Hank: And so even though you're speaking to a developer audience. Who's supposed to be hyper rational and care about metrics and output and productivity. First and foremost, they actually care about this other deep human stuff. Developers are humans are after all. Congratulations. 

Gonto: Hey everybody. Um, We have another episode of Code to Market this week. I know that people maybe don't work that much this week and next, or they don't ship features. We're going to talk about that, or they don't do anything, but we do. So we're here. And our first topic is actually a topic that Hank brought up.

I didn't even see this on Twitter. Because maybe it was so boring that I didn't see it. But our first topic is around boring releases. Where Shopify did it absolutely right, we think. 

Shopify had two tweets. One from Toby, the CEO. And one from the Shopify account. Where they basically shipped like 140 features. Which are all boring features, but make the products better. 

Sanity did the same thing a little bit of time ago, where they had the same idea before. So in that sense, actually, I think very smart from Sanity, on talking about how to ship boring features in a more fun way. But I don't know if they nailed it. Um, what's your take, Hank? 

Hank: The Sanity launch… the launch was also boring. Like I think a fun way to think about this is there's a release and there's a launch. One is about the code and one is about going to market. And when Sanity did it, I put it in our notes. This was about a month ago, but it wasn't actually exciting enough for us to talk to you about.

And now that we have this comparison with how Shopify did it and they did an outstanding job, it's interesting to talk about. Now what Shopify did. First, I love there's two videos…and they're both really high quality videos the one from the CEO and then the one from I don't know who he is, maybe he's a product manager. That one's on the main account and he's almost reading out times they got roasted for a lack of features or for crappy features they have and he's just agreeing with them like yeah, that sucks. We'll fix it.

And the other one is this lots of cuts, interesting noise, kind of weird animation stuff from the CEO. And I can just hear in some meeting they had these two competing ideas and they're like, let's just ship them both because we have both. We have enough followings on both different accounts. We'll hit different audiences from different angles and get even more reach and amplify each other. 

Gonto: And I think it's not just, first of all, I love both videos, so I agree with that. I think in Shopify's case, they probably did it because Toby is very well known. Like, everybody follows Toby. They're a public company. They're one of the biggest companies in Canada. And because of that, of course it makes sense. 

But, even if you are the CEO of a company, you have two competing ideas of a boring video or something like that, you should still ship both. Because maybe if the video is really good, like in this case, even if you don't have a lot of followers, maybe it's retweeted, and you actually can create followers.

So, I wouldn't just do it if you have a lot of following, like in this case. Um, but I did love, as you said, the contrast and the Toby one I think is shorter and more straight to the point or like, yeah, we shipped features that nobody cares about, but better performance, better this, better that. And the other one is actually more clear on what they, they shipped. Um, so I loved it. 

They also shipped a website that I love. Because I don't know if they did it on purpose, but the website is boring. Like it's a boring website with boring features. The website looks like something that you could do with front page or hell cities. If you remember them from the nineties where they just have the features, they have like a tightly like our area or Times New Roman with some description and that's it.

But they have 140 of those and I think that's what makes the impact. It's like, we ship boring things that make your product faster, but we ship 140 of them. It's not we shipped two or three. Like it's a big deal. And they made the website boring and if you stay sometime on the website there is boring a pop up will show up saying do you want to see the boring TV ad?

Which I love because then even if you didn't see the Twitter you can see it at that point. How did you feel about the website? 

Hank: I felt it was good. I mean, I agree with you on those points. And another thing I'll mention here, less about the site but more about the launch and contrasting this to Sanity's.

Even though both of them said this is our boring launch, Shopify spent so much less time talking about the boringness of the launch or like the maintenance. They jumped to what the features are and what the release is and how it's important to you and what's important. Much faster. So they get your attention with like, Oh, boring launch, flashy video, but here's the meat of it.

And I think the site serves that purpose really well because they do all the flash on the social. And then once you get to the thing, they've already primed you. They just want you to know what they've done for you. More than anything, it's a brand building exercise to get all this out and to really show people we care about you and your experience, even if it's boring for us maybe to ship it.

Gonto: I think it's also a fantastic way to ship something when you have nothing to ship. Like I've been with a lot of companies where are… like companies grow fast. So you add a lot of features and you add technical depth, and then you need to solve technical depth. And maybe it takes you one year, nine months to feel that to fix the technical depth before you can fix something else. 

So shipping the boring stuff and showing people that you're not dead. You're actually shipping stuff that is to fix the technical debt and the problems that you had. It's a really nice way to just show up, be there and have some branding around the time when you have nothing else maybe to say.

