Episode 107
· 37:49
Today, we're talking with Gonzo. He did the 66. That's right. He was the 6th employee at 0, and they sold for 6,000,000,000 to Octa. We talk about why 0 did so well, why Gesherme from Vercel is such a beast founder, and why it's so important to be different.
Jack:Enjoy the episode. This is pretty much the best possible outcome anyone could have is they join a startup as the 6th employee, and that startup turns out to be off 0, and they sell for 6 and a half $1,000,000,000.
Gonto:I can't complain. Okay.
Jack:What do you think, like, off 0 did so well to kinda get to that? And you, what did you bring to
Gonto:I think the first thing that Obsiro did well was actually considering on focusing on developers. Like, back then, again, this was 10 years ago, there weren't that many companies that focused on developers. Maybe Twilio, maybe a bit Atlassian, maybe Stripe, but that was it. So focusing on developers, I think, was number 1. And and related to that, I think we did a couple of things correct.
Gonto:One was actually understanding that developers relate to problems differently. Like, one of the first things that we noticed talking to developers was that our competitor back then, Okta, which then bought us, was building content for refresh tokens and single sign on and stuff like that. And in reality, non developer gave a about that. All developers didn't care about authentication. They didn't like it.
Gonto:So they only cared authentication when they were told to implement it, that there was an error or if they need to look for something open source. So I think focusing on that was definitely one of the things that I think helped us. Thing number 2 was actually finding niches inside developers that made more sense. We were big believers in focusing on what I call, like, up and coming communities and then established communities. So for example, again, 10 years ago, our established community was Backbone.
Gonto:Our up and coming one in the beginning was Angular JS, which was version like 0.4, and we bet on Angular on, hey. If we become a big part of this community and this grows, then everybody is gonna know us. And that's what's happened in the front end world, Angular Exploded, and we were the most recommended, person in that Angular world. We built that by going to conferences, meaning the speakers in those conferences. They're going drinking with them.
Jack:The color for the bell.
Gonto:Going to specific places and stuff like that. But I think we built real relationships with them, and then they started to share our content that was actually really good and talk about us. And that helped us, like, explode in that space. Last thing to share is, I think one of the things that helped out out Zillow in the product per se was the idea of extensibility. Back then, nobody talked about extensibility as much.
Gonto:But without Zillow, there was something that was called rules back then, which you could basically write code that would get run as part of authentication pipeline for every user that logged in. So for example, if you only wanted users to in the US to log in, you could do if user dot country equals US, then continue. Otherwise, fail. And that's a level of extensibility at any point in time on who to show multifactor, when to do one thing, when to let people sign in, sending data to other places. That was a big thing for developers because they felt that they could change it however they wanted.
Gonto:And that's in the product was key. The other thing that was key, for example, that we did in the product as well was in Docs. We paid so much attention to Docs. We were one of the first startups that I'll call what everybody has now that's called quick starts. This idea of a quick start with a specific framework.
Gonto:We have, like, a picker for SDKs where you said, okay. Why are you building the app in the front end? This tech. What in the back end? This deck.
Gonto:Okay. This is the guide for you. And it started with something simple, then more complicated steps. But in the guide, for example, it automatically have your client key and your client secret already there if you were logged in. So you could copy and paste and it just worked.
Gonto:If you downloaded a sample project, the sample project had a dot m that was already configured for your account. So making it so easy in the doc experience to connect to your accounts, making sure we've had extensibility, betting on different frameworks and different things to use, and actually really understanding the developers, I think were the main pieces that made outcedo really work, in the first few years.
Jack:I I think there's one one thing you said in there that I just gotta linger on it. I think it's, like, the fact if you exit for that much amount of money, you can make jokes about doing with the, with the, community. But I think it actually does play into, like, a very important fun point, is that, like, it's not just about, like, the, depth, like, the breadth of these, like, relationships, but often, I'm surprised when I meet dev tools, and I kinda hang out with them, how close some dev tools get with the communities that they work with, and I kind of wonder if that is, like, a big part of it is just actually having, like, really deep relationships with some of these, like, community members.
