**Introduction**: Hosts Matthew Rll and Adam Duvander welcome Corey Quinn of the Duckbill Group. They discuss Coreyâs unique position in developer marketing and his expertise in AWS billing.
**Developer Marketing Program**: The hosts briefly introduce their coaching and training program for those transitioning into or leveling up in developer marketing.
**Origin of Duckbill Group**: Corey recounts his career path, marked by getting fired unexpectedly and seeking a role that leveraged his skills without being tied to traditional DevOps positions. He saw a market need for AWS billing management and decided to build his consultancy.
**Consulting Model Insights**: Corey emphasizes that successful consulting requires addressing an expensive problem quickly and efficiently. He explains why he chose fixed fees over hourly billing and how managing AWS bills became his focus.
**Early Reactions to Business Idea**: Most people supported Coreyâs idea, though one notable skeptic questioned its scalability. Corey wasnât interested in building a billion-dollar business but rather solving a practical, persistent issue for customers.
**Positioning and Marketing Strategy**: Developing a concise and effective tagline ("I fixed the horrifying AWS Bill") was essential for communicating Duckbill Group's value. Corey emphasizes the importance of clear, relatable messaging to reach diverse audiences, from developers to finance teams.
**Authenticity and Personal Branding**: Corey leverages social media, particularly Twitter, to market with his signature humor and directness. He acknowledges that LinkedIn isnât suitable for his style but finds success through authenticity and building trust.
**Challenges and Growth**: Corey and his business partner Mike Jan scaled Duckbill Group by leveraging complementary skills and addressing inbound leads strategically. He notes the importance of balancing client acquisition, service delivery, and brand building.
**Content Strategy**: Corey hosts a successful podcast and newsletter to engage with his audience and maintain top-of-mind awareness. His approach emphasizes genuine connection rather than hard sales pitches.
**Reflections and Advice**: Corey advises against chasing enterprise-level solutions with small-business tactics and stresses the importance of adaptability, authenticity, and continuous learning in consulting and marketing.
(00:00) hello and welcome to developer marketing stories my name is Matthew rll and I'm Adam duvander today we are excited to welcome Corey Quinn of the duck bill group normally you see and hear him screaming at Clouds talking about Amazon bills uh but today we are going to talk about the way that they get customers the way that they work with developers and also need to speak to that business leader audience and before we speak to Corey I'd like to share with you about developer Marketing in practice which is a program of coaching and training that
(00:38) Adam and I are running now if you are someone who is moving from marketing into developer marketing or you're looking to level up your devell career or maybe you're a technical person a developer who wants to come over onto the devil Dev marketing side then this is for you over a period of 6 to 12 months depending on on which plan you pick we'll give you one-on-one personal coaching and also we'll put you through a training program that will give you the Frameworks the understanding the concepts and the measurements that you
(01:13) need to succeed in a developer marketing career so go to developer. marketing to find out more and to apply to be on the program now though we're going to speak to Corey Corey welcome we like to know if you could take us back to that moment when you decided to start duck bill group I I think that that is a good way to view it only in hindsight where the you look at the history of that anyone has done it seems like there's a path and a plotting inevitability between this is where I went from here obviously to the next thing then obviously to the
(01:49) next thing I didn't have a freaking clue uh it turns out I'm one of the best in the world at a very specific skill which is getting myself fired by surprise from job and after that happened for theth time I I couldn't stomach the idea of just getting the same job again with different faces because when you're when you're in the devop space it doesn't matter as much what the company does in most cases whether you are shipping boxes or streaming bits it it really doesn't matter keep the site up and it's just a question of different tolerances
(02:27) it's it is more portable between companies than most engineering roles I suspect the problem that that I had was that okay if I don't want to do this same thing of running devops teams and being a devop myself and that is how I singularize it you can deal with it then I decided that there was let's see something else what can I do that lets me apply the skill set in a way ideally as a consultant because I but one of my problems is when I get bored I cause trouble and that as a consultant when I get bored that means the engagement is
(02:58) done and I can move on so it was a question of okay what expensive problem would people be willing to pay a fixed fee for and I know how to solve in relatively short order because as soon as you start billing by the hour you're lost when it comes to Independent Contracting there's the Jonathan Stark has this whole book series up hourly billing is nuts and he's on to something in that sense you're going to work aspirationally about 30% of your time as a consultant on the billable thing that you do the other 70% is stuff that you
(03:29) have to keep the lights on accounting uh marketing to new customers servicing existing ones relationship building and the rest and I looked back at my own career what problem did I have that I would pay to make go away and it was pretty clear to me that the AWS bill was one of those things that cropped up at the least convenient time I it has not been baked into any of our planning you don't get points for saving on it there's no glory there it's I just wanted this to go away so I can get back to doing the thing that I'm ostensibly
