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Benedicte talks to Geoff about the marketing experiments they’re doing this fall.
Now that the business is a bit more stable, Geoff’s putting his focus back on marketing. He shares the three marketing experiments they’ll be doing later this year: “cleaning out the gutters”, working with creators, and building their content factory.
Benedicte and Geoff also talk about SEO, content products, and more.
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What is Slow & Steady?
Join us as we share what it's like to build and launch a bootstrapped startup while working for yourself full-time. Benedikt is working on Userlist, and Benedicte is establishing herself as a Gatsby expert and developer advocate for hire.
Welcome to Slow and Steady, the podcast you get to follow along as we build products in public. Each week, we'll give you an honest peek into our lives as we share our struggles, our wins, and everything in between. I'm Benedicte. Today is August 22nd, and this is episode number 187. And I'm feeling excited because I'm joined by Jeff Roberts, Marketing cofounder of Otsera and also as of April, my, colleague, 2 days a week.
Benedicte:And today, we're chatting about marketing. But first, how are you feeling, Geoff?
Geoff:I am feeling Pretty good. I have a feeling that I'm sort of at the end of something, and a a new beginning on the horizon. I've been Traveling, for the last 4 months, and I'm gonna be traveling for 2 more months. But on Friday, I leave Europe and head back to to North America, and it feels like the end of the chapter sort of. So I'm, a little sad about that, but but, Excited for what comes next too.
Benedicte:So what countries did you hit while you were in Europe?
Geoff:Greece, Sweden, and Scotland.
Benedicte:That that is diverse like, that is diverse set of countries.
Geoff:Absolutely. Yeah. A little bit of everything. They they couldn't be more different culturally, let me tell you.
Benedicte:Give her, like, one example. I heard you I've read that you love the, cinnamon buns in Sweden, the.
Geoff:Very good.
Benedicte:Those in our way as well. So yeah.
Geoff:Absolutely. Yeah. I think in general, just going from Greece to Sweden was sort of a Shock to the system. I've been telling people, like, every conversation that I heard between Greek people was sort of combative and loud. And you go to Sweden and everyone's very quiet and polite, and it was like polar opposite in terms of, just the interactions between people.
Benedicte:How's Scotland?
Geoff:Scotland's great. It's very, very beautiful. I love it in that sense. Certainly, it's rainy. I mean, we've had a lot of rain since we've been here, and, I have 2 little kids that are trapped in the house when it rains, so that that part's tough.
Geoff:But it it's just a beautiful country, and it makes you feel good about the world. It's, like, still wild and untouched, and, It's good. I like it.
Benedicte:You gotta take a page out of Norwegian like, the Norwegian playbook, which is there is no bad weather, only bad clothes. Which is one of our, sayings, and that's what we tell kids when they say I don't wanna come and go outside, when it's raining, it's like
Geoff:That that makes total sense. That's there's, like, no fashion in Scotland. Everything is just very practical clothing. Everyone is, you know, dress for all weather at at all times. And my family coming from Greece where we were wearing bathing suits for 3 months showed up completely ill prepared and Basically, had to buy a new wardrobe, to insulate us from the rain.
Benedicte:Oh, yeah. It's the same thing here. My sister who grew up in England, though, where they just Pretend they don't have bad weather. I don't know what's up with that. But, she always laughs at me because I will travel nowhere without my woolen layer.
Benedicte:Like, there's always a wound layer with me wherever I go, and I've had good use of it. Like, I traveled India, and we went to See the sunrise in Himalaya, and it's cold.
Geoff:Sure.
Benedicte:Put on my wool layer underneath the summer dress, and you're all good to go. So yeah. But that's not what we're talking about today even though, Europe, is a fun topic since I live there. Anyway, I saw on Twitter that you're planning to do marketing experiments for this fall, and I would love to hear more about them.
Geoff:Yeah. What was your planning? I would say the short version is I should have been doing a lot more marketing experiments, over the course of the last 2 or 3 years. But, you know, like like a lot of founders, I've been sort of sucked into helping the business wherever it needs help. And, Over the last few years for me, that's been a lot of product management and a lot of customer success, customer support.
Geoff:So marketing has been more of an afterthought than it probably should Should have been. And I feel like we're at the point now where we have good conversion rates. We've got a steady customer base. We're sort of ready to go faster. So I've been spending much of this summer trying to clear my plate a little bit.
