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In this episode of the Laravel Podcast, Matt Stauffer sits down with Hank Taylor, Laravel’s head of marketing, to unpack what it really looks like to market the ecosystem surrounding a major open-source framework. Hank shares his path into the world of Laravel, his deep roots in marketing (especially in open-source) and how he’s helping shape the future of community engagement.
They dive into the revitalization of in-person meetups, Laravel’s evolving marketing strategy, and the cultural shift toward embracing PHP. The conversation also explores the challenges and opportunities of moving from a one-person marketing approach to a more structured team effort, with an emphasis on bridging the gap between technical and non-technical team members.
- Matt Stauffer on Twitter
- Hank Taylor on Twitter
- Hank Taylor on LinkedIn
- Laravel Twitter
- Laravel Website
- Tighten Website
- Podcast Suggestions
- Laravel meetups
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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.
Creators and Guests
What is The Laravel Podcast?
The Laravel Podcast brings you Laravel and PHP development news and discussion.
Matt Stauffer:
Hey everybody and welcome back to Laravel podcast season seven. I'm your host, Matt Stauffer, CEO of a Tighten. And in this season, I'm joined every episode by a member of the Laravel team. Today I'm joined by Hank Taylor, Head of Marketing at Laravel. Hank, could you say hi to everybody and tell us a little bit about what do you do at Laravel?
Hank Taylor:
Hello, hello. So I do a few things here. I help run a few teams. So dev rel, marketing, revenue operations, support, and also helping establish our sales motion for more of the enterprise stuff. So.
Matt Stauffer:
I'm already learning things. We're literally like five seconds in the podcast. I knew, I guess I knew that you did DevRel. I didn't know you did RevOps and I don't know. Just got a lot on your plate. I mean, they are all marketing related, but still it's a lot.
Hank Taylor:
Yep, I like all the go-to-market stuff. Which by the way, is a term that Taylor didn't even know, he'd never heard the term go-to-market until I'd used it a few times. And he even told me, he messaged Adam Wathan. He's like, do you know what GTM go-to-market is?
Matt Stauffer:
All right, so let's say that listeners don't know. Can you give the description you would have given to them at that point?
Hank Taylor:
It's go to market. It's the broader term for like, it's for someone like me where, okay, I'm doing a little more than marketing and a little more than my title would lead you to believe at first glance. You need a broader term for all the things you're doing that are kind of customer facing. So how do you actually take your products out to market? Go to market.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I would you consider, cause I think you said customer support. Would you consider customer support as part of GTM or is that a separate aspect to what you do?
Hank Taylor:
That's one of the ones that, you know, sometimes it's part of GTM. Like when companies get bigger, you might have...
You might have support roll up into a CRO for a bit or you might get a chief customer officer you know that will own that and separate or whatever. But yeah, I would consider it go to market in many ways, especially if they're owning renewals like once you get into enterprise customer support...
Matt Stauffer:
Sure, if there's any money related in there, then yeah.
Hank Taylor:
Yeah, once you have a team that's doing, you know, quarterly reviews with customer, with the bigger customers and the renewals and that sort of stuff, they have to be very tightly woven with the go-to-market teams and part of the go-to-market teams. They have to, they have to know what's coming down the pipe from sales, that they're going to be doing onboarding and their capacity is directly tied to sales and marketing capacities.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, totally.
Hmm. Okay. That's helpful. I mean, I, I was first just opened to the idea because when I took over as CEO at Tighten, I was like, Oh, I guess I've always been tangentially related to marketing because I did the podcast and I spoke on conference and stuff like that, but I wasn't really super involved in sales. I was just like, I show up to a sales meeting when somebody tells me to, so even just the idea that sales versus sales and marketing, and there's just those very rudimentary delineations between those.
I was like, there's a whole world here that I don't know anything about. I know that some people listen to podcasts. They're like, I've been talking about C-suite delineations for, you know, early stage startups every day. But there's a lot of people that are like, bro, I don't know. I just show up and code every day. So thank you for explaining a little bit.
So, you know, one of the things that I ask for everybody when they first kind of come in the podcast is for us to hear the story of what we were doing before you joined Laravel. And then what was the story of you joining Laravel? Because it seems like everybody has like a little bit of different story of what their process is like. So.
Where were you before? Where'd you come from? And what brought you here?
Hank Taylor:
Okay, maybe I'll go back a bit further than people normally go. Back to 2007.
Matt Stauffer:
As far as you want. We've gone the whole way back to somebody learning how to code in high school. So you're safe. You can do whatever you want.
