DevTools Marketing with Jason Lengstorf

It just sort it's like exhausting. Like it doesn't mean you like them less but you don't know what to expect. You don't know when you should call them or like what activities are the right activities to to reach out to them about because they're always into something new. Right? And and companies are the same.

If you're constantly changing your messaging, you're constantly changing your positioning, then every time I'm starting a project, I'm not sure if your company is right for me because everything that you're doing, it like contradicts itself. You're you're never consistent enough for me to have a clear picture of how you fit into my workflow. So so giving me enough stability in messaging for me to be able to make a decision about how you fit into my life is really important. Because remember, if you run a company, you're spending twenty four hours a day thinking about your company. Yeah.

As a consumer of your company, I spend about fifteen seconds thinking about your company if you as a founder are lucky. And and that fifteen seconds, if it feels inconsistent, I just sort of write you off as not being relevant to what I'm doing because I don't quite understand it. So I'm gonna go with the thing that I get. Yeah. Which is why a lot of people choose big old ostensibly bad companies because it's very predictable.

I know exactly what I'm getting. Like if you go to Jira, what Jira offers hasn't changed in decades. Right? Like I'm sure there's lots of new features but ultimately they've sold exactly the same thing. And so I have a very predictable outcome if I reach for them.

Even in with all the frustrations and all of the the stuff that comes with choosing Jira as a tool compared to the newfangled tool that keeps telling me, well we're like Jira if you crossed it with Trello. Just kidding. We're like Trello if you crossed it with linear. Just kidding. We're like linear if you crossed it with It's like, okay. I don't know what that is. I'm sure it's good. Come back when you've made up your mind.

It helps specifically for open source companies because I know there's hackers who say SSO tax and whatnot. Right? Like but, like, in the enterprise, you're not thinking about SSO. You're not thinking about audit trails. You're not thinking about these features as a core part of your product, and you get that out of the box.

And you don't necessarily think about these enterprise features, but they still lead revenue. And it kinda is a no brainer in that sense. So we have absolutely no complaints, and we are firmly rooted in Work OS. That's I'm super happy.

As a consumer, my perception of time relative to your company is blips. Right? So so the the thing that's tricky is as a a dev tools leader, we have to think about our product in the span of consumer time. How often is somebody gonna be exposed to our product? And how long do they need to get an idea of what it is we do?

My my current operating theory is that you should commit to at least a quarter, but ideally six months. And if you're able to commit to one message for a quarter, what should happen if you're positioned properly, is people will start to repeat that message on their own. So if you say we are, you know, the word Uber for cats. If you're consistent with that message for three months, then at the end of that, what you should see is that the people who are most active in your community should be repeating that message. And that means that you've been consistent enough that people understand it, They've internalized it, and now they're repeating it to other people to help explain what's going on.

Mhmm. If you can give it six months, that's better. Because then people who aren't like your number one fans are gonna also understand that message and internalize it. You know, it's sort of the like GEICO. I don't know if GEICO is a thing in in The UK, but in The US, there's this this insurance company called GEICO.

That they understand that sure they can afford to hire a new agency and change up the image and rebrand and do this whole thing all the time. They have the money. But they don't because they understand that a consistent message has more value than a perfect message. And and so I think that's the really important thing that a lot of dev tools companies need to understand is that if you're a project management tool, telling me exactly what kind of project management tool you are doesn't actually do you any favors. Make it clear that what you do is make it possible for me to make sense of my work.

Right? Anything else is details. But if you get into those details as part of your marketing, now you have to change your marketing every time you add a new feature. Right? So it's it's gotta be positioned in a way that I understand that you are gonna make it easier for me to organize my work.

That's a great positioning for a project management tool. And that's really if you think about it like that's what Jira is saying is like if you have a huge team, we make it possible to make sense and track all of the thousands of things that are happening inside of your enterprise company. And that's why all roads lead to Jira. Is because that's the message they send and that's the message that everybody remembers and they're stable. So you don't see Jira rebranding or pivoting or telling everybody that they've reinvented everything or now.