Gonto:I think that that's those real relationships are key. And I think, like I'll give you an example. We knew some of the most known influencers in the Angular space, and we knew which conference they were going. So in a lot of cases, we applied to speak at those conferences to meet them. And you could tell me that that's fake because it is fake.
Gonto:It's true. Like, we're trying to fake meaning them. But then you have to be genuine because if you're not genuine, you're not yourself, you can't really create friends and be be, like, create relationships. So I think about it differently. I think about it on I try to create the best circumstances that I can to then try to create real and genuine twin relationships with them by talking about life, going to places, and stuff like that.
Gonto:And then, of course, it requires you to have good quality product and content because otherwise, even if they are your friend, they're they're not gonna share
Jack:all the first
Gonto:Yeah. True. True.
Jack:Yeah. That that makes total sense. So it's like it's sincere. It's like you do wanna meet people, and you're kind of, like, angling yourself towards them, but you're actually you are genuine in in that you have a huge interest, and you're creating great stuff. Exactly.
Jack:This episode is brought to you by Work OS. At some point, you're gonna land a big customer and they're gonna ask you for enterprise features. That's where Work OS comes in because they give you these features out the box. Features like skin provisioning, SAML authentication, and audit logs. They have an easy to use API and they're trusted by big dev tools like Vercel as well as smaller fast growing dev tools like Nock.
Jack:So if you're looking to cross the enterprise chasm and make yourself enterprise ready, check out WorkOS. We've also done an episode with Michael, the founder of WorkOS, where he shares a lot of tips around crossing the enterprise chasm, landing your first enterprise deals and making sure that you're ready for them. Thanks WorkOS for sponsoring the podcast and back to the show. Actually, just also, and then one other point on you were saying about the docs. So do you think it's gonna change now where, like, you create these quick starts and it's like you can pick this and you can pick that, and then it generates it.
Jack:And now it's like everything's gonna become even more personalized.
Gonto:Exactly. I think with AI, things can become even more personalized. The other thing, like, for example, one thing that we did with Clerk recently, they are also like an auth company for front end that I'm working with. One thing they were doing was not just quick starts for login and sign up, which is the easy thing, but also starting to add quick starts for more advanced things. Like, I need to add multifactor.
Gonto:What's my quick start for that? And I think starting to look into quick starts, not just for these stupid and crazy example and actually making something tailored, I think, makes a difference. And thing number 2 is when we did the quick starts, nobody did quick starts. So then back then, it's like, oh, wow. They have quick starts.
Gonto:It's so easy. Now I think it's the opposite. Everybody has quick starts, and the problem are not the quick starts. The problem now are the the dev tools are so complex, and they need to help at such a scale that for whatever of these platforms, you actually now need, like, real life examples. That's something that I did a lot with Vercel on trying to focus on building real apps.
Gonto:Because with real apps come real problems. And then people might start easily with a quick start, but now they are not they they basically understand that there's more than that. And if you don't do these real apps with real examples, then either people get lost or people get pissed off because, like, oh, this works only for, like, a stupid use case and not for a real app and stuff like that. So I think now, not just it's tailored into AI, but also starting to think a lot more about real apps and real use cases. That's what I'm seeing as the new trend, I would say, in dev tools, examples and docs.
Jack:And what what is the key difference between, like, a real example and, like, you know, because people make, like, I'm gonna do a chat app, and it's like, could kinda be real. I don't know.
Gonto:I'll give you an example about, like, a real example, like, for example, for authentication, it's the quick start was let's implement login and let's implement sign up. That's it. The real app will tell you, like, okay. How can I get the user to stay logged in for a long time? What happens if the user logs into this account from another computer and now wants to actually force log out from all because he forgot the account logged in in the hotel and he shouldn't have.
Gonto:How do I fix that? How do I make sure that this user can continue to do things all the time without having to enter the password again? How do I make sure that even though they enter the password again, that when they do something that it's critical, they actually have to do a multifactor or add the password again or something like that. So it's helping them think about in the real world, there's problems that don't exist in a quick start. Understanding how your product plays in those real work scenarios actually gives developers a really big clue on how this company and this product can help me as I grow and help me understand what are the problems that I'm not even seeing.