(04:01) good at as a devops engineer who can I just throw this to and there really wasn't anyone like that out there so I figured all right well we'll give it a shot worst case I just do this for six months and then get a real job again was there anyone who who said who said that's crazy you know you've had these devops roles before you know that it translates between companies because you just said that right it uh why not go and you get the next one only one person in everyone that I spoke to about this idea had a negative approach on it and
(04:34) he was one of the founders of Heroku I'm not kidding and his exact feedback was well I don't see how you turn this into a $500 million exit okay I don't think that that was in the list of things I needed in this life to be happy I mean power to people who can get there and pull it off I don't need a yacht Fleet I basically I'm okay with just paddling around to the backyard and a dinghy everyone else thought it was great and it was oh my God I would love to be able to just go and throw that to someone else and not have to worry about
(05:12) it I I did talk to some people who led me down the wrong path Joe Russo and Pete cheslock um both of whom were people in my Orbit who themselves were terrific folks who working on the AWS side themselves Pete later became our first principal Cloud Economist here and I thought this was the common case not the exception case so I I dramatically overshot where I needed to be in order to be convincing to the people that I was working with and I mean I was good at what I did then but I look back now and I didn't know anything compared to
(05:45) where I wound up I'm still learning things about this space that is mine uh there's an entire I guess movement of fake it until you make it that doesn't necessarily work you you have to actually have a skill because otherwise people are paying you for something you don't know how to deliver and all you're doing is setting fire to your own reputation in that case once you had the idea of what product or service you could offer uh how did you find a way to describe that to other people that would make sense to them
(06:17) positioning is marketing and it's deceptively complicated took me about two months to come up with the phrase that fits into a sentence I fixed the horrifying AWS Bill and that is a very intentionally crafted most people who are you know happy will hear that and think oh yeah fixing the horrifying bill it's horrifying it's surprise and it's expensive when you talk to finance it's horrifying because of its lack of predictability and its susceptibility to be an unbounded growth problem whoever hears that takes away what they need to
(06:50) from that statement it took a bit of word smithing to get there and naming things is of course the devil and that does get at an interesting point that I think is in many Dev tools which is those multiple audiences I mean you you have the the dev who you're you have one of their headaches right but you also have the in this case the finance team's headache and it might be a different one for different Dev tools eight years in I have not been able to track down the watering holes that the finance and procurement people consistently hang out
(07:21) at most of the way that my work tends to lead to engagement is someone in engineering brings me to their attention when it becomes a problem the a WS bill is a highly fixed point in time where people care about it I can talk to you about it today and you could not care in the least about anything about it we are recording this on October 1st October 3rd is when the bills generally start to come out and in two days from now you're going to care very much about that bill because your boss is going to be screaming at you great uh three or four
(07:51) days go by and there's a new fire burning but this one doesn't go away on its own so in a week you won't care anymore so there's a fixed point in time where you have to care this is also partially why I don't just run my mouth on social media about AWS billing to the exclusion of all else it that is just it it it feels too promotional in some ways that don't that doesn't resonate with me it's a buy my thing buy my thing buy my thing no I I want to build the audience so they stick around and every once in a while I will mention the things that I
(08:21) do so that I become synonymous with the problem in people's mental SEO stack but no one is going to hang out if I just make billing jokes all day I assure you they're not that funny so so you you you've you've made your social media personality for one of a better way describing it a a part of you know you're very much a presence has that been a conscious choice of of how to promote the duck bill group do you think I did this by accident I mean that that's the that that's honestly it's one of those things where yeah my last job that I got
(08:55) surprised fired from was at Black Rock where their social media policy was shut the hell up because we are regulated and we will kill you with a stick if you get a regulator's attention so I basically to sit there in stew and keep my personality to myself and when I went independent suddenly I didn't have that restriction anymore and I figured all right I have a maiden name I can go back to using my middle name Corey Quinn can vanish Into The Ether but I have to know will my personality get me into the same