Geoff:We've brought on some some help and support to help ease that burden, And I'm excited to get back to what is sort of my primary skill, what I'm supposed to bring to the team, which is marketing expertise. So I've just been thinking through kinda what comes next, how do we accelerate everything from a growth perspective. And as part of that, what what you alluded to, I'm gonna be publishing sort of a website where I talk about What I'm working on, what the strategy is, sharing results, and all that kind of stuff, just because I think that content will be interesting to other SaaS founders.
Benedicte:Mhmm. So you're saying even though you have a marketing founder on board, which is, like, everybody's dream, all the, like, the tech indie indie founders, You're saying they might not always have time for marketing?
Geoff:Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. It's just, You know, you hear so much about, you should delegate this, you should delegate that, and I think that advice is always coming from a good place. But if you're a bootstrap business, you can only delegate once you can afford to delegate.
Geoff:Know, with our growth, we've all worn lots of hats because that's what we've had to do to get the business to where it is today. And we're at the point now where we, you know, are doing a little bit better, can bring some people on to help with support, and ultimately there, you know, there is an opportunity costs to not having the marketing founder focused on marketing, you're not gonna grow as fast and be able to make those sorts of investments in other areas of the business that you want to. So, we had to be pretty deliberate about, you know, bringing on additional help and finding a way to free up a little bit more of my time to focus on this stuff.
Benedicte:And for, you know, long time listeners, I think a lot of the push to getting some more support help Came after some long discussions with, Jane and Benedikt of Eucerless, when we all met in Athens. So full full circle here, on silent study.
Geoff:Yes.
Benedicte:Because I didn't say this in the introduction, but those who are wondering where Benedict is, He is on vacation, which is well deserved because he never really takes any long vacation, so I'm very happy for him. But what are like, what's, Like, your top 3 experiments you wanna run, or do you have, like, some thoughts, some ideas?
Geoff:I've got a few. So the first thing whenever I've sort of sat down and said, okay. It's time to make a deliberate marketing push Beyond just kind of the day to day work that is marketing. The 1st place my mind always goes is, like, let's clean out the gutters. And What I mean by that is let's make sure sort of all the plumbing through which we acquire customers is clear and working as efficiently as possible.
Geoff:So The very first track of work and something we've sort of already started on, at least in a minor way, is, really just having, like, myself, You, our design lead, James, and then some customers go through the sign up and onboarding process for and make notes, What's working? What's not? Where are people getting stuck? What could, just be a smoother workflow to get people through sign up and onboarding? And I think the reason to to start there is just it's one of those things that it's one of the only things that affects every marketing channel.
Geoff:If If you can make even incremental improvements in that whole user experience around sign up and onboarding, it's gonna make every channel perform better. So That's kind of the first task. The second one is the one that I'm most excited about, and that is We've had a lot of really awesome people that have wanted to contribute to Obseta in some way. So much so we don't have opportunities to give to all of them. Again, it's like, we we've gotta grow this thing in order to be able to hire all these talented people that wanna work our project, which is a great problem to have.
Geoff:But a lot of them have come back and said, you know, we're not looking to join your team full time. We're not looking for crazy Compensation. We just like either the idea that you're working on or the model that you use to run the company, and we wanna participate in some way. And we heard this from, like, 1 or 2 people, then 3 or 4, then 5 or 6, and really high caliber people. And I just said to myself, like, we're we're sitting on an amazing opportunity that we're not taking advantage of.
Geoff:So the sort of second project is going to be, how do we take these people, give them something relevant to that we actually need to get done, that we actually think is a good opportunity for the business, that we haven't prioritized ourselves or just don't have time to get to yet, and sort of match these people with projects in a way that, You know, they're excited to contribute to Obseta, and we're getting something out of it too. And I think the other fun thing about this model is not only Getting to start to work with some of these people, but we can give them projects that are sort of risky, that have High potential upside, and if they don't work out, so be it. Mhmm. So we've got 3 or 4 people already, who I think are a great fit for these types of projects and figuring out how we can sort of systemize this This whole thing, I guess, is the next step. So we've talked about, like, do we have a, like, contributor of the month or a creator of the month that works with us on a Given project each each month and we just open up 1 opportunity a month or something like that.