Jack:Yeah. That makes sense. And I guess that comes from just talking to your users and, like, trying to, like, oh, I saw a customer did this, or I had a they had a challenge with this. How do we bring it in? Is that the sort of thing that Exactly.
Gonto:I think it's working with solution architects and solution engineers to see what cool things they've done with customers, what things customers can ask. And it's not just talking to customers, but most of the professional services and sales engineering arm in the companies can actually help you build some of these as well. And I think it forces you to have a better relationship with the customers to understand what things are they doing. Are they doing it correctly? How are they thinking about it?
Jack:Yeah. And that that actually reminds me of something that, I we we have a mutual friend, Ramiro, and, he was telling me that, there'll be, like, some minor outage, and the the founders will be, like, on Twitter at, like, 2 AM, like, replying to people, long after the exit, and that struck me as like pretty, you know, quite quite hardcore people. Right? And so I was wondering like what you've seen. You've also worked with, you know, from Vercel and, like, a lot of others.
Jack:What are these people like that built these, like, you know, huge startups and not just, like, okay startups?
Gonto:I think, like, main characteristics that I see and I'll talk about Gishearma because I worked with him recently more in Brazil. I think what he does really well is that, number 1, he's obsessed about everything and obsessed to the level of detail, not just the abstraction. It's like, okay. Why are we doing this? What is it?
Gonto:How are we improving this? And, like, he's always thinking all the problems and pushing them and being obsessed on making sure every detail is okay. I remember that once, for example, we sent a tweet that some pixels were wrong in the image and he noticed. And he talked about, like, this is a big mistake. We need to solve it.
Gonto:Everybody says that the culture of the CEO or the persona of the CEO is the culture of the company. And I think this is a great example of something that I personally really like on this idea on we do not tolerate mistakes. It's not that it's bad to make a mistake, but if we make a mistake, we fix it, we improve it, and we do it better. But I think this level of obsession with the details, with what's going on and why, I think it's important. Secondly, I think what Guillermo does a really good job of is being a public persona for Vercel and posting on Twitter all the time and giving examples.
Gonto:And he's actually using Vercel. He implements things using Vercel to see what works, what doesn't, give the feedback to the teams, and then get involved with them. There was this trend a couple of years of ago that micromanagement was bad. I personally strongly disagree with that. And I think most of the great founders that I've seen also do.
Gonto:And what that means is it's not that they will tell you exactly what you need to do, but it's more about understanding and knowing the details. There's so many leaders that don't understand the details or don't want to learn anything about sales because it's boring and I don't care, or they don't wanna learn anything about marketing because it's boring and they don't care. And I think going into the details and learning them makes a huge difference mostly because the founder can also have these first principles thinking on what's like, trying to deeply understand what's working, what's not working, and why. And then from those details, actually give feedback and improve it. But having this ability to deeply understand what everyone is doing, how are things going, and be able to have an opinion and a say on that, I think makes a huge difference.
Jack:Yeah. That totally makes sense. It sounds like, you know, when people talk about, like, walking the factory floor and, like, they there's that like, Elon Musk always talks about, like, sleeping on the factory floor. It kinda sounds like Gizmo was kinda doing that in the sense of, like Exactly. Yeah.
Jack:That's that's very cool. And and the founders of Allsero as well, they were like this kind of approach as well.
Gonto:I would say the CEO was a bit less than this. CTO very much CTO was exactly the same as Ichirno. Deeply cared about everything, tried to get involved in every department, always had opinions on everything, always get into the details, always try to give you very specific and direct feedback, no and I think it makes a difference. I've never seen a founder that's not like this eventually succeed. So that's where I think everybody talks bad about obsession, about micromanagement, but it needs some type of craziness to be the founder of a really successful startup.
Jack:Yeah. Like a, you know, like a 6 6 and a half 1000000000 exit. And then also for yourself, right, once so you were the when you left Orsira, you were, like, the SVP of marketing for and this is a big company at this point. You joined as the 6th employee. I guess there were, like, 100 Yeah.
Jack:Or more employees when you left. What how were you thinking about kind of leading that team?
