Hank:

This goes back to what we said a couple of weeks ago, which is like, hey, founders, in this case, executives, can you just chill a minute before you reply or write a big article, maybe think through the strategy? Because this actually made Malte look bad, I think, on the initial, when he posted that article, everyone's like, dude, chill.

Gonto:

Hello, everyone. We have another great episode of Code to Market. By the way, we got a really good kudos on Twitter from two people this week.

Very happy about it. We want more of that. Why aren't you sending tweets to people about what we do or what we do great?

Why aren't you liking our YouTube posts? Why aren't you subscribing?

Hank:

Gonto, I think you mean thank you for the nice things. We love when you do that. We're so appreciative.

We can't just nag the audience into doing stuff.

Gonto: Oh.

Hank: We got to be persuasive marketers here, you know. By the way, actually, I had a side note that we didn't talk about before. But whenever you hear for the listeners, there are many people who listen and don't watch.

And we put the video on both YouTube and Spotify. But if you ever hear this noise, that's us showing something on the screen. And I noticed that whenever that noise plays on the YouTube, our retention goes up, which means people rewound like 10 seconds to like look at the thing.

So I thought I'd make note of that, because if you're hearing that random noise as just a listener, it means we're showing a tweet or a site or something on the screen. Anyways, we got some topics to get through, Gonto. Get us going.

Gonto:

We do. The first one is a new chapter of the Cloudflare versus Vercel fight. I don't know if I enjoy it and I like it or if I'm done with it.

Maybe I'm in the middle yet. But basically, Sanil from Cloudflare worked a repo that Malte did called Just Bash. And then he was basically playing with it and shipped an early version, 0.0002, to NPM. So then Malte saw it and it was basically renamed, but it was mostly the same thing. Then Malte built an article, because of course they're doing the Twitter articles now, why even though it's open source and it's Apache licensed and you can fork it, you shouldn't if you're a big company. And doing a big argument of the why and stuff like that.

What was your feeling on it, Hank? Like who won this battle?

Hank:

Well, that's the funny thing here is so Sanil replied and was like very apologetic. He was like, oh, I was going to reach out to you on Monday, blah, blah, blah. This is just a weekend thing.

And the interesting thing is like Sanil, I've met him multiple times. He's like the nicest guy. He's one of the nicest guys on Twitter.

This is not like I don't think this was meant to be like another chapter in the like Cloudflare, you know, attack or whatever. Maybe it is. But Sanil is still nice enough that I don't know.

This goes back to what we said a couple of weeks ago, which is like, hey, founders, in this case, executives, can you just chill a minute before you like reply or write a big article, like maybe think through the strategy? Because this actually made Malte look bad, I think, on the initial when he posted that article. Everyone's like, dude, chill.

And he got ratioed by Sanil's apology. It was very similar to the thing we talked about with Dharmesh from HubSpot a few weeks ago of like, okay, just a nice guy forking something and playing with it over the weekend. I wouldn't qualify this as like a slop fork of like vNext was that's a slop fork.

It was we are launching this, we're announcing it, we're talking about it. Use it.

Gonto:

This is totally different. And Malte's point was to Sanil was you have to be very careful now after Liberation Day. And by Liberation Day, it meant like the tweet about vNext.

But I actually don't think he has to be more careful because of Liberation Day. It's more that Malte and the Brazil team is a bit more basically sensitive, I would say, because of that. And they shouldn't be like they could have just pinged Sanil.

Similarly, Guillermo replied to Malte's post with something. But then when people started replying to G, he was saying like, look, I really like Sanil, he's a nice guy, I'm investing in his company. But this is unrelated to that.

And I think he tried to fix it, but it didn't work. And I think going after people that everybody thinks are very nice without asking them, I don't think it's a good move. And I think Sanil being very apologetic was fantastic, showing like, look, I'm sorry, it wasn't on purpose.

And he was very genuine. And because he was very genuine, I think everybody was just agreeing on this. And I think it made Malte look bad.

But I think what Malte did do great was he tweeted then, as we're showing it now, that he was sorry and that in hindsight, he should have waited or he should have pinged them. So I actually think he did a good job. Most executives never apologize and never say sorry.

I actually think highly of him for doing that.

Hank:

Yes, he did. He had he edited the article. And so now that's the first thing you see is like, OK, I actually caught up with Sanil on the phone about this.

And he did an apologetic tweet. And that was a good move for sure. And I think next time, like part of the thing here and part of the social media game is understanding people's intent and that even if they're at a company that loves to harass you, CC Cloudflare versus Vercel, not everyone at a company is like that.

Like a great example, you know, from years prior was like Lerab. Lerab is a super nice, genuine guy. And he did a pretty good job of getting on the phone with people and like hashing stuff out rather than just, you know, going out and attacking and vice versa.

Like he was very open and available for people to talk to him if Vercel had upset them. So if there's more of that, you know, maybe there will be less drama and less attention, but there will be more goodwill. I don't know.