Hank Taylor:
There you go. Well, so the path to me getting at Laravel or even in this world of I'm a non-technical person at a technical company started because MySQL had an office in Boise, Idaho where I grew up and where I've moved back to here.
Matt Stauffer:
What?
Hank Taylor:
Yeah, they had like a satellite sales and marketing office. And my brother was one of their very first marketing managers.
Matt Stauffer:
Really? huh. Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
This was pre, this was before Sun acquired them, which was later acquired by Oracle. And so I was his intern fresh out of high school. I needed a summer job. I didn't want to do construction. I knew that my future was in an office. I was like, I might as well get started now. And back then, boy, let me tell you marketing, now I'm taking you on a tangent. I told you I'm a yapper sometimes.
Matt Stauffer:
Do it. Yeah, please.
Hank Taylor:
Back then marketing, in open source was a totally different game. Like no one had done it. And MySQL was the first billion dollar open source acquisition. That and JFrog. And they just beat JFrog. Like the JFrog guys still talk about it. I'm friends with one of them. But back then, my job as an intern was I would scroll to the bottom of the fastest growing sites of the week. You could get a list from Alexa, which is now dead but I would scroll to the bottom of the 500 sites. I wouldn't check the porn sites because I was too squeamish for that. And there would be someone called a webmaster and they would put their phone number and their email on there.
Matt Stauffer:
huh. Email address would. really? Wow. Okay.
Matt Stauffer:
So I would just copy those onto a sheet. Sales guy would call them and say, hey, you're one of the fastest growing sites. You're probably on MySQL.
Hank Taylor:
because 90 % of the internet at the time was. And they go, yeah, great. You want to buy support or do you want to be on the line if everything blows up? And that was it. Billion.
Matt Stauffer:
That's brilliant marketing actually, I love that.
Hank Taylor:
Yeah, credit to my brother and his boss. And so later on my SQL's second acquisition once I got you know, I don't have to go on to it, but basically my brother ended up in the Bay Area. I followed him to an open source BI company. And then my greatest hits have all been these open source community driven companies. So Neo4j, that's a niche database. Not too many people know it, but a lot of people listening will. I was, you know, employee number 50 there. I was like number 30 at GitLab and I built up the SDR team, the digital marketing did a couple things. They gave me more responsibility than they should have. And I was really proud of the work I did there just for a short year. And then skip ahead a bit to Vercel. I was the first marketer there. I owned similar teams. I had DevRel, RevOps, and marketing and helped build out the sales team there. And...
Yeah, that one was like the really big ride because I was in an executive position, know, hyper growth during Zerp. It was crazy. And then I went to some company and quickly left because I was able to go full time advising. And so as this I was full time advising focused on DevTools and so over the year and a half between Vercel and Laravel, I was advising just tons of dev tools, which really even accelerated my learning even more, even though I thought I knew a lot after Vercel. But one of those was Laravel. So when Accel started the process of investing,
They were on the board at Vercel. So one of their board members is a friend of our board and obviously, you know, they're all part of the same investment firm at Excel. And they told Taylor and Tom, our president and COO, hey, check out this Hank guy, see if you can get him to join. I said, there's no way I'm joining. I've had enough full-time rides. But then Tom and Taylor, they're different people to work for. So after a few, no, I just mean like, I mean,
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Together? okay.
Hank Taylor:
Everyone who's listening to this knows that Taylor is a different type of CEO and a different type of founder, like everything. He's a weirdo in all the ways that we love. He's this interesting enigma of like, he's strangely humble, but he drives a Lamborghini, right?
Matt Stauffer:
We love that. Yeah. Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
And we do love it. And I was like, okay, I could work for this guy. And so he and Tom, know, mainly Tom, you know, talked me into it. And yeah, I started full time at last year's Laracon. And that was the path in. So when I was a part-time advisor, most of what I helped with was a little bit of thinking about positioning of Laravel Cloud. Also with thinking about the positioning of the announcement of funding because obviously with an open source community, getting VC backed, like that's a big deal. So I thought a lot about, you know, okay, how do we, you know, how do we talk about that? When do we announce it? You know, et cetera. And then, you know, I helped put together like a little exploratory enterprise side event at Laracon so that we could see.
Hey, we just showed the demo on stage yesterday of this Cloud thing. actually, we did it the same night. So it was like, Taylor was just on stage showing this thing that we didn't even tell you guys why we were having this dinner. Now we're at the dinner. What do you think? Are any of you interested? And we figured out, these companies were years away. These companies, they could adopt as soon as we're ready. And so figuring out that enterprise piece. So that's what I did. And then you already heard all the stuff I'm doing now building out DevRel, marketing, rev ops, support sales, etc.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah. So this is not a usual question that I ask everybody, but I am very, curious. How do you break down your time and your responsibilities on a week-to-week basis?
