Hank: I love that you said, let's kill Lazarus, especially cause, you know, in the Bible, Lazarus comes back from the dead, so you can't kill him. 

Gonto: I didn't even know what Lazarus was. 

Hank: Yeah, I was, I was gonna say, cause,  yeah, cause you're Jewish, right? So…

Gonto: Yes.

Hank: Lazarus famously was brought back to life by Jesus, uh, in the Bible. So maybe they'll get him, but, uh, you know, then he'll come back. Anyways, that's a dumb joke. So….

Hank: So we're going to talk about Raycast again. They had a fun little launch we loved. Then we're going to have crypto story time with Ganto, and then we're going to delay until next episode where I'll do a deep dive on Laravel's product launch.

Gonto: And my objective on that one is to read everything about the launch and say the things that I love and crush the things that I hate. 

Hank: There will be some stuff to love and some stuff for you to crush per usual. 

So with Raycast, they put out a video and they are launching… How would you describe it? How did they describe??... an AI extension marketplace? So developers are building AI extensions. You can now connect to right from the product, 

Gonto: The best way to explain the feature is it's what Apple intelligence should have been, but wasn't. Meaning you can write natural language, like, and connect with apps. And it will automatically connect with those apps through AI extensions that developers write, and you'll be able to do a lot of things through that. Besides the launch that I loved, I think the feature was great. 

Hank: Yeah, the feature is good. Here's a side note before we even get started. I have a side note.

I noticed their pinned tweet is an old tweet about “Raycast is for Windows now,” which is interesting because normally I'm very quick to pin the recent tweet to the top and try and boost it more. But in this case, I was like, huh, maybe this is a good idea because I think last time we talked about Raycast, I mentioned how, well, “I'm a Windows user, so none of this, you know is even close to me.” And their pinned tweet is about how they have Raycast for Windows. So I was like, huh, it is useful to sometimes have a pinned tweet on old news. 

Gonto: What I like about, I didn't think about it before, I actually thought it was a bad idea, but now that you say this, shipping Windows opens a huge tam for them. Having AI extensions It doesn't open a new tam, but rather can get existing users to pay.

Like I'm an existing Raycast user and I'm, I paid to try this out and I love it. So I might continue paying on this, but Windows users is so many new users. I think it makes sense to how it has been. 

Hank: Yeah, and by the way, as a side note, and we'll probably talk about this more when we talk about Laravel launch next week. It's so important with any feature launch to really just think about, “hey, is this feature to grow our LTV with current users? Are we playing for our fans or are we trying to win over a new group and get new tam?” Because I think the approaches you have to take and think through are very different and the context you have to provide are very different. But just an interesting, another side note.

Okay, so we've done multiple side notes already. We talked about the thing. What did you like about this? You sent me the tweet. I liked it too But what did you like? 

Gonto: So what I like about it is couple of things. One is they gave very specific examples. And what I like about it is even though Raycast can be used by any Mac users, most of their users are developers or product managers.

So every example or most of the examples that they used during the video were actually for developers. So that means that they actually thought about who their target user is. So that was thing number one. Thing number two, I really like how Thomas and Pedro played roles. If you check the video again, Thomas played the role of,” I'm going to tell you exactly what it is and show it to you.” So he just showed demos, showed how things works, and it was incredible. 

And then Pedro recapped the demo by talking about the benefits. So I really like that playoff. One is benefits. One is exactly what it is. And that I think is fantastic. And if you can do that not just on the video but in landing pages, I think that's awesome.

Hank: It's your classic sales, sales engineer, product marketer, product manager. That dynamic is just tried and true. And I also noticed it and liked seeing it in video because a lot of times you get people, they're all trying to look like the expert on everything and then it gets muddled. But there's something interesting with having the specialization and just playing into a role, even if it's not necessarily who you are.

They're both very technical. They can both speak to value, but they chose a role. I like it. 

Gonto: I actually never saw this in a video either before on this idea of like two people playing roles and these benefits versus “show me what it is.” And I thought it was genius. Like I agree. Like I think a lot about like Apple, you know, Apple, everybody wants to look as if they are a genius and they know everything. This was a different vibe. 

Hank: Yeah, I will, we did something similar with a Next.JS conf where we had RouchG on stage and he cuts away to the technical demos, but even there we still had those people probably speaking too long about the values and stuff. To your point, these were much more finite and specialized back and forths.

