Hank: I think the principle for anyone listening here is find the way to zag and I don't think it hurts to go really hard. I think lots of people are really scared to zag really, really hard, but guess what? Like if you zag really hard in your convergence tank, you'll just do it again.

Okay, Posthog launched a beautiful website this week, although I saw in the notes something I disagree with. We'll get to that. I disagree with you, Gonto, because you said PlanetScale was much better.

Gonto: I disagree.

Hank: Okay, we'll get to that. But I love this. So for the listener, and maybe we'll put some stuff on screen if you're on YouTube.

Oh, we also put video on Spotify, so you should be able to see it anywhere. But their site is like a desktop and it's got a little window labeled home.mdx. And first off, the first thing that I really loved about this is the use of color to help you quickly see different features that you can explore. And so this thing is very interactive.

You can click, you know, startup, side project, growth, or scale. So you've got your plans. You can click the different features included in those plans.

Like you can click product analytics and then explore and then a little window pops up and you can explore there. So all of this, to me, it's a great example of show, don't tell. Maybe the best I've ever seen on a website.

Now, Posthog has an advantage because they're very visual product. They are, you know, data visualization at their core, but they're leaning into that in the exact right way. And then they have lots of fun visuals in the background.

They're legally required cookie banner, which is how they label it. You know, has a fun little image of some politician giving a thumbs up. It's a very fun, very different, refreshing take on how to do a homepage.

So hopefully I've painted a picture. Now, I guess I'll also say one more thing, like this desktop motif, skeuomorphism, whatever you would call it when you're putting a desktop looking thing inside a browser, they've got all these little like files and folders you can open on the side, you know, like the company handbook, why Posthog, roadmap, product OS, like it's very interesting. Enough for me.

Hopefully people get the picture. What are your thoughts Gonto?

Gonto: I didn't like it actually. I liked that it was creative. So I agree with that.

Like it's a desktop, there's multiple categories. You can click on things like that I think is cool.

And they have some really nice Easter eggs and copy. Like I actually want to hire the copywriter from Posthog because of the cookie that you mentioned, because if you go to more, it says like sexy legal documents or things that spark joy or like crazy shit. Then if you go to trash, you can see picture of feets from the employees, which I thought was pretty good.

And you can even interact with some of the things. They also have like the white paper.

Hank: A picture of what? What did you say? 

Gonto: Employee feets.

Hank: Employee feet. Where is this?

Gonto: Yeah, go to trash. You'll see that there's multiple feets there. The other thing I like is that they actually have their main white paper in the trash showing like, we don't care about white papers.

And the name is copy of white paper two, final, final. So they have these little quirks and details that I personally loved. So I thought it was a really fun, very fun website.

What I didn't like about it is it has too much content. Like I really, like I have fun because I know what Posthog is, but I don't really understand the product at all. Like if I go to product and just click on product OS to see them, there's like so many categories.

There's six customer data infrastructure, five product engineers, like what the fuck does this product do? So what's interesting to me about this is if you understand the product, it's a fun website because you really like the things that basically are toys. But if you don't know what the product is, I think you land here and you have no fucking idea what it is.

There's so many pages of content, so many things to pick. And there's nothing that gives me like a one short tagline of what it is. And maybe it's because most people know what Posthog is, I don't know, but it's very hard to get the differentiation on it.

I have one more comment, but before that, Hank, do you like, you already know what Posthog is, but did you try to read the content? Like, do you really understand what they do?

Hank: So I did already understand what they do. And I'm reflecting on what you're saying here. What I like is almost the exact opposite of what you're saying, which is I feel like this central window is very effective at drawing people to the actual features and how to get started.

And I think all that stuff on the side, all that, like, yes, as I click around that, there's way too much information. This is like someone's messy desktop. They did, maybe they took the metaphor too far, but maybe that stuff is just for people like you who actually know the product and want to dig around.

For the new people, I think this does a very good job of just helping you understand, okay, what's in here? Like, I didn't know that PostHog does feature flags, and that's really easy and simple to see in this. And this is so much, I mean, think about the alternative.