Benedicte:I like that. Creator of the month. That's kinda cool. And if we need more spacing, it could be creator of the quarter.
Geoff:Absolutely. Yep.
Benedicte:Yeah. I
Geoff:would love to I would love to get to the I would like to do, like, quarterly cohorts eventually Mhmm. Where we just say, like, here's 2 or five people that are working on these projects this quarter, and then we're gonna have sort of another batch next quarter. And, certainly, the objective there is to to build a pool of people that we would eventually hire hire onto our team.
Benedicte:Mhmm.
Geoff:But from a marketing perspective, I guess, it's just a matter of, Here are, you know, new people that want to contribute and sort of help get outside out there. And I think Having more talented voices interested in that is always a good thing.
Benedicte:And then whatever like, I've come from that. Like, now I'm thinking, like because, you know, I like to live stream, which listeners know I haven't done it in a while. Yeah. But then it could be, like, live streaming with them, helping them get set up. So if they're gonna create, for instance, like, a project showcasing Laravel plus outseta, we could, Do a live stream where you and I kind of come on and answer questions and help them get up to speed faster.
Benedicte:In addition to what we are working on, which is these template businesses that we're gonna have with their own design and their own brand and marketing, That we're gonna be able to, set up in different languages and different tools and different technologies, I guess, is the point.
Geoff:Yep. So that's that's number 3. That's a perfect segue.
Benedicte:That's number 3. Okay.
Geoff:Number number 3, I would say is, The way that I've started thinking about this, and we talked about it a little bit last night, but is we need to build sort of a content factory at outset. And the transition that I would describe is we've done a lot of content marketing in the past. Most of it has just been me as The founder writing about our entrepreneurial experience. And then when it's come to creating, like, tutorial focused content, Most of it has been really bad. It's it's been me just doing, like, screen recordings with really low level polish, and, I think that was appropriate for our stage.
Geoff:Like, in an early stage startup, you're moving so fast. The product is changing all the time. Investing a lot of time in all these tutorial videos, they're just gonna be irrelevant 2 days later. But we're a little bit more established now, Sort of more stable of a business. And I think, first of all, there's more frameworks, more technologies, etcetera, we need to create guides for, but also the production polish needs to be higher, and we have more people, yourself included, Participating.
Geoff:So how do we create a factory where we can crank out all this content in a way that's uniform and consistent and, relatively well well polished in that kind of thing. That's kind of the 3rd big project, I think.
Benedicte:So this is a video we land on again. I only remember mall Molly's Marathoners, which will be a membership, and course, Community, business,
Geoff:and then we go ahead. We're gonna do a a course, SaaS product in a membership site. Molly's Marathon versus the membership site. Yeah. The SAS product was, I don't think we've actually named
Benedicte:it yet. Name it, but it was it was like, oh, that was my yeah. Like, to do list for families. Because one of the cool things about Atsara is that you can have an account that is connected to multiple team members, I e, family members. So we could showcase that with an, family chore app.
Benedicte:We need to give it a good name.
Geoff:I think we had Family Family Factors was the,
Benedicte:family factor.
Geoff:Placeholder names.
Benedicte:I don't know. Alliterations. Is that what it's called in English? Yeah.
Geoff:Maybe. Yeah.
Benedicte:Maybe. And then the, and then the course was
Geoff:Peak productivity. So that was just gonna give us an opportunity to Sort of troll all the productivity gurus out there.
Benedicte:Oh, I have to send you we we should almost reach out to him. It's like One of my all time favorite like, I don't know if it was, like, TikTok or I think I don't think it was TikTok because it's so old. I think maybe it's just like a Twitter video. Anyway, this guy, like, does a productivity morning, like, routine video, of him, like, as a dad, And it is the funniest thing ever. I'm gonna we're gonna put that in the show notes.
Benedicte:But he basically is like, I begin my day with Shavasana, Laying in bed, pretending to sleep longer than my wife. That is my rest. And then it's like And then it just keeps going about, like, all the things he gets to practice when trying to, like, put clothes on the toddler. And, but it's just, like, it's so, like, Purely, like, in the moment. I thought he was inspired.
Benedicte:Probably read something about, you know, like, these productivity theorists and just had to
Geoff:Sure.
