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Developers building a software business on our own terms.
Ben: So Josh, I made a discovery the other day, I was working on a stack for an ECS for our API. And, and I was looking at some of the things that are required, like some of the infrastructure stuff that's required for API to be deployed. And one of them is the, uh, the bucket that stores the source maps. So when someone, has a client side, App like they have JavaScript and they want to compile the source maps and send it to us so that we can do the source map tracking, the mapping of that back to real code.
so we have a bucket for that and it's that bucket has to be there before the app can, spin up and start saving uploads, of course. And so I was putting this into Terraform and [00:01:00] I was looking at it and I was like, actually we don't. Create this bucket here. where is this bucket created?
And so I went and I dug around in our code cause we've got like, you know, 5, 000 repositories and stuff. And I realized that this bucket was actually, maintained by one of our serverless repositories, so that's all deployed via the serverless stack. It creates the bucket, it creates the dynamo table and blah, blah, blah.
And we just referenced that. I'm like, Oh. Well, that's kind of a bummer because I want to have it all deployed here. And, so I was like, okay, I can make that change. so I went and I started making, doing that. And then I realized, oh, but if I do that, thenthe serverless app actually does some stuff, right?
It takes the uploads and it does some things and. Right. And so I was looking at that and I'm like, oh, okay, I can replicate that too. No, no big deal. And I started looking at that table, the Dynamo table that I create. So it tracks the uploads that come in from ES3 and does some stuff and it saves some stuff to DynamoDB.
And then what it's supposed to do is when that source map, object gets expired after whatever months, cause we cache it for a [00:02:00] while, but then it goes away. it's supposed to remove that record from, DynamoDB as well. So it's a, there's an S3 hook that it listens to and it removes the record. And yeah, it doesn't do that.
I thought it was configured to do that, but it doesn't actually do it. It's configured, it's misconfigured. And I haven't looked at that functionality for three, three and a half years. So that DynamoDB table, which should have, I don't know, a couple of thousand. Yeah, it should have a hundred thousand rows or something in it.
It's got much more than that.so I started like deleting a bunch of the old data and, that was taking so long. I didn't want to like, you know, I mean, cause DynamoDB is like super scalable, right? You can do a lot of work on it, but I didn't want to like overwhelm things. And I, so I was just doing it slow and in the background while I was doing some of those stuff.
And it was taking so long. I was like, you know what, maybe it would just be faster if I just like dropped the table and recreated it. Cause I've since I've added an expiration thing to have Dynamo automatically delete the stuff now, instead of having to, depending on [00:03:00] S3. Yeah. So that was my discovery last week.
I was like, oops,
Josh: So did you end up dropping the table and recreating it?
Ben: not yet. no.
Josh: still running. the real question is,where we, expiring the files.
Ben: Yes, well, yes, because they were using a life cycle rule inside of S3, so that was working just fine. it was just, we were looking for the wrong event coming into DynamoDB, and yeah. so the real solution is, I've added a TTL to the DynamoDB table, and now when we create records in there, it's just gonna TTL it for us, and we can just cut out that lambda thing, which I should
Josh: I'd probably like. Matches the life cycle rule so that everything gets expired when it should.
Ben: Yep.
Josh: cool. I love that automated, data expiration. That's just,
Ben: Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah. I love that. I, that's the one thing I really wish Postgres had that was super easy. I mean, you can put, an expire at field in there, but then you have to have a cron job or something that goes and actually deletes this stuff. But yeah, having an automatic TTL perjure on your data store is just, that's the bees knees.
I love it.
Josh: That sounds like it would be a cool, product, like little add on product, if you could somehow build that as a, like a extension or something for Postgres and sell it, I would pay for that.
Well, there is PG cron, which you can use. So you could just set up a query and have it run, but yeah, it's cool when the database does it for you automatically. Yeah. Well, and at least we had the S3 bucket in a, repo somewhere being created because, I think that was probably you're doing. I think when I created the service way back when,that's probably like what, like eight years ago or something. I would be surprised if I had used that.
