Episode 95
· 30:30
Everyone says you should write a blog post, but the problem is you've got to spend a lot of time because they've got to be technically interesting, and you have to do it for 12 months, 18 months before you even see any results. Most people give up before they start seeing the results. Yeah. Technical founders in particular would love to build the product, but it's the easier bit of building a startup.
Jack Bridger:Hi, everyone. You're listening to Scaling Dev Tools. I'm joined today by David Mitton from Arcjet and also console.dev. Thanks, David, for joining. No problem.
Jack Bridger:Great to see you. Yeah. Great to see you. And I should say that we were just we bumped into each other, in an office, and we were like, okay. Why don't we just do this?
Jack Bridger:So
David Mytton:Completely unplanned, But I've been listening to the podcast for ages. So, yeah, we're excited to be on.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And I've been listening to, to your podcast as well and console dev 1, which yeah. I wanna see more more episodes, actually. It's
David Mytton:Yeah. I know. Getting into running a startup full time, have had less time to do console dot dev and the podcast newsletter's still going. Yeah. But the podcast, like, you know how much work it is.
Jack Bridger:So yeah. Yeah. So, David, could you tell us a bit about Artjet?
David Mytton:Artjet is a tool to help developers protect their apps once they go into production. So if you think pre prod and prod pre prod is your writing code. There's lots of tooling, whether it's something like Semgrep for static analysis or GitHub's code scanning. There's lots of tools to help you protect your code as you're writing it and writing bad code, essentially. But once you push your code into production, then there's not as much for developers.
David Mytton:You probably use Cloudflare or maybe Fastly or Akamai to do network level protections. Those are really good tools, but they're just not built for developers. They set the network edge, so they don't really know anything about your your code, your application. They don't have the context of the request, and they don't work in the development environment. You can't test them locally.
David Mytton:And so you'll often find that you write your app, you build your build it or push it to production, and then you turn on the security stuff and it breaks things. And the idea with Artjet is it sits in your application at the middleware layer and your API routes and integrates into your code. So you can test things locally. You can test it in staging, test it in CI. And then then when it goes into production, it's actually providing things like rate limiting, bot protection, to email validation, and detect attacks and help prevent your site breaking.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's that's really, really powerful. And, like, what do do you find, like, people are coming for, like, specific are there, like, specific cases where people are like, yeah. We need ArcGerry.
David Mytton:Yeah. We've built these core primitives. The the bot detection, if you want that, you can just use it by itself. If you want rate limiting, you can use that. But you can also compose them.
David Mytton:They're kind of composable primitives. And so you you can build all the rules together. And what we've found is that developers are not really thinking about the security challenges, but they're really thinking about problems that they're facing once their apps go into production. So spam sign ups or they're getting loads of free accounts and they want to prioritize their paid users on their API, give different quotas. And so we're seeing a lot of use of the bot protection and also the ability to do dynamic rate limits based on pricing plan or who's logged into your application.
David Mytton:Yeah. That that makes total sense.
Jack Bridger:I was speaking to someone that was, like, having loads of, spam like, people were, like, requesting phone, like, verify like, the 2 factor auth 1. Yeah.
David Mytton:And it's expensive. Right? Yeah. Sending SMSes all the time. Yeah.
David Mytton:Yeah. So you need to rate limit that. You wanna prevent automated clients from submitting forms. And, really, a human will only submit a form. Well, ideally, they'll submit it once because they'll be successful, but maybe you have a typo in your email address and you can detect that.
David Mytton:So maybe a couple of times, anything more than that is probably suspicious. And Yeah. You may not necessarily wanna block it. You might wanna just flag it for human review. And the idea with ArcJet is you get these signals in your code so you can change the logic of your code based on what we're detecting rather than kind of like a brute force block or allow on the network.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. That makes total sense. You've been working on ArcGap for it's, like, a year or 2?
David Mytton:Yeah. Just over a year ago. Yeah. June 2023.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And so when I first came across, your work, David, it was actually with, Console before, and which is amazing, and people should subscribe. It's like if you're looking for, like, dev tools newsletter, like console.dev is awesome.