Hank: Do you think it's worth saving up some of these features to do a big boring release like this? Because I think the normal thing to do is you just ship these sort of things as they're done, but I almost wonder if they saved these up for months or even a full year so that they could turn it into a big bang launch type of thing.

Gonto: I don't know how it was in this case, but if I were them, I actually wouldn't wait, but what I would do is I would ship them without announcing them, without any blog posts, without nothing. And then once I have a lot of them, I ship them all together, but maybe the customers already saw some of them or already felt them, um, or leave them. But then you package them together because it's not the same to release the call than to actually launch it. And you can separate those two moments, I think. 

Hank: So that way the people who were roasting them about, Oh, you can't, you know, do this on Shopify. That issue was fixed for them. And they were probably told about it privately months ago, but then they were able to bundle it as part of this big thing.

Gonto: Exactly. One thing I do want to mention, like a couple of thoughts on like why we thought that the boring lunch was boring from Sanity was number one. You can't make, I think, a seven minute boring lunch video. Like, any video, I think, in social media that is more than one minute, one minute and a half, is boring. So it's hard to pay attention.

Like, we were doing a podcast and we wouldn't, we couldn't even watch it fully, to be honest. So I think that's one the second one I think is instead of building a custom page for this They've reused their blog and the boring launch was just two or three things or at least that's how it looked like. Then when you click maybe it looks as if they were more. But I don't know it was confusing. But I think highlighting, like, the number and highlighting it in a way that is unique and fun is, I think, what was missing, even though the intention was, was there.

How did you feel about the Sanity launch?  

Hank: There were some really interesting foundations of their idea. I like the idea of the two founders. It's the CEO, um, and the CTO talking about the release and having this back and forth and us almost being inside their one on one, but it was a little too slow paced and friendly to be catchy.

And that was like one problem that you definitely had. I did watch the full video, but that was, I watched it in full weeks ago when it came out. It was mainly out of curiosity, you know, not so much because it captured my attention, which is the problem. I think generally, I also think it wasn't clear or crisp on what the release was.

They meandered in their conversation a bit about, “Oh, why don't other CMSs do this or our competitors? I don't know. It seems so obvious.” Like there is a little bit of that type of attitude in it, which was interesting. So yeah, Shopify, I think just did a masterclass. 

Okay. So Kent C. Dodds, he's been appearing in our podcast a lot. But he's marketing, you know, his event. So it's relevant. 

Uh, he put out this tweet about his event and the image says “find your people.” Which I thought was really interesting. It's not the typical pitch that you see, and we've talked about this sort of thing, but what are your, what's your reaction when you saw it? 

Gonto: Last week, we talked about this on how conferences are about staying in the hall, they're about talking to people, they're about networking and less about the talks. I think he nailed that on this. The other thing that he nailed is loneliness is such a big thing in the US. Like it's not a big thing maybe in Latin America where I'm from, but in the US I think it is a big thing. And find your people it's a really nice way to help you connect with others. 

When I moved to San Francisco, I actually went to a lot of meetups to see if I could meet people there that I could connect and then go out or do something. So on that, I think he, he nailed it. Um, why else do you think that it was good or interesting? 

Hank: Yeah, I think it shows. a principle that he's building his conference on, which is about that human connection. And he's showing, hey, this isn't just to sell you stuff. He wants to connect with people. He is very much like that.

And he wants to attract the type of people who want to do that. And speaking right to the human psychology pain, ego, whatever. It's something we've talked about before. It's the most powerful type of marketing. It's, it's speaking to your very soul and a deep need that, you know, hey, make your site, you know, 1 percent faster, just can't speak to you in that same way.

And so even though you're speaking to a developer audience, who is supposed to be hyper rational and care about metrics and output and productivity first and foremost. They actually care about this other deep human stuff. Developers are humans are after all. Congratulations. 

Gonto: Exactly. And I think humans are not rational.

Reforge had this, uh, this mantra on building landing pages that I really liked that was called Elmer. And Elmer meant emotion, logic, motivation, and reward. So their whole idea was we humans make decisions by an emotion. So something is driving us through an emotion, but we do not like thinking that we are emotional.

So then we need to give them something logic, something rational that we can use as an excuse on why we make the call. So we first target the emotion and then after the emotion, we gave them something logical that they can grab on to say this is why we decided instead of saying that they decided emotionally because they don't want to do it.

And I think that's even more true to developers. 

Hank: Yeah, most developers, when they want something, it usually started with some sort of emotional reaction that speaks to their, perhaps their identity or ego. I want to use this tech. And then they have to go convince their superiors or somebody, Hey, let's use this for our team or whatever.

And then they have to bring the logic and stuff. And I think it'll do it with this conference to sell some tickets. It's, you know what, I do want to go, I want to go find my people. And this will be great because X, Y, and Z and all these things. And maybe I can get my company to pay for it. I'll share a story too.