Gonto:

I know. But overall, I think the learning is if you make a mistake, say sorry. If you see something and you like the person or you know of the person, which I think in this case it was true, just ping them before going all in on what the fuck is going on.

And as you said, just relax. Wait 30 minutes. Wait an hour and see what's going on and decide after that what you're going to do.

Hank:

Yeah. If you do go and like type out the whole thing, the article, you should play out in your head. OK, I send this.

What's the result I'm trying to create? Who's going to read this? Who's going to be for it, against it?

What will the person who is the subject of this, what are they going to actually think? And yeah, exactly. It's just good public relations.

OK, next thing here is we got a launch. We love a launch. Repl.

It launched what they call it. Agent for agents for. Yes.

So super professional, well done video of the launch. Lots of good like founder talking and walking well scripted cuts to demos and animations of the thing. Pretty long for a video on Twitter.

They did a neat thing that I'm actually not sure I know how to do, which is they had a view this video on the blog link like overlaid on the video. That's a feature I'm just not familiar enough with on Twitter. But that was cool.

I want to figure out how to do that. What do you think of what you saw of the video? I'm sure you didn't watch the eight minute video.

Gonto:

That's I think the first comment is like the video was so long. Like what I did was I skim it. So I started like clicking around to see pictures and then by looking at the pictures, I got an idea of what was going on.

Hank:

By the way, we're at about eight minutes in our video right now. You guys better be watching. You better watch this and rewatch this.

And like, oh, wait, wait, wait. We're not nagging today. We're saying thank you so much for watching this far in the video.

We really appreciate that you're here. Genuinely continue. Got to.

Gonto:

We do want to knock them to like we thank you, but we want you to also say it more and share it with others. So it's both things at the same time. And I'm Argentinian, so I can be a bit more direct.

But what I was saying about the video is I think they should have done like a teaser, like a short version, maybe a 30 seconds version or one minute version showing the demo of what works, what doesn't. Very fast. And then, hey, if you want to learn more, go to this other video.

I think they did a really good job of the production. And I like that there was a real demo. Amjan was there.

He was real. He was talking about it. The video looked incredible.

But overall, I liked it a lot. The only thing to say is it was watched a lot because it's but it wasn't different. It wasn't creative.

It's similar to what everybody else is doing, just a lot higher production level. And I think something different to me, as I always say, is better than this same shit, but higher production level.

Hank:

I agree 100 percent on that. I disagree on one point. And this is a thing people don't do enough.

But I would like to see more. So people, I got a new idea for it. If you do a cool, nice launch video that's many minutes long or like some sort of conference talk or something, you can launch with the full video and then over the next two weeks, drop the clips, like drop the little clips out that pull people back in that people who didn't have the attention span, they saw eight minutes and they went away.

Gonto:

Yeah.

Hank:

Then when they see the like, oh, here's a 30 second version, like, you know, what did we launch a week ago? Like, boom. Or here's a clip of like one feature.

Yeah. We're in such a launch frenzy, especially the companies where all they do for marketing is launches. We're missing out on the landing.

Like nobody's nailing how to land new features and stuff. So everything just if you missed it on the timeline, it's gone. I agree.

You agree?

Gonto:

I agree. I do think like if it's not a timeline, it's gone. But at the same time, it has to be on the timeline.

So it's a bit about also thinking on, OK, where can I leave some of this stuff? I think part of the strategy is also like, what are you pinning on Twitter? What are you pinning on LinkedIn?

So that people see our company's changing that because a lot of people, when something goes viral, will go to your profile. And if you just ship something, that should be your first pin as well. So thinking about what's pinned, what's there all the time is also, I think, important as you launch this.

Hank:

Agreed. By the way, did we want to talk about VoidCloud or are we skipping that? VoidCloud?

VoidCloud. VeetCloud? No, it's Void.

It's VoidCloud. Yeah, it's a new thing by Evan Yu, the creator of Veet and Vue and Void.

Gonto:

Oh, yeah, I saw it. I don't have an opinion. I haven't seen it enough.

But if you want to talk about it, I can react to your thoughts. Happy to do that.

Hank:

I mean, look, let's just do a quick note here, which is because we're giving Cloudflare too much dang airtime. But like one of the interesting things that Evan did, which cool, he launched another, yeah, another deployment cloud. I'm all for those.

We love we love another deployment cloud. He did a quote tweet of his launch like hours later, not even. And he said, I want to be very upfront about Void being tightly coupled to Cloudflare.

The lock-in is what makes the DX possible. So he's basically like leaning in to like the number one complaint of things like Vercel, Next.js, you know, from a couple of years ago, like everyone was worried about the lock-in. He's saying, yeah, there's lock-in, but like the tight coupling, he's just coming out with message instead of doing the opposite and burning himself with the like openness and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And yeah, like, you know, even people were like, but presumably you can you can build all this stuff on other stuff. He's like, yeah, with 3x the effort and worse DX. He's like, he's like saying, I'm making the right choice for me and my customers here.