Hank Taylor:
Hmm. It really.
It's not consistent how I break down my time and my priorities, but the first thing I center on is the products, of course.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Like it's making money.
Matt Stauffer:
June 6th.
Hank Taylor:
So, yeah, so when does this podcast come out? Okay, Nightwatch won't be launched by then, but that's the next launch. that's everything I think about.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Teaser. We just got...
Hank Taylor:
So everything kind of works back from then and constantly nagging the product teams of like, is that on track? Like, are you actually doing it on that date? Do I have time to squeeze in other work before or you know, what kind of accordion am I working with? I literally teach, like I talk to my team about Parkinson's Law. That's the, one of those, one of those like laws of the internet where work will expand to the time left to do the work. And.
Matt Stauffer:
Can you remind me which that is?
Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Yes. God, it's so true.
Hank Taylor:
So I talk about how we have to fight Parkinson's Law. So actually, the marketing sites for Nightwatch are actually done early, which is like a first ever.
Matt Stauffer:
Nice. Yeah, not until the night before at 2 a.m.
Hank Taylor:
Yeah, so props to Leah and Chris and David and Tilly on design. That's pretty incredible.
Matt Stauffer:
Nice.
Hank Taylor:
Yeah, so first thing I center on is, well, what are the product launches? I've already mapped out, OK, there's Laracon. That's like a big tier one type of thing. With that, we have a really interesting update for Forge that Taylor and now James Brooks have teased.
Matt Stauffer:
I can't wait, man.
Hank Taylor:
Oh boy, people are gonna love that. And then there's gonna be, okay, there'll be like the demo at Laracon of that thing and then the actual release. I've kind of got an idea of when that's gonna be in the following quarters. So those are the first big chunks. And then I organize, okay, who does all the main work for those different things and how much time do they need from me to get their work done, to be on block, to move forward. And that trickles all the way down to like, you know, the little things that I play with here and there of like, maybe I can send out, you know, a tweet this week or write a blog post myself or like, hey, you know, co-work with somebody. I really like.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.
Hank Taylor:
you know, I don't pair program with my team, but I do like, get on Zooms or huddles and co-work with people and all that stuff. So I don't know how well that answers your question, but that's the broad strokes.
Matt Stauffer:
It's great. How are you as a delegator? Do you find it natural? Is it something you have to work really hard at?
Hank Taylor:
I've had to work hard at that because I really like doing a lot of the type of work, right? I have an interest in all sorts of stuff,
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Other things, yeah.
Hank Taylor:
But I'm probably better at it than at Laravel than I've ever been. Part of that's because at Vercel, you know, when I was person number 30, I begged for a head count in my first couple months. I was like, hey, like the amount of stuff and traction we've got here, man, give me an employee and like... We could do some damage. And I didn't get it. Like, Vercel didn't even... Lots of people think of Vercel as this big rich company, but when I joined, they didn't even buy me a monitor. We were poor. And yeah, and I asked, I was like, hey, can I get a monitor and...
Matt Stauffer:
Oh my god. That's unreal.
Hank Taylor:
They were like, we're pretty sure you have a monitor that works. You don't need a new one. Like, you're to be fine. I'm like, dang, when did I join? That was, that was April, 2020. So I joined right at the start of COVID. Nobody knew what was going to happen. So for my first several months,
Matt Stauffer:
Wow.
Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
I had to do everything myself and then I got in this hole that took a year and a half to recover from once I started building a team of, there are too many things that only I know about that I built, because I'm an automator. I'm not a programmer, but I know how to use tools to the max. So I've built out a lot of stuff.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
And that takes a while. So here, I resist a lot of urges to build stuff and instead I try and go work with someone on my team. And really one thing that keeps me honest about this is this little phrase I have in my head, which is teaching is the essence of leadership. So I know, okay, if I'm going to be a good leader, instead of just going and doing a thing, I should actually be teaching someone how to do it and get them rolling with it.
Matt Stauffer:
Yes.
Matt Stauffer:
I love that. Okay.
Yeah, so let's talk about some of your specific projects. So I know that there's a lot of different pieces of your job that are outside of marketing, but I really do want to focus on the marketing aspects for today. And one of the things that's most interesting for me is marketing as it relates to open source. And you talked about how you like, hey, marketing with I'm sorry, it's mySQL for me. I'm supposed to say ask you all, but my sequel marketing of my sequel.