Terraform or cloud formation or anything to actually like put that in, you know, I probably just created the bucket via the console. but I think you, you ended up migrating that sub part of that service to the serverless architecture.
Ben: hmm,
Josh: that makes sense. Cool. Well, I'm glad we're getting that sorted out.
It's always nice when we can find some extra data to delete.
Ben: right, yeah, that'll save us a few pennies.
Josh: Yeah, nice work. Well, um, we had a question, From, Adam, who's the founder of judo scale, which is a, it's [00:05:00] formerly rails auto scale, which is an auto scaling service, for Heroku. I can't remember if he supports other platforms now, but, long time friend of honey badger.
And, I think we ever use rails auto scale back when we used Heroku. I feel like we might've used it for something.
Ben: so I used it on a client project,
Josh: Okay.
Ben: yeah, I have a long time client who I still do some work for every now and then, and, they're on Heroku and we're using it today, been using it for years. it's great. And I checked in with Adam a few weeks ago, a couple months ago, and, he's working on supporting ECS as well.
So we, we chatted about how we use ECS. They could get some info on that. So yeah, he's doing some great stuff over there.
Josh: I was going to say that would be really cool because like I've tried to set or like, you know, we've, we have, obviously we have auto scaling, when we're all, we're not using ECS anymore or no, we are using ECS. We used to have it on EC2, but it's a big, um, Kind of a hassle to set up with AWS, with all the Terraform rules and everything that you have to [00:06:00] do, um, alarms and alerts and things.
Um, so just The ease of Heroku, being able to deploy something to Heroku and then have that advanced, like, you know, managing your costs,as your traffic patterns change and things. that's kind of the dream of just like a one click, like turn it on and have a UI for it. so that's cool.that's a free ad from founder quest to Adam. but after our last episode, Adam, messaged me on, Twitter and mentioned that, he's interested in learning more about,what our launch plan has been for insights. because you know, as a small company, with limited resources, like what are we doing?
To launch a big new feature in the product. This isn't like exactly a product launch, but it's probably the closest we've ever come to a product launch, I guess since hook relay.so yeah, let's see. I could actually read his question here. He said, I'd love to hear you talk more about your launch plan from a marketing perspective.
You talked about [00:07:00] how you've been punting on that intentionally. and now that we're working on that, he'd like to know what we're. What we're doing. So what do you think, can we go through a list? And, I guess we've got some, I, we have a lot of ideas for the future. but we've been really busy the past couple of weeks, working on our launch plan and I think it's been going pretty well.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. yeah, I think definitely the launch plan was very intentional on, we wanted it to be a slow roll. I think the first parts of the launch plan were, really reaching out to individual users early on that we thought would be interested in the feature and getting them interested.
into it. I mean, of course, we were using it ourselves. having some real live customers actually using it was super helpful in getting it proved out. we discovered some scaling issues. And I think having that time was super helpful and as part of our rollout process, because it turned out that those customers who were using it early on, then Became early paying customers right after we launched.
And I don't know if we're at that part of the conversation yet, but I just wanted to kind of set the groundwork for like why we decided to [00:08:00] do, the incremental thing rather than a big bang thing. It was really helpful to us to, I think we talked about this last, in the last episode, it was helpful to us to have some proving it out because we are going to get some scale, from day one, uh, we don't want to just fall over right as soon as we launch it.
So having that groundwork was helpful. Yeah.
Josh: to have a, handful of dedicated users already when you go to actually do the launch. that can start talking about it. We've had some, friends that have been using it, who have been mentioning it on their social media feeds and things like that, now that it's finally public, so that can help.
I think that's helped a little bit, to spread the word. And of course we can ask them, To share, you know, tell people about the product. but yeah, so the first, The first thing we really did, like you just said, was we, so you personally emailed, some people, this was like pre prelaunch feature flag, you know, insights was in the product, but it's behind a feature flag.