It's an interesting kind of counter positioning, even though it's like the same type of problem.

Gonto:

But I like that Was it paid by Cloudflare? Was it something they did on purpose? Not really?

Like, how do you think about it?

Hank:

I mean, I don't know. It must be in tight partnership with them. The interesting thing is Evan is pretty diplomatic online.

Like he is a pretty open guy. Like he is an open source person's open source person, you know? So yeah, I don't know.

I don't know the behind the scenes there, but it's interesting. And just freaking Cloudflare is all of our notes right now. So let's move on.

We're done talking about you, Cloudflare. Don't do anything else interesting for the next couple weeks. We need a break.

Oh, shoot. We did have one more small note on Cloudflare. Damn you, Cloudflare.

Their little monopolization thing.

Gonto:

We just have two. Cloudflare is doing a really good job on the Twitter game, to be honest, because we never talked about them. And they started to show up more and more and more.

And I think that's changed when Dane became CTO. So I don't know if it's him or not, but if it is, he's doing a really good job. Good job, Dane.

Hank:

This little monopolization thing they did. So several months ago, I think we even talked about it because Browserbase did like a little thing about it. But several months ago, they basically started more aggressively blocking web crawlers to their sites and specifically like agentic crawlers.

And now they have released a new crawl API endpoint, which makes it easy if you're a Cloudflare customer to crawl sites. But they're blocking everybody from crawling Cloudflare sites. And so a couple of things to know, like one, I mean, cool monopolization move, you know, monopoly is going to monopolize.

But on this, people can call you up on it.

Gonto:

It's like, look, you were fighting for this. I know. And it's like the status on this.

And then they are doing the opposite. And I think people called on them, which sucks. So do you think they should still ship it because they are a monopoly or better to just not ship it?

Like I know how much value people get from this crawl. I don't think it's worthy to ship it. I think much better to just keep on pushing on the halo of when I help you make money from the crawls.

Hank:

The problem is, like, if you think about it from their perspective, like they're making it harder to crawl using traditional methods. Like, why wouldn't they give you an easy way to do it now? They're still allowing others.

And like, I don't know. It's interesting. It's one of those things where it's like you're damned if you do damned if you don't.

So I think they have to. And I think they're they're uniquely in a position to do it. And I think they do have this argument of safety and anti-spam and protection.

And they're going to be able to better offer that for their customers by also offering the solution. And they're going to be able to police it better for their customers. Right.

What was also interesting is at least two companies browser base. I know I forgot the name of the other one. Something like fire crawl or something.

They both immediately launched their crawler things. And they're like, oh, we got scooped.

Gonto:

And this one is good. That is actually from the CLI and it works. And I think part of it is also based on the OpenClaw vibe.

Like OpenClaw, for example, works really well with fire crawl, which allows you to crawl pages that have CAPTCHAs or stuff like that. By the way, Cloudflare, we've been talking a lot about you. My OpenClaw can hit any website except the ones who have your Cloudflare CAPTCHA turnoil that can be fixed.

So then I couldn't use my OpenClaw to check into my flights. So fix that. Fuck you.

Hank:

No, they just gave you the API to do that. So you just have to use their thing and pay them, Ganto. That's what monopolization is.

Gonto:

I hope people change to the virtual CAPTCHA.

Hank:

Oh, there you go. Oh, man. What an interesting, what an interesting feature of the Internet we have.

OK, last note, because this one I feel passionate about. This guy tweeted this. What do you say exactly?

OK. He said petition to ban no reply at emails being used for sending emails. If your email can email me or if your company can email me, the least you can do is make it easy for me to email you back.

I always get on the soapbox when someone on my team's like, oh, let's make a no reply. No, screw that. If someone wants to click reply, like they're trying to do something and it's worth dealing with all the like dumb spam and out of office replies you get to get the couple gold nuggets.

Gonto:

I agree. And I think there's two things that I would think about this. So one is I agree you should have a reply.

Second is if you're asking for feedback, make the reply like a real human. And it could be a real human account or maybe an account that looks like a human, but it's managed by a bot or something like that. Like I've had a lot of cases where replies look like they go to the CEO, but it's a different email that is basically managed by an AI bot that sends the important ones into the CEO or send it to support at least, but do something better on that sense.

Hank:

Absolutely. All right. So let me sum up a few takeaways from this.

Like these are some easy takeaways from this episode, everybody. So one, don't have no reply emails, have a reply, have a human manage the replies. It's a mild annoyance for some great opportunities in there.

Two, if someone upsets you on the internet, we tell you once again, slow your role, like just calm down. Think about the consequences before you hit send, maybe contact the person who upset you through a DM, whatever. And then the other takeaway was if you're doing these launches, you need to do the follow-ups to land your launch, land the features and remind people who haven't tried it yet or who just missed the launch altogether.

Boom. We're learning stuff here, you know? So like, subscribe, share, comment, whatever.

Gonto:

Yeah. And talk about us everywhere.

Hank:

We really appreciate it.