And like all that stuff is happening internally. I'm sure they're introducing AI features. They're rolling out new stuff all the time. They're you know decommissioning old products. All these things that happen at all these other companies.

But externally the message stays exactly the same and so they appear to be stable and trustworthy and all of these things despite all of what I'm sure is absolute chaos on the inside of the company. Which is exactly like every other company out there that's got absolute chaos. But a lot of dev tools companies, they're small enough that they externalize that chaos by changing what they say all the time.

If you're not ultra clear on which problem you're solving for me, I don't know how to hire you. Right? And so I can't trust your company to solve the problem if every time I talk to you you're telling me something a little bit different about how you're gonna help me. You're like, oh, we're the everything tool. We're the AI everything tool. We're the crypto everything tool. It's like, okay hold on. But what what problem do you solve?

And and so I think the the thing that's really challenging is, you know, we we assume that if we get the perfect description of what we do, that that will instantly sell who we are and and what we stand for. But really what we need is we we need to build a sense of like, I have seen this company around. They have always seemed to understand what they're doing. They seem sharp and the people I know respect them. That gives me confidence to give them a try.

And then once you get into the system, ideally the product backs up all of those perceptions and you see like it does what it says on the tin. I'm getting you know, I'm getting the results I expected. It's making my life easier. And now I become one of the people who goes out and instills confidence in others by saying, yeah, that's what we use and it's great. Right?

So it the thing that I've noticed is that a lot of dev tools companies get very very focused on the minutiae of what they do. They start comparing technical specs. Like, oh we can do it in you know, we're we're 30 x faster. We we cut you know fifteen seconds a week off of your times which leads to a x you know x amount of savings on you know human labor every year or what we we whatever it is. They always come up with something and it's very like technically bound which means that a benchmark from a competitor can prove them wrong.

And it also means that when that thing becomes a commodity like when we were talking about JavaScript frameworks and everybody's talking about being blazing fast. Well, eventually, all those frameworks switched over to being Vite plugins. K. So now everybody has the exact same performance because it's Vite. Right?

So what's your differentiator? And if your differentiator was how fast you could build, you've you've now have to reinvent your messaging because the messaging the tech shifted. And the same thing is happening with AI. If you were the whatever tool and then AI comes out and allows you to do that thing in a different way. Well, you can't market the technology anymore because now the technology has shifted and you're using AI to do that thing.

But the same problem is being solved and if you can clearly articulate what your value is, what is the outcome for the user? Then the tech can shift a million times because the outcome stays the same. And you know, it's like if you were going out to buy a bottle of Coca Cola and they were telling you about their their specific technological methods for getting the beverage made and into a jar. Like when they switch from glass to plastic, it's new messaging. When they switch from you know, what whatever sweetener to the other sweetener, it's new messaging.

But we don't care. What we care about is that, oh, it's it's Coca Cola. That's the brand I know. I know what it tastes like. It's something that I can have on a hot day and it's like a million things that that we're associating with it that they you know, Coke pays $5,000,000,000 a year in advertising. Like they know what they're doing. They're they're selling a nostalgia. They're selling a a belief. Right? Like you don't identify Coke as a technological thing.

You identify Coke with memories. And with like a state of being. Oh, I'm on a hot day on the beach, you know what I really want is a Coca Cola. Right? Yeah. You hear that sound. You think about like, oh yeah, that's exactly what I want. And and more tools should be thinking like that. Like if somebody thinks about our tool, are they are they just running benchmarks in their head? Because that's a losing game.

That's that's commoditization, that's a race to the bottom, that's you know you're basically like we can do it faster but then somebody can do some technical innovation and now they do it faster. Well now you're on the treadmill and you've always got to be having a team of engineers dedicated to going faster. Yeah. And eventually you bottom out where like you're doing micro optimizations. You know, like right now people argue about which programming language is the fastest and the and the truth of the matter is, if you're a company where that like rust versus go is the bottleneck in your company.

