Gonto: At the same time, I did baits and I'm raging as well because I'm giving them shit.

Hank: It's working. You're sick of the bait, but it works. I always wonder if we're going to be able to not check the explicit checkbox when I'm uploading this to Spotify.

And then there you go, throwing out F-bombs and flipping the bird. All right, we'll check the explicit box this time on Spotify. Okay, we've got a good episode lined up.

First, a special announcement. I think it's going to be an invitation-only event. So we're doing an event, the Code to Market Summit at Snowbird in Utah.

So this is a ski in the morning, workshop afternoon, dinner, panel Q&A type of stuff at night, and then drinks. There's a spa. It's the best snow on earth.

It's my favorite place to ski, Snowbird. It's going to be awesome. It's basically a mini developer marketing conference.

So it's basically for our audience here. I'm still trying to talk Ganto into coming, but whether or not he comes, which is doubtful, let's be honest, he's got to come up from Argentina, but whether or not he comes, the workshops are going to be good and the snow is going to be good and it's going to be worth it. I'll get more details up by the time we post this episode at ctm.fm slash summit and link in the show notes. What do you think, Gonto? I told you about this idea.

Gonto: I love the idea. I love the idea. I'm not going personally because I suck at skiing and I think it won't be as much fun for me if I'm not a skier, but if you're a good skier, this is the best.

That's dope.

Hank: You're not coming because you have to come up from Argentina and you have a new baby and you can't stick your wife with the baby. People who don't ski are going to have a great time. There will be people of all levels and there's a spa, so if you don't ski, just come for the spa and then you don't have to buy a lift ticket.

It's the best of everything.

Gonto: Maybe you're right. Yeah, but it is true. I can't do that many trips with the newborn and I have to be selective on them, but I like this idea of most of the conferences, they have talks that suck.

The idea of this is you actually are on the slope, you're talking to people, you're having fun and then you get to learn something, but that's not the biggest part is just a section. So excited that you're running this. I love that it's go-to-market branded.

Hank: Yeah. And by the way, I haven't finalized the workshop topics. I have a list of 10, so I have to narrow it down because this is a two, two and a half day thing.

So there's going to be two bigger workshops and then we'll have some panels and stuff depending on who comes. I think I've got some interesting panelists for Q&A and stuff, but I don't know, Ganto, of the ideas I sent you, do you remember any of the workshop ideas or is there anything I should definitely do a workshop on that would be most valuable to people coming?

Gonto: I think you should do something on launches. Like you are the launch expert on how to do something creative, unique. There has to be something on launches.

That's the biggest thing. And we also talked about so many of them on the show.

Hank: True. Yeah. Ooh, yeah.

Like what makes a great launch and how to get creative with the team. That's usually what underlies it. Yeah.

There's also a bunch of stuff I want to talk about with the buyer experience, because so many companies, they put so much effort into the developer experience and then the buying experience sucks. One of our topics today could be an interesting topic there, though I don't know it's universally applicable. But yeah, we've got two other topics now.

Ganto's got the first one. Ganto, you've got to fill me in on this one because I didn't, I only saw, I scrolled past it. I saw it and I didn't fully engross myself in it.

Gonto: There was a tweet where a team was sharing how they just raised the preseed. I think the was probably a couple of millions, like, I don't know, 3 million, 4 million. And they spent 1.5 million of those on a new office. And they literally have a launch video for the new office with one of the funders walking around doing an interview and stuff like that. And they have like a big post on why they have a chef and like why they have showers. And it's a great event.

And basically what they're saying is like engineers are expensive in SF. You pay maybe 100K to recruit one. So if you have a great office, you have barbecues, you have Nordic vibes, an industrial kitchen, a sauna, then more people will come.

So they think, or at least that's what they said, that it's a fantastic investment. I have a lot of thoughts, but I want to hear your thoughts first on it.

Hank: I mean, one thing you said is this might be rage bait. Like, I don't know. It's not a great, well, I'll commend them on this.

Like whether or not you agree that the office is a great investment, they're getting more yield out of that investment by making it into marketing. And they're early enough that marketing for recruiting is important. Like they don't have an established brand or anything.

So probably one of the most important things for them is hiring more so than actually selling the product at this point. So you got to keep that in mind. A lot of times people use fundraisers.