Gonto:So for me, it was harder as as it started to grow, to be honest. Like, when I left, it was 1100 people, total of the company. Marketing team was 100. So it was a huge team. And I think in the beginning, it was more about doing things and getting done and running experiments and improving when it was more 100 people.
Gonto:I honestly didn't enjoy that much because what my team was telling me is that I should spend less time with them on being creative, on thinking about ideas, on pushing them, and more time actually doing their internal politics. Because even though Aotiba didn't have that many politics until later on, once you're 1100 people, if they say there's not, it's it's a lie. So it's selling the projects that marketing wants to do with the other executives, trying to push for them, building relationship and breaches and stuff like that. I didn't like that stuff, to be honest. As much as working with the team, being creative and stuff like that, we were actually so I was I I did a live 360, which I really liked.
Gonto:I recommended to everybody, which is similar to a 360 experiments where, like, people that are your boss, your direct reports, and your peers give you feedback. But instead of the typical one, you literally do a call with all of them together for 2 hours where there's a facilitator. You tell them what you think are your strengths and weaknesses, then you leave, and these 9 people actually discuss together what to give you on feedback. Sometimes when you do a 3 60, you get very confusing feedback because some people say one thing, others say others. Mhmm.
Gonto:This live 360 actually is not confusing because they give you very precise feedback that is agreed upon everybody that discuss together. Their feedback at this stage was what I was saying on this, like, you need to be less with the team, less on ideas, less on the details, and more on the other stuff. When I heard that, I wanted to leave, to be honest, because I think that's not what I liked. But we were writing the s one, and I said, okay. It's a fun thing.
Gonto:Let's save for some more time. But then eventually, when we heard that Okta was sold, I decided to to leave because it it wasn't, what really ticked me or what motivated me at this stage. To be honest, at this later stage, what was the most fun for me was probably almost September to December. Like, at this stage, my role as the leader of a 100 people team is more to set the vision and direction for the year, set the strategy, and then let the team work on that. Because it's a huge team, you can't change direction and strategy every month, even every quarter.
Gonto:You need to set it for a year. So then every year at this stage, August to December, we were doing the research, trying to do the math, and then finish by picking what is the strategy, what are we focusing on, what is the vision on this, and why. That I loved it. But then the rest of the year was more pushing for my projects, making sure that they worked, and less of thinking of new things and changing because at this case, very hard to change things as I was saying every month or every quarter.
Jack:Yeah. That totally makes sense. And kind of thinking of, new things, like, kind of puts me on something that I know that you're you're sort of, like, famous for in the dev tools world. You've got the saying of that it's better to be different than be better. Yes.
Jack:Could you talk a bit about why you think that?
Gonto:I'm obsessed with this. Like, I think when when when I think about marketing, I think there's 2 things that matter at marketing. 1 is showing up on people's habits. So understanding developers' habits is key on how they relate to a problem because then how to market to them is showing up in those spaces places. However, if you show up literally the same as everybody else does, nobody will notice.
Gonto:So the idea of it's better to be different than better is this idea that if I do the same as the rest but slightly better, nobody will notice. If I do something scrappy and but very unique and very different, I think people will notice and will make a huge, huge difference. And I think that's something that I think is important. I also hear a lot of, companies talk about that for growth and for marketing, what's the most important thing is data. I agree that data is important because it helps you iterate and become better.
Gonto:But data doesn't give you creative ideas. Data doesn't tell you exactly where to focus on. That's where I think having tastes, good gut feeling, and creativity, I think is a must for any marketing and growth team where you actually can do some research. I believe more in qualitative research that's a that rather than qualitative at first because you understand more specifics, more details you hear. And then once you have that, you can come up with more, I think, creative strategies.
Gonto:Like, I'll give you a few examples, but one creative strategy, for example, that, Clerk, for example, that is a customer worked on is this van. They built a van that I love. They bought it. They put basically Clerk all around the images and everything. And now every time there's a meetup in San Francisco or something, they just park the van in front.
Gonto:Sometimes they make cookies so people smell the the smell it basically and like it. Otherwise, they just have the van. But having something that goes every night to meetups where developers are, where they show up is a thing that doesn't scale, but it's creative. It's like, wow. That one is really cool.