And you personally reached out to, a number of [00:09:00] customers who you thought would be a good fit, friends and customers to become those beta testers. And, that's how we got started.
Ben: Yeah. And I think one thing that's been really helpful also from that, from a marketing standpoint, is that, when you're talking with them, you're feeling what their use case is going to be, what their usage is like. if you get permission, you can look at their data and see what kind of things are coming in.
And then that can be helpful, like in making screenshots, right? Because you want to put up a marketing page and want to have in our case, some charts to show, right? so we actually have some real data that we can use to do that. Also, of course, testimonials. If you get some good feedback from them, then you can put that up on the marketing page too, once you're ready to launch, if you get some bad feedback from them, then you can fix the product right before it goes out to the world.
but also I think one thing that's really cool, I can't remember. I've heard this a few times in the microconf world, and I can't remember where I heard it, so apologies for not having the attribution, but,like the copywriting, a good tactic in copywriting is getting the words of your customers, [00:10:00] right?
Using the words that they use by actually quoting them. I remember one of the tactics was go to Amazon reviews and pull out the actual text that people are writing about the products, right? So I think you get some of that too, right? When you get the early customers who are using it, cause they, they send you an email, it's Oh, I like this.
I like that. And then you can just like slide that content right into your marketing copy.
Josh: Yeah, that's funny. I remember that advice about the Amazon reviews. And the only thing I would say now is that's probably a dated strategy now that all Amazon reviews are generated by chat GPT. so if you want a dumb marketing copy, you could just go straight to Chat to your GPT and have it write your copy for you.
No, I mean, like, I think the advice is still sound as long as you're finding, where people are talking about the product organically, that could be still on some reviews. but, yeah, definitely. I like to go to forums and, but like just having that feedback from real users, if you're talking to customers and then you can kind of,write your copy, Like in their own words.
[00:11:00] Yeah.we should also probably put some testimonials on our landing page. I don't have those yet, so I just wanna be clear. we haven't done all of this, but I think we're starting to gather some testimonials that we can start working into, to, our copy, which is exciting. Yeah, I can't remember the one from the other day off the top of my head about the Splunk costs, but that was really funny. Do you remember what it
Ben: Yeah. getting the, Splunk likeability without having to sell your kidneys. Yeah.
Josh: That's right.
Ben: It's like, yes,
Josh: have to put that one.
Ben: That's exactly what we're aiming for here. Giving you Splunk like stuff without charging you crazy amounts of money.
Josh: Yeah, that's the shortest way to say it, I think, so far. So I love that.so yeah, that was like step one was, like launching to early customers, talking to them, working with them.and then when it came time to actually launch, we, like we had mentioned, on the previous podcast, we decided to still take a slow approach for the first week, and just basically like turn it on and start to do some of the not making a lot of noise.[00:12:00]
Necessarily, but, starting to do some of the,soft launch things. Like we, deployed our landing page and updated our marketing site and put out the pricing and, we launched, some in app onboarding things to introduce the feature to users who like, You know, basically see it for the first time, just in their day to day.
so I think the, in app launch was, that's something that I don't hear people talk about quite as much, but I think that was important for us and that, that has been important. So, uh, basically the problem was like, we're, we have this big new thing and most people don't know what it is yet.
And if we just drop it into the UI. how do we tell people what it is? if they're just landing on it organically, without coming from an email or a blog post or wherever. And we don't like to interrupt our users, during their workflow too much. that's something like, I think the.
