find the ones that love your products, they will spend the time to give you at least the feedback on the things that are the most annoying.

And it will help, not in the same way, but still very useful for the product. So I love this idea of. It's a win-win for everybody and that's the best way to do this. 

Hank: Agreed. 

Gonto: Thank you everybody for listening. Thank you everybody for all this year, like we've done so far. I think this episode 12, everybody says that if you do 13 episodes, you're gonna continue doing it.

So unless we drop in the next one, likely we are gonna continue. But thank you for listening and Happy New Year and we'll see you in 2025.