Gonto:Another one, for example, that GitLab did that I loved was, GitHub did an event where they had very bad food, very bad food on GitHub Universe. So what GitLab did was they rented the best taco truck, in the Bay or where they were doing the event. They put some stickers on top of it just to make it scrappy, and then they sent a message like, if you're not gift card universe and the food sucks, we got the best tacos in town for you to try it out. And there was, like, a queue of people there who then went back with their cap that says GitLab with a sticker and the napkins and stuff like that. And that's all the things that then people remember, that people notice, and that I think are are unique.
Jack:That's, that's so wild. I the GitLab seem to be really good at this, actually. They always have that, like, the the fact they, like, share their meetings, which is something that, like, is still still unique because no one wants to copy it.
Gonto:It's GitLab, I think, does everything different, which I love. And then it doesn't have to be something like this that is, like, physical. You could have some of these examples online. Like, one thing, for example, that we did with Vercel was build this team that was called product advocates. Like, every company has SDRs, and the SDRs go after developers.
Gonto:When the SDR goes after developers, developers don't wanna talk to a sales guy. It's like, who the is this guy? I don't wanna talk to them. So our idea with them was completely different. It was like, okay.
Gonto:Let's let's try to do 2 things. 1 is instead of having somebody like an SDR that is not technical, let's hire somebody technical. So we went into, Apple to Apple Genius Bar, to Best Buy Tech Support, and CS Bootcamps to hire people who were slightly technical but were still gonna be cheap enough to be an SDR. Once we had those people, we trained them on how to use the product slightly. And then after that, the whole idea was when is a good time for these people to reach out to connect with sign ups.
Gonto:And the reality was that it made sense when they were blocked. So we try to guess when people were blocked. If you click on a section in the dashboard, go to dogs, come back, and do nothing, maybe you're blocked. In those cases, we have these product advocates, these technical SDRs contact you, try to help you get unblocked, and then eventually say something like, hey. We got you unblocked.
Gonto:You want to have somebody on your team talk to sales? Because the developer didn't want to talk to sales, but maybe the EM or the director of engineering did. And this was something that was unique, was creative, was based on blocked, was based on helping developers, and then sending to everybody else. In the beginning, the process was developer. The image were developer.
Gonto:The people who are these product advocates never did sales before, so you know how to lose sales. But it still worked better because it was scrappy. It was technical. It was unique, and it worked better than having a very professional SDR or the best SDR in the world. So it's not only for physical things, but you could have creative and unique digital experience that starts scrappy that actually help with conversion.
Jack:Yeah. That makes so much sense. And you wrote this amazing article on on that with, with Hank. Right? Yeah.
Jack:Everyone should read that. One of the things as well, like, I know you've been thinking a lot about, like, how developer marketing is changing and stuff, especially now with Hypergrowth Partners, your consultancy. I guess you're seeing a lot of different trends as well because you're not just working with 1 company. How are you seeing things change?
Gonto:Couple of things that I see change is one is I always think about this idea of the the analyst call it, like, the consumerization of b to b, which basically says that how people do in their day to day life and how they buy things from a b to c eventually goes to a b to b, which it's a very hard term for something that is obvious. If I do something in my day to day life, of course, I'm gonna be the same way when I go to work. And what that means is that if you look at how people have changed, like before, people always googled. Now people don't Google it that much. A lot of people search on TikTok or they search on YouTube for looking at a video of what they wanna solve or they are in different social medias to learn from others.
Gonto:And I think using that, that has basically changed how dev tools should focus on what things should they do based on how other people interact with services. So to give you an example, I see a lot of developers now that instead of searching on Google, they search on YouTube for something that they need to learn. Or in the in the b to c life, like, people follow influencers. Like, I'm a foodie. I follow 6 foodie influencers that will tell you which new restaurants are out there.
Gonto:For dev tools, the same is happening where if you look at Theo, Antonio, at the Primaget and so many of them, people now trust them in what they think, what new technologies they are trying, and what's coming, and they follow them to see what's got, what's new, and why. So starting to think about these influencers and how they relate to things, I think are very important. Last but not least, unrelated to this influencer world is that before, people used to follow brands. Like, before, people used to follow and read what a particular brand is saying. I'm seeing less and less of that, and I'm seeing people follow people.