Holy shit, you've got a great company because that is never the problem. It's always something else in the organization that's the bottle neck. It's it's you know, like so rarely does the the specifics of like how fast you can run a loop in your programming language actually determine the outcome of that product. Yeah.

I think, you know, before they pivoted to their new thing, the ARC browser company was doing such a good job of of like positioning ARC as this sort of like anti browser browser. And they they had this in house video team. I'm I assume they still do, but I don't know what their new product is. I I still use Arc. But they they were like these launch videos and all this stuff.

And they never really talked about the specifics of Arc. They more talked about how it let you get away from some of the things you didn't like about your old browser. And that you know, and it was kind of building this idea of like what if you were what if you weren't like beholden to the big search engines or or you know to a fang company. And so it's it speaks to your identity a little bit and it makes you think like, yeah, I'm counterculture. I'm cool.

Like I'm I'm on the edge. And that's a really good way to to market to people. And I I think you know we we see this go really well for certain companies and and it can backfire. Think like Vercel is an example of it kind of going too far and backfiring where they they were absolutely selling an identity to the point where now like people feel almost like ostracized and and like left out because it like reached cultiness. Mhmm.

So there is a balance to be struck. But I would say Vercel is a great example of doing it right. And then you know, deciding that if a little bit is good, a lot is better and and maybe finding the other side.

And and I think that that's a line that has sort of been crossed where it's like you're you're either all the way in or you're like not a member of this community. Right? And I think that like there there are companies that I think have done a good job of being a lifestyle without making it like a personality, if that makes sense. Mhmm. And I I feel like certain companies, and and I would say Vercel is one of these, they they kind of require it to be your personality in order to because because otherwise, you're like, you know, you're either a hater or you're you're all in.

Right? And it's sort of like, oh, but what if you just wanna use it? Yeah. Like what if I don't care? Yeah.

Right? I don't I assign my identity to my toothbrush. I don't assign my identity to the brand of socks that I wear. And I don't assign my identity to the tools that I use when I do a little home improvement project at home. And I don't care about the tools that I use when I build websites.

I'm here to build something that solves a problem. And I want to use tools that solve my problems. I don't necessarily want to like argue with people over which to like, and I do think there's there is something fun about being a professional and talking to other professionals about what the best tools are. Right? And we see this in every industry.

You know, I had some work done on my studio recently and the the folks doing the work were like arguing over like Milwaukee versus DeWalt tools and you know, it's like it happens everywhere. We all have our preferences and what we think the best is. But I think there's a there's a line that gets crossed where we start to make it like who we are. Like my personality is being like a all in on TypeScript person and everybody who disagrees with me is wrong and I'm gonna fight them on the internet. And it's like, don't have time for that.

Right?

Could they have found some efficiencies and and done some other things if they had added in a framework or whatever? Of course. And usually in a professional context they would. But they're capable of doing without. Yeah.

And I think where where it's hard is sometimes people get caught in the middle where they think my tools will make me good. And then they get really resistant to the idea that the tools don't matter because they they kind of build their identity around. Yeah. They invested a lot in in choosing a tool that they considered the thing that made them valuable or professional. And so I I think the the trick when you're when you are a dev tool is like you want a strong community that's like a big supporter.

It's interesting. Like it's really cool to be in the inner cool kid circle. But as a dev tool like that's fashion and it's always fashion. If you pick a tool and you make that tool your lifestyle, I promise you it will not last more than a few years at which point the fashion will change. And so if you're if you as a non affiliated individual are staking your whole personality around a tool, you're gonna have to reinvent yourself every eighteen to thirty six months because the fashion will continue to change.