(09:22) amount of trouble that every Mentor coach parent teacher casual acquaintance person I sharing elevator with Etc has told me it is for my entire life they're probably right but I have to know and somehow it worked I the humor is also and I think people miss this it's for me because I I am profoundly ADHD and I get bored easily and want to move on to new and exciting things keeping it fresh with how sarcastic can I be what new humorous take can I take on this without Crossing Lines where I'm hurting individual people or just turning into a
(09:56) jerk how do I how do I tow that line and I do get it wrong I want to be very clear I don't think I'm not sitting here thinking oh I've never gotten it wrong and offended people I have and it sucks and the trick to an apology is you actually have to mean it and you have to do better than you did yesterday so if you were talking to someone who isn't naturally good at social media and getting out there would you recommend that they just stay clear of it I had 1500 Twitter followers when I started doing this and it took me seven years to
(10:28) gather them so I assure you I was not doing this as someone who was good at social media the quick quip the rapid response the having fun in the Town Square really aligned with Twitter it I assure you I have never yet found a way to make my brand of humor work on LinkedIn those people have no sense of humor they're too busy effectively fading themselves as best I can tell and I just find the entire approach to be noxious I have nothing but respect for people who can Market effectively into that and and have humor that works but I
(11:00) just find it so soul sucking to be on that site so that sounds like follow the follow what does feel natural the hard part for me it took me four years to realize and really internalize that screwing around on Twitter was actually doing work and not just me killing time waiting for the next thing it's that old work ethic of I used to have a crappy boss who would I'll never forget this I worked at that job for 90 days which should tell you a lot then I quit uh at one point was on Reddit looking up something on r/ sisadmin and he wandered
(11:33) past and he's like is that is being on Reddit really the best use of your time right now and I was a director level employee and it's yes yes it was but I can't stand this I I have to find somewhere where I'm only accountable to myself and of course to my clients but it turns out that if you upset clients and don't have a great outcome word spreads word will spread either way and I significant source of our business is Word of Mouth referrals and people who hire me again after we had done a successful engagement with them Andor they had
(12:09) changed companies Andor a contract expires it's time to negotiate it yet again it went super well last time come on back in it's not that big of an industry so you went from that initial okay I'm GNA I'm going to do this thing I did it for two years and then I hit a plateau uh my business partner Mike Jan was similarly doing consulting at the same time and we'd been friends for a decade uh he would introduce me as his friend and I would correct him and say no no you're best friend he said that at one point on a recording so I soundboard
(12:42) it and I hit a button and I can interrupt him with his own voice saying you know Corey Quinn he's my best friend and I do that whenever he gets up because that's the kind of jerk that I am and but but he was doing his application performance monitoring consulting which he was having problems with because when you consultant in the monitoring space people like the advice great now go ahead and implement it for us and as soon as you get bogged down in implementation it changes the nature of what you're doing um and he was having
(13:10) trouble growing his business as a result I was doing just fine but I lack process I'm always chasing novelty I would have people express interest and I would forget to give them a quote for a project we're talking just leaving money on the floor we were here in this room for 3 days trying to figure out what us working together would be like cuz I had a revelation in the shower IP out soaking wet and I call him I found the thing to collaborate on come run my company and it worked and we grew significantly beyond that but as we're
(13:40) sitting here in this room for three days put beating this together like I'm checking email periodically and leads are coming in and he stares at me he's like why don't you make a shitload more money than you do it's I was making a few hundred grand a year at the time but yeah it was again I was it was by that point I was basically at replacement salary for senior SR at a tech company money the first year I was making 80 grand and the hard part is living in San Francisco is at any point I can say screw this it's a Wednesday by Friday
(14:09) I'm going to have a job paying me that 300 Grand a year at a big tech company and I don't have to do all this other non-core stuff that I feel like I'm failing at I also don't recommend this path for most people to be clear I'm I'm here because it's it's really the path of Last Resort for me I if there were another path that worked for me it would have been easier and I probably would have been uh less frantic chasing it down has part of what you've done to evolve the business over the years been going beyond that initial I know you
(14:39) know you said it took two weeks to come up with the the description of the the the elevator pitch of what you're doing but two months two months sorry right so but if you worked on the on a broader kind of pitch over the years to to to win over the people who might be a bit more skeptical you know how I can tell that you two are very much in the engineering space it's because you believe that the entirety of the duck bill group's business comes from me the engineering side of it absolutely yes I tend to have a significant outsized