David Mytton:Thanks.
Jack Bridger:And there's podcast, and it's great. So I kind of was curious about, like, the journey from, like, console to, ARP Chair.
David Mytton:Yeah. Well, if we go back just a little bit further, my the first company that I started, Server Density, in 2009 was a server monitoring product, so, like, Daystar, Conurelyc. And we built that in 2009 and then sold it in 2018. Obviously, a lot happened in in in training years, but sold it in 2018 to StatPath. They're a large security platform, and have, like, a huge had a huge network.
David Mytton:They they actually went bankrupt, last month. I left in 2019. So it's nothing to do with me. Yeah. So sold sold to them, joined as part of the acquisition, stayed there for 18 months, and then left and did a master's degree in environmental technology at Imperial in London and focused on sustainable computing, like, the energy consumption of data centers, cloud computing, that kind of stuff.
David Mytton:And then finished the master's degree and decided that I wanted to get back into tech. It's kind of why I really love doing, I'm playing around with a lot of, sustainable technology as well, but, decided to start console dot dev just because there's wasn't anywhere that developers could go to find out about the best tools.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
David Mytton:Like, you can go on Hack and Use and there's stuff there, but it's not really for specifically for tools.
Jack Bridger:You have to look for and filter.
David Mytton:Yeah. And there's no control over what shows up. You'll get really interesting stuff, but it might not necessarily be dev tools related that you wanna try out. And so just in the period of 2009 to when we started console in 2020, the there was a massive explosion in the number of tools and companies and open source, everything just trying to push tools to developers. And so it was very difficult to know not just what you should, where to find things, but also what you should pay attention to.
David Mytton:Yeah. And as a as an experienced developer, you know, it's very difficult. Like, your time is very limited. You wanna play around with stuff, but a lot of stuff is just not that good. Yes.
David Mytton:And so the idea of returning the newsletter was that I would pour the work in and try everything out and then the newsletter is 3 very short reviews, 300 characters of what we like, 300 characters of what we don't like. So I spent 4 years just playing around with dev tools every day, writing reviews, getting to know founders who are building things, open source developers who are building stuff on the side. Yeah. And then in parallel to that, I was getting into the security side of software and doing hacking challenges and learning about how insecure everything is.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
David Mytton:And it was through that that I started thinking, well, what's the developer tooling like for security? And as I I said earlier, like, you've got this there's a lot of stuff as you're writing code, but that's only half of what you need to do. You gotta actually deploy your application, and then just it wasn't as good. Like, the where's the Vasile of security or the super base of security, like Yeah. In those two examples are just one of many examples of really high quality developer tools Yeah.
David Mytton:Where the developer experience is really the most important thing and you can you can deploy code in seconds and then there's all these features and it's got amazing design and it works really well for developers. And there was just nothing like that for security. And so I decided I'd prototype it. WebAssembly was becoming really interesting at the time. And part of the architecture is there's a WebAssembly component that runs in the SDK and so we can do a lot of the analysis locally on your server, not WebAssembly in the client, on in the browser which is what most people think of with WebAssembly.
David Mytton:Figma is the most Yeah. The famous example. But we run WebAssembly on your server, and we can do a lot of analysis inside that security sandbox with very high performance analysis of what's going on and, decided to build that and started it last year.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's amazing. And and I have questions, on on that journey, but I just wanted to say something that was, like, that I think says a lot about you and about how you run is that one of my friends, is good friends is, like, running a dev tool, and I won't name them, but their dev tool is, like, really good now, and it's amazing. And they're getting, like, tons of customers, but at some point, they it was, like, the early stages. And in their own words, like, it was pretty janky.
Jack Bridger:Yep. And and they tried to sponsor, console dev. And I think you returned you actually returned the money to them because they you were like, yeah. It's just not quite good enough to be in in there. I really thought that was, like, showed, like, a ton of, like, integrity, actually.
David Mytton:And,
Jack Bridger:yeah, it was just, like, really kind of a cool aside for anyone.
David Mytton:Thanks. That's so that's funny to hear on the other side. I do remember, we'd see idea is this it's things that I like and so I review them and I only put good things in there. I applied the same with the sponsors. Well, it is sponsored.