They think that their fundraise is going to get them more signups when they announce, we've got a series C, everybody sign up. And then they're always disappointed because nobody signs up because you raised money, but people will apply. And so that's a good way to get more out of it.

But what I saw wasn't even the direct, I saw someone quote tweeting it and like mocking them. So you said, oh, this might be rage baity in order to get more attention. And that's all I saw was people raging about it.

Gonto: It's like for sure it's bait. I saw the tweet first and I was 100% sure that there was going to be rage and it was bait. But at the same time lately, and this is one thing that makes me sad about Twitter, everything is bait on Twitter lately.

Like come on, everybody's doing bait. I would love if people just did great content just because they liked the contents, but I think everybody's bait. So this was for sure either rage bait or agree bait, but it was like a very controversial thing to do.

I personally disagree mostly because of three things. One, I think they fucked up similar to Cluly, where they focused on doing marketing before the product is out. If you go to their website, which is sona.in, I think, or something like that, like it says, it's not AI. Yeah. Oh, okay. Of course it's not AI.

And then it's like your AI power workplace, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's no product, no nothing. So I would have done this.

I would have done this marketing later. They are probably doing it to hire people, but I think using 1.5 million just to hire better people instead of spending it to promote your product, I think is fucked up. And what I'll say is if you listened to our podcast, I said a lot of podcasts ago that Cluly fucked up very early on that they did all of the marketing before they actually had a good product.

I don't know if you saw, but Cluly just pivoted. Their new website is about AI note takers and the CEO went into tech crunch this rap. And he said that they fucked up on doing marketing too early.

And if he would go back in time, he wouldn't have done that that early. He would just have done it later on. Even more considering that now they're not a cheating platform.

They're actually an AI notepad. So I feel similar vibes in here. It's bait.

Of course it's bait. And you could have spent 1.5 million on a better bait. Like, I don't know, you could spend 1.5 million on something that helps the product.

Hank: To your point, because I've got bad news. Not only is their product not ready, this website is terrible. This is one of the worst launch sites I've ever seen.

They've got, first off, they still have- Oh, now you don't like it. You were like, oh, I like these people, they do well. No, no, the website is terrible.

It's got the powered by whatever up in the corner. So they're not even paying enough to remove the ad by whoever's powering their website.

Gonto: And if you go to the website, I think it's from them. Because if you go to that word wave, it says building the future of work with Sona. So I think it's basically an AI website builder or something like that that uses maybe Sona.

I don't know. But the powered by sucks. Do not have that in your website.

Hank: And also just the formatting's lame. And it's a weird background picture. All of it is lame.

Yeah, that's pretty bad. Now, if they were to do this again, they could do it. Look, the office thing, it got them attention.

The bait worked. But they directed that attention the wrong way. I guess, yeah, maybe they have some people applying.

But if you're applying to this company and you looked at the website, anyone smart applying is going to think this company is not going to pay me very long because they're going to go under. Probably. So if they had waited to have some of these more fundamentals in place, and this is often a thing I think we both tell people we consult with is, hey, you can wait on your fundraise announcement.

You don't have to rush it out the door. You can chill. Sometimes you can wait.

You can wait like eight or nine months, even, you know, so that things are really lined up and you've got a bundle like bundled announcements to go with it, like your actual product launch and whatever. So they should have waited. They should have.

I don't know.

Gonto: Yeah. Even a better a better bait would have been we spent two hundred K because our company is called Sona. So we brought everybody into the Sona to work for a week.

And this is what happened. Like Mr. V style that would have been cheaper and probably better than this. They will still get rage bait, maybe less than this.

But I don't know. They got two point one million views. Not worth it.

At the same time, I did baits and I'm raging as well because I'm giving them shit. So it's working.

Hank: You're sick of the bait, but it works. It does. I always I always wonder if we're going to be able to if I'm ever going to be able to not check the explicit checkbox when I'm uploading this to Spotify.

And then and then there you go throwing out bombs and flipping the bird at a company. All right. We'll check the explicit box this time on Spotify.

All right. Next week, that's the next topic.

Gonto: Let's switch topics. I don't want to base on these motherfuckers anymore.

Hank: Great. OK, so this one, there's not any catalyzing post, although we did find a few relevant. We have a few relevant posts about this, but something that's been coming up in a lot of conversations I've been having.

