Simon Willison's Weblog: marketing

Quoting Zach Holman

2024-11-26T20:21:29+00:00

One of the things we did all the time at early GitHub was a two-step ship: basically, ship a big launch, but days or weeks afterwards, ship a smaller, add-on feature. In the second launch post, you can refer back to the initial bigger post and you get twice the bang for the buck.

This is even more valuable than on the surface, too: you get to split your product launch up into a few different pieces, which lets you slowly ease into the full usage — and server load — of new code.

— Zach Holman, in 2018

Tags: github, marketing

Give people something to link to so they can talk about your features and ideas

2024-07-13T16:06:28+00:00

If you have a project, an idea, a product feature, or anything else that you want other people to understand and have conversations about... give them something to link to!

Two illustrative examples are ChatGPT Code Interpreter and Boring Technology.

ChatGPT Code Interpreter is effectively invisible

ChatGPT Code Interpreter has been one of my favourite AI tools for over a year. It's the feature of ChatGPT which allows the bot to write and then execute Python code as part of responding to your prompts. It's incredibly powerful... and almost invisible! If you don't know how to use prompts to activate the feature you may not realize it exists.

OpenAI don't even have a help page for it (and it very desperately needs documentation) - if you search their site you'll find confusing technical docs about an API feature and misleading outdated forum threads.

I evangelize this tool a lot, but OpenAI really aren't helping me do that. I end up linking people to my code-interpreter tag page because it's more useful than anything on OpenAI's own site.

Compare this with Claude's similar Artifacts feature which at least has an easily discovered help page - though the Artifacts announcement post was shared with Claude 3.5 Sonnet so isn't obviously linkable. Even that help page isn't quite what I'm after. Features deserve dedicated pages!

GitHub understand this: here are their feature landing pages for Codespaces and Copilot (I could even guess the URL for Copilot's page based on the Codespaces one).

Update: It turns out there IS documentation about Code Interpreter mode... but I failed to find it because it didn't use those terms anywhere on the page! The title is Data analysis with ChatGPT.

This amuses me greatly because OpenAI have been oscillating on the name for this feature almost since they launched - Code Interpreter, then Advanced Data Analysis, now Data analysis with ChatGPT. I made fun of this last year.

Boring Technology: an idea with a website

Dan McKinley coined the term Boring Technology in an essay in 2015. The key idea is that any development team has a limited capacity to solve new problems which should be reserved for the things that make their product unique. For everything else they should pick the most boring and well-understood technologies available to them - stuff where any bugs or limitations have been understood and discussed online for years.

(I'm very proud that Django has earned the honorific of "boring technology" in this context!)

Dan turned that essay into a talk, and then he turned that talk into a website with a brilliant domain name:

boringtechnology.club

The idea has stuck. I've had many productive conversations about it, and more importantly if someone hasn't heard the term before I can drop in that one link and they'll be up to speed a few minutes later.

I've tried to do this myself for some of my own ideas: baked data, git scraping and prompt injection all have pages that I frequently link people to. I never went as far as committing to a domain though and I think maybe that was a mistake - having a clear message that "this is the key page to link to" is a very powerful thing.

This is about both SEO and conversations

One obvious goal here is SEO: if someone searches for your product feature you want them to land on your own site, not surrender valuable attention to someone else who's squatting on the search term.

I personally value the conversation side of it even more. Hyperlinks are the best thing about the web - if I want to talk about something I'd much rather drop in a link to the definitive explanation rather than waste a paragraph (as I did earlier with Code Interpreter) explaining what the thing is for the upmteenth time!

If you have an idea, project or feature that you want people to understand and discuss, build it the web page it deserves. Give people something to link to!