Gonto:Like, people care about people. So as I said, people can follow some known influencers like Theo or Antonio, but they also wanna follow people from your company rather than your company itself. So I think building brands and people who become the brand inside the company is key. In the case of Vercel, for example, of course, people follow Guillermo Rauch, who is the CEO, but it's not just him. Lee Robinson is a personality now in Vercel.
Gonto:He was VP DevRel. But if you look at it, he shared a lot of, like, DevRel, a lot of Vercel stuff in his Twitter, and people follow more on his Twitter, his YouTube, what he posts more than the Vercel one. So So I think for companies, building up a persona internally that is basically a representative of that company is key. And then working with some of these influencers to to make sure that they know of your tool, that they use it, and that they think about it, I also think is key in this new world that we
Jack:live in. Yeah. And, actually, Lee Lee Rob is, like, the guy that everyone talks about is, like, when you speak to DevTools, they're like, we we need a Lee Rob is it Lee Robinson on he's Lee Rob on Twitter. Right? Everyone wants him.
Jack:But then there's also this kind of like fear that I hear, like, some DevTools say, which is like, what if we invest all this time and money into this person, and then they leave? And how, like, how do you think about that? Is it like a
Gonto:In I I think it's it's possible, but I think it's events that you should take. And in reality, if you build these people up and they do a good job, you should be promoting them, giving them more stock, giving them more cash, giving them more responsibilities. And I think if you keep them happy, if they keep on growing in the company and they get to do more, why would they leave? They would leave if they're unhappy, if they hate their manager or something like that. So I think investing in them makes a lot of sense, mostly because I think if you give back to them on what they are giving the company, I think it's gonna be great and it's gonna work.
Gonto:Similarly, other things that I, for example, I see working a lot on b two b that Lee doesn't do as much, but Jared does on Versell is memes. Like, memes have now governed the dev tools world as well, like our regular world. I see so many memes about developers and what they are doing and why. So I think trying to spend time on thinking about memes and building memes, I think, is key as well.
Jack:That's did you ever have any board meetings about meme memes?
Gonto:We we should, but I I don't know if it's a board meeting, but we should definitely spend, like, spending half an hour, 1 hour on a meme that goes by dial is time well spent.
Jack:Yeah. A 100%. That's so funny. And, actually, I kind of wanted to get, like, a bit of an insight. Like, if someone comes to you, at Hyper Growth Partners, and says, like, you know, I'm a dev tool.
Jack:Like, what what can you help me with? And, like, what would what would be your areas of focus typically?
Gonto:So first step is typically better understanding their ICP. So a lot of them say they focus on developers. Like, okay. What type of developer? Is it a front end developer?
Gonto:Is it an SRE? Is it DevOps? Is it a different one? How do you think about them? That's thing 1.
Gonto:Thing 2 is understanding that developers do not relate to topics in the same way. What do I mean by that? Developers don't give a about authentication. Developers are obsessed with how they deploy their apps. So maybe they would never search anything authentication related for Obsido, but for Vercel, they will want to learn how to deploy it, how to think about it, and stuff like that.
Gonto:So understanding how they relate to your problem space, I think is the other key. And once they understand that, I think it's understanding their habits and then showing up on those habits more. That's 1. 2 is just talking and that's related to talking to more and more the middle players all the time. So that I I see a lot.
Gonto:Thing number 2 that I see a lot is most companies write messaging from product marketing, like value propositions, like, what are the benefits? And, they try to add 3 objectives per noun and stuff like that. But trying to help them actually nail what is your differentiation, be specific, show code, and show how this fits with the SDKs and the front end frameworks or the back end frameworks that the other companies using, I think is key. So rethinking the websites, taking this into account on specificity, on show and tell, on looking exactly on who is the persona is the area that we typically help a lot. Then we try to do a lot of analysis to understand what are the specific use cases that your customers are using you for and then thinking out how to promote those.