And that's fine if that's what you want to do. Like in a lot of folks who are professional creators, that's literally their job is they they just sort of like find the things that are trendy and they teach them and that like I'm not saying that's a bad thing. But it can be really exhausting if that's not your job. Right? And so as a dev tools company, you can you can get a lot of hype and like build a really fervent community if you go the lifestyle way.

But the risk is that as soon as it becomes unfashionable, now everybody turns on you. Right? And so this was I think the fate of Gatsby was Gatsby had everybody and the community was there. It was super strong. Everybody was building everything with Gatsby.

And when when it started to become like well there's a lot of really good competitors to Gatsby in the space and they weren't investing in their community the way that they were. It was almost like the founders were surprised that people didn't just stay loyal. It's like, well no, you you like the reason you got a community in the first place because you had something that was uniquely good. You were solving problems in a way that couldn't be solved elsewhere. Mhmm.

Now lots of tools have emerged that solve that problem in the same way. You don't have like a monopoly on this space and you have no reason to expect any community loyalty. You need to you need to be investing in making your tool something that continues to solve these people's problems in a way that is better than anything else that's out there. And had they invested in it as a as a utility, I think they would have made different choices. Because I I think the the investment was made from like the lifestyle standpoint where they figured people would want to go all Gatsby all the time.

So the investment was made in Cloud where all of your Gatsby sites which was clearly all of them would be built on the Gatsby build system which would you know solve all of your Gatsby problems and there was no way to really run anything else on it in a way that was really supported. And as a result, when people like it stopped being fashionable, they were like, that's a lot of work to to like have this for my Gatsby sites and everything else over here. So I'm just gonna go over here, but it's kind of a pain to host Gatsby. So what if I just stop using Gatsby? Mhmm.

Right? And so it just drops off a cliff in terms of usage.

It defaults to things that are very performant. You can push it to a server hosted environment and run it on a node instance like in a Docker container. You can push it to something like Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare running in a in a serverless environment. It's just kind of built to go wherever you want it to go. And it solves problems in a way that's very standards based.

I'm not throwing everything out to learn some new framework specific thing that I would have to throw out if I ever stop using that framework. I'm using the web. And then the astro things that come in are conveniences that I can also solve in other ways. And so the thing that I find really fascinating about that approach is that my loyalty to astro is that they're not asking me to make it my identity. Right?

I get to use it and mostly what I'm doing is just writing web standards. And so to me, I I reach for astro not because I want to be like an astro guy. And I want, you know, everybody to know how much I love Astro, but because it's the thing that causes me the least amount of like struggle to get the outcome that I'm after. And I feel like this is one of those things that like this is why WordPress took over. At the time, WordPress was the easiest way to get the outcome you wanted regardless of your level of skill at building for the web.

And because they nailed that and because nobody else really moved into that space very fast, they were able to get 50% of the web or something built on WordPress, which is now finally declining because lots of different options have come out and WordPress didn't understand that. And they thought they could, know, like force people to love WordPress, which is why we're seeing the antics. But and you know, now that there's lots and lots of options, people are making those choices for the thing that's actually solving their problem. And so I think this is this is to me kind of the core of the challenge is is like, you need to be building something that people want. But you can't expect them to want it forever.

You have to continually be, you know, remind them these are the problems you're trying to solve and be aware of the problems you're trying to solve and make sure that what you're building continues to solve them. And never expect that what you're gonna get is somebody saying like, oh, well I'm loyal to you because I've always been loyal to you. Like you'll get a very very small number of people who will do that. But the vast majority of people, it's their job to put something on the internet. And if you don't make that easy, they're gonna find the thing that makes it easy.

Like, you know, it's it's like a whole personality. Yeah. But the the danger of that is that one, it's exceedingly rare. Like how often have has anything become enough of a trend that it can become a personality. Right?