Typical approach would be to maybe send an in app style, intercom, type [00:13:00] message that announces the new feature and links to a blog post and does the typical,marketing copy thing. but the problem is like, if you're. A developer who is like, you know, you just got,alerted in the middle of the night and you're half awake and you're trying to figure out like what the error is, you don't want like a marketing spiel, like to pop up and be like, Hey, like we have this new thing that you got to check out right now.
so that's always the tension that we have in, like introducing things in the UI and telling people about it. So our approach, this time, which I really What we landed on was like a more subtle, a subtle, like kind of drip style, introduction via UI elements. So we put a little,like new indicator on the, on the navigation element.
that when you click on it. It will take you to the page and you would see like an introductory message that would then tell you what it is and it would let you dismiss it, pretty easily. so [00:14:00] basically like a subtle prompt,that would introduce the new feature, but it's completely optional.
Like it's very easy to ignore. but it's also hard to miss, that I get that the gist of that,
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. I love that doing a little badge thing, because I'm probably like most people, I find it very hard to resist tapping on bad things that have badges, right? I'm like, Oh, there's something that needs my attention. but we specifically chose not to make that badge red because we use red in the UI for really important things that are down or broken.
Right. So we didn't want to do that. So we made it blue or green, something like that. It's a friendly color.
And,Yeah, the teal color. And I love that because you're going to be sitting and you're going to come to the UI, you're gonna be doing whatever you're doing, and then when you have a little bit of spare time, you look and you're like, Oh, what is this?
What is this new thing that's got this little badge on it? And I go and click on it like, Oh, I think it's really cool.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. And, Roel actually worked on, the implementation for that feature. And I really liked like what he came up with. So it's basically like we have this, um, well, we called it a user message [00:15:00] in our app. but it's basically like an inbox for sending. Like, you know, you could think of it like a message, but it's not triggering like a pop up message or something like that, like you would get with intercom it's triggering a UI element, like the little indicator that we just talked about.
but it's also tied to the dismissible. message that you get when you actually click on it and land on the page. So when you land on the page,you get like a little, alert box with a like X or close a button on it. And when you click that button, it dismisses both the alert and the the UI indicator that brought you there.
So once you get to that point, it's as if, you know, you can just move on, and that part of the journey is over. but again, it's not popping up an announcement, it's not popping up a tour. like I started to kind of experiment with doing UI tours, you know, like that are kind of like step by step calling out elements on the page.
But again, those are like very interrupting, of someone's workflow. and so yeah, we landed on this different approach.
Ben: [00:16:00] Yeah. I mean, really wanted people to be able to dive in quickly. We didn't want them to have to, be gated behind it. Oh, now see this and now see that, we wanted, Kevin did a great job of putting the inline documentation right there, and so that intro message says, Hey, go check out those docs.
Start playing right now. get people in there. And, that was already for us to turn on the feature flag. So basically launch day was we clicked a button in the, in, in our admin UI and turned on the feature flag. And then everyone had. user messages waiting for them, so that when they click through, they could see that message and dismiss that icon.
And,that was a launch. And, we also did some marketing. I know you put another message in the sidebar, our recent UI edition, where we actually have a sidebar now, so people could, when they're, maybe they're not going to be captured by that little green dot. And so when they're in the menu and they're doing stuff, it's like, Oh, there's this little call out the bottom, try and catch their attention there too.
Josh: that came kind of after the first, you know, when we created row out, created this pattern, that we could use. And then I reused that for the sidebar message. So the sidebar [00:17:00] message is also dismissible. So it's just, it can go away once you see it, which is nice. because the alternative would have been just to hard code it in there for everyone for a period of time and then take it away later.
but I really like this pattern of being able to like introduce, like little UI changes and messages and other things, there's a lot of different ways we could use this in the future. and you could even automate some of this stuff if you wanted to do it, like with a time sequence or have it like coincide with onboarding emails that go out or that sort of thing.
we could use Heya to automate some of that. so there's, it's a cool pattern. I
Ben: yeah, yeah, I like it. I'm looking forward to using that some more. I think the takeaway is like when you're thinking about marketing, a new feature, You need to market to your existing customers, right? Because to them, it's going to be a new thing. Even if they'd been in your app for years,you're bringing out this new functionality and you need to sell them on it, right?