(15:13) presence here but it's not our only source of inbound leads my business partner Mike has a lot of following and a lot of respect in the finop side of the world the procurement folks and the rest I view the AWS building problems through the lens of being an architectural problem and for a lot of folks it is but at a certain Enterprise scale which is now our bread and butter it stops being an interesting engineering problem and starts instead becoming a central planning how do you how do you end up managing the AWS bill
(15:41) when you have 1500 different teams consuming it and you're not in a position to start passing edicts across the board it's a different style of problem a different category of problem but a lot of our engineering customers have become those larger customers all roads lead to Rome so to speak I'm just more of a Remis in this case well and let's talk about some of the the sources because you also have podcasts and newsletters and things right like and those those aren't like you said those aren't saying lower your AWS Bill the podcast
(16:18) right it's right all of those things are things I wanted to exist and the the last week in AWS is a terrific example I wanted to see a single point that rounded up all the news that was relevant to me and economic side of it which is all of it uh from AWS discarded the self-promotional nonsense that they throw in there all the time that they're well it's a partnering things so great some partner in Dallas is super excited about a thing you've never heard of good for them I don't care and I I put this out forur i' do it for six weeks if I
(16:49) got 250 people to subscribe I'd keep doing it because I didn't want to just be sending this out like a family newsletter or something charity Majors tweeted about it two weeks before it launched 550 people signed up and it's been growing ever since and that is just an excuse for me to keep on it forces me to keep up with what AWS is doing it forces me to find new ways of being creative longer form and don't underestimate this at all I can wind up in people's email inboxes every week whenever I want to and I have something
(17:19) to say and that means I am not subject to algorithmic curation I'm not at risk of deplatforming when another douchebag buys a social media platform I use there's it winds up really leaving me in control of my own destiny the screaming in the cloud interview podcast on the other hand I almost didn't care in the first six months whether anyone listened to it or not it was an excuse to talk to people I had no business speaking to because can I talk to you about your aw Bill results in who the hell are you get out of my office whereas would you like
(17:49) to be on my podcast as I'm sure you folks are discovering means oh great let me clear some time and we absolutely would love I love the sound of my own voice I'm going to indulge it wherever I can and it came something more than that I'm almost 600 episodes in and I haven't gotten ADHD bored with it yet because every conversation's different and now thinking again about marketers of Dev tools maybe they're not the the face of that podcast but what are some things you think that they could could pull from that experience you know to to help
(18:20) people buy their devops tool well part of it too is I didn't honestly know when I started doing all of this whether it would be a sustainable business there was a great chance that 18 months from then I was going to have to Pivot to something else well what am I going to need for that pivot well I'm going to need an audience to tell about it I think that people lose sight of themselves in the job that they are currently in Done Right someone who does developer marketing and engages with an audience will develop a bigger brand In
(18:52) Their audience Niche than the company that they work for barring you know Google or something great people will follow you as you go through various things and that is that is one of those things that is important it can last a career I've always said that you can sell out the audience exactly once because they won't be around for it a second time so if you're going to do it make it count you know nesting doll yacht money okay maybe I'll have that gone maybe I'll wind up pitching multicloud is a great solution and AI is
(19:22) everything and now an SVP at IBM for 6 months and then six months after that no one will ever hear from me again yeah that's the sell out and taking the Money and Run doesn't interest me that also means I've rejected sponsors over the years when I they have not been able to successfully convince me that using their product as directed would not cause harm because I'm not going to sit here and shill for something that's crap is there a a a a tension between having sponsors on a podcast or newsletter that is also
(19:51) there to drive inbound for your own company it's a good question and it's rare that we wind up having a direct call to action to come and buy things from us but no one generally cares I always made it I always tried to make sure that this podcast sponsor was not someone that competed with the guests company that that would have been a little on the awkward side but it hasn't been an issue uh I also worried unnecessarily as it turns out that okay I make fun of companies on Twitter are they going to not want to sponsor me
(20:20) well AWS has been a recurring sponsor so clearly it's not as big of a deal as I thought and in something like 150 sponsors over the eight years I've been doing this uh I've only seen twice where someone said ah you made fun of us on Twitter we're not interested because what the what the intelligent marketers get they really do get this is that almost nobody is going to say oh I I'm not going to do business with you because Corey said something snarky about you but a lot of people will absolutely say yeah yeah IGN ignore the