Hank Taylor:
If you worked there, they say my SQL.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I believe you 100%. It's one of these where I'm like, I, but it's my sequel, right? So, you know, marketing for my sequel and you've done this. So like, I know that at Laravel, your job isn't necessarily to market Laravel or project, right? You're, you're doing things, but I don't think it's not to do that either. You're talking about Laracon, which is as much a community event, you know, it's more community than it is. So like, what's, what's it like doing marketing for something that inherently
Hank Taylor:
But it's my sequel, I know. I know.
Hank Taylor:
It is.
Matt Stauffer:
doesn't actually like have a conversion. Like you're not gonna say like, we're gonna market Laracon. Now granted somebody signing up is cool, but like the end result is not, we have a measurable new member of the Laravel community who's invested that you can check off a thing, right? Cause so many things with marketing are like, how many sales did you make? How many, was your revenue and stuff like that? And while you are the rev ops guy, you're doing marketing in all these places that don't have direct dollars tied to it. Can you talk a little bit about what is different doing it that way, then you know like a more traditional marketing job is?
Hank Taylor:
Yeah, I love the size of company that Laravel's at right now because one, I get to be the person, I've been this person several times at several companies now. I get to be the person who introduces a lot of metric and data thinking, but also vibes are, that's such an important part of marketing.
Matt Stauffer:
Just as important. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hank Taylor:
And so, On that question, the same way that I think about, OK, here's the next. These are the main things happening that we're going to be super public about. Tier 1 launches, announcements, events, Laracon, Nightwatch, Laravel Cloud. There are also occasionally tier 1 framework updates.
We don't have any right now. Sometimes like high tier features happen and those can sneak by at a company like this where when Taylor's been operating this way for over a decade and he can get a PR on a Thursday. This happened a few weeks ago, or maybe a couple months. I'm hazy, but like he got like a PR on a Thursday. I was like, this is good. He and Joe cranked on it for a few days. And then like Wednesday, it was this cool thing.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
And I was like, Hey, Taylor, like, you know, let me in on those. Like, want to help, help me help you, you know, I want to amplify. He's like, well, that thing just came and then it was out and I knew you were working on this thing or whatever. It's like, yeah, that's pretty fair. So sometimes, you know, with open source stuff, it's so fast and especially at a company. And I've, I've told my team to be very careful about like, Hey, this company has operated successfully without us for a decade. Like,
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
You know, there is no reason for us to insert ourselves in ways that slow down or break stuff. Like that is something I've seen many marketers do is they come in, they try to insert process where something's been working. So I'm very much a, if it's not broken, like don't fix it. And there's so many other things we need to fix, you know, like Taylor's been begging me to like update the blog.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
forever. Our blog design is outdated. We'll get there. And okay, so I'm going on a super roundabout answer, but I do, we do have seasons where we will focus more on framework and open source. And we do that in different ways. So one thing we've been doing, and it's not like big on Twitter or through email type of stuff. For the first time ever, we've been sponsoring meetups and
Matt Stauffer:
Love it.
Hank Taylor:
You know, my one of the people on my marketing team, we went together to Laracon Australia and we learned, wait, there is a Laravel meetup already active in like the five major cities of Australia. And we didn't know about these and they're just like. We're like, how many are there? We start taking around. We're like, there could be there's at least 50 active Laravel meetups meeting quarterly, there might be 100, there might be 200. And so we've been doing the slow and steady work of like cataloging these and I got up, I had a moment to get on stage at at Laracon EU and I just said, hey, I've made a box, like a swag box. And if you're meetup host, you get this box. But you gotta, you gotta basically register with me because I don't know who you are, where you are, what you're doing.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
And so this is an effort that's growing and we're going to launch a meetups finder site. Right.
Matt Stauffer:
Thank God. I've been talking about this for years and I'm like, why don't we have this? Oh that's great.
Hank Taylor:
Yeah, because right now it's like, well, do I go to meetups.com? Is it on Eventbrite? Is it on Luma? And so we're like...
Matt Stauffer:
Is it called Laravel? Is it called PHP? But we really know it's Laravel. There's so many different options.
Hank Taylor:
Yes, and so what we're saying right now is if you're a PHPX meetup, there's kind of that brand. And then if you're a Laravel meetup, if you consider yourself that, we're already telling you, register with us. So this is your call. If you're hosting meetups, if you're part of a meetup and you want swag for your meetup, we'll at least send you stickers and we'll probably pay for food in most countries of the world. We've got a whole form.
Matt Stauffer:
Beautiful.
Hank Taylor:
I think you can go to Laravel.com slash meetups. I should verify that and we should edit that if it's not true.
Sorry. Giving your editor a little work here. There you go. If you go to Laravel.com slash meetups, there is a form for this. Basically, you register your meetup. We'll send you a box with a few t-shirts or hats or something to give away and a bunch of stickers for everybody. And we'll reimburse you for some food. And that's like.
