FounderQuest Is Marketing On Marketplaces Worth It?
This week Ben and Starr talk about Honeybadger's efforts using marketplaces to get new business and whether it's worth the development time needed to set them up. They also discuss Honeybadger's participation in the GitHub Student Developer Pack, creating a code of conduct that still allows for free swag, and tease out a special announcement for RailsConf 2020!
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Full Transcription:
Ben: Speaking of Macs and stuff, software kind of being weird, my son, my younger son over this week has been playing with Raspberry Pi again.
Starr: Oh, that's cool.
Ben: Yeah, he wanted to do some funky USB stuff, and he's like, "I think I'll try it with the Pi." And so he's getting all into that, and then he's coming to me with questions like, "okay, how do I start up something on system boot?" And I'm like, "Oh, well let me introduce you to System D."
Starr: Oh my goodness, Ben. You've been waiting for this day, haven't you?
Ben: Yes, it's pretty awesome.
Starr: Oh, that's so great. That's so great. I'm so glad.
Starr: Did you buy your kayak yet? You said you were buying a kayak.
Ben: No, I didn't buy the kayak yet. I almost bought the kayak, but I decided against it because we had the expenses for working on the house and sending Addison off to college and so on. So yeah, hesitated. I'm going to wait. Maybe this summer. Maybe in the summer I'll get that kayak finally.
Starr: Yeah, that's the reason I was thinking about it. I was thinking about... I was like, "Oh, has Ben got his kayak yet?" And then I was like, "It's really cold to be kayaking." Do people kayak in this weather? I mean, probably, because it's Seattle and people are crazy, but-
Ben: Yeah. Well, just this week some dude crashed his plane in a lake nearby and a kayaker rescued him. So yes, kayakers apparently do paddle out this time of year.
Starr: Oh, well thank goodness for these kayakers who want to be freezing, I guess.
Ben: I know.
Starr: They saved that guy's bacon. All right. Today I think... Well, our astute listeners will know that Josh is not with us. He's had a bad cold and yeah, we just haven't been able to... He hasn't gotten well in time to make this happen. So we're having another one of our Honeybadger fireside chats, which is our branded marketing effort for when one of us is gone. And so it's just two of us kind of chatting, and-
Ben: It's like everything is better when it's a branded marketing effort. You know?
Starr: Exactly. Exactly. That little trademark, like that little TM sign. That's like the salt. The salt in your cooking, you know?
Ben: That's when you know you're getting a high-quality podcast.
Starr: Exactly. We looked up the Unicode character for that and everything.
Ben: Nice.
Starr: Today we're going to be talking about a number of things. They're all sort of loosely related. First we're going to be talking about GitHub Student Developer Pack, which is this sort of marketing effort that I don't really know about, and so I'm going to use this as a chance to sort of ask Ben lots of probing questions and figure out what's going on. And since that's kind of like a referral marketing-type effort, I don't really know what the official type name is for it. We're maybe going to talk about other things that we've done in the past. What is the GitHub Student Developer Pack, and why have we done that?
Ben: Yeah. So GitHub started this a while back where they offer a variety of products and services to students as part of a outreach thing. And we just recently started being involved in that, because I think it's a good idea to get students familiar with our product. It's the Microsoft strategy that they did way, way back in the day. Well, even Apple before them, right?
Starr: Oh yeah.
Ben: You get students using your product, and then as they grow up, they eventually buy your products. Right? I think Apple has been very successful in that in the education market. And then Microsoft came and did the same thing, and then Google did that too with Chromebooks now. Anywho, yeah, the GitHub Student Developer Pack is all about helping students get access to a variety of services and products to help them in their development. So GitHub's like, "You know what? We should make students better at developing stuff and give them tools to help them do so." And so you can go to their website and get all kinds of goodies if you happen to be a student.
Starr: I study the Blade. Does that count?
Ben: Hmm. Well, maybe, but only if you happen to have an email that will certify you as an actual student.
Starr: Okay. An email. Really?
Ben: Yeah, yeah. If you have a .edu.
Starr: Oh, an email address. Okay.
Ben: Yes, yes.
Starr: I'm sorry. I was like, so they think... Anybody who can use GitHub can forge an email. Like, come on.
Ben: No, they actually do some verification to make sure you're a legit student, but once you can verify that you are... And if you don't have the .edu kind of email address, if your school isn't cool enough for that, then you can upload your student ID, and presumably some human somewhere will look at that and say, "Oh, yep, this is an actual student," and then flip the bit on your account that says this person is a student.
Starr: Awesome. We've done various things like this in the past, and I think our thinking about these have changed a little bit. And this was maybe prompted by that Seth Goden course that you and Josh did. In the beginning, we were really looking for... I don't know. We were just kind of tracking these efforts very seriously and being like, "Oh, okay. How many people are signing up as a direct result of this versus like..." But then, yeah, at some point we were like, "Oh, this is just kind of like... These are students. These are seeds we're planting for years to come, and there's literally no way we can tell." There's no real direct way to track that, right? Is there? I mean-
Ben: Well, yeah. Like you said, we in the early days were really interested in being able to track all the conversions and having measurable results of all the efforts. And over time, we've gotten more comfortable with the idea of brand and marketing, and doing things that will pay off in the future. In this case, I think it's a bit of both, because we do want our brand out there. We do want developers to be exposed to us early in their careers, but also we can track it pretty well, because we are of course signing them up with identifiers saying, "Oh, this person came from GitHub Student." We know of the however many signups we have in a given week, how many of those are coming in through that offer. And over time, we'll be able to find out just how well that converts. Now of course in this case, the time horizon is a bit longer than our usual, because our particular offer for that pack is one year of free service. We'll have to wait a little bit to find out if they convert at all, but we'll see.
Starr: We'll see. Siri, remind me to chec...