hey HN, supabase ceo here. interesting article, and interesting reading the comments
this article is more in-depth than any analysis we’ve ever done internally - perhaps we should add it to the company handbook. in case you want to know how we think about content/marketing internally:
- Twitter content has a half-life of about 