Is Marketing To People The Same As Robbing Them?

The guys discuss gorilla conference marketing and how they promoted Honeybadger back when they could barely afford to attend the conference, let alone a sponsorship. Also discussed is turning Honeybadger's unprofessionalism into a marketing strength, dealing with swag logistics, and why you should never wear a blazer to a dev conference.

Full transcription:
Josh:               00:01          Tatum's favorite programming language right now is Haskell, but I suspect it's because there's a big blue elephant on the cover of the book and elephant is her favorite animal. Yeah. I'm guessing it's not the functional purity that she loves it for.

Announcer:          00:23          Hands off that dial. Business is about to get a whole lot nerdier. You're tuned into FounderQuest.

Starr:              00:31          Yeah. Ida's just been getting really into scientific visualization type stuff. She's doing R a lot lately. I don't really think it's a very good programming language just for general purpose stuff, but she does seem to like it.

Josh:               00:44          Nice.

Ben:                00:44          When the Honeybadger founders compete on their kid's language learning. My kid's just doing basic. They suck.

Josh:               00:52          Yeah.

Ben:                00:53          You should get Tatum a PHP book. She would love that.

Josh:               00:55          Or Postgres.

Ben:                00:56          That's true.

Josh:               00:58          Any elephant ... Why are there so many elephants in programming by the way?

Ben:                01:02          That's a good question.

Starr:              01:03          I don't know.

Starr:              01:05          Programming books-

Josh:               01:06          Is it because of the memory?

Ben:                01:08          For Postgres I think that's the case, yeah.

Josh:               01:10          They either have a long-

Starr:              01:11          Yeah. Like they're supposed to be smart or something.

Josh:               01:14          Yeah.

Starr:              01:15          I don't know I've never met an elephant that struck me as that smart.

Josh:               01:19          Like an elephant never forgets, right?

Starr:              01:21          Right.

Josh:               01:22          Maybe that means, I don't know.

Starr:              01:24          That doesn't mean they remember.

Ben:                01:25          As opposed to Mongo I guess their logo should be what?

Josh:               01:27          That's true.

Ben:                01:27          A fruit fly.

Starr:              01:28          Oh burn.

Ben:                01:29          Oh burn. Sick burn.

Starr:              01:30          Ouch. Yeah, because it dies after 12 hours.

Ben:                01:36          Exactly and forgets everything.

Josh:               01:39          Ben's on fire today.

Starr:              01:40          Oh man. Poor Mongo.

Ben:                01:41          I know.

Starr:              01:44          They've been around, it's been like a decade since-

Ben:                01:46          Wow.

Starr:              01:47          ... we've had bad experiences with Mongo.

Ben:                01:48          That's true.

Starr:              01:49          We still have to say bad things about them.

Josh:               01:54          Yeah.

Starr:              01:55          Okay. We should probably talk about marketing gentlemen.

Ben:                02:00          Sure.

Josh:               02:01          Yeah. That sounds good.

Ben:                02:02          Yeah. Love marketing.

Starr:              02:03          You love marketing?

Ben:                02:04          I do love marketing. How else-

Josh:               02:05          I do too.

Ben:                02:06          How else are you going to get people to know about who you are and give you money, right?

Josh:               02:11          I also hate marketing, but that's another podcast.

Starr:              02:14          You could commit a crime.

Ben:                02:17          Okay, but will that convince people to give you money?

Starr:              02:20          They give you money in the end.

Josh:               02:21          Yeah.

Ben:                02:...