Matt Stauffer:
I'm typing the same thing. Oh, it's there. 100%. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Love this.
Hank Taylor:
And we're going to make this a proper site where the host can still get this stuff and you can become a host or say, I've been hosting this for years already. And we're just going to make it easy to find these things because there are so many people who would go to meetups. Meetups are back. And I used to love going to meetups. Both as a marketer, like at Neo4j, we had a super robust meetup system and it was just great to like that's a great way to just go interact with people but then also as a marketer i used to go to a bunch of marketing meetups and it's fun so I think meetups are back people want to meet in person. So like that's one way we can just start to amplify things this year we are focused entirely on Laravel events
Matt Stauffer:
Nice.
Hank Taylor:
Laravel Lives, the Laracons, and Laravel Meetups, and these PHPX Meetups. Next year, we'll probably be expanding to other PHP events and thinking of how to sponsor those, how to get more involved. I've got two field marketers now who I can send us stuff. And then...
Matt Stauffer:
Nice.
Hank Taylor:
You know, in the years to follow, we'll continue to widen the circle as Laravel grows. But that's, you know, very long answer to, okay, how are we thinking about framework marketing? Like, that's one way. And that's one way to build community is to actually support it. We got all this VC money. got it. This is what it's for, right? And there's not a...
Matt Stauffer:
Right? We're gonna do something with it. Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
There's not a direct ROI, but you know, when I put this line item on the budget of basically stickers and food for meetups, like I think that's literally what it says. And I just dragged that out on a sheet with like a little growth rate. And you know, I talked to Tom about it and he was, I was like, you're to be cool with this, right? Cause like the bill's going to keep going and I want to spend money on these people. Like they're, they're traveling to meet and talk about us and their jobs and whatever. And yeah, easy thumbs up. I'd rather do that than ads, right?
Matt Stauffer:
Great, I love that.
Yeah, I and yes, I don't even need go into it. Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
I am gonna do ads at some point, but...
Matt Stauffer:
I would and that that kind of leads me to like another question that I didn't prepare you for so apologies. But one of the things I was curious about is I spent a lot of time trying to convince people who don't currently use PHP or Laravel that it is something you should be thinking about. It's in two primary settings. One of them being we have a potential client or somebody else's potential client. And I want to be like telling the story very consistently of Laravel and modern PHP are legitimate places for you to build the foundation of your future on. And then the other one is to newcomers to learners saying that this a good technology for you to learn there are jobs here. Are either of those things that you feel are either currently or in the future a part of your responsibility set doing marketing at Laravel?
Hank Taylor:
I do. I wasn't prepared for this, but I do have this hat. Dollar sign PHP. So the reason I made this hat, I'm going to talk about my big brother again.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay, I love it.
Hank Taylor:
Because he went on one of his big successes after my sequel was Xamarin, which was Nat Friedman's... company before Nat Friedman's company got acquired by Microsoft and he became CEO of GitHub.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I know.
Hank Taylor:
Nobody knows that Nat Friedman did Xamarin first. Xamarin was a company that did, here's why it's relevant. And you'll see like I'm a study of, like I like to study this like dev tool space. And this is what me and my brother, we talk shop about this stuff all the time. And when I told him, hey, I'm, I've been advising this PHP company and actually I think PHP, not only is it back, it was never gone, brother. Like we talked about this. And I was like, you know, cause I come from, like I was out there, I will take a little bit of credit for making Next.js the dominant React framework. Different stories for a different day. Not the right audience, but.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
You I'd heard for years PHP is dead, but I'd also heard rumors of PHP Lambos. And so then I come in, I started advising this company. I'm like, this is about to have a renaissance. And I talked to my brother about this because Zamrin, where he was head of marketing for Nat Friedman, they were a C-sharp. You used C-sharp to write mobile applications.
Matt Stauffer:
Right?
Hank Taylor:
and C sharp similarly like not the cool language and so one of the things they did was they just were like we need to make at least people who use C sharp they should at least know that they can be proud of being C sharp like they shouldn't be ashamed of it and...
So that was my first thought with like that, that silly hat, the dollar sign PHP. So I was like, Hey, you know, we make a reference to the PHP money. It's got the like variable on there. I'm very proud of that as a non-technical person.
Matt Stauffer:
That's very clever.
Hank Taylor:
And I was like, let's just, so, so you'll see a lot of efforts from our team over the next couple of years to just help people be proud of using PHP and understand that
Matt Stauffer:
I love this so much.