Gonto:I would say that for hyperdosed, our main thing is our main value propositions at 2 states is we're always on the bleeding edge, and we try to be creative on based on who you are. So what I mean by that is we always focus on the same things, but the outcome for every company is completely different on exactly what we focus and what we will do. Because the reality is that it needs to come from what's the bleeding edge, what everybody is lately using, what is better, how do should we try it, and then how can we create something creative and unique for this company specifically?
Jack:And bleed by bleeding edge, like, that's that's because you you want to, like, attach yourself to, like, the growing communities and stuff? Like, what could you talk a bit about more about, like, what you mean the
Gonto:Yeah. What I mean by bleeding edge is I think about, like, tools and things that you use or things that you do follow this Gauss campaign on in the in the middle, they are very effective because there's maybe 2 or 3 people using some new technology or some new way. And then eventually, everybody starts using it. And when that happens, maybe it's not that useful anymore. To give you an example, I think now and for the past maybe year, year and a half, it was the YouTube influencers time.
Gonto:Because everybody follows the YouTubers, everybody cares what are the influencers says, etcetera. Eventually, it will happen that every that tool is sponsoring YouTubers. And when that happens, nobody will believe the YouTubers anymore. So now it's like, what is the next thing? What is the thing?
Gonto:What is the strategy? What is the tactic that there's very few companies using that we should get into? Use it now for maybe 1 or 2 years, and then what is the next one that we should serve on? But, eventually, when everybody uses the same tactic, that tactic stops working.
Jack:Yeah. Could you, are you are you able to reveal any of the bleeding edge? A see one secret bleeding edge that you've got?
Gonto:I I think one of the things that I'm seeing the most lately is what I call outbound to inbound. And it's this idea that once you start seeing developers that are signing up to your platform from com from Coca Cola, you can automate depending on what they are using, what they are using, and what they are doing and why to start doing outbound to directors of engineering and engineering managers on that company. For example, one thing that we do a lot is if we see 3 developers from Coca Cola using the platform and we learn what's the use case, one thing I've been doing a lot lately is, we start showing ads for a week to the directors of engineering in that company. We don't want them to click the ad. We just show the ads because we want them because of availability bias that if the developer brings up, hey.
Gonto:I'm working with company x to the director of engineering. They say, oh, this name sounds familiar. And because of availability bias, if they see that it sounds familiar, it's probably better. And then after that, we do start doing a lot of this how to convince your boss. Like, developers are great champions, but they suck at convincing others.
Gonto:So arming them in this entire process, I think, is something that is key. And I think for this, using AI now for custom written message that are specific, that talk about the use case, that talk about the case studies, now is unique and it works. In 1 year, when everybody sends emails with AI and everybody starts doing outbound to inbound, and similarly, it will stop working because it's like, oh, it's another AI email. Let's block it. But now it works because it's highly personalized and highly based on people who are using the platform.
Jack:Yeah. That that's a really cool one. So one final thing, Gonzo, is, you just started a podcast. Could you share about maybe we could put a clip in.
Gonto:On one side, it's interesting how this video that he published talking about how he will stop doing ads, I actually think was the best publicity for Vercel ever. So thank you for the shameless plug, but I've just started a podcast with Hank. Hank was the 1st VP of marketing at Vercel. We call the podcast code to market. And what we do is every week, we look at what's the current thing on the dev tools, and we give our opinion on that the on on that current thing based of our thinking on marketing product and growth.
Gonto:For example, recently, we talked about Theo changing how we have sponsorship. We talked about this whole WordPress mess. We talked about the launch week from Bolt dot new and a few other things. But it's short and sweet, 15 minutes every week where we chat out, what's going on.
Jack:Yeah. It's very good. It's very funny. Yeah. Gonzo, thank you so much.
Jack:This is really fun, and I think everyone should follow you on your, m Gonto on Twitter and, Gon.to on, on online. Hypergrowth partners, and, yeah, everyone should follow you. It's great stuff.
Gonto:Thank you for inviting and for allowing me to chat about this. As I said, if anybody wants to contact me, Twitter is probably the best way. Like, send me a DM to atmbonto, and happy to connect.
Jack:Amazing. Well, thank you, Gonzo, and thanks everyone for listening.
Gonto:Thank you.
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