David Mytton:You could pay and it prioritizes me looking at your tool because we have quite a long backlog, but it does it's not pay to pay, kind of pay to be in the newsletter. And I Which
Jack Bridger:is kind of like one of those things where, like, everyone says, but you actually Okay.
David Mytton:It was good that you got a real example of us actually returning the money to someone. Yeah. And it's not like we'll never include it. Like, products evolve and things Yes. Things progress.
David Mytton:But I kind of copied that from Tim Ferris where I don't know whether he actually does this, but it feels like on his podcast, the adverts are only for the things that he uses. Yeah. He uses a lot of really interesting things, and he gets paid a lot of money for some of them. Yeah. And I've always thought that it still feels like that's how he does it.
David Mytton:And having that integrity means that you could have an audience who trusts you. And when there is a sponsored review in there, it is an honest review. We always include what we like and what we don't like, but it's always gonna be stuff that I think is worth your time.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. It was really cool. And but so so then going back to what you're saying about, the origins of ArcGex, could you tell us a bit about, like, yeah, the initial like, how did you get it out there, like, initially and
David Mytton:yeah. Well, this is the hardest bit, and it's it's something I've seen. So I've made a few DevTools Angels investments, and it's something I've seen through console as technical founders in particular would love to build the product, spend all the technical founders in particular would love to build the product, spend all the time on the technology. And it's not that it's easy, but it's the easier bit of building a startup because 50% of it is a product, 50% of it is just the go to market and getting it in the hands of developers. And it's just really, really difficult.
David Mytton:Developers, they're not immune to marketing because they love trying new things, but they don't like marketing that is very obvious or really cliche or horrible. And so it's it's just a lot of effort and time put into things that probably are no no surprise, like write blog posts. Yeah. Like, everyone says you should write a blog post. But the problem is you've got to spend a lot of time because they've got to be technically Yeah.
David Mytton:Interesting. Yeah. And you have to do it for 12 months, 18 months before you even see any results, and most people give up before they start seeing the results. Yeah. There are some companies that do this really well like, Superbase is amazing at their technical blog post.
David Mytton:Fly. Io is really good. Tailscale are really good. And they they will talk about their product, but they're really just talking about the interesting technical things that they've solved. Yeah.
David Mytton:Cloudflare, they're kind of a competitor to Art Jet, but they're an example I use all the time of their blog. Yeah. Like, it's it's run by the CTO. He has the last say and everything. He was on the console podcast a couple years ago now, but, John Graham coming as he was on the podcast, and we talked a little bit about this.
David Mytton:And their blog posts are amazing, and they go into the technical detail of how they run the network of 300 plus data centers and deal with something like 15,000,000 requests a second through their network, if not more. And developers love that stuff. And I think for them, that's been a really good recruiting mechanism to get people who want to work at Cloudflare, but also just to get people who would want to use that product. And that's the kind of principle that you need to create content. So and content as a word has been labeled negatively, I think, because people think, oh, content is just like Trivia.
David Mytton:SEO Yeah. Fluff. But it's content in the sense of really interesting stuff that people want to read and the same with videos. That's Yeah. That's huge now.
David Mytton:YouTube is a really important channel for certain type of developers. Yep. Yeah. And and then podcasts as well. Podcasts are really important.
David Mytton:Podcasts are very hard to grow. I'm sure you've found that it's just you yeah. It just takes a long just similar to blog posts. So you gotta put out good content consistently, and so that's really difficult. And then influencers as well, and you're an influencer now.
David Mytton:Yes. And there's influencers that people have heard of, like celebrities and pop stars, but there's influencers in the dev tools community. Yeah. And you think it's a niche, but they've got hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and it makes a real difference. Yeah.
David Mytton:Yeah. So it's all these things getting it out, and then you've also gotta have a really good product.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. And so you in terms of, like, if you're thinking about, like, blog like, are you writing a lot of content, currently?
David Mytton:Yeah. So I'm my goal is to do a blog post a week. We've got DevRel on the team. He's writing a blog post a week as well, and I try to encourage the team to write blog posts. Yeah.