Tags: github, marketing, seo, writing, openai, chatgpt, claude, boring-technology, code-interpreter, coding-agents

Quoting Ryan Broderick

2024-07-10T17:43:57+00:00

Content slop has three important characteristics. The first being that, to the user, the viewer, the customer, it feels worthless. This might be because it was clearly generated in bulk by a machine or because of how much of that particular content is being created. The next important feature of slop is that feels forced upon us, whether by a corporation or an algorithm. It’s in the name. We’re the little piggies and it’s the gruel in the trough. But the last feature is the most crucial. It not only feels worthless and ubiquitous, it also feels optimized to be so. The Charli XCX “Brat summer” meme does not feel like slop, nor does Kendrick Lamar’s extremely long “Not Like Us” roll out. But Taylor Swift’s cascade of alternate versions of her songs does. The jury’s still out on Sabrina Carpenter. Similarly, last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon did not, to me, feel like slop. Dune: Part Two didn’t either. But Deadpool & Wolverine, at least in the marketing, definitely does.

— Ryan Broderick

Tags: marketing, ai, slop

Reasons Why I Think 50% Coding 50% Marketing is the Best Framework for Solo Tech Founders

2022-10-08T15:43:09+00:00

Reasons Why I Think 50% Coding 50% Marketing is the Best Framework for Solo Tech Founders

Jon Yongfook offers a deliciously simple recipe for splitting up the work of both developing and marketing a product: one week of development, then one week of marketing, then repeat. I really like this concept: I mix the two activities randomly at the moment and constantly find myself feeling guilty that I’m not spending enough focused time on either of them!

Via @yongfook

Tags: entrepreneurship, marketing, startup

Launch HN Instructions

2021-07-19T01:05:37+00:00

Launch HN Instructions

The instructions for YC companies that are posting their launch announcement on Hacker News are really interesting to read. “As founders, you’re used to talking to users, customers, and investors. HN readers are not any of those—what they are is peers, and using any of those styles with peers feels clueless and entitled. [...] To interest HN, write in a factual, personal, and modest way about what problem you solve, why it matters, how you solve it, and how you got there.”

Via dang

Tags: hacker-news, marketing, y-combinator

Potential new elevator pitch / tagline for Datasette: The best way to publish data online

2020-10-04T00:03:00+00:00

Potential new elevator pitch / tagline for Datasette: The best way to publish data online

One of the biggest challenges I’ve had with Datasette is compressing it into a single elevator pitch or tagline that helps answer the question “what does this software do?”—the project does a lot of different things, so finding the right angle for explaining it has proved really difficult. I’m workshopping a new tagline over on the Datasette discussion forum—feedback, suggestions and challenges very welcome!

Via @simonw

Tags: marketing, pitching, datasette

It’s Not a Feature Problem—Avoiding Startup Tarpits

2017-10-22T12:53:41+00:00

It’s Not a Feature Problem—Avoiding Startup Tarpits

“When we turned on paid advertising for the first time the increase we had a sizable increase in signups. We always feared that a new user would just churn because of what we perceived as deficiencies in the product. While there were users who churned for that reason, it was never the nightmare scenario that we imagined.”

Via Hacker News

Tags: marketing, startups

What are some good examples of tweets used to attract visitors to a new website?

2013-10-06T14:47:00+00:00

My answer to What are some good examples of tweets used to attract visitors to a new website? on Quora

Without knowing what the site does, I'd go for the personal approach: "I just launched my new project, example.com - check it out and let me know what you think!"

Tags: marketing, startups, twitter, quora

What are some creative ways to pitch a new initiative to my team without slides?

2013-10-02T17:03:00+00:00

My answer to What are some creative ways to pitch a new initiative to my team without slides? on Quora

Use a whiteboard.

Tags: business, funding, marketing, speaking, startups, quora, pitching

What are some interesting and unusual tactics to draw people to your booth at a large conference or convention?

2013-04-23T15:47:00+00:00

My answer to What are some interesting and unusual tactics to draw people to your booth at a large conference or convention? on Quora

Make sure you have people on the stand who know their stuff - ideally people who built the thing you are promoting. Make it worthwhile for people to come and talk to you. Don't have booth babes who are there for their looks rather than their expertise.