So shooting for that in and of itself is just it's a moonshot. Yeah. And the the other thing is that how many of those trends last beyond a season. Right? And if you're trying to build a sustainable business, relying on virality and people picking this up as like a thing they want to be a core of who they are, is so shortsighted.

Yeah. And so our our job needs to be We need to be constantly present, but we need to be present in the way that you know, like grocery stores are present. Like I'm I am here to help you get the thing that you need done done.

Like again, if you're talking about your specific features, if you're marketing on like the specific technology, if your whole personality is AI right now, that's not gonna last. Right? Because either AI is gonna become such a commodity that everybody will use it like React. Like you couldn't go out there and say, we're the project management system built in React. Like what?

That's a nothing feature. Right? And in not that long saying we're the company that uses React or AI. It's it I mean, it's already kind of a nothing feature. Every single company now when you log in has a little sparkle button. Right?

Like you're you're offering something that every single company can offer very easily by paying open AI or anthropic money. Yep. So what are you actually solving? And and if you don't have that figured out, that's the work that there is to be done. Because if what you're selling is your features

It's like, okay, you're full of shit. Right? Like what's it what do you actually do? And when you see somebody who can articulate this really well, then you start thinking to yourself, oh yeah, that actually will make me more effective. I think like warp dot dev right now has a really interesting product where it's a terminal, which we all live in the terminal as developers.

And when you use it, the things that they're offering are like, this is a terminal that you can click in your command and highlight to edit something without having to like hit the back key a bunch of times. You can right click any block of output and copy it instead of having to like drag and and paste the whole thing. That's a that is a materially valuable thing as a developer. When I spend so much time running git commands, starting you know, doing the NPM start and I get an error and I need to send that error to somebody. Instead of having to like drag around my thing, just right click and like send this.

And I think this was like cursor as well. Was like, oh, you know how like when you use AI to code, it's a pain because you have to like copy paste stuff and you don't get this diff and everything. They were like we just built it into the IDE so you get a diff. And what I saw move everybody to cursor was we will generate a diff.

And obviously everybody is like scrambling to build the same thing and we're seeing stuff like windsurf and I think you know, Versus code has all those features now. So it's it's very much like an arms race at this point. But ultimately, they all understood the assignment which is to say what we're doing is we're not removing you as a developer. We're not saying AI is gonna replace you. We're giving you the the tools to integrate this into your workflow so that you can be more effective and get better stuff built faster.

Right? That's the positioning. And and they're all making tons of money doing this. Right? Yeah.

And so actually interacting with a terminal outside of knowing a bunch of shortcuts is extremely difficult. Yep. So this adds a layer of UX on top of the terminal that allows you to do common terminal things much faster. They they've got a bunch of other stuff that I'm not talking about that that is great. But in in my mind, like where I kind of had my moment on warp was when I saw somebody like copy pasted something from a website into the warp terminal.

Mhmm. And it was like, know, start with your in like, you know, in quotes, your key here and then over here your key here. And they pasted it in and then they double clicked that your key here and pasted in their key. And I was like, oh. Because that's a pain when you're not in there.

Right? You're like, okay, paste it, hit back back back back back, and then you gotta delete the thing and then paste the thing. Yeah. And it was like, oh, this is a modern terminal. This is a terminal that lets me do my work that it will acknowledge that a mouse exists. Yeah. And like, I'm not too proud to use a mouse. So like, let me. Yeah. Why can't my terminal recognize that that these modern input devices exist?

And you know, the the all of the things that terminal is doing is it's like you as a developer spend a significant amount of time in the terminal. We are adding a modern UX to this so that you can do things that feel like they should be possible. You wanna use your mouse? Fine. You wanna have snippets?