David Mytton:It's hard to get engineers to do it just because it's not their job, really. Yeah. And they're obviously building the products and they're writing code, And it's quite different discipline writing Yeah. Prose than writing code. Yeah.
David Mytton:But some engineers are great at that. And and those are the some of the most interesting blog posts because they're actually writing about the things that they've I saw it. They've built. See, I'm writing writing blog posts every week. And do you
Jack Bridger:have, like, a process, like,
David Mytton:to do it? It depends on what I'm writing about. Often, I'll have no idea at all, and then I'll come up with an idea and I'll write the blog post in 3 or 4 hours,
Jack Bridger:and then
David Mytton:it will go.
Jack Bridger:Like, it just kind of has to come out of your filler out sometimes. But
David Mytton:when I look back on the blog posts that I've done really well, it's writing about something that has taken me a long time to solve, technically. Mhmm. So a recent one was we wanted to put, reduction into our Go logging on the server because we'd log a lot of data panel requests, but we don't want to put information into the logs. So personal information, IP addresses, all that kind of stuff because it goes into we use Datadog, goes into Datadog for a bit, and then it goes into long term storage and just GDPR compliance. If someone wants to remove part of their personal information that you put in there Yeah.
David Mytton:You've now gotta figure out where has it all gone. And so we wanted to put, data reduction into our our go logs. And there wasn't an easy way to do that, and there were a couple of ways that used Go's reflection API. But when I did it, the performance wasn't great. Yeah.
David Mytton:It added a couple of milliseconds to the overall execution, which doesn't sound like a lot, but our API's SLA is 20 milliseconds full response time for making a security decision. So if we're doing 4 milliseconds of logging Yeah. That's kinda like that's like 25% of the budget. So we wanted to reduce that. And so I spent quite a lot of time investigating different ways to do log reduction and found a really good option and then wrote about it.
David Mytton:And that post has been, like, Google Google for that because it's hard to do. And then we also have the exact same challenge with Next. Js and how do you do logging to JSON in Next. Js. And they don't make easy out of the box.
David Mytton:There's a couple of libraries that in JavaScript that that make it possible, but they don't quite work with Next. Js out of the box, and there's some config tweaks you have to do. So that one is not quite as complicated. You could figure it out in an hour or 2. Yeah.
David Mytton:But that's an hour or 2 of developers' time that might just write a blog post and Yeah. Provide the solution.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's really that's really interesting. I feel like it's like it's just this process of, like, every time you do something, reflects, like
David Mytton:Yep. Every time you do anything, I think, unless it's just, like, saying that next year, I see this template, probably take some notes and then write a quick blog post. Yeah. And that's probably the easiest way to get started because you've already done most of the work, which is the technical bit. Yeah.
David Mytton:And then you can just write about it. And I also find that until I've written about something, I haven't completely solved the problem because it's Yeah. I probably understand it by writing about him.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. I I feel like sometimes as well, like, I don't know if it's maybe this is slightly different, but this is more for, like, the onboarding stuff or, like, guides and things of, like, how to set things up is like it I feel like it also forces you to reflect on, like, every step of, like Yeah. Oh, this is we don't make this that clear. I actually Right.
David Mytton:Did you have someone on your podcast recently talking about this, like, the onboarding side of things? Yeah. I remember listening to that episode. It's like you build it once, and then no one ever uses it from your team again. Yeah.
David Mytton:But it's the first thing that every single one of your users uses. And I think there's something about having the CEO own that bit, the onboarding bit, and just doing it every single week. Yeah. First thing Monday morning, sign up for your own product Yeah. On a new email address and see what it's like.
Jack Bridger:I I I feel like there's, like, so many, like, things that are just, like, so basic that it's, like, you might go back to, like, this big article and, like Yep. I we had where, like, the Docker image was out of date for them, like just stuff like that where, like and and things have changed and
David Mytton:it's Onboarding, quick starts, like, the first bits in the in the docs, things change all the time. And you want your developers to write documentation at the same time, but maybe it's in a different repository and they just didn't they forgot to do the PR correctly or they just didn't think about it or they haven't had time to do it or there's a rush to get something out. And there's all these reasons why you can't always sync the docs with a release. So you need someone whose job it is or at least they have the responsibility to to test that on a regular basis.