The standard right now, you have your standard viewport, you get a highlight, maybe two or three things that your product does, and then people have to scroll down and sift through hundreds of words of text to understand what's going on. I'm really curious if we can get a follow-up from that, because when they posted it, they said, we're worried we took this too far. I don't remember what the exact tweet said, but the designer was like, I'm worried we went overboard, and I hope our conversions don't tank and I get fired.

And I'm really curious. I hope that they do that follow-up. I hope they tell us how their conversions did, how this went, and I hope they give us the window outside of the initial just, like, interest from people like you and me.

Gonto: First of all, it's interesting enough that people are talking about it. So if we have listeners that don't know what PostHog is, then they are learning about it. So that, I think it works.

I got a reply, actually, from the designer, because I put my feedback. Maybe we can invite him to some episode here once they get some data so they can talk about it. 

But one last comment that I had is actually a comment that is not mine, but I really like it. It's from Andy. He's the CMO at Neon Serverless Database, now Databricks. And what he said is that this is a classic example of SAG.

And his take is, when everybody is doing zig, you do zag to get attention. And he thinks that PlanetScale is another example of zag. And the idea of doing a zag is not to increase conversion, but rather to increase awareness.

It's to get more people to see it and to talk about it just because it's different. Like, we are talking about it, and we're talking and sharing it with people. So in that sense, they did a really good job of zag.

The other thing I think that the PlanetScale is better, because what I like about the PlanetScale is pure text, very specific, very clear, very to the point. And I talked to Andy, and he agreed with me that PlanetScale was better. And what he was saying is that some of these zags, when they are really good and people really like them, they become the new zig.

Like doing black websites was a zig at some point in time. Now everybody does black websites because they work. So the question to me is, will PostHog, will PlanetScale become the new zigs?

I don't know. That was my thinking process, my thought process on this.

Hank: This one's too hard to imitate, I think. And too, I mean, the controversy that you'd have between teams on being able to launch this, I don't think people can imitate this one in the same way that people have imitated, for example, the Next.js Conf tickets or, you know, everybody using the basic, you know, first viewport of H1, two line subheader, two CTAs, and something beautiful. But let's compare this real quick.

We didn't have this in the notes, but go to tempo.xyz real quick.

Gonto: That's the new Stripe one? Yes.

Hank: So this is a site where they hit you in the face with their cool design. And it is different. And they have this fun little thing that you can play with the design of the site.

You can change the zoom and the twist. And then when you scroll down, you know, it's different. But this site is terrible because all of the zag, all of the effort on the zag, which is this pretty design thing, it does nothing to help guide the user into better education, understanding, or actually converting to the product, right?

It's basically a designer's play thing, is how I feel. Whereas the PostHog thing, actually, the elements, I think, combine well to drive user understanding. I like the PostHog one better than the PlanetScale, which we talked about before.

PlanetScale did this very, like, they've got, you know, a more monospaced-looking font. It's very text-heavy. The first image you see is actually ASCII art.

It's like a diagram. But yeah, I'd love to hear you say your thoughts on this.

Gonto: On Tempo, I agree. Because the problem with the Tempo website is that I'm actually watching on the right and not on the left. Like, I'm watching this very cool animation and moving it and zooming it in and zooming it out and just looking at it and seeing what it says.

And that's honestly the only usage that I care about the site.

Hank: It's a designer's portfolio site. That's what I felt like.

Gonto: I 100% agree. And the problem to me is that the rest is literally only text and there's nothing to call attention to you to the text.

It's like, I'm scrolling. My attention goes to the right. I look at the left.

It's like, oh, there's too much text. I don't even know what it is. I go back to the right.

So that's why on this one, I agree. I didn't like it because it's a lot of text. 

What's different to me in PlanetScale is I start. I could read if I want the first two paragraphs and literally just understand what PlanetScale is. But then if I scroll, I see this chart that talks to me about BTS, bytes, with the BT guy, the primary, and just looking at the chart and reading a bit on top, I understand a bit more on how BTS is their main differentiation and it's what they did and how they implemented. Then I scroll more.