So I like that. I think I can learn from that for sure. 

Gonto: A last thing to mention is. On the launch day, Thomas had done podcasts that actually launched on the launch day. One was on Zwick's podcast on AI, and I saw two other podcasts that he did, and they all launched on that day. That, to me, is the new way of doing PR.

Before, when you were doing a feature launch, you wanted TechCrunch to post about your article. Or New York Times or Forbes or whatever, but I think legacy media in that sense is dying and people like it when you cut the middleman. So the new PR is literally what Thomas did with it. She's going yourself into the podcast and just talk to them and talk to people and connect with it. 

Hank: Yeah, the coordination on multiple channels, and that's also a way to bring new audiences to you. One thing that's interesting is when you have, this is me more just kind of giving my advice, but when you have those like external channels, a lot of times what the marketing team will do is they'll promote them from their own channels and the emails. “And say, hey, go watch so and so on someone else's podcast.”

And there's two ways to think about it. Sometimes it's good if they say something there that you haven't said through your owned Channels or your own media, your own YouTube channel, Twitter, whatever. Then it's good to point. But a lot of times I don't actually like pointing to the other place because then you're just giving your audience somewhere else to look when you're trying to launch your own thing.

So, I don't know, just another choice to make I think is: do you amplify the external third party content or do you try and just focus it all on yourself? I dunno if you've thought about that before. 

Gonto: I never thought about it, but I really like the idea of not pointing to the other ones. I would only point it if it's huge.

Like, I don't know. You went to Joe Rogan's podcast or something like that. Like, I, well, maybe not Joe Rogan, but some other one, but I post it to show like, look, I went to a huge podcast or something like that. But otherwise I like your advice. Focusing on on yourself. 

Hank: Yeah, it can be interesting. 

Gonto: What else did you like?

Hank: So one other thing I liked, he just kind of made an offhand comment about, “Okay, in the studio today…”

And that just made me think about, you know, one of my two themes for this year is learn how to do the content creator influencer marketing in B2B.  And I just like seeing that these companies are, they're making studios and they're thinking from the beginning about owned media and how to scale it and just make it a habit.

I won't out them, but we're a customer of someone who's doing a customer story on us at Laravel. And I was like, “Hey, I'd love to do a video with you guys on this too”. And they're like, “Oh, we've never done that.” And their YouTube channel has no subscribers and they're incredibly popular. If I, if I said the name right now, I'll tell you after, like everyone knows them.

And I'm like, “You guys haven't done any videos with customers?” Like. That's crazy to me. So I love that Raycast is investing in that. 

Gonto: You told me on Twitter the other day about a customer story you really like. I think it was Supabase with Browserbase or something like that. How it was maybe studio prepared or something like that.

Hank: It was the Supabase with Bolt.new. 

Gonto: That, yes. 

So that's I think another example of great It's studio video being used not just for demos and product presentation, but also for customer stories. 

Hank: Yeah. Actually, I haven't watched that video. They released a teaser of it. We'll put the tweet on here too, but I think the full video is out now, so I'm curious to watch it.

People are doing trailers for their marketing videos now, which I think is what a, what a brave new world of, uh, content marketing we're in. 

Gonto: Video and studio are eating the world. It's. As we talked a lot in other episodes, like it's the, it's how B2B companies are copying the B2C world where video production is everything.

Hank: Yeah. Okay. That's all I had to say on that. No more side notes. 

Gonto: Perfect. You don't have a side note for the side notes for the side notes? You will probably next week for Laravel, but…

Hank: I will.

Gonto: Let's switch to the other topic, which I think it will be more of a Gonto monologue. So I'm sorry for you about that. 

But I don't know if you guys saw, but there was a huge hack last week. It was, there's a big exchange called Bybit, which got hacked. And basically the hackers stole 1.4 billion dollars. It was the biggest hack and the biggest stealing of money in every, any crypto story in history. And I think something like this could have crashed Bybit and just made them never be able to work again. But in this case, they did such a fantastic job that I actually think they now look stronger than before. And I wanted to chat about it because it's the best Disaster response I've seen in my life. 

Hank: Okay. Yeah, so my understanding is they got hacked and then the CEO Ben started tweeting lots of updates and he talked about… he had town halls. I saw he did live streams I saw he posted his whoop data that showed his like stress levels over time. Which just come on… that's great. Like leaning into that stuff of like “Hey, look how stressed this.. I was about this and now I'm less stressed so you can be less stressed too.” Like just chef's kiss on that.