Benedicte:Yeah. Because they're usually, you know, single men, and, like, their mornings are gonna be different than
Geoff:Yep.
Benedicte:Other people's morning, like, you know, if you don't wanna get up at 4, which some people claim they do. Anyway, Yeah. So those are the 3 businesses, and it's kind of taken a little bit inspiration from Tailwind, which have these templates that have, like, Fake businesses, which showcases I guess they have next. All of theirs are next, the the React framework and Tailwind that you can copy. But then what we wanna do is to have 3 businesses, fake businesses, and then we can do Framer, the framer version, framer version, the WeWeeb and version, the Webflow, the Laravel, the React, whatever people can contribute with.
Benedicte:But all of the sign assets will be there and kind of all of the features will be there so that we can fuel this content factory.
Geoff:Exactly. And and I think the other thing it does is sort of going back to project 2 is it allows other people to contribute. Like, Sort of the common thread here is we have a small team. How do we do more within the context of a small team? And we've had a lot of people With very framework specific expertise, say, I wanna create an outside of demo.
Geoff:Can I do that for you in next dotjs or whatever it is? And I think now we can say, yes. We have this hypothetical business. Here's the branding. This is what this project looks like.
Geoff:You just need to go build it, and, we can get more people contributing in that way.
Benedicte:And then I think it also will become a great resource for People wanting to build their business because then they can see, like, oh, I'm more of a molly's marathoner, and I know this technology, or I am enamored by enamored, enamored, enameled. Enamored. Yes. By this technology. So and I can see, oh, I can build the features I want with this technology and then go and, like, do that.
Benedicte:While it can be hard coming in, like, oh, I wanna create a membership business. It's like there's so many Possibilities. And also hard to know, like, can I build this with this framework? And then we can showcase, yes, you can have these features with this framework.
Geoff:Yeah. Yeah?
Benedicte:It's cool. I like it.
Geoff:It is. I'm excited.
Benedicte:So I guess, another well, do you wanna talk more about it? Do you have, like, a 4th and 5th and 6th? Like
Geoff:I don't. I mean, I I think a lot of it is, honestly, not like we're Doing too much new and too much groundbreaking. It's just spending more time on the stuff that that already has been working. And, like, the acquisition channels for us are sort of the common ones for a bootstrap SaaS company. It's content.
Geoff:It's SEO. It's affiliates. It's referrals. Some integration partnerships. We don't we don't have, like, this, magic pill we can pull out that is some crazy idea no one's ever thought of.
Geoff:We know where to reach our audience. We're sort of start up people ourselves, and we market to similar types of people. So it it's more just, Sort of beating the drum more more steadily and, investing more time in marketing in general.
Benedicte:What did you call, because you have, like, branding and then you have the Yep. Kind of the other pieces. See, this is this is me not knowing that much about marketing, I guess.
Geoff:So I I think all of that is is marketing brand like, everything you're thinking of is is marketing, and it's all stuff we need to to spend more time on, frankly. But I think when people hear marketing, what they usually think is is lead gen. And That that's certainly true. Like, the objective of this is we're trying to turn up the volume and acquire customers more quickly and, certainly, Sort of upping lead gen is one of the ways to get there. But I do think that sometimes marketing might Might actually be the wrong word.
Geoff:Sometimes growth is is a better way to look at what you're trying to do. Whether it's stuff like the onboarding and sign up flow improvements that I mentioned, whether it's stuff like proactively fighting churn. There's lots of other Things you can do to get the objective that you're looking for, which is revenue growth. I do think in our case, like, We've got some work to do in that regard, but, I think we need to crank up the the lead gen and the traffic to the site and, you know, the number of free trials that sign up per month, and, that's gonna be a big part of the focus.
Benedicte:So you kinda answered that. Yeah. My my 2nd plan question was, like, what were what has been the main channels, so far? And that is so how do we do how how are we I I remember looking at it, but, like, how are we in terms of SEO? Are we doing good?
Geoff:It's very we have a weird a weird story with SEO. So in in short, Outsetta is a all in one tech stack to Oh, we got that. SaaS or membership type business. But what that means is it's a it's a platform that's a billing system, a CRM, Email marketing tools, a help desk, financial reports. It's a tech stack for a subscription business.