And if I look at performance, I see their data on P99, P35, and they have numbers. So in this, I can only literally just read the first two paragraphs, look at the logos of company using it, look at the diagram, look at the image of the chart on performance, and that's it. With that, I almost got everything that I needed without having to pay too much attention to the text and without getting something distracting like in tempo.

That's why I like it more.

Hank: That's true. And it does drive the curiosity in the right way. 

Gonto: Exactly.

Hank: They have the validation from the companies across the board, large, new, small, big, or old, new, small, big. They have enough of a technical explanation that you'll be like, okay, we should evaluate this deeper. I do like that.

Both of these, I think the principle for anyone listening here is find the way to zag and I don't think it hurts to go really hard. I think lots of people are really scared to zag really, really hard, but guess what? If you zag really hard in your convergence tank, you'll just do it again and you lose a couple months, but your homepage, it's the most important storefront of your website.

Gonto: I 100% agree. And I think what's important is you zag, but still being specific, being clear, and putting focus on your differentiation, your features and what you do. You don't zag by, at least my take, by making something flashy on the right, like Tempo, or you don't zag as much as dropping everybody with so much info.

The only thing that I can say about PostHog is there's no marketer that I know that doesn't know what PostHog is. So with that in mind, maybe that's why this is fun. It just helps them bring more awareness, but I don't know.

I'd love to hear people's thoughts. If you have any and you're listening to the podcast, tag us on Twitter with your thoughts and I'll change topic a bit. 

I saw tweets from Browserbase from Erica, actually from browser base, and they mentioned how they did custom Legos of people.

And they basically gave those Legos to specific people in different companies. First of all, I love the gift because when I saw that they did custom Legos, my first thought was I want custom Legos as well. I looked at this and she's sharing like in this tweet, she shared that they spent 1500 on personalized Legos and packaging.

They did 30 microsites with custom demos. They booked 12 meetings and they got 250K in pipeline. So the ROI is more than 8,000%.

And what they did is they built these custom Legos and literally walked to people's offices in SF to give it to them. What's your take? Do you like it?

Not like it? What's your take on direct mail or giving it to people in general?

Hank: Okay, I mean, so first, I mean, thank you for the overview. I didn't look into it as deeply as you. Second off, for any listener who's sick of us talking about Browserbase every week, tough beans.

They're zagging every week. Show us someone else who every week is kind of dominating our brains this way because they're always doing something new and interesting. You know, yeah, we like Paul and that gang, but there's a lot of other people we really like, and they're not bringing the heat like this.

So very interesting lesson on that. So then three on the actual campaign here, physical stuff can always do well if it's thoughtful. People don't like stuff.

People like good stuff, right? Isn't that the whole point of the industry is you're always trying to create something that's 10X better and so on. And when you send basic stuff, like if you send another Yeti bottle to me, I'm going to think, okay, this company is just like everybody else.

But if you sent me a custom Lego thing or, you know, I'm the stuff I'm trying to do with Laravel, I'm trying to do custom patches for events and like stuff that I just haven't seen before. People will pay attention. They'll remember it better and so on.

I just think the physical stuff is often overlooked. And with all the AI stuff, it is very in person right now. You know, there's lots of talk about the 996.

We're in the great lock-in of September to December. And so if you know, great, all the AI companies are here. They all want something.

And I've seen, you know, instead of offering them all a coffee meeting, offer them a custom Lego. They're going to answer that email, that DM. So yeah, another call, two out of two on this podcast for, “hey, everybody, wake up and get more creative.”

Gonto: And it's not just the creative part, but also what I liked is number one, I was a big fan of direct mail. Like I did so many direct mail Auth0. We've done one that was similar to these Legos, which was transformers, where we gave special transformers to different people in the company.

And then we told them, if your kid likes another transformer better, you need to talk to them and exchange it as a way of getting all of our, all of the people that were making the decision. So the champion influencers, bloggers actually talking to each other about our project. So we need that, especially for big enterprise companies.