Jack Bridger:And that's the CEO.
David Mytton:I think it should be the CEO. Yeah. Yeah. Even up to hundreds of people. Yeah.
David Mytton:I think the CEO should sign up to their product. Like mystery shopper type approach. Like, you actually use your products. Did emails make sense? Did they come out?
David Mytton:And how does that all like, what is the messaging around it? How does it look? All that is because it's part of the experience. I think probably you should do countries should do the same thing when you enter the country through the border. So you're coming as a tourist to a country and the first person you see is a kind of surly border agent.
David Mytton:That they should be like, of them are really great, but also some of them are not. And if you've been on a 12 hour flight
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
David Mytton:It's the same kind of thing, isn't it? You're a developer. You haven't got much time. You wanna solve a problem That's
Jack Bridger:a good way to think about it.
David Mytton:And to sign up for the product.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's such a
David Mytton:good way
Jack Bridger:to think about it. Yeah. That's that's amazing. And then so you are someone who's like if you think about, like, DevTools founders, like, you understand content, I think, more than more than, like, the top top naught point naught naught 1 percent of people, right, probably because because of console dev. Do you think so you've got the blog posts.
Jack Bridger:Are you also doing, like, newsletters and stuff?
David Mytton:Yep. So we do a a monthly newsletter. So you sign up to the product Yeah. And you you get subscribed to that. And that started out just sending interesting links about security.
David Mytton:But I now put, like, a short editorial type opinion piece in there just to make it interesting. And that was an idea I I stole from Fly Dot IO's newsletter. They just started sending one out. Maybe the second one has gone out, as as we speak. And that was really interesting because it's they they've got very they've got very certain type of messaging and how they describe things.
David Mytton:They're very informal. They describe things in a very technical way Yeah. And that is also in their newsletter. And when the first time I I received it, like, there was a this big description of how they do DevRel, I think. And then in their their one that's just gone out this month, it was just all about their billing system that they've rebuilt from scratch, which is a very, like, niche and specific thing to fly.
David Mytton:Like, no one's gonna use that. No one's gonna see it as a product or the code other than when they get billed. But the fact that they're talking about it in their newsletter is really interesting. And so then they talk about the product and then there's some other links that they put in there, and I thought that I should do the same thing. Right?
David Mytton:Find something interesting in in written form, provide some interesting links, and then the last thing in the newsletter is what's updated in the product because, like, developers don't like getting emails. If you've ever emailed a developer, it's very difficult to get them to respond. Yeah. And particularly if you're trying to get something from them, like if you have a product or you want to get feedback, they don't like responding, and so it's a privilege to be able to have access to their email address to get in their inbox. Yeah.
David Mytton:And so I feel like when we send them something it should be something they actually want to read. Yeah. And then the side benefit is, oh, this is by Art Chat and here's what the product's happening to the product. And, hopefully, people will say stay subscribed to the newsletter even if they're not using the product yet. Yes.
David Mytton:And then, hopefully, in the future mind. Yeah. Stay top of mind every single month. They're seeing something interesting from us.
Jack Bridger:And I think like I get is that like a kind of do you consciously think about what you want people to feel about Arcjet? Or
David Mytton:We have done we we spent a bit of time thinking about it because the word Arcjet, when I was coming up with the name for their company, literally had list of Wikipedia entries of, like, all the engineering terms, all the science, all the physics terms, and went through every single one. Yeah. I was like, does the domain exist? Is there a startup? Is there a trademark?
David Mytton:And Art Jet, there was nothing. Yeah. There's something in Fallout, the game Fallout, called Art Jet. Really? And then also NASA NASA has an experimental electrical jet propulsion engine for spacecraft Yeah.
David Mytton:Called called an art jet.