Cause it's not part of the workflow today. You want it to be part of the workflow. It treat it like a, like a new product, right? Cause they, they need to activate on this feature. Just like you [00:18:00] want someone new, showing up. Today to activate their account and actually get some benefit out of your app.
You want an existing customer to get some benefit out of this new part of your app. So, you know, coming up with a, and again, like our approach is to try and be pretty low key, pretty laid back, not in your face. And so we're not going to do a pop up thing, but we're going to do a sidebar thing. We're going to do a little badge thing to get people's attention and say, Hey, there's a new thing put up in front of you.
and then, okay, how can we help you activate in this new feature?
Josh: Yeah. I think we might do more things than the normal, um, to make up for the fact that we're not like interrupting you, um, yeah. And making you look right now that you have a lot of opportunities to kind of like, you know, when you, when you happen to have time to finally click the new thing.
Ben: I think my favorite thing about the user message approach is that we've also done it so that we will create this message for new customers that show up even today, right? So if you create a new account today, you will see this call out because we really want people to activate on this feature.
We feel like it's going to [00:19:00] be a huge benefit to using the entire application. And that if you're, if you sign up to Honeybadger today and you don't check out insights, Then you're not getting the full benefit of using Honeybadger, right? So, uh, at some point, if I guess we might feel like, ah, we don't need that user message anymore.
People are getting into it naturally. and then we can take it away. We can stop auto creating it when people create their accounts. But for now we're doing that. And, I like that.
Josh: Yeah, we can replace it with whatever the next thing is that they need to start using. Yeah.
So, um, that was the first week.
Ben: Oh, and when we did the feature flag, we also, we tweeted about it. we posted it on Mastodon about it. Just kind of like a, Hey, we launched a thing because our friends, people who follow us on social media, they already know that we've been working on this because we've been talking about it forever.
and so Hey, we're just so excited to get this out there. And we did, and those weren't like promoted tweets or, ad spots or anything. It was just
Josh: these were from our personal accounts.
Ben: yeah. and the thing that was cool about that is that, if friends share something cool, they did, you want to share that, right?
so Mike shared it to his followers and, X number of people showed [00:20:00] it to them and boosted it or whatever, I can't remember what the terms are on the various platforms. shared it with their audiences too, because they wanted to celebrate with us that we were doing this on a, on a personal level.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah, and that's nice. I think with our, Yeah. With our audience, because our audiences like happens to, coincide with like our followers who are developers. Um, you know, that's both marketing and that's just like nice to celebrate the new feature with the people who are following along.
I have to like always remind myself that like my Twitter followers are not necessarily my,Honey badger audience. some of them are, but it's kind of weird. Like, you know, we're, we're selling to software developers and we've kind of developed a personal audience.
That's a mix of software developers and indie hackers. And there's a lot of overlap there. but indie hackers are not always, you know, that's not like our primary market either for honey badger. so I always have to remind myself like, when I'm doing like social media things, like on my personal accounts, like it's a mix of personal, you know,
Building in public and sharing what you're working on [00:21:00] because it's good to share and it's interesting for people. And then, actually doing marketing.so week two was when we did the, like the official announcements and social media, you know, or honey badger accounts,uh, the first thing we did was, you, Wrote a blog post announcing the feature and introducing it.
it to people. And then we, tweeted that out and posted it everywhere.
Ben: Yeah, that was a team effort. I really appreciate the edits you did on that. Cause,it's really pretty easy for me to dump out a bunch of texts. It's not so easy for me to dump out a bunch of great texts. And,going through the editing process that you did was certainly helpful.
But, once we had that blog post, then I could go and I could say, Hey, like the ones that have been using it, who weren't paying yet. Hey, uh, now we've launched and now that we've launched, do you should really kind of pay us now? You know, the smiley face, uh, and the, there's the return on those emails was fantastic.
