Marketers of Technology
00:07:44 · Cristina Bunea
[00:07:44] S0: I would say we do a couple of other things. My philosophy at Northflank specifically, and this has varied across the board when working with other companies, but at Northflank, because our buyer is very, very senior engineers into large enterprises. Although we have like smaller startups and sort of self-service developers, those people usually don't like to be told to. So, we try to be exactly where they are. And that is like the LLMs because it's in their workflow, they search for these things. We do paid advertising as well. So, we've had quite a lot of success with paid advertising, like really, really good conversion. We do events. I would say our events are a bit different than most other dev tools out there. Think I have a bit of a controversial opinion about how a lot of dev tools market themselves. I think there is a very fine line and a bit of a trap that a lot of them fall into becoming a bit too consumer. I think it really depends on who you want to sell to and what's the ultimate goal. For us, the ultimate goal is to take on giant companies like VMware and OpenShift, IBM OpenShift and things like that, which is we have to appeal to the large enterprises. At the same time, sure, it has to be easy enough to self-service and things like that. We, if I have a pretty strong opinion about not doing sort of community at Northflank, because I think that would potentially scare away to some extent, some of the enterprise buyers. Now that doesn't mean our marketing is boring or is like stuck in the past with the enterprise. A lot of the enterprises we work with are quite forward thinking and quite modern. But I think you can fall in the trap where the team is spending maybe a bit too much time on the solo developer deploying a toy app versus the large enterprise deploying serious workloads at scale that needs that type of more intensive support and things like that. So I personally do not think we will ever do sort of like the community, like open source and then having like an open channel for everyone to put in their feedback and things like that. We work with customers very closely, but it's just not community in the general sense of the word and how people apply it today. I don't think it's the right channel for Northflank.
00:09:58 · Andres Figuera, Cristina Bunea
[00:09:58] S1: And I would love to know a bit more as why you're mentioning that you feel community would scare away potential enterprises, which I understand that you prefer like an enterprise who comes to work with Northflank. It would bring a lot more of bulk jobs and it'll be a higher volume of things to do, which is very different to what you're mentioning of a single programmer just deploying one little app or something like that. But why would you mention that it would scare them in that sense? [00:10:21] S0: I think because it has happened with other products, I don't want to point any fingers, but I think a lot of products in a similar space, when we speak to enterprise customers, they're like, well, yeah, like my impression of product X is that it's for like smaller apps, prototypes, and things like that. And I think a lot of it has to do with the community aspect of it, where you see more examples of solo devs deploying something. Again, nothing against that. And Northflank is very much suitable for that as well, but it's not the ultimate goal. They see a lot more of those instances happening. And I think it's just like naturally as a human, it just changes your point of view in how that product is. Like, would you say, for instance, I'm trying to come up with a good example, but there are products that I would just consider more consumer or prosumer rather than enterprise heavy.
00:11:11 · Andres Figuera
[00:11:11] S1: No, but I do understand now what you mean because it is possible that when you have that community available for an enterprise who's checking you guys out, they could read the comments of people who really, don't feel an enterprise would enter a community and just say everything they've done, but it'll be that aspect of them feeling it's more tailored to a solo dev or anything like that, which I get would be a bit of a misunderstanding that could happen. So so totally agree with you in that sense. And and it's very cool that you're able to take that stance because I feel everybody's about community nowadays, and everybody's trying to follow a trend or just make sure that they're fitting into the playbook that it I don't even know if there's a playbook anymore because everything's changing every single week.
00:11:54 · Cristina Bunea, Andres Figuera
[00:11:54] S0: Yeah, exactly. Which again, like we are so consciously product led and like we anyone can deploy anything on Northflank. Don't take that stance in the sense, oh, they have to get on the phone with our sales team because that is never the case. Like our ultimate goal is that an enterprise can fully self-service the entire product without needing to talk to us. We're usage based. So it's like, that is our ultimate goal that the product is so good that you don't need to talk to us. So in that sense, we never like put, there's obviously certain features that are more complex than we put behind an enterprise plan, but the product itself is built in a way that most sort of community based and more like consumer products would be. But that's only because developers do not want to talk to sales immediately. They want to try out the product. They want to see how it works. [00:12:41] S1: You also mentioned now that you are opening up Northflank or making some, like you're working on it because there's a lot more vibe coding going on and there's a lot more people who aren't specialized in programming or developing and they want to create a website or do something with Northflank. How have you felt that the experience has been with that type of customer?
00:13:03 · Cristina Bunea
[00:13:03] S0: It's interesting because Northflank was not initially built to support the non technical, has never really touched Kubernetes or has never really touched the pipeline or preview environment or things like that. So it has been interesting. I think fortunately, we have put in place a long time ago, all of the interfaces for all of the users. So we have an API, we have a CLI, and then you have the UI of the platform. And we found it really, really interesting how well all of the coding tools and all of the coding agents work with Northflank. So, we now have very non technical users and people in enterprises who are deploying, they're building their app with the hardness of choice and we integrate with any hardness. We're very much harness agnostic. So, you have your coding tools, you're using Cloud Code, you're using Codecs, you might be using something else, self hosted model, whatever that might be. And then they use our Cloud Skills, they use our, like we have a product as well, which basically everything runs in a secure sandbox. So it runs remotely, which means that it's not going to do any damage to your laptop in case you might be downloading something or Cloud Code might go crazy and bring in some vulnerabilities. But I think we were lucky in the sense that we have always thought about the developer experience and how to make it the simplest it can be and the easiest it can be while giving flexibility. And I think having our API, our CLI works so well out of the box with all of the coding agents has been making our life a lot easier because I think we would have had to build a lot of other stuff to support those non technical users otherwise.
00:14:35 · Andres Figuera
[00:14:35] S1: No. And I'm asking because I love to, to, like in this podcast, we usually want to address the fact of how technology companies are being able to get their products or their services adopted more by the mainstream than the early adopters, which in this case is usually the developers, which are the ones who love to get their hands dirty and like in the nitty gritty of what the platform does, and they want to understand every technicality. But when it comes to the more mainstream consumer, I feel it's a bit harder to get there. So if you're really simplifying the platform and making it available and easily and very usable for everybody, I feel that's going to be something that's going to boost your users like and everybody that uses it a lot. Have you seen an increase in that amount of usage with Northflank since you've been simplifying it and making sure that everybody can vibe code on it?