Jack Bridger:That's quite a good connotation for
David Mytton:So that's what we wanted to use. We wanted to say kind of sci fi and space and futuristic. And so we a couple of weeks ago, we started discussing this properly to, like, make sure our branding and how we talk about the company and how we do our design is has that feel without it being cliche. Yeah. Because everyone well, all a lot of dev tools have this have a very similar feel, and so we're conscious of not seeing the same
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
David Mytton:But also taking this kind of futuristic space type feel, which is linked to the name.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And because I because I always felt like console.dev has, like, a really strong brand.
David Mytton:Yeah. It's, like, very that was luck. Like, the domain was available. We just read the console.dev.
Jack Bridger:I meant I actually meant more, like, in the terms of, like, just everything is very, like, kind of congruent
David Mytton:and Or with the lines
Jack Bridger:and everything. And also, like, just the way you, like, write about things matches, like, the brand, and it just feels very, like, I don't know, like, well done. I don't know.
David Mytton:That's good that's good to hear. The console branding, we put a lot of effort into the design of that, like the website and, the custom email template as well, make sure it works on dark mode, make sure it works on light mode, and just having kind of this kind of a neon feel. Yeah. And we did that in 2020 before neon became cool. It was cool in, like, the seventies and the eighties and then it wasn't cool and now it is cool again.
David Mytton:And I feel like we're a little bit ahead of that. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:You made it cool again.
David Mytton:I'll claim that. Yeah. But it's kind of how I write about things and then Art Jet is a bit more we put a bit more time into figuring that out because it's a bigger team. Console is just me doing the writing and then my cofounder, who does kind of the the back office side of things and Yeah. Have a limited amount of marketing that we do as well.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And I guess, like, the question I guess I have as well is, like, were there any things that you learned from console or dev that you, like, have been applying directly into ArcGit?
David Mytton:I think we we talked a little bit about the go to market. That was a big learning and just how important that is. Like, I spend a 100% of my time on that now and then 100% on Pretty much. Percent on go to market. Yeah.
David Mytton:It's 100% on go to market and then another 20% on running everything else.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
David Mytton:It's like the CEO bits. Sort of like, oh, I've gotta review the accounts for our UK subsidiary today. And then Oh, no. The next day I'm reviewing a PR. Yeah.
David Mytton:And now I'm deploying something to AWS and figuring out how to set up Kubernetes. It's like all these completely different tasks. But I'm trying to spend a 100% of my time on go to market, and that's the biggest thing I've learned from console. But the other big thing was just around the importance of the developer experience, and we talked about the tools that don't get into console. Those are probably the ones that have the most interesting things to learn about, the ones that aren't I don't think are very good.
David Mytton:And why is it? Because it's not that there's a different amount of effort. Yeah. So developers are building stuff, and they're putting in a lot of time and effort. And just because I don't think it's good isn't anything to it's not an aspersion on them.
David Mytton:Yeah. And as as developers, it's just they haven't quite reached the level of quality that is needed today to Yeah. Attract developers. Yeah. And it kinda goes when I started server density in 2009, server monitoring, Datadog didn't exist.
David Mytton:And it was, tools like Nagios and Monet and, these sysadmin developed tools where it is very utilitarian. It does the job, but it looks awful. Yeah. And that has changed completely today where you expect the level of experience from Vercel in all of your tools.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
David Mytton:And just to focus on on the DX is super important, and that means everything from the onboarding through to, the docs are organized and all the code samples. I wrote all of our documentation at the very beginning. Now our our team helped as well. But, every single code example, we've probably got 200 code samples in the docs that I've created for TypeScript and JavaScript. Yes.
David Mytton:And Next. Js has got the app router and the pages router, and they're both supported. So we've got 4 code examples for every single feature and component in the product, and it's really tedious doing that. Yeah. But it's that kind of effort, putting the amount of effort into the code that you write also into the packaging that I've ever seen.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. That's that makes so much sense. It's like you almost become like the I guess you're the one that's actually just, like, yeah, poking it and just, like, constantly making sure that everything is, like,
David Mytton:Yeah. Consistent and it works. Yeah. And not just, like, the quick start works. Yeah.