I think everyone that I emailed,was willing to sign up and had one customer is like, yeah, I was only sending a little bit, but now I'm going to send a lot of data now that you're [00:22:00] live. So I think having, You know, we, it had been a week since we had announced it via our personal accounts on social media.
It had been a week that publicly it was available, but having a, a flag posted saying this is our thing and it's a net it's real and it's live. I think it gives you something that you can share with people and say, Hey, this is a noteworthy kind of event. And, it's another excuse to share stuff on social media.
And, you know, all it's sharing is, I think as developers, we're often hesitant to like. Repeat ourselves when it comes to sharing the stuff that we've built or whatever. But any marketer who's worth their salt will say, you gotta tell people like, seven times before they even realize you're telling them something.
Right. So, uh, it's a little bit of that too.
Josh: Yeah. the way we've been thinking about all of this, is mini launches. So like we're creating opportunities to tell people about the product, maybe tell them about a different aspect of the product. and moving forward, I think that's going to be.
Our strategy as well is like, you know, creating small little, campaigns around specific [00:23:00] things.but you mentioned that, it's easier for you to just write a bunch of texts and you don't love the editing process and that works really well for me because I actually like really love the editing process and like, I don't know, I really like deleting things.
And so like my editing process is basically just like deleting textparing things down and making it more concise and getting to the essence of what you were saying. so yeah, I guess we're a good, we're a good team on,blog writing.
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: Um, the other thing we did, was, on the website so we publish your blog posts, we promoted it everywhere.
I also added a global alert banner to our website, which,it says basically like introducing honey badger insights, logging and observability.
from honey badger learn more. And it's just like a global, banner that's like at the top of every page that you visit on our website. So that's the homepage, but also, anyone who lands on a blog post from like Google, for example, or from social media is going to like, this is the first thing they'll see now, for, probably for a [00:24:00] few weeks, at least, maybe longer.
but I, that kind of guarantees that everyone who lands on the website is going to, at least know that we launched this big new thing and we now do this thing that we didn't do in the past. and I think that's actually, that seems like an underrated, thing to do just because that's another existing.
Audience that you have,like your customers, it's usually a little bit more of a warmer audience and you can treat that as a marketing channel of its own.so I think that's, that's been good. We've been getting some clicks on that banner.
I checked the other day.
and it's not like a ton of clicks, compared to our traffic, but, we're getting a pretty solid number of clicks. So,
so that was, yeah, that was like, that was last week, I think.
and now we're getting into the real,marketing things, the ongoing, the things that aren't going to stop, or aren't going to be one time events. the next, like the next big thing we're working on is we're going to be sending emails. We haven't sent emails to our customer lists yet.
we [00:25:00] haven't sent emails to our, marketing lists. And, so that's another part of the, like marketing to your existing, users. and, And I think, I'm pretty excited about that because that's that's a guaranteed to get in front of a lot of our customers who aren't, maybe they haven't visited, the UI in the last couple of weeks, they haven't read our blog posts or they're not following us on social media.
That's where they're pretty much, they're going to be introduced to the product. So I have to remember. That, I'm reintroducing the product in these emails. These are not people who have, been following along necessarily, even though we have been talking about it a lot, it seems like we've been talking about it a lot, but I will guarantee you that most of these people, if we just say go check out insights, they're going to be like, what's insights. so yeah, we'll be like reintroducing, um, uh, we want to talk about pricing in these emails. I think, it's time to really answer the questions about how do you pay for this and what, how does it compare to say [00:26:00] Splunk or PaperTrail, or New Relic, for example.
Ben: Yeah. I think you made a great point there that, and I had totally spaced on this, like for most of the people who will be receiving that email, this is the first time that they will hear about insights because yeah, they haven't used the UI in a while and they haven't read the blog post and you feel like you've talked about it to death, but for them, it's this is brand new,back to that, you got to say something seven times, for them, this is time.
Number one, Even for you, if it's time, number 45.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. So we'll have to think of more ways we can. Up that number, maybe we'll send more than one email.