We've done like newspapers, like fake New York times saying your company got hacked, but the competition didn't because they weren't using Auth0. And the most successful one we did was a locked box, which was literally a locked box that was transparent. So you could see inside.

And if people wanted to get what's inside, they needed to get a code from us or throw it to the floor, in which case they typically record it and we got something out of it. We stopped them because of COVID. But now that people are back to the office, I think doing direct mail, again, makes a lot of sense.

And what I especially like about this, which I've never heard before is you can actually just walk and go into people's offices. That's the mind blowing thing. Like in SF, there's a lot of AI companies.

So if you're selling to AI, don't ship them a direct mail, like don't not like just literally just walk and give it to them. And I was thinking about what if you do the same in Texas, but for oil companies, can you actually just walk in into an oil? I don't know.

That was my other question, but I love these calls at all. It's not just direct mail, because if you can actually go deliver it in person, actually talk to them through a microsite to them or whatever, I think it has a bigger, bigger impact even more.

Hank: Yes. A hundred percent agree. Okay.

Confession. I got a little distracted because I've got the PostHog site pulled up here. Did you know that they have a screensaver if you idle on the site?

Gonto: What? No. Is it good?

Hank: Yeah. It just has, it's got the, you know, classic like DVD bouncing thing, except instead of like the DVD logo, it's, it's an animation going through their different feature icons. So it's got like the database and the bar graph and the pie chart and the play button.

Very fun. Well done PostHog. You stole even more attention.

But yeah, to your point, I mean, plus one on everything you said, the ability to do stuff in person now it's back, people who take advantage of that and like creating the human connection. Cause now people know her, they know Browserbase, they have something that's on their desk that they will never get rid of. And it will constantly remind them of Browserbase.

Very clever. I've never done a direct mail campaign. 

Gonto: You should.

Hank: And now I'm feeling like I got to try it. I got to do it.

Gonto: Direct. We got so much pipelines through direct mail. Like our most, I don't see our most popular, like our most pipeline generating activities on Outbound were all direct mail.

Like literally all of them. So I'm a big believer. Like I'm sad we had to stop during COVID, but now I think everybody's back.

As you're saying, I got a great lock-in. But that's if you send to SF. If you send to other places, they don't even know what lock-in is.

Hank: That's true. I referenced it on a standup call today and nobody had any idea what I was talking about. So.

Gonto: They didn't. But they don't use Twitter?

Hank: I guess not that team.

Gonto: What team? Are they in marketing? If they're in marketing and they are selling to DevTools, you should fire them all just for not knowing what locked-in is.

They have to spend more time on Twitter. It's their job.

Hank: To be honest, I haven't seen it that much on Twitter myself. I've only seen. 

Gonto: What? I've only seen it a couple places. I've seen it a lot. I feel like I could miss it.

I feel like you wouldn't miss it, but I feel like I could have missed it.

Gonto: Interesting. I don't know. I'm a big believer that for working on DevTools, you have to be on Twitter, which is why we talk about Twitter weekly here in part.

Hank: It's true. It's true. You're right. I'll bring some LinkedIn posts next week for people.

Gonto:

I'm down. Like, let's do a special episode. LinkedIn posts.

Hank: Actually, actually, that's where I saw the PostHog thing. I saw the post hoc thing on LinkedIn. 

Gonto: Sigh…pitiful.

Hank: OK, so speaking of maybe firing everybody because they don't they're not on Twitter enough.

You and I were talking about interview questions and specifically we're talking about this and we're like, oh, we should put this. We should put some of our thoughts in the pod because we're talking about how there are some people who are really good at interviewing and they're really good at telling you what they think you need to hear to hire them and to think they're qualified. And I think especially for technical founders or early heads of marketing, it's easy to fall for those interview answers because you don't know what exactly the person's going to do.

There are so many different types of roles in marketing and just interviewing marketers is especially tricky. So you and I started getting into the tactics of like, OK, how do you tease out the good marketers? And I thought we'd just share a couple.

Let's just spend a couple minutes sharing our best tips for interviewing people. You had a great one, I thought.