When I was at Laracon Australia, I'm at a booth, I'm the marketer. And some guy from Japan came up and gave me and the other marketer I was with these melon flavored KitKat bars. And he said, Hey, I thought you guys might like these. I brought these. because I felt like I needed an icebreaker in order to speak to people because I'm really anxious in crowds. But then I remembered these are my people and I actually don't need this here because everyone's a Laravel developer like me. And it was kind of cute and kind of funny and it's a really interesting lesson about building spaces and community. 

Gonto: I actually have a thought like I'd love to make a conference that is just an un conference.

Like conferences now care so much about the speakers and who they are and what are the talks. I actually think it's more about connecting people. Like, I would love to see a conference where it's invite only. You invite people who you think are really smart, but then there's no format. It's an un conference where any of these smart people can suggest to give a talk or something like that.

They will write it down in a whiteboard. You have different whiteboards per room, and then people can choose where to go. I’d definitely go to a conference like that. 

Hank: Great. So, if somebody wants to organize that, Hit us up. 

Gonto: Invite us. 

We have a third topic that is completely unrelated to tweets or things that we saw this week, but I think Hank will love it because it's related to to launches, and I will love it because even though I'm Jewish, I'm starting to love Christmas.

So it's about Christmas launches and we were seeing a tweet actually that was saying that there's approximately like two DevTools launches per week, every week, except this week and next week. So the week of Christmas and the week before, and I think people are doing it wrong. I think like there's like literally nobody, like nobody that is working or very few people that are working, people are with their families and the sad truth is that people hate being with their families in most cases. So they're using Twitter or looking online or whatever. 

Hank: Speak for yourself sir. 

You know, it actually kind of is related to, to the last topic. All these lonely devs, they need something to do. Give them something to do. 

Gonto: Exactly.

Hank: Um,  I mean, there's data foreign against it. If you look at open source packages, if you just look at NPM trends, every year, there's that massive dip in the usually up to the right chart.

And you can see it like the react, uh, NPM trend is a good one to look at. And you'll see this Christmas phenomenon. It's when people stop creating react projects. And that being said there are plenty of people who have time to try something new. They're not working on their work stuff, they still want to tinker on something. So they're either gonna you know go find a new emoji to upload to slack because they're bored or they could try your product. And you can own the space and we talked about with mega launch week, which was two weeks ago, it's so crowded. You can, and it's because everyone's trying to shove in their release before the end of the year.

You can't cut through the noise. There's no noise these next two weeks on the DevTools side. So it would be easy to cut through it. 

Gonto: And even if people don't work on something this week, like something I would do now, that I think is creative or different is like, I would try to launch something and ship it and share it on, on Twitter, with a video, on social media, whatever. And then on the blog where I announce it, or even in the tweet, I would say something like, If you really enjoy this feature, put your email or your Twitter here, and we'll remind you to try it out next year. So then, people read it, and if they like it, you get a reminder from them. Maybe on Twitter, so you don't have to share your email. To try it out. And that could be a good way to engage with them again to get their Twitter at the same time to do Something that's funny so people learn about it, but they will implement it next year once they are ready to code or ready to do something different.  

Hank: I love it. I feel like you have even more ideas like I think there should be if you're gonna do a swag drop This would be the time to do it if you're gonna do obviously it'd be too late to do like a Christmas You know, sweater swag drop, but you know, people are always doing interesting stuff like that.

Gonto: I got a very weird direct mail that people love to be honest, which we did a direct mail where we sent it to people. We did some research on the people and we sent them a gift where we said like, Hey, we think this is an amazing gift. If you have forgotten a gift for your father in law for your mother in law or for somebody you can give it to them and you will look awesome courtesy of us. If you remember all of the gifts you can keep it and you love it and it's a gift to yourself.  But that way it was a fun way to present us and with good timing with christmas to send the direct mail. So and what we mean by that is just  be creative, be unique, do something different.

Hank: Yeah, and speaking to a human need. Oh no, I forgot to get a gift for my father in law. Exactly. Now I've got it. Thanks. Uh, was that Auth0 you did that at? 

Gonto: Yeah, exactly. 

Hank: Yes. Awesome. Thanks, Auth0.  I love that.  I think we have one other Just a little note that, uh, Sean, aka Swiggs, sent us his, uh, his conference guide, how to do those in real life really well.

So we'll put that in the show notes, but 

I liked it. Thank you everybody for joining us and next week, um, we'll do this a bit later because our editor is spending Christmas with her family, so she's not lonely. Um, and she's editing it later, but we're recording and coming back next week. Thank you everybody for coming and have a wonderful Christmas.