(20:48) internet clown this is the first I'm hearing about this company that could be useful for me and maybe it solves a problem that I have I'm I'm purely top of funnel that's important uh I also don't tend to misunderstand that a newsletter or a podcast is anything other than top of funnel all it is doing is telling people about a thing that should already perform slon convert I do my damnest not to ever be someone's first experience with podcast or newsletter advertising because expectations are unreasonable and if you
(21:19) don't have a functioning sales funnel all I'm doing is taking your money away and I have this ridiculous idea that I could do more business with people over the long term than if if I just do a cash grab once and then take the money and run you know an old timey business philosophy that our grandparents might have recognized out of the newsletter the podcast the Social Media stuff is there one aspect that's that you think is more impactful for generating inbound than the others absolutely not because if I did believe that I wouldn't do it
(21:52) there's a I would wind up focusing on the thing that works and that's it um I found that there's there is a bit of a funnel to this almost anyone at least once upon a time will click the follow button on Twitter uh some significant portion of them will sign up for an email newsletter some smaller subset will listen to a podcast and almost no one will sign up for Consulting Services now the difference between almost and actually no one is enough to build a thriving business on as it turns out but I find that meeting people where they
(22:19) are is the right way to do it at least for me the Fast Response witty quip on Twitter is great but instead of sending a tweet can you imagine if I emailed you all every every time one of those thoughts crossed my head after the eighth email in an hour you would absolutely be smashing that unsubscribe button and probably my face because shut up already no one wants to hear it in this constant Stream So the longer form curated approach okay a weekly Roundup of things I've seen that's a lot better I would also advise people don't make
(22:50) the dumb mistake I did and put the word weak into or weekly into the title of what you do it forces a publication Cadence that is been a challenge I took my first significant amount of time off not including the births of my two children uh about two months ago I took a six week sabatical spent about half of it underwater abroad and I it was great not having to think about this stuff for once I hear this like crowd strike thing didn't work super well I don't know not my problem I was underwater diving and yeah what happened for those six weeks
(23:20) to to the things with weekly and the name my business partner took over and wrote it in his own personal style uh for the newsletter and we just to put the podcast on Hiatus part of the challenge is the way that I've done this is it's very hard to scale in that people are intrinsically signing up for an email newsletter written in my voice and other people's material fits about as well as other people's shoes do I've done some AI experiments can I get things to a point where it can possibly sound like me and the answer is yes but
(23:48) it just Nails the snark piece of it it doesn't have the Insight pieces and it's not just the shitty jokes that keep people around maybe there's a future where that changes but I have haven't seen it and I keep a a relatively close eye on it so going back to a couple of things you said that I think people listening can pull something from you talked about someone follows you someone uh subscribes to the newsletter right as it goes down those numbers get smaller but if you can make the the top wider that the numbers work
(24:23) out I I could see something similar with where at the bottom it's someone signs up for your tool your Dev tool that that you're marketing but I think that expectation that that's you're asking for more and more of them in each step I don't have a process that flows people from one to the other I'll periodically remember to tweet about the newsletter sign up for this thing in the newsletter I'll mention the consulting stuff I link to all the podcast episodes but there's not a hard cell and I think that that is
(24:54) where people wind up uh getting it wrong maybe this works on some folks but I signed up to a Tik tocker's uh email newsletter uh this past week where they sent out some piano lessons all right it's an ADHD Obsession in time to time I'd love to PL putter around with it and he's emailing me three times a day and it's a constant upsell to buy his course rather than delivering the value up front and it's written in that salesy dialect that just makes me instinctively cringe I haven't unsubscribed yet just because I don't think of it at the
(25:22) moment but I need to do that just because this does not resonate with me now I'm not telling him he's doing anything wrong he is targeting a much broader audience and maybe in the aggregate this works better but it's not me uh one thing that's never been far from my mind is that when I write the newsletter and then record its podcast equivalent and then put that out every week I'm taking roughly a year from Humanity in consuming it I have to respect that I have to honor that where I can't just phone it in it feels as
(25:51) though everyone we speak to on this podcast is saying the answer to developer marketing is have good product and have good content and have good relationships and I wonder if we should just close it out there and that that should just be the uh you know you just put that on a website instead of having a podcast the end yeah the problem is is that it's it's difficult to do that and it's impossible to do the relationship piece of it and authentically you have to actually like people I wear my heart on my sleeve it is never that hard to