Geoff:But from an SEO perspective, The keywords that are most relevant to our business, it doesn't make sense for us to focus on them. If we tried to rank number 1 for CRM software or email marketing software or billing software, that would just be a fool's errand. It would be wasted effort and we would never get anywhere. So we haven't really focused deliberately on a small set of target Keywords in the way that most people that focus on SEO do. And that in and of itself is a a bit of a missed opportunity.
Geoff:There are keywords this week we discussed, there are keywords that don't directly describe our product per se that we should probably be targeting things like authentication for a Framer website. Framer doesn't offer authentication. Oceta offers authentication That works well on a framework website. If we can rank for those sorts of search terms, we can win business off off those rankings. So There is an SEO play, but we haven't done a lot of that to date, sort of in terms of deliberately targeting keywords.
Geoff:What we have done Go ahead. Yeah.
Benedicte:And I was thinking because because 1 I mean, I know that we have, like, you know, membership site or membership features for Webflow or membership Something. Webflow, which obviously is is trying to get people who search for how to create a membership site with Webflow. Yep. Then we could also kinda have, as you said, like, authentication for Webflow, billing for Webflow. The only thing I'm wondering if We created all of those if those pages would be too similar, and they would end up, like, being flagged as duplicate content, or, like, how Yeah.
Benedicte:You know? Or if we just need to put all of those words in like, bake them into the Webflow Plus, etcetera, Like, landing page or if that will be too watered out. Like, that would be interesting to to know.
Geoff:I think, in short, I have sort of a Abnormal perspective on this topic maybe. I think a SEO consultant would tell you a 100%, you should, You know, build landing pages for everything. You should have authentication for Webflow and email for Webflow and, billing for Webflow and all these all these different pages and just crank out these pages. And because there's a high number of them and they're all targeting different keywords, they're gonna rank and send you relevant traffic. And that isn't necessarily wrong.
Geoff:Tons of businesses take that approach, and it works. Something that, maybe I Overvalue is keeping out SETA and sort of the surface area that we have to manage and maintain Small and simple. And I've always sort of steered away from, like, anything related to programmatic SEO are just building massive numbers of landing pages. Because while these things might work, they exponentially increase The amount of real estate that you need to sort of oversee. And I would rather just have, like, a 3 or 5 page website that converts really simply and drive relevant traffic to it other ways.
Geoff:It's kind of a difference in approach. I don't know if one is more right or more wrong, but I know that I'm sort of biased towards that, That more simple approach. And I think part of that comes back to how we run the company too. We are this small bootstrapping team. If, You know, I had a $100,000,000 in funding, and I had an SEO agency overseeing all these landing pages.
Geoff:I would probably go out and Take a strategy more like that. But that's it's another I'll
Benedicte:code them. Yeah.
Geoff:Yeah. And and even, like, there's other I'm gonna make all the SEO consultants out there puke, but there's other, other things that I just Don't love. Like, everyone will tell you you should have competitors, competitor comparison pages. And, again, they're right. And I even think that that is a better tactic because people do search for brand name competitor, brand name alternative.
Geoff:But every competitor comparison page that I see is full of incorrect information, and it's just kind of this half assed page, and it just upsets me.
Benedicte:I I feel like those are more, like, hard to maintain because you have to go out and, like, check your competitor all the time to see if your, like, page comparison table is correct While creating kinda something like authentication for X Framework and membership chart for X Framework Yep. Could be easily kind of, created if you had, compostable I think they call it compostable content now. Like, where you have, like, different content pieces and you can mix them together. Because the the the copy or, like, you know, the premise for email with Webflow is the same as email for Framer. Like, it's It would be the same thing.
Benedicte:It would just be switching out, like, the the thing it's connected to. So that is that is program possible To programmatically create without having, like, glaring errors or just, like, super bland, boring pages because I think that's the other aspect and especially now with AI. Like, people are gonna crank out so many pages. It's not even like, It's just there's gonna be too many pages.
Geoff:This is actually a marketing experiment I've been thinking about. So this, indie hacker, his name is Danny Postma. He he has this huge huge following on social, and He published something earlier this year that basically said everybody thinks to be a successful indie hacker, you need to have a big social audience. You don't. Here's how to do it if you don't have an audience.