Ben: Well, and we've got some, other things that we've talked about doing, in addition to using our existing customer list, our existing marketing list, like we could post to show Hacker News. we haven't done that yet. we could create a product hunt launch. I'm actually more in favor of the former than the latter of those two things, because I think the Hacker News crowd is probably more.
Josh: geared better, better target for actually having customers who would actually use it because they are familiar with Splunk. They are familiar [00:27:00] with, Elasticsearch or Datadog or what have you. Versus I think the product on people that's that skews more towards the entrepreneurs, the indie hackers, the creators, who aren't quite as technical, Yeah. There's a lot, it's a mixed audience. and I would imagine on the smaller side of things, um, it's not that developer audience, um,
Josh: this at the small to medium sized companies that we're, after, like we do have. Indie hacker customers.
And, And,
so, yeah.
we've, we've been on the fence with product hunt. I know Justin Jackson recently, decided to do the product hunt launch and I want to check in with him how it went, for transistor and their new transcription feature, which looks cool by the way. Um, yeah.
Ben: news, they really want to see the text, right? You describe what it is. They want to go into the blog post. They want to go and see the code. they want to get their hands on it. And I think the product time crowd, they more they want to see the video.
They want to have the presentation and, we don't have that [00:28:00] video yet. So that's a bit of a holdup for doing that. maybe one of us does the Hacker News thing and another of us does the Product Hunt thing so we can focus on those two different approaches.
Josh: maybe we'll split it up. Maybe I'll do product hunt and you do
hacker news.I have heard that like hacker news is a little bit of a slot machine in terms of what takes off and I know people like will post small, you know, they, they, it doesn't hit the front page until they've posted it a few times, like, you know, over, over three or six months or something, like it might have to be a repeated attempt.
to get it to stick.
Ben: Yeah, I've never done that. So I don't really know how that goes, but I've, I love this show, Hacker News. I love reading those posts. And one thing that I've observed though, is that you have to be wearing your flame proof underwear when you go and post there, because there are some strong opinions on Hacker News and yeah, no telling what you're going to get.
Josh: yeah, you gotta let those things roll off. Have a thick skin.
Ben: before, but I think also, no less important is like when you get our ads updated with, podcasts. Hosts and, [00:29:00] get some new ad reads for the insight stuff. We got to go to our Heroku marketplace and go to the GitHub marketplace and update those things. we might even have to launch new apps for those two marketplaces because the billing is separate and different and it might be different
Josh: I hadn't even thought of that.
Ben: Yeah, I've been thinking about that. It's how does this going to work? especially with Heroku, because there are so many,knobs that you can turn on that individual plans that you offer and, but the actual. Yeah, it's complicated. Anyway, if you've, if you've built a Heroku add on, you know, you know, uh, if you haven't, then just be happy that you haven't had to worry about that.
so yeah, so there's some things there that we can definitely call out on those marketplaces. Cause those are a marketing outlet, right? those have an advertising for our product and people, it's a front door for people who are coming in and trying it. So we got to update those.
Josh: yeah, we've been updating all the, like, our profiles everywhere. also, like, on comparison sites and, basically, anywhere there's, a Honey Badger profile from way back when where we're trying to go and find those and update them and make sure they're advertising our current website.[00:30:00]
Features and benefits and all that. Um, and, and you mentioned the ads, like, cause we do just normal ongoing marketing. that's another, I think kind of the,trend of what we're talking about here is that we're launching to Concentric circles, like we're widening the circle of our audience.
With every iteration of this launch. so we started with our most, interested, and friendly customers in the early beta. and then we launched to our, just to our most active users, because it's the people who are in the UI seeing. The thing that are going to notice those subtle elements and go check it out.
and then we're launching to our, our personal social networks, and then we're going to the company social networks, or profiles.and then, yeah, all the way to the point of we have this audience, this wider audience. of people who are just have, who have been exposed to our advertisements, who like read Ruby weekly or Laravel news or some of the other newsletters or listen to the podcasts that we advertise on.