(26:21) figure out what I think about something much to my chrin I realized like my face has subtitles so my wife will periodically have to Elbow me when I'm bored to tears in a conversation like oh yeah that's right put the mask back on and pretend I care what this person's talking about it I can't I don't know how you sustain that long term so I don't I invite people that I want to have on the podcast I talk to people who are doing interesting things I I make it I try to remember there's a human on the other side of anything that I'm making
(26:51) fun of now there are people that sometimes misunderstand this and they they almost have a parasocial relationship with their own employer where you are a $2 trillion company give or take and the fact that I said this service that came out is not great for customers I know you worked on it extremely hard terrific it's still not where it needs to be and customers depend on me to call that out I'm not saying you're a bad person I'm not saying your work was without point I am saying you're not done and there's more
(27:21) work to be done and some folks more often Junior folks tend to think that that is just me crapping on them unnecessarily that is never my intention but you don't get to choose how people hear the things that you say sometimes well I think that gets to the that authenticity and and building that trust that I think is often missing on the marketing side because they want every message that goes out to be pristine and Polished and and have a link to sign up for their product part of me wishes that I instead of doing the a was billing thing I
(27:59) focused more on a Dev tool because that is more directly aligned with my audience does I could actually convince people to buy that thing as opposed to go talk to your Finance people about this place that that's a it's a more direct shot and but I do know this about myself I see it in with sponsors so it would have to be true for anywhere that I worked I would have to believe strongly in the product itself because otherwise what am I even doing here so say more about that you think if you were on the in the sponsor shoes you
(28:29) would have to believe in that product Oh if if I worked as a if I worked as a developer Advocate or for a Dev tools company or a developer marketer for a Dev tools company I would have to earnestly believe in the product that I worked for and that shows with some of my sponsors where I'll get the script and I'll just completely ignore it like yeah and hell with this I'm their customer I've been using them for a while let me tell you why I love them enough to give them money every month and that resonates now I don't tell them
(28:54) it's coming and I certainly can't sell it that way because the first time I say that something I'm not enthused about remember subtitled face it'll show and no one will believe me again but there there are products I get excited about tail scale is a great example local stack is another and disclaimer I am an angel investor in local stack so don't think that I'm just that'll come out someday it's like aha that small amount of money you put in is absolutely why you're Shilling for them for years no I put the money in because I like what
(29:19) they're building that's the way that that works and you provide feedback to a sponsor when they give you the a script that looks like Shilling I provide feedback on the internet whenever I use a product so that's sort of the other problem of it but yes I also ask how much how much am I my team asked this because there are there's more than just me over here people tend to forget that we are about 10 people give or take right now and there's a piece of this where it's how much am I allowed to play with the script there are times I will
(29:50) flat out say I am not reading this script as written you are unnecessarily picking on an individual despite the fact that they work at a big company like by name no I'm not starting a war with a distinguished engineer full stop uh there are things where okay you were saying something that is unsubstantiated and I cannot back it up uh there your your url has five sublevels in there no one is going to read that let me give it a a short URL my snark dcloud URL redirector let's just use that everyone's happier for it and things of
(30:20) that nature but I also don't necessarily tell people they're doing it wrong uh perfect example an early sponsor wound advertising an ebook in the newsletter and I was convinced it would perform terribly it crushed it and I know this because of what they told me afterwards I'm not sitting here looking at Deep analytics on this stuff and it's rare you find out from sponsors what works and what doesn't I was also somewhat surprised that I have no tent pole long-term sponsors that have been doing this for years everyone comes and goes
(30:49) they'll come back but people want to liven it up and migrate around good for them you mentioned those uh uh after a couple years the business PL I wonder if there are other what setbacks that you you encountered lots of them the question is is which ones are ger main to the audience I'm a terrible manager I learned that the fun way uh there are I found that I am very bad at doing rote and recurring things a lot of what I do to scale myself is anything that doesn't need to be me I delegate to a team member getting an EA
(31:19) was transformative for me but these are all down the path things I I think that there's also the idea that if you don't love what you're doing and you start waking up dreading work it's time to change things up a little bit there are times I go on significant long sojourns where it's all right I'm going to just spend a month learning this new technology that a customer is using just because it's an excuse to get Hands-On with something I I did a die at the start of this year and picked up kubernetes for the first time because I