Have really cool demos running. Ideally of your product, but if your product doesn't demo well you can improvise. I saw one trade show booth recently that had a 3D printer and camera-based computer vision system rigged up - it was only tangentially related to their product but it was super interesting and started loads of conversations.

Tags: conferences, marketing, quora, conference

What are the best events search engines?

2012-01-13T11:15:00+00:00

My answer to What are the best events search engines? on Quora

Since I co-founded one I'm certainly not qualified to express an opinion on which ones are best, but here are a few of my favourites:

http://plancast.com/ - Plancast focuses on showing you events your friends are planning to attend, but as a result also has a big corpus of events data that you can search through. They also automatically pull in events their users have signed up for on other services (such as EventBrite and Facebook), which further increases the size of their index. http://songkick.com/ - Songkick focuses exclusively on gigs and concerts, and does a fantastic job of aggregating them (I believe they have the most comprehensive database of gigs). You can also sign in and "track" your favourite artists at which point Songkick will alert you when they are playing in a town near you. http://eventful.com/ - Eventful is an events aggregator. They've been running for years, and do a very good job of pulling in concerts, festivals, theatre listings, family events and so forth. http://lanyrd.com/ - this is our site! We're a crowdsourced conference and professional events directory. We don't cover gigs/parties/etc but we have a growing index of conferences and evening meetups, especially for tech and related industries. Here's an example search for upcoming social media events in the UK http://lanyrd.com/search/?contex...

Tags: events, marketing, search, search-engines, quora

What are some good social media events that will take place in 2011 in Middle East and North Africa region?

2011-01-09T12:59:00+00:00

My answer to What are some good social media events that will take place in 2011 in Middle East and North Africa region? on Quora

User StartupDigestME on Lanyrd follows entrepreneurship events in the region which may also cover social media topics: http://lanyrd.com/people/startup...

Tags: conferences, events, facebook, linkedin, marketing, social-media, quora

How do you find out about events in Birmingham, UK?

2011-01-04T14:47:00+00:00

My answer to How do you find out about events in Birmingham, UK? on Quora

We have a page of events in Birmingham on Lanryd: http://lanyrd.com/places/birming...

You can subscribe to an Atom feed for that page, or subscribe to it in iCal.

For music events, take a look at SongKick: http://www.songkick.com/metro_ar...

Tags: events, marketing, quora, birmingham

How Companies Pay Artists to Include Brands in Lyrics

2008-09-20T12:16:52+00:00

How Companies Pay Artists to Include Brands in Lyrics

“We just feel that if it’s a product that’s admired by the artist and fits his/her image, we now have the capability of leveling out the playing field and making things financially beneficial for all parties involved.” Charming.

Tags: branddropping, marketing, music

The law behind "tell a friend" services

2008-07-28T10:49:22+00:00

The law behind "tell a friend" services

Useful guide based on UK law, updated in July 2008.

Tags: law, marketing, spam, tellafriend, uklaw, viralmarketing

Quoting Bruce Schneier

2008-07-01T14:51:51+00:00

"Digital Manners Policies" is a marketing term. Let's call this what it really is: Selective Device Jamming. It's not polite, it's dangerous. It won't make anyone more secure - or more polite.

— Bruce Schneier

Tags: bruce-schneier, marketing, security

Lessons from mySociety conversion tracking

2008-03-17T02:12:06+00:00

Lessons from mySociety conversion tracking

Neat trick: show the user a “subscribe” form with their e-mail address pre-filled for them and there’s a much higher chance that they’ll click the button.

Tags: conversions, email, marketing, mysociety

Quoting Alex Hopmann

2007-01-24T20:48:17+00:00

Which is the real explanation of where the name XMLHTTP comes from- the thing is mostly about HTTP and doesn't have any specific tie to XML other than that was the easiest excuse for shipping it so I needed to cram XML into the name (plus- XML was the hot technology at the time and it seemed like some good marketing for the component).

— Alex Hopmann

Tags: ajax, marketing, xml, xmlhttprequest