Hank Taylor:
Hey, they're going to be haters out there and they have less to say than ever, less valid to say than ever. And it goes into, yeah, there are secret projects I can't even talk about right now, but there are efforts being made that will make PHP more relevant than ever, including in the world of AI code gen. I'll say that much.
Matt Stauffer:
Oof, that's spicy. love this.
Hank Taylor:
That is, yeah, that could get a little spicy, but it won't be anything that's spicy to our community. Our community has an interesting relationship with AI, I think, but I don't think anyone who just heard me say that and is maybe afraid, I don't think they would be if I were able to go into it.
Matt Stauffer:
I believe that I'm not concerned. Honestly, you know, like I spend probably as much time as anybody in the community talking to business owners using or considering Laravel. And the number of times I've been asked over the last couple of months, just does it work with AI? Like they don't even know what that means. They don't know if they means AI for co-gen perspective. from a IDE perspective, integrating with APIs, they just know that if I'm talking about technology and I can't say yes to does it work with AI, like they don't want anything to do with it. So for me, from a perspective of what moves the ecosystem forward, we don't want to be at the trailing edge of things. Everyone knows I'm not an AI maximalist, right? Like I've been like very careful and very cautious, but we're going to use a useful tool when it's a useful tool at the same time, right? So I'm here for it. I'm excited.
Hank Taylor:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
I'm very interested and I appreciate you sharing that story without me prepping you about the PHP hat because I have a long and storied relationship with the PHP as does Taylor as does Laravel and a lot of it has been hopeful at the beginning and frustrated, you know in recent years and trying again recently to just say like doesn't matter doesn't matter what's happened with PHP community whatever PHP is the language you're using in a day to day and there's so much good there and we're not able to tell the story of Laravel without telling the story of PHP. We're not able to defend Laravel or be proponents of Laravel without being proponents of PHP, right? So it's got to be there. And when I saw you make that hat, I first saw it at that enterprise dinner and I did not know that this was your motivation behind it. And my first two responses were, oh my God, why would they put PHP in a freaking hat? Ya know, like, we're trying to distance ourselves from PHP and then immediately my God, I love that we are choosing to embrace because I'm like, I do write PHP every day. So why am I walking away from it? And so was like, yes, let's embrace like, yeah, I got a freaking PHP hat. I'm a nerd. OK, like, yes, this is who I am. Knowing that you are aware of that dynamic and it was intentional is just makes me extremely grateful for your thoughtfulness there.
Hank Taylor:
What I found very quickly with this community is the Laravel community is incredibly pragmatic. And part of that comes with the age of the community. This is decade old community. It's older than almost any React community, right? Y'all have seen some things come and go. And for better or for worse in some cases.
Matt Stauffer:
That is the truth. Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
and some of the things some of the things that are shunned or that we're shy about i don't I think there are ways to embrace and embolden around it and i think yeah that's part of the thought behind that and many other things that you know I've been pushing and you'll see pushing out through the company but...
Yeah, we're in an interesting renaissance for Laravel and that means there must need to be a renaissance for PHP.
Matt Stauffer:
I love it. I'm excited about it. And know, and I am currently working on a, you know, why use PHP kind of pitch. So I'm like, I'm here with you, but it took, it took some time. So I appreciate your kind of contribution to this kind of movement in our community. So.
All right. Well, we can obviously talk about each of our individual topics for like half an hour, but I got to keep this moving. So the next big question I wanted to talk to you about was the experience of marketing at Laravel prior towards Accel investment, primarily having been Taylor saying, do this thing. Now Taylor is not marketing dummy. He knows how to, you know, build a hype about a thing. He knows how to bring in, you know, like good naming and great documentation. He built the community of Laravel very intentionally. So this man understands the things, but he was one man and the marketing for most of the tools was limited to him dropping hype about it ahead of time, giving a really compelling announcement and telling people about it. And then just continuing to tweet about it every once in a while. And it was effective and it drew, you know, drove the the growth of those products for a long time, but that's not exactly how a full marketing agency, you know, set up does things. So what was it like to transition from the old world of Taylor's kind of primarily single man marketing world to trying to build a team around marketing those same products and also the new products?
Hank Taylor:
I mean, we're still in that transition. It's going to take us a while. Taylor is still the most powerful channel we have, to use a marketing term, right?
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I believe it.
Hank Taylor:
We are, I mean, Taylor has more followers than we have email subscribers, which is, that's backwards for every VC backed company like in the world. So we have a lot of work to do. Part of that's because this company didn't send emails. Which there's good and bad to that. One, there are no bad habits to break. I'm always breaking companies with bad habits on email. Most emails stink. We try, you know, we have two rules for emails. They must be useful. They must be interesting.
Matt Stauffer:
I love it.