So what were the I mean, you said this consumed like your Saturday and Sunday. I mean, what are the biggest lessons you took from it? I guess would be my first question. And then next I'd want to know, how could they have done even better? Aside from not getting hacked. Sometimes your product's gonna blow up. 

Like, you might not care about crypto, but sometimes your product's gonna blow up, there's gonna be a disaster, and you have to be able to coach, if you're the CEO or founder, you have to know how to handle it. You have to know how to coach your co-founder through it. If you're the head of marketing or something, you have to know how to coach your team and your founders through it. What are the lessons here? 

Gonto: Yeah, disaster response is so hard. I actually, I'll start with your second one, which is, I don't have anything to improve it. I think I'm honestly blown away with how good they did. Like they were, first of all, they were extremely transparent.

And as you said, Ben, the CEO and the official Twitter account were constantly tweeting about it. First thing that I liked was they quickly acknowledged what happened. And while they were doing the research, they said they got hacked for 1.4 billion. Like holy shit, without knowing how or what happened, being able to do that and being so transparent with customers, knowing that it might blow you was incredible.

After that, of course, what happened was a lot of customers wanted to get out because it's like, “fuck, they're being hacked. I need to get out.” So they started to get a lot of withdrawals. Other companies, and when I say other companies, Binance, for example, in the past has halted withdrawals. There was actually a tweet from the C, well, the previous CEO of Binance on why they should have stopped withdrawals and then responded that he disagreed and why.

And in this case, not only did they continue withdrawals, but also they actually were transparent on how they were behind on the withdrawals because there were so many and they said, uh, “wait for us, we're gonna do it.” And how much time it was gonna take. They were also very fast at getting a loan. So they get, they got a loan for, for Ethereum to actually be able to back the withdrawals, mostly because they knew they were okay and that they're making a lot of money, so they're gonna get it back.

So, they did the loan. And they were transparent with the withdrawals and why they were slow. Then they showed that they had done before, like a compliance audit, showing that they had one on one backing on funds from every customer, which was from a third party that people trusted. At the same time, they also, after doing some research, shared how that money was not from customers, but rather from money that they had earned or revenue that they had created which they stopped and they missed. One day later, actually during that night the CEO, as you said, did a space on Twitter. Open. Anybody could go, anybody could ask questions. He would reply to anything live. Mind blowing. Like, holy shit. 

Then, after that, next day, they did it so fast, a new bounty program, where anybody that would help them get the money back, they would get 10 percent of what was recovered. Which, holy shit, like, that's a lot of money, like, that was really good.

They also moved very fast with all of their partners, to ask them that if any of the money that was hacked, if they went through their platforms, to please freeze those transactions. So they will get the money back. And a lot of people froze the transactions and they were already able to get some of that money back or some of the things back through those things being frozen. 

Every other team stayed all night and they were there. A few days even later they now know that it was Lazarus. It's a North Korean hacker that did it. And they actually created a new website that's special on how they are working with others to kill Lazarus and getting money from it and stuff like that.

The CEO also tweeted again on how all of the withdrawals were done and now it was back to normal. And then they actually shipped a full explanation maybe two days later and they showed that the hack was actually not done through Bybit.

It was Safe, which, okay, the name is awesome because it was uh… Safe is the name of the product, which wasn't safe because it was hacked. But Safe, um, had a problem where actually a front end engineer account was hacked and they were able to push some other contract address for the money to be sent, but in the UI it would look like it was the correct one.

So when you were doing it, you thought they were doing the correct one. So they shipped that and then they got Safe to actually publish how it was wrong and why and they ended up explaining like what happened and it was mostly like social engineering attacks like everything, but I talked a lot, but they did all of that in under three days. Like I'm mind blown.

Hank: Yeah. Okay, so big themes. One: speed to response. Transparency. I'm sure they couldn't be a 100% transparent like…well… here's the thing like transparency doesn't mean sharing literally everything. It means sharing what you can in a way that is useful. So I think they were fast. They were transparent.

They took immediate actions. And then once they started to get breathing room, they also started other actions that were a little more longterm. Like, Hey, let's, I love that you said, let's kill Lazarus, especially cause you know, in the Bible, Lazarus comes back from the dead, so you can't kill him. 