I don't know about you, is this concept of technical SDRs or as I call them, product advocates and technical sellers or forward deployed engineers. It's an interesting hot topic. And I've had a few like new clients talking to me about this.

And by the way, I guess I haven't announced, but I'm only part time at Laravel now. So this is like a quiet announcement for just those who listen. But I no longer have a full time job, which is interesting, but I'm still part time there.

But yeah, so I'm picking up some client work, which should bring some more insights to to these podcasts. But yeah, one is everybody wants to talk to me again about this using engineers as customer facing employees on the sales side. Have you been seeing this be on Twitter or do you just see it on Twitter?

I don't know. What do you think about this?

Gonto: I have seen this in other companies in a lot of cases because I pushed them to do it similarly to how I pushed you to do it as well on Bercel. I also deleted out Ciro very early on. So I'm personally a big believer of this.

The only problem is that I think if you have engineers, they are too expensive. So you can't really have engineers as SDRs of top or something like that. So eventually you need somebody technical that is not them.

I know I remember, for example, that we hired people from Apple Genius Bar or Best Buy tech supporters, stuff like that. So they were technical. We gave them a training and then from there they would be sort of technical, but not a lot.

But I think now you could do so many things on this. Like with one of my customers, what we did was look when people were blocked, like click on a section of the dashboard, go to logs, come back, do nothing. So there's things that you can know when somebody's blocked.

And in those cases, we actually had somebody reach out to like, Hey, we know you're implementing this. You are blocked. Let me help you out.

And after we help out, we ask the intro to an EM or a director of engineering. Big believer that those things work. If you're also showing that with some type of outbound for leaders or stuff like that in there.

But personally, I kept seeing more and more companies doing something like this.

Hank: I disagree on the cost. I think it's a sourcing problem. So if you find junior engineers, if you want to hire technical SDRs, which we'll get to why that's important, but like, say you want to do it.

And the first question is, is that even affordable? Well, you can get junior engineers pretty affordably now. Lots of teams already do this for customer support engineers.

And if you can afford a customer support engineer, which is it, let's be honest, like customer support is a cost center of the company. You can definitely afford the same type of person with slightly different training to be at the front and to be revenue generating. And so originally at like at Vercel, I was hiring bootcamp grads, which we had also hired some of the same type of bootcamp grads for our CS team.

And they worked out wonderfully. Some of those were the worst and were fired very quickly. Some of them have gone on to be product engineers, to go into DevRel, to go and some went into like proper AE roles, et cetera.

And so now what I'm recommending, like one company I'm working with, they're moving some people from their support engineering team.

Gonto: But support engineers, at least I did this, they were more expensive than SDRs. And also a lot of these engineers didn't want to work for commission, which ideally you do for these product advocates role as well.

Hank: Yeah. The commission part is always a conversation. So I think like with SDRs, BDRs, they're normally at like a 70-30 base commission.

With product advocates, you can do 85-15 or even 90-10. Like their motivation is different. And if you haven't heard the pitch before, and we have some articles on this and why you should do it, which we'll put in the show notes.

But the basic premise of the pitch is if you have a junior engineer who can self-teach on product, then what you have to teach them is the soft skills of sales, mainly writing. And both sets of those skills, the technical and the soft skills of selling and writing, those are good for that person to have for the rest of their career. A problem I often had when I made the SDR teams at GitLab and Neo4j and even Trey.io, those SDRs, you know, they're not interested in learning the technical stuff and you have to do all your training on that. So they're not actually getting better at sales, except for like what they naturally do on their own. But you spend all the time on the technical training and that technical training is only good for that one job and they know it. And it's not going to help them in their whole career.

So there's like this weird, it's a perverse incentive.

Gonto: When I did do this though, I had either people from bootcamps, I've done that. Or as I said, Best Buy tech support or Apple Genius Bar. A lot of those folks actually do want to learn how to become more technical.

So for them, I typically did like one week course on the technical side and one week more on like the sales side and stuff like that. And they were actually so thankful that they get an opportunity, they can become more technical and stuff like that. But they end up doing a really good job, but they do need, I think, a lot of automation on this.

People are getting blocked or stuff like that. I've done some of these, hey, let me know if I can help. But I don't think they're as effective as actually figuring out if somebody's blocked or I don't know, they got to an active user and then nothing happens or they dropped activation.