(31:46) ostensively lost a bet with the internet about its relevance five years later and I gave a conference talk on it it went super well and I still run a kubernetes in my spare room because I continue to make poor choices but it was a fun diversion from the constant all Cloud all Cloud everyday Cloud type of problem that I ran into find ways to play with it find ways to mix it up uh be a genuine authentic person I think we're craving that authenticity right now seems to be in short supply uh the only time I really ask people for money
(32:14) directly is my annual Charity t-shirt drive that winds up raising money for 826 National a creative writing program for kids I'm not here selling uh various screwdrivers or whatnot it doesn't make a lot of sense for me something I considered and rejected after I did the economics was what if I made a version of the newsletter uh paid member only and the pro it's it's a seductive idea but this is Tech the long-term value of a sponsor s to a sponsor of someone getting the newsletter becoming a prospect becoming a lead buy becoming
(32:48) a customer for that company given the size and scale these Enterprise deals one success story pays for sponsoring everything I do for the next 10 years the long-term value is in Saye which means that I can charge commensurate sponsorship rates which means I punch above my weight for the audience size one of the best ways I can think of to diminish that value would be to charge too little for it oh just just pay me $5 for this great doesn't make sense well what if what if you just write the same thing but have a paid version without
(33:20) the sponsorship ads you can't do that with the New York Times either and there's a good reason think of the pitch for half a second of hey you want to add adverti in this thing where the most engaged most well-healed people with disposable incomes can pay not to see the thing that you're talking about do you want to sign up it's a terrible pitch it so it it just leaves me twisting in the wind where I don't put a tip jar out it's just I want you to spend a lot of money with me or no money with me I'd rather charge nothing than
(33:50) only a little bit because it devalues everything else you do attendant with it okay so so let me have you put on your Cloud Economist hat for for a Dev tool here then because oftentimes you hear Dev tools are going up Market they want to sell to the Enterprise but then there's this seductive selfs serve that I as a Dev want to be able to play with it too should should someone be thinking about the5 $50 a month whatever the low plan is right if they uh if they're maybe getting some interest in free or open- Source
(34:32) usage should they try that or should it be about setting the sites on the big deal it's highly dependent on the nature of the business in question and the tool as well and the general shape of things it is it is a significant weeder function to just weed out the folks who can who are can successfully transfer a dollar from their bank account to mine for one another mistake that I see people making across the entire industry is mistaking Enterprise problems as just small and medium business problems that are scaled up it's a different category
(35:09) of problem are you sure that the thing that you have built respects the nature of the Enterprise complexity both organizational and Technical do you have the full court press to wind up doing a sales motion to Enterprise folks I have the easiest sales pitch in the world for an Enterprise if you pay us money you'll turn a profit on that engagement in the first 20 minutes most of the time we are it is a slam dunk Roi story and it still takes months and months and months to go from Prospect to Clos deal it takes time
(35:41) it's slower and there's a lot more moving parts that have to be addressed whereas someone who can self- serve sign in sign up off the website great awesome is it expensive to service those customers I don't know what percentage of them start becoming significantly larger customers I don't know if you only want to have large Enterprises use your thing then the only people who will be using it and talking about it are the small folks who go through that entire sales cycle if you have something that's available for anyone to kick the tires
(36:09) on and play with then there's going to be much more of a network effect tied to that of people Word of Mouth people telling other folks about it assuming that it's good and solves a real problem what I also see is a lot of tools that look frankly quite derivative where oh it's the another oh it's an observability tool you're the what the I have 20 of those already which ones do you replace well we're the 21st great great that's maybe it solves a problem but I have a hard time believing it just because I've been sold
(36:37) that same bill of goods so many times differentiate yourself I've never been a big fan of doing what everyone else is doing you you mentioned that long sales cycle do you have a process of how to keep those prospects engaged throughout that or you know you and you said you got like 10 people do you have dedicated sales marketing people who who help progress those relationships or is it is it mostly you and and other senior people do yeah do I have a process absolutely not but April Palmer our head of sales sure does because she's very good at
(37:12) these things in a way that I am very not good at these things I get brought in for some of the high level conversations absolutely but I am bad at remembering to follow up with things like it's a I've just learned it's a common ADHD failure mode where it's like oh it's been eight months since we talk it's so good to hear from you it's like frankly I I forgot you existed completely until you showed up in front of me oops it's a it's I that is not the stuff that great sales relationships are made of and that's not something that I ever was