Fine. You wanna share this with your colleagues so that you all have the same like git rebase like super command that's you know, compressed down to like update. Right? Like all of that stuff is is just is just there. You don't have to share a bash config. You don't have to you know keep like somebody's bash files all like or you know, you're not sharing a dot files thing. Nobody is putting their their dot env into the Slack chat anymore. It's all like all these things that we do at our jobs

And it's a clear value prop to me as a developer because I like using the terminal. I don't want to move out of the terminal, but there are things about it that are hard. Yeah. So if you if your outcome is you get to stay in the terminal but it's not as hard. That's a clear value and now I'm interested.

Right? And every feature they add supports that value prop. They would have to completely pivot as a company to not be able to keep pushing that particular message for the whole life of the company. Right? And so that means they can have to to it take the longest walk around to what we were initially talking about.

They they can come up with a marketing campaign that is we make it easier to get stuff done in the terminal. Right? And then whatever that messaging is, right? Yeah. They take that, they can put together assets, they can put together landing pages, videos, talks, demos, whatever it is.

And that can all live for a really long time. And the only thing that really needs to get updated is like if there's a demo, obviously you add the new features to the demo. But talking to a developer about how the terminal is essential, but kind of hard. Mhmm. And wouldn't it be great if your terminal didn't do all that? Yeah. And like gave you a modern input. Okay. That's true. Even it like it's true now.

It'll be true when you add five features in the future, and you don't have to rewrite that marketing. So a lot of it is if you understand what the value is that you provide, the features will always support that value prop.

Mhmm. But that's more of like, you know, as an as an expert we want to figure out how things work under the hood. But as a as like a CTO, I don't have to care about that. I can just say, well, I know component based seems to be what's one in UI. So React is the most popular component based framework. Let's use that. Mhmm. Right? Cool. Easy. That that solves a lot of problems for me and my team. So Yeah. Good good job everybody. Let's rock.

Like, you know, once you've got those things at the top right. Yeah. But just for fun, can we do just ask you a few things about like if any DevTools founders decide that they do wanna do video or I guess when they should and then, you know.

You can take the transcript and edit it into a blog post. You can turn that into a tweet thread. You can you know, there's so many things that you can do with video. And this the same is true when you are talking about like a DevTool. If you do a launch video, you can run it as a promoted ad.

You can take little cut downs and promote those on Reddit or LinkedIn or Google Ads, whatever you want to do, right? So so you can kind of turn it into part of your paid strategy. You can you know if you like I I do the web dev challenge, which is a show that's thirty minutes long and it's it's kind of like functionally, it's kind of like a webinar. It's it's devs using a tool to solve a problem and so you get to see the tool in action and

Which is another video plus blog plus snippet asset. We've got all the social clips that we can then run for you know for weeks honestly after the episode goes live to keep reminding people like, hey, did you want to see how this works? Look at this fun thing that happened. Go watch this episode. And each one of those things is like a new thing we can sell.

It's not us remembering like, oh yeah, we gotta go talk about that thing that we did. It's like a new thing. It's a new asset. Oh, look at this funny moment. Right? That's easy to share. Yeah. And it points back at the video that you did before. So you're you're getting more leverage out of that thing. Blog posts, you get user feedback.

Like so much stuff happens. People leave comments. You can use those comments to inspire new blog posts, new videos, new anything. And and the it just works in a way that like very few other mediums work. And so from a from a standpoint of like if, you know, if I'm working at a a dev tools company, and this was honestly how I got to where I am now as I was at Netlify.

And I just saw we were doing conferences, sponsoring event booths, and we just weren't We were seeing ROI but it just wasn't the way that it was in '20 We we were doing like paid ad spend, but it was on like we were bidding on keywords. And it just wasn't getting the results that we wanted. We were trying to do meetups but like post 2020, meetups just kind of disappeared. Like they're very difficult to get people to come out to. Companies aren't really hosting them anymore.

Like it just the the infrastructure that was there is gone. So like running a local meetup is is kind of off the table unless you want to do it yourself. Right? So that kind of disappeared as an option. It's like what can we do? Like what are the and everybody was on Zoom calls all the time. Every conference looked like a Zoom call. Every webinar was basically a Zoom call. Your meetings were all Zoom calls. Your family talks were all Zoom calls.