Gonto: Main things that I care about is number one is ask them questions until they are very specific on what they did exactly. I'm obsessed on specificity on everything. And I think it's very interesting because if somebody cannot be specific on what they did and how they did it, they did not do it.

So either give me the specifics or make them up. If you can make them up something credible on the spot, I'm game too, because that means you're smart enough to actually make it up. So if you can make it up on the spot and it's smart and I buy it, or if you can talk about the specifics, I'm happy.

If you cannot talk about the specifics, I think it's the wrong person. And sometimes people feel intimidated because I listen to their answer and maybe spend four questions on that answer, just asking more deeply. That's one thing I always do.

Second, what I always do is…

Hank: Just to build on it, like you can you can warn people like, hey, I want to know, you know, something you're proud of or whatever. But I want you to tell me the really specifics. Like we could spend you can tell them we could spend 10 or 15 minutes talking about this one thing, because it's really important for me to understand like how you get into the weeds. And I'm happy to hear the details.

And then, like you said, keep asking questions until you're satisfied that you either know one, they actually did it or two, they're faking it. They're lying. They didn't actually do it.

They're taking credit for something someone else did or, you know, they just kind of mindlessly did work. 

Gonto: Exactly. That's I think one of the ones that I care about the most, very specific. I always ask questions about like what's the most creative experiment you've done that you like. And another one on what's the experiment or thing that you did that failed miserably, but you learned a lot from it. And what do you do based on that? Those always have them always the questions. 

And then I have two more interesting things. One is I always push back. Even if I agree on their answer, I push back in one thing, calling them like they are full of just to see how they respond, to see if they double down on it and discuss with me or if they say, oh, you're right, something like that. Like I want somebody who calls bullshit on me.

So if I call bullshit on you and you don't reply back, you don't have the conviction that I need for somebody to be on my team.

Hank: Are you a hostile interviewer, Gonto? Have you heard of these interviews where people try to just like piss off the person getting interviewed and see how they handle a tough situation?

Gonto: It's similar, but I think they need to be able to push back on me. Like if I say something and I agree with me, like you could, if you're sure of yourself, you can tell me something else. And I think that's key on any startups. I do that a lot.

And the last thing I mentioned is I asked them, tell me one thing that you learned this month that you liked and explain it to me, whatever it is, I don't care what it is. So that to me tells me, did they learn something this month?

Because if they didn't, that sucks. And can they actually explain me something in simple words that I know nothing about? I got once, somebody had explained me something about physics or plants or whatever.

But if you can really explain me something I know nothing about and get me to understand it, that's a really good skill, I think.

Hank: That's good. I like all of those great interview tips. I don't know that I have too many to add.

I mean, I really like asking people a question that they should be ready for, you know, like something like, what are you most proud of? You know, what's, what was a big success you have? And then I ask the inverse afterwards, which you do a similar thing.

So I say, yeah, what was, what was the biggest failure, your biggest embarrassment? Like what happened with that? And, you know, people should be trying things that they got embarrassed by or whatever.

If they struggle to answer that question, because sometimes they need a little thinking, you can try different angles. Like what areas, the most friction at with your type of work, like which, which team or department or person even, you know, is usually fighting against your type of work or is there friction or it always takes extra time or you always have them in the back of your head of like, oh, how am I going to persuade this person or whatever? You know, it could be a salesperson, it could be a designer, it could be an engineer, it could be another marketer.

But yeah, I think my biggest tip is don't allow yourself to hear and buy into the answers that the person being interviewed wants to give you. You should always, here's the theme of the episode, you should zig in your interview. It should be unlike any interview they've ever had.

And then you know that you're talking to a more real, genuine version of themselves. And of course, you know, try to always end on a positive note so that they actually want to work for you. Because sometimes people zig in interviews, but they take it too far.

And then you're like in love with the candidate and they run away. So that's the other side of it too.

Gonto: Agree. But yeah, I think that's it for today. Thank you for joining us for our zigzag episode.

And thank you Andy for our zigzags theme, because I think that's going to be the title of the episode. And I think we'll release some of the interviews that we did shortly as well. Thank you all.