Geoff:And, the post basically outlines sort of finding keywords that, have very little competition but high relevance and creating a whole bunch of, content sort of programmatically around related keywords. And, he sort of proves with one of his products that you can Build a you can build up social or, organic traffic very, very quickly using this approach. Mhmm. There's no way in hell I'm gonna do that on outside of website, but I have I have a side project's website. Yeah.
Geoff:And I wanna take his exact methodology and do it on the side project and then sort of Have that be one of the experiments that I can report back on and say, this is something that I don't want to do, but I'm gonna I'm gonna try it over here and see if it actually works. And if it works, what can we learn from this? What can we borrow and apply to our business?
Benedicte:Mhmm. Yeah. Because you you could do the same approach, but be more thoughtful about the content that you create for those pages, like finding these keywords and and then that's something that we've never talked about, but I've been thinking about this week because we wanna sell that in our other business. You know, Ulla and I have, like, focusing on becoming, the or offering DevRel services, and what we've done so far has been Getting sponsorships to build, pruner follows, and we really enjoyed that. We're trying to expand on that.
Benedicte:And in a so that would we we would call that, like, real world Real world apps are, like, you can sponsor a real world app. But then the other thing that is, like, closely related is what somebody coined content products, I guess and one of the most well known in developer circles are JWTIO, which is owned by Auth0, which explains how, JSON Web Tokens work, and we even link to them from our
Geoff:We do. Yeah.
Benedicte:Our, documentation because we Because it's a great resource. Right? So I've been thinking about and we haven't talked about this before at all, but, like, is there any, like, content products we could build Potentially, maybe not this fall, because I would love to do more of these. Any content products we could build for. And the only thing that I came up with so far is, like, a membership pricing calculator or something like you know, how should you price your, Price your memberships and, like, have copy around that, and then you can, like, tweak things, and you could get, like, different And this is what I can say in English, tears.
Benedicte:Tears.
Geoff:Tears.
Benedicte:Tears. I always wanna see tires, and it's that's not correct. Tears. But that was, like, my best idea when I was just, like, thinking about it. But, I am sure there are things our audience would like To see as like a like JWT, which is like a dev focused one.
Benedicte:But Yep. For our audience, is there, like, A content product we could make that could be, yeah, a spare head for us.
Geoff:Sure. Absolutely.
Benedicte:I don't know if you can Do you have any ideas on the top of your head?
Geoff:The the one that I've always thought about is, So we have payment like, people know Stripe payment links. That set of offers payment links to It wouldn't so much be a content product. It would be more a free tool. But if we could just have a website where you can come, connect to Stripe, create a payment blank, and it's got outside of branding on it and whatnot. Mhmm.
Geoff:That could be sort of a free entry level tool, that I think a lot of people would use.
Benedicte:To create instead of creating them in Stripe? Or
Geoff:Yeah. Mhmm.
Benedicte:Yeah. Because
Geoff:because we wouldn't charge for it. Stripe charges you for it.
Benedicte:I see. Interesting. Interesting. Thing because then we do the direct integration with Stripe.
Geoff:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Benedicte:I like it.
Geoff:So yeah. It's one of those, it's one of those things I I think, it's what can we do with a relatively Small engineer engineering lift.
Benedicte:Yeah. Yeah. Because that's another like, so content products is one name that I Heard, like, very recently. Another one is engineering as marketing, where you take, like, sawdust from engineering and create something out out of that. And then you have side projects as marketing.
Benedicte:So I'm trying to, like, figure out what term to use and, like, how to explain this as a service, Because some of the especially if it's, like, you know, engineering sawdust, like, it has to come from it or not has to, but it's because somebody did something in engineering. But if you wanna outsource it, I'm thinking content products or, like, side project marketing could be interesting. Because we interviewed Marie from Llama Life, And her fidget spinner was, like, her top acquisitions channel for a long time, and it's just like fidget spinner.com, I think, and you can spin a fidget Spinner in the web browser. And, and that's been, like, a huge, huge way for her. Like, for for a while, that was, like, one of her, larger acquisition channels because it went viral.
Benedicte:But that's the hard thing about these kind of projects. Like, it's really hard to promise that things will go viral or will, like, have Get a massive track traffic. It's it's it's riskier that way. Like, it's it's hard to promise. But but yeah.
Geoff:You never know unless you try. That's the the name of the game.