Nobody wanted to watch another Zoom call. So what can we what can we make that was actually interesting and and the only real option was what you can do in person stuff but that gets egregiously expensive because you have to get people to come out. You've got to have enough space for them. You've got to you know, there's a lot of production stuff that needs to happen for people to be able to watch a thing that's happening live with enough detail for them to follow what's going on unless it's a talk. And so I mean, that's like, okay.

So TV is kind of the next option. We watch a lot of TV. And before, during, and after the pandemic, we all have watched a ton of TV. So what lessons can we borrow as as DevTools companies? Like why do people choose to watch something?

So just invest a little bit extra and make something that people want to watch. Right? And so, you know, you can work with a company like mine, or you can think internally about like what would our reality show look like? What would our series look like? What would we make?

And how would we Would we take the problem that we solve, the outcomes that we generate for somebody? What can we do that's a story that basically the arc is give people the problem that we solve and then watch them work through it. Yeah. Right? And and you know, maybe you do David versus Goliath where you've got like somebody with no tools is trying to solve this problem and you get to watch all the struggles they hit.

All the the rough edges and and tough corners and somebody else gets your tool and you get to watch them just sort of breeze through it. Right? That's a great comparison. And that's an interesting story too. Like, can a super seasoned developer outperform with no tools Yeah. Outperform a junior with the right tools?

Mhmm. And so, they're not they're not willing to entertain the idea that the story will allow somebody to imagine a world where they don't have the problem that they currently have. And then in a week or two weeks or to the next time they start that project, they're gonna go, wait a minute. I saw something about this. I think I could do better.

Now the attribution on that sucks. You are gonna have a really hard time proving that this video led to this person to activate. Mhmm. But if what you do if you think about that and you say, you know what? That's the wrong call.

We're not gonna do that. Instead, what we're gonna do is we're gonna put up an email form so that our sales team can call these people. You're never gonna convert that way because you never sparked the curiosity. You never let somebody imagine what they could be. You just said give me your email.

Yeah. And every time somebody says give me your email and they haven't told me why, my instinct is to give them a fake email. Right? So it it has to be like, we have to invest in the community if we want the community to invest in us. And people can smell it when you're actively invested in like giving them something of value.

And there's a million ways to do it. It doesn't have to be video. But it it needs to be an understanding that there is an earnest exchange of like we're here to help. Mhmm. So we're going to put time and energy and money and effort into making something that is valuable to the community.

Whether that is good storytelling, which is what I'm trying to do at Code TV. Whether that is something like what what Nelify did with the Jamstack community where they were like just dumping buckets of money into into keeping local meetups running. Right? They basically ran a whole nonprofit around making the Jamstack community function. And you know, when they and there was a point where they decided strategically to stop doing that and you can kind of draw a line between where that stopped and and when they stopped showing up in news.

Right? Because they they stopped making the investment and the community said, oh, well they're not investing in us. Right? And and so the the the thing that's really hard is it's very very difficult to fit that intangibles of like we are here to to support and grow this community because we know that if we are making the community's life easier, they will choose us when they want to go and solve problems that are relevant to the domain that we help in. You can't put that on a spreadsheet.

Like, okay, we went and spent, I don't know, $500,000 a year on generating reality TV show about the devs who work in the problem space that we have.

There's like five hops in that chain, zero chance attribution's happening. Yeah. But you know it's true. You know it works because you can see when we are doing this, the lines are deviating from the Right? Even if they're not attributed you you know that it's like it is being driven because the community you can just feel it.

Like if you've got any sense of connection with your community, you know that it's working because the vibe is there. Like you can sense in the way people talk about you, the way people reach out that like they feel like you're one of them. Like we're all in this together. We're part of this community as opposed to you are a company attempting to sell me a good. Yeah. True.