David Mytton:That is also important. It has to work, but everything that branches out from that. Because developers start with a quick start, but then they go Yeah. They go a lot deeper. And this is often where it's called a graduation problem Yeah.
David Mytton:Where you fall out of that quick start, and now the docs aren't there and there's functionality that's that you don't know how to use or it doesn't work or there's very common scenarios that just aren't covered. And it's thinking through all these different things, and there's no like, we haven't got it right. Yeah. And there's no way to get it 100%. Yeah.
David Mytton:You just gotta keep going and trying it out, and then you'll you'll get feedback from a user using it in some crazy way that you never thought of. Yeah. And then you gotta support that as well.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I think when I, like, started the podcast and before I'd done, like, tried to build my own stuff, like, I feel like it's it's really easy to, like, underappreciate, like, how much those kind of basics are, like, not you know, are, like, really hard to do.
David Mytton:Yep. And it's the stuff behind the scenes.
Jack Bridger:It's rare.
David Mytton:Like and if you don't do it, you notice. People will notice. But if you do it right, then no one notices Yeah. Because it's what they're expecting. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:And it's like, oh, I don't really know how we grew. How did we grow? Like, just I know. Whoever just used it, but maybe it's all the work that you do where it's just making it amazing.
David Mytton:It's all the work, and then you also don't know which thing you did actually had the impact. And then 5 years later when someone asks you, you create a narrative around what it was. And maybe that was it, maybe it wasn't. Yeah. But also the 5 years is a long time.
David Mytton:Things have changed. Yeah. So there's a lot of, I think, common things that you need to do. Like, we're talking about with the writing just writing blog posts Yeah. On a regular basis.
David Mytton:But there's a lot of new things that come up like influencers. That's a that's pretty new Yeah. Last 4 or 5 years, really. That's that's a new thing. Certainly, in tech and dev tools, that's a new thing.
David Mytton:And there'll be something else in 5 years' time when you're doing your how many episodes you're in to this podcast and you're talking about what works. There'll be something new then. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And have you tried working with influencers yet with UpchUp?
David Mytton:It's very difficult to get in, and I think there's a it's, like, kinda like selection bias. Once you're in with one one well known influencer, then the others will see and you get this credibility.
Jack Bridger:Mhmm.
David Mytton:And so I think it's kind of like the cold start problem. Interesting. And So
Jack Bridger:it's actually hard to get It's hard to get hard to get to kinda take your money in a sense.
David Mytton:Yeah. They just they just don't reply to emails or they're just not interested or they think the product's too early, and these are all legitimate things and it's good that you can't just pay to be mentioned by an influencer. So otherwise, they wouldn't have the audience because people don't trust them. And so we've been spending a lot of time working on it and I'm trying to understand how to do it and got some really great angel investors on the architect cap table that have been helpful with that, but I think it's just okay it's just continuous. It's all part of the how the product is, like Yeah.
David Mytton:The amount of time you've been in the market, who's using it, the kind of scale you're at, and then just engaging with people. Yeah. And it's also it can't be a transactional thing, I think. It's not just pay some money and then they'll talk about your product and then you're done. I think you need to be useful.
David Mytton:You need to be seen to be in the community. You need to participate. Yeah. And then they want to work with you at some point. But I think we're still pretty early in that, so check back check back in a in a year or 2.
David Mytton:We'll see Okay. How it's gone.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's super, super interesting. Okay. David, that was, amazing. Like, we've wanted to chat for ages, I think, and it's kind of so cool that we just bumped into each other.
David Mytton:Yeah. Funny to be in San Francisco rather than
Jack Bridger:Where can people learn more about Arcjet and about you?
David Mytton:Arcjet.com, that's the website, and blog. Arcjet dotcom. And then for me personally, it's davidmitten.blog. Don't write as much as I used to on my personal blog. It's mostly about sustainable computing now.
David Mytton:And my research on that has kind of dialed down as I've focused on other things. So console dot dev will be the other thing as well. Subscribe to the dev tools newsletter.
Jack Bridger:Okay. Amazing. Amazing. Thanks everyone for listening. Thank you, David, for joining.
David Mytton:Thanks a lot.
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