Benedicte:Yeah. But then I guess it's easier to use internal. So this is what I'm thinking about then. If we're gonna try to sell it as a service, like how to and then how to price it. And if people are willing to do these kinds of bets outside of their business, when they actually have to pay like, They have to make a purchasing decision.
Benedicte:It's not just engineering playing a little bit on their off time.
Geoff:Yeah. The the thing that's tough To me about this topic in general is I think a lot of people I was reading on Twitter earlier today, a a founder of a a company called Pali. And he he was saying, like, our growth has come from free tools. You should build free tools. Here's the free tools that we built.
Geoff:And you look at his product, and the free tools that he created are a perfect sort of natural step towards using his paid product. And I think if you have a product and can identify an opportunity like that, fantastic. But some products tend to lend themselves to that better than others. And I I have seen a lot of founders, like, become obsessed with this idea of engineering is marketing or we need to create free tools. And there just isn't sort of a tool that really fits with their product.
Geoff:So, I guess, don't don't force it is the is the point.
Benedicte:And that is why also JWTIO works so well
Geoff:because it's Yeah.
Benedicte:Like, everybody who who wants to do anything with authentication from As a developer or even as an as a non developer, you Yeah. Gotta understand a little bit about this. And and I think that was the first I think that was the site that I ended up on when I first researched subject, like I don't know when. But, like, it's been it's been there for in my kind of developer life for a long time, and and it feels Doesn't feel like marketing because it's very educational, and it's doesn't push push Auth0 that much. I mean, it pushes so little that every authentication service I see who's that at their source.
Benedicte:Like, even direct competitors of Auth0.
Geoff:Oh, trust me in year 1 of. You know, we we started having more technical tickets, and very quickly, I got into a conversation with Dave, our other cofounder, who is an engineer, about what what's actually happening from a code perspective when somebody authenticates and Mhmm. He said, oh, there's a JWT access token passed. And for me, that was just like, what the heck is that? And he he sent me a link, and I I read it, and I, you know, got it more than I did before.
Geoff:So Yeah.
Benedicte:I think though. I think though. Like, I would love to make something similar, but for no coders. Like, authentication for no coders that, in essence, ends up explaining JWTs and and other mechanisms, but more visually and more for somebody that's not coming from a technical background. Because Auth0 is very much like their That site and, like, that kind of marketing is very much towards developers be because it has to be implemented by a developer.
Benedicte:While no coders who use tools like ours, like, they they have a different, like Yep. I don't know. Different
Geoff:Back then get it. I guess. They don't get it.
Benedicte:I mean no. But they don't get that kind of a explanation, which is, like, perfect. Like, I loved it because it was short to the point. I was like, okay. Yes.
Benedicte:I get it. But then there's, like, a different way of a more visual way of explaining it that I think could be very beneficial to People who do enjoy tools like Framer and web web flow, those kinds of tools because I assume they are visual thinkers since they love these tools. Well, like, I don't wanna go and talk like, drag on sliders. I just wanna, like, write it in code and get it redone. So, yeah, That's
Geoff:There there's such an opportunity to do that for everything authentication related in the no code space, but especially single sign on too. The conversations we have with people around single sign on, people have no idea what it is, how it operates. They just Get it in their head that they need single sign on. And if single sign on is present, it's gonna allow them to log in to, you know, every product out there that they could ever want to log in to and, very quickly, even if they have a a project that Our single sign on features can support and support well. They just don't understand how these how the different pieces are connected.
Geoff:So there's a huge educational play there.
Benedicte:Yeah. That's interesting. Could start for the blog post, though. Mhmm. And not a content product even though that would be so much more fun for somebody who just wants to no.
Benedicte:No. I'm just kidding. I think that's it, though. I hope, I hope the listener you, dear listener, has enjoyed listening to our plans. If you have any inputs or comments, DM me on Twitter.
Benedicte:My DMs are always open unless, you know, x closes them without telling you. But I opened them again, so they should be open. So feel free to, to DM me or Jeff, I guess, if you have any input. And I guess that's it.
Geoff:Yeah. Thanks for letting me sub in. This was fun.
Benedicte:Yeah. This was fun. And then next time Benedict has vacation, we can talk about how it went.
Geoff:Alright. Let's do it. Put it on the books.
Benedicte:Yes. Let's leave it on the books. So we usually end with a see you around the interwebs. Bye bye. Yeah.