So they're familiar with us. Maybe they're not, active users [00:31:00] of honey badger. but You want those people to know that you have this new thing and the product is changing, and like how it's developed. Like they may not be on your newsletter, but they may not be on your email list or your marketing list.
So that's where like targeting, you know, we want to change, update our ad copy, at least for a little while to like really highlight the fact that we've launched a new thing,to get the word out.
Ben: Yeah. That, that you're reminding me of that, out on this outer periphery, the circle is, people who maybe have never come across you, but they're using tools that now has some overlap with your product. So I'm talking about, in our case, we were accepting a bunch of logs.
From our customers and putting them into a searchable index, right? that's what insights does. And there are a bunch of services out there that have a logging export feature. So like our database service, crunchy bridge, right? They have a thing where you can plug in and say, okay, do you want to ship your log someplace?
Well, we want to have honey badger insights showing up on that [00:32:00] list of places that you can ship your logs to, right? So there's integration marketing or partner marketing. and. we have a new gem that goes with, we talked about last time that goes with your beta, right? So those, so people who are using that database hosting or people who are using that, your beta gem before that didn't know about us at all.
Now there's this new. Honey badger insights thing that goes along with the thing they're already using and now they can check it out and be introduced to the honey badger. So that's probably like our last frontier. I mean, we've done some of that work already. but it's so broad, like there's so many places you can go and do that, you know, uh, putting yourself out there for GitHub PRs and things like that.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. And that is starting to get into just, our day to day marketing territory, like moving forward. like these are the things we're going to be doing to market honey badger,we now have these new places we can like having insights as a feature basically opens up, New places we can advertise and new integration points and all of that.
So, yeah, talking about like mini [00:33:00] launches, an example of that moving forward is just a general marketing strategy is to do those integrations and then do a little launch, do the blog post and the emails and, do things around those integrations. Maybe we can even get some like partner,co marketing if we could, have the, have crunchy.
Write a blog post about us or something like that. that would be cool. But, um, yeah, all those going back to those like traction marketing tactics and channels, and just working the, yeah, basically working the playbook, that's in any number of books these days.
Ben: Yeah. you reminded me on the, uh, the partner thing and the blog posts and stuff. We actually did do a thing with, double cloud. They did a feature on me and on our new product that we're using because they want to promote their services, for quick house hosting. So yeah, if you find some overlap and some find some, dare I even say it, Synergies, between you and other people who would be interested in promoting your story.
That's a great. Cause yeah, you get introduced to people that wouldn't normally [00:34:00] be aware of you.
Josh: that's a, that's our last step. that's step 1, 000. We're creating synergies.
Ben: But that's a great question. And, I hadn't really like until we laid this all out, I hadn't really thought about. All the things that we have going on, with marketing of this new thing. You just like, Oh, okay. What's the next thing? What's the next thing? So yeah, having all this in one
place, this is, it's a lot.
Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. But it's been good. And, yeah, we have lots of ideas, lots of marketing ideas for the future. It's just finding the right ones and the energy to do them all.
Ben: Well, hopefully, that answers your question, Adam. but if not, you can hit up Josh again and we can make another podcast episode, dive in deeper.
Josh: yeah, I love it when listeners ask us questions, cause it makes the, uh, coming up with an episode topic that much easier. So
Ben: Right.
Josh: Well, we'll,
Ben: be, you don't
have to just be regaled by my tales of, Dynamo DB woes.
Josh: I'll always take an AWS story.so well, we're ready to wrap it.
Ben: Yeah, let's wrap it.
Josh: All right. Well, this has been founder quest, find us on founder quest, [00:35:00] podcast.
com and, give us, reviews and ratings on the podcast platforms of your choice. until next time, I don't know, keep shipping.
Ben: Keep shipping. [00:36:00]