Gonto: I didn't even know what Lazarus was.

Hank: Yeah, I was going to say, cause… yeah, cause you're Jewish, right? So, Lazarus famously was brought back to life by Jesus, uh, in the Bible. So, maybe they'll get him, but uh, you know, then he'll come back. Anyways, that's a dumb joke. 

So, yeah, those are interesting themes. I've been, have you had some serious crises before?

Cause I, funnily enough, we were talking before about how we're both long on crypto as an asset, but we're not really like, blockchain fanatics. Which…

Gonto: Yes.

Hank: I really came around on that after working a little bit for a blockchain company. I was like, “Oh, yeah…this isn't really gonna like be benefit… like I don't really believe in this anymore.”

 The only time I've, I've had some crises, but the only like real crisis that I think could have affected people's finances was when I was at that crypto company and I, you know, 10pm in a hotel room at our offsite with the executive team talking to like some reporter who was going to leak some alleged zero day security incident. I, it was intense, but speed and transparency would have been uh, well, they were important in that case. And yeah. 

Gonto: I’ve had a few different ones. Like one, I remember we had a DevRel guy that… DevRel, as you know, like represent, sort of represents you on Twitter, who started to talk about trannies and bash people on Twitter at night. And then we were, we were starting to be bashed on Twitter ourselves. So like, how can I see you hire somebody like this and stuff like that? I remember when we were online discussing what to do, how to do it, et cetera. I remember we ended up actually fighting the guy on Twitter.

Like we mentioned on Twitter that we were letting go of the guy at 3 a. m. And then I met with the guy next morning, 7 a.m. to tell him he was fired before, but he saw the tweet before, for example. But it was getting to that moment of like, okay, we'll do this before he'd read the tweet. I don't fucking care.

It was crazy. We had another instance where a company was saying that we were hacked and it was a lie. It was just a phishing attempt that somebody was doing on us. So we also had to explain, like do a blog post and ship it and stuff like that. And the last one I remember was somebody that we hired in Japan that had our Twitter credentials that changed the credentials and stole our Twitter accounts and started to tweet shit from our Japanese Twitter accounts.

Actually, now I remember I have three more. I won't mention all. But, there's so many of them.  

Hank: Yeah, oh man, the, yeah, all the little crises. I remember at one point early in my career, I was like, people should just like, like, do they pre draft all these like emergency things? And then as I rose the ranks and matured, I realized there's no way you can prepare.

Like, you don't know what kind of crazy stuff that hackers are going to do to try and social engineer their way in, that your employees are going to do because they don't, like, man, in that case of just not realizing, like, geez, they're a representative of the company. Like you gotta, you gotta watch what you say, no matter what you believe. Like, uh. 

Gonto: exactly. I actually…

Hank: There's more than you can handle. 

Gonto: Sun Tzu on the Art of War talks a bit about it. And I like this idea. Like he talks that you should always have plans. But once you start war, plans don't work anymore. But having the plan means that you're better at reacting and moving fast. So that's where thinking about how you would act on a disaster is great.

When you're in a disaster, you won't follow the plan. But having done the plan will give you better ideas on how to react at that exact moment. 

Hank: Yeah, awesome. By the way, you reminded me, you've mentioned, well, you mentioned one of the books. I have, I have the Art of War. It's that little blue one right there. That's a good read always. 

Gonto: Have you read it? 

Hank: If you liked…

Gonto: You’ve read it. 

Hank: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I've read that one a few times. It's short, if you get the right translation.

If you like Crypto Storytime with Gonto, then you'll like this book On the Edge. That's a good one. It talks a lot about SPF and that whole disaster with FTX. 

Gonto: Did you see SPF tweeting? About how you fire people and why. Like, from jail, mind blowing. That's another thing that blew my mind this weekend on Twitter. 

Hank: Wow, I missed all that. I was, this weekend, not only was I preparing for the launch, I also had to finish my Scuba certification, so I was either underwater or on Slack. 

Gonto: Well, you are underwater in both cases.

Hank: Yes. Nice. You've, you've come, you've come all the way on being a dad and speaking English. Fantastically done. Let's wrap it there. 

Gonto: I made it! Anyway, thank you for listening to us today. Next week, as we said, we'll have a special episode where we'll do a deep dive on Hank's Laravel launch. Talk about what went well, what didn't um, and some learnings from it. So tune in next week. Thank you all.