(37:40) particularly great at but there's a story we have multiple sales and marketing folks who work on that extraordinarily well and that is that is their skill set I'm not going to take credit for their work I'm bad at it some developer tools companies or you know infrastructure companies or whatever will have one or two people who are very very much in the face of the company they're very prominent in particular uh communities I wonder if you as someone who plays that role for duck bill group if you have advice for
(38:18) marketers on how to Reign someone like you in when necessary in what sense when is it necessary to Reign someone in I mean I I am when I have a strong enough opinion the the company will adjust to accommodated I I am the company when you own it you can do an awful lot of things like that when when it comes down to you need to spend more time talking about these things well okay let's have a discussion on how that looks it's a collaborative experience across the board it it is not necessarily something that's going to be generic where oh just
(38:49) just tell them to tone that part back don't don't worry when people spend a fair bit of their time talking about things that aren't directly gerine to the thing that you do I mean okay maybe get concerned about that if they're on a keynote stage at a big Tech conference and never mention the thing that you do okay that that seems like a foolish choice but there's give and there's take for everything people are never one-dimensional I was just thinking right now we have one particular experience or or situation while we're
(39:14) recording this where a very prominent member of a particular open source Community is uh potentially doing damage to to that Community standing as a WordPress user myself and WP engine customer I've been working with WordPress for a long time I ran it at large scale at media Temple before GoDaddy bought and killed them I have a lot of love for the WordPress community that their founder is currently setting a fire because the takeaway is not WP engine bad and wordpress.
(39:42) com good it's this whole platform is inherently unstable and there's no separation whatsoever between the foundation and the company and the dictator for Life who runs the project and that makes me very hesitant at this point to move forward with any WordPress we run our sites on WordPress and now I'm really thinking hard about whether that's going to be the case for the next thing I do so yeah when someone goes completely tilting at a windmill like that and and basically sets fire to the reputation that's not exactly the common case and
(40:16) that's a scenario where okay you're a developer marketer and you need to reign in someone how do you reign in the head of the company that that's a tricky thing to do I've always had relationships with with my team and tell them on day one that okay great if you think I'm going to forward a particular direction please say something this I may not agree with you but I'll hear you out that's the way that this works because other people's perspective is extraordinarily important even folks who are on his own side at
(40:43) this in this case Matt nwag are absolutely taking away from it a sense of oh he is really not doing this in an an intelligent thoughtful way one of the things You' mentioned about reigning someone in is uh allowing that freedom to talk about things that aren't specifically about the product and can you talk more about why that is important for them to do because if you don't have someone doing that then it's pretty clear that there every answer that they have to anything that they any question they respond to
(41:17) is going to be oh this product it does everything I I think that if I can't find an example of a developer Advocate pointing out something where their product is not fit for a given ask then I have to question everything else that they're going to tell me there is always a use case where this is a terrible way to do it and or the product is not ready yet in that sense I if you lie and tell me it is I'm going to find that out during the proof of concept super quickly and I'm not going to believe you a second time when you tell me things
(41:47) there's a there are cases where we have to go ahead and get in front of everyone and talk about AI do you really because there's a lot of fatigue about that going on in a lot of communities right now you know the community of people who have ears so Cory as we come to wrap up I i' I'd love to know if you were able to give yourself advice the you eight years ago knowing what you do now about how you've promoted and and brought duck Bild to potential customers is there anything that comes to mind sure not sure how
(42:20) gerain is for other folks but I would have separated my own brand a little bit more from the company sooner we've been doing we've been attenuating it for about half of the company's life now and it's going reasonably well uh as evidenced by this conversation and we're doing that in such a way that it is not broadly entered the awareness of folks everyone has a different perspective on the thing uh people look at our team page of who works here and I I swear some people are convinced that everyone else's job is to sit there and clap
(42:47) while I do everything yeah that that is not how it works I I do not have enough hours in the day for anything reasonably approaching that but there I would say delegate more and sooner uh obviously don't tie everything you do to a weekly Cadence that doesn't go well but other than the rest everyone's going to have an opinion on what you're doing but you have to live with the consequences make the choices accordingly if someone hadn't come across you before now which seems unlikely but where would you direct them
(43:18) to to to learn more that becomes a separate problem as well because all right now there's so many different places where do you drive people um for the analysis of AWS news last week in aws.com Duck billg group.com if you care about AWS bills at you know Quinny Pig on social media if you enjoy posting [Music]