Like, I think you can find great moments to ping developers to help and that makes a big difference on your reply rate as well.

Hank: I think you're right. Like two things to distill from what you just said, just to highlight them again, is one, they do still need technical training and they do still need, they do need lots of automation. I guess this is the other thing.

Because they're going to be more inclined to help people with their technical problems, which is great because then they're not going and bugging like a product engineer for 10 minutes at a time on Slack randomly, because they can probably sort out a lot of those problems on their own. Or once they've solved it once, they know how to solve it for the next 10 people who ask. But because of that, they're going to spend less time doing what SDRs do, like cherry picking long list of leads and target accounts and stuff.

So you need to add more automation, which is the way the market's going anyways. And that's very much my style anyways, so as well as yours. So I think it works really well for us in high automation, you know, strong like signal-based growth hacky style of stuff.

Gonto: You know, and something I've sometimes done that really worked was actually show them how the first email is a bot, but then the reply will be a human. Like in one of the cases, what we did is like, hey, we know you're blocked. And this email, as you probably know, is automated.

Having said that, there's a real engineer that will read your reply if you need help. So let us know. And I think that those type of like self-deprecating, like we're a fucking bot, but we see a reply and we actually have somebody read it.

People love it. And it makes also increase your reply rate as well.

Hank: I wouldn't call it self-deprecating. It's just honest. You know, CCing Ganto from 10 minutes ago, you're sick of the rage bait, like you're seeking authenticity.

And by the way, if you want to play, if you want a social feed that is constantly authentic and genuine and true and never rage baits, let me tell you about the network for professionals, LinkedIn.com. You'd love it, Ganto. You'd love it over there.

Gonto: But there's not that many tweets about Sidney Sweeney in LinkedIn.

Hank: Oh my gosh. Well, that could be a pro or a con depending on the listener. We'll leave it to y'all to decide.

I will say further on, like most of my experience prior to Laravel was with like doing technical SDRs. But at Laravel, we've been having good early success with having solution engineers as sellers. That's really interesting.

And I know a couple other companies that are leaning into this and there's like, there's like the big examples that you hear about a forward deployed engineers like at Palantir. We don't have any salespeople. We just have forward deployed engineers.

That's not applicable to most people who listen to this, you know, selling B2B developer SaaS. But what is, is I think there are more and more paths and people interested in being closer to the deal. And I think the future is going to be more sales engineers as the primary role and AEs, maybe not even AEs, maybe EAs, executive assistants helping them because a lot of, a lot of the work becomes logistical for AEs in highly technical sales.

Gonto: I do agree. The only place where I had seen really good AEs is when it's a really big enterprise deal and they have to navigate the internal politics, the roles and stuff like that. And one thing, like I've seen some AEs that are like really nice to talk to, like they care about you and stuff like that.

You can still find engineers that are like that, but just harder to find. Those are the only cases where maybe an AE makes sense, but for SMBs mid-market, probably sales engineer with somebody else, I do agree is going to be enough. And the company that does a good job of this is Clay.

I don't know if you saw, but Clay has this GTM engineers team who actually sell. So their sellers are GTM engineers, which for them, I think it's fantastic given that's who they sell to.

Hank: Yeah. Very interesting. I will say it's very hard to source.

Like if you want actual sellers, I think it's very hard to source those types of people if you don't have a big community. And so like this is easier for open source companies because there'll just be enough people who are fans of the technology and the brand that will be interested in sales.

Gonto: An easy way to find sales engineers are like DevRel. I think in general, most of them are good sales engineers. When I was at Outseed and I was DevRel, there was no sales engineer.

I was the first one just because I was more outgoing with people. And I think it's a good way for developers for DevRel to probably make more money. Like if they're good at closing deals, they can probably make more money as sales engineers than as DevRel.

Hank: Yeah. I could talk for hours about this, but I think that's enough.

Gonto: I agree. Anything else that you want to add about your call to market summits about Snowbird, anything, any final nugget, anything you want to spoil of it?

Hank: No, it's going to be fun. I'm trying to figure out swag, but that'll depend on sponsors. I'm going to really limit how many sponsors we have, but I think if I get a couple, it just means I can drop the ticket price, but go to ctm.fm slash summit and sign up.

Gonto: Thank you everybody for listening.