Hank Taylor:
And that's incredibly hard to follow those two rules by the way but especially to you know a large list where some people hate if you send them even a little email that you think is important for everyone to read but nonetheless there's there's a lot to be learned you know by the end of the summer i hope that we are at the point where we are for those who subscribe to it, we're sending a monthly changelog email for framework, open source in general, includes framework, Forge, Cloud, and Nightwatch. With Forge might come other core services stuff, we call them, ya know, Vapor, Nova, Spark, Envoyer. By the way, another quick aside.
Man this this team of Taylor plus like eight nine other people they've shipped so much is one of the hardest things of onboarding people myself included to the team is just like hey we've got like 30 proper nouns as like our first party like big open source packages. So learn those nouns first. It's like learn it's like here's an extra 30 teammates whose names you have to know and you have to know what their jobs are and all that. Yeah, so that's just.
Matt Stauffer:
Oof.
Hank Taylor:
That's just like a challenge. And part of why I've told the team, like, cannot slow down the machine. So yeah, as I was saying, by the end of the summer, hopefully we've got a monthly changelog for those like four main things. That would be awesome. That would be amazing progress. In addition to these, you know, we're doing three tier one product launches this year and our biggest Laracon ever,
I'll be satisfied if we make that type of progress. Within a couple of years, I think we'll have a large and engaged email list. Email still does matter, no matter what people say. Developers like email more than they admit. And we'll have other channels. I got us on Blue Sky even.
Matt Stauffer:
Fantastic.
Hank Taylor:
So we're building out the other stuff. But Taylor is fantastic at it. This whole company is a credit to that. I don't know if I answered your question, but that was kind of my meandering there.
Matt Stauffer:
That was great. mean, and I think the acknowledgement of Taylor's abilities, a marketer, I think is really valuable because people talk often about the things that he can do. And that's not usually one of the words that comes up, you know, like people will say, oh, he's a developer. He can build these great APIs. He builds community or whatever. And I'm like, and he has an incredible innate sense of marketing. And I don't think he would call it marketing because I think he would. I mean, he wouldn't at the beginning.
Hank Taylor:
Well, his core skill is communicating, which is rare for a technical founder. His ability to write and to speak, both in short and long form, is actually unique among the founders I've worked for.
Matt Stauffer:
That makes sense.
Hank Taylor:
and I've worked for some like heavy hitters like Routch G might be unprecedented in terms of short form like social writing. Sid at GitLab you know he was really good at like internal docs and and you know kind of vision setting but not really great at the writing but...
Yeah, Taylor's a very good communicator and he was able to carry the company's distribution on his back entirely. And still does to a large degree. And there are some things we've agreed on, Like Taylor and I still check every tweet with each other that's going out from the main account. Anyways, I could talk more about that. Of course, that could be a whole hour in and of itself.
Matt Stauffer:
I love it. Yes, each of these could. Well, I have one last big question for you. And of course, if there's anything else you want to talk about, but you mentioned being a non-technical team member at a technical company. And we do need to put an asterisk on the non-technical because you're an extremely technical non-technical person. But that aside, your day-to-day job is not programming. And you're at a programming company and you have been, sounds like for the majority of your career, been a non-technical person at a technical company.
What is the experience like when you are, because I can just imagine things like you're asking things from your technical team members. Why I need you to tell me about this or whatever, or you're asking them to do things for you. You talked about having, ya know, Chris and Leah, you know, building out the thing, building out the marketing sites. Do you ever feel like there's sort of like a, you know, the stereotype of developers are, oh, well, these dumb non-technical people or non-developers or looking developers being like these freaking nerds in their parents' basement who can't communicate, do you feel like there are cultural barriers that you have to overcome? And I don't want to say specifically about Laravel, because I don't want you to have to feel like you're talking bad about people, but just in general, being a non-technical person as a technical company, are there ways, code switching, technical barriers, communication barriers or whatever that you have to overcome when you're in that kind of environment?
Hank Taylor:
Yeah, probably the biggest skill I've gained through the years is knowing how to build a team of non-technical people who can communicate with the technical people. It's part of the interview process that I have now is figuring out can these people that we're hiring, can they learn and can they communicate and mirror and
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Hank Taylor:
Also, are they brave enough to ask about things they don't know about? Like, that's the hardest thing is because, yeah, some engineers will make you feel like an idiot. And they almost, some people relish in it.
Matt Stauffer:
Yes, I just going to say that. Some of them love it.
Hank Taylor:
And so far, we don't really have anyone like that at Laravel. I've found, again, to praise the community like this community, in addition to being incredibly pragmatic, they're pretty kind. Unusually kind, I would say. I mean, that's because they felt so downtrodden themselves for the last decade. That's one of my theories.
Matt Stauffer:
Could be. Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
And part of it's because the demographic is on average older and they're not so hot to trot, whatever. Yeah, that's definitely a barrier. There is...
Some of it's intelligence. Like you do have to be smart enough, but that's that any startup, any high growth startup, you have to hire people with above average IQ on average. But there's also the other intelligence types, like for teams like this to work well. the communication has to be really good. And you've worked with some of the people on my team. They're very good communicators. And I think the person you've worked with the most, you know, I'll give her a shout, like Cynthia, I've worked with her at three different companies. Like there's a reason for that. And I've learned to like filter for, okay, people like that. And I don't know with...
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
You have to be able to get mutual respect from both the technical and the non-technical people. And it goes with other things too. Like it's the same for design teams. Like they have their own language and egos and that type of thing. and, you know, everybody has their own egos about different things and you have to find ways to get that out of the way. I guess. I don't know if that's like a super, like I could get into tactics about, know, how you get into that, but.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Hank Taylor:
That's the very high level answer, I guess.
Matt Stauffer:
In a 40 minute podcast where I'm talking about as many topics as we did, you did a lot there. Again, each of these could be a podcast on their own, but that was really good. And we are at the point where we're supposed to wrap. So before we do that, I just want to see, is there anything either of the topics we covered that you wish we'd gone to further or any other topics you really want to make sure we covered today? Obviously I'm going to have to come bring you back on later. So there's space for other things, but just in this moment, is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about?
Hank Taylor:
I mean, geez, I'm super excited about the Nightwatch launch. We talked about that a bit. I mean, that's been spoken about. There will be plenty of marketing about that, you know, in the coming week or weeks.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Soon.
Hank Taylor:
The meetups thing I'm super excited about. I don't know, if anybody's still listening at this point, I love ideas. I love the, hey, you know. Have you guys thought of doing this? Why aren't you doing this? I do weird stuff. I will try almost anything. At Laracon, I'll spill that. I don't think anybody else has really spilled this. maybe Taylor referenced it on this podcast. We're doing a golf tournament for the sponsors and speakers and a few other select guests, like a bunch of the people who bought those community bundle tickets, which is a separate big experiment. I like doing weird stuff.
We can try it all out and why not? That's what makes my job fun. And if it makes the people happy, we'll try it. If you have swag ideas, oh man, people who aren't coming to Laracon, they're gonna regret it. It's gonna be awesome. Some of this...
Matt Stauffer:
So someone has an idea, how should they tell you? Sorry, sorry.
Hank Taylor:
I'm just saying like some of the swag most of its free some of it will have to like sell. Because you'll see it's like stupid expensive to produce. Like I guess it's known that we have these artisan jackets this year. Those were sold as part of this community bundle and we only sold 55 of those tickets and then we had to shut it down. We actually sold five more than we meant to. But you'll be able to purchase those jackets they're gonna be pricey but...
Matt Stauffer:
It is known.
Hank Taylor:
man, they look so good. Yeah, and that's just dumb stuff to get excited about. That doesn't really help the company in too many ways, but yeah, what were you gonna ask? Sorry.
Matt Stauffer:
You said you said vibes at the beginning. There's there's a lot of vibes for people being excited about having something like that. And I
Hank Taylor:
I'll just say this, you'll see that that jacket, that'll be something that shows your status in the Laravel community the longer you're in it. That makes it sound worse than it is. It's something where it will be representative of where you've been.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Hank Taylor:
and what you are, I don't know. This all sounds just, until we can get into the details of it, you know, it can't do it justice. Just forget it. Just come to Laracon and you'll see.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Matt Stauffer:
I mean, I hate to be this person, but I'm already a pointer. I'm like, take my money. I literally since I heard the thing, I was like, so how am I paying you guys money to get me one of these? I haven't gotten one yet. So I'm already captive audience, so I doubt I'm the only one. OK, well.
I am very excited about all the things that you talked about here because there's so many things that are fun and new and creative and interesting. If people want to throw ideas your way, you already told them where to sign up if they're doing the meetup. So if people want to throw other interesting ideas your way, how should they get in touch with you?
Hank Taylor:
Just tweet at me or DM me.
Matt Stauffer:
We'll have his Twitter handle in the show notes. So well, thank you so much for hanging out today. It was a pleasure talking to you Each of these topics could have been their own podcast gotta have you back another time soon. But until then thanks for hanging out
Hank Taylor:
Yeah, it's an honor to be here. Thank you so much.
Matt Stauffer:
Awesome, and to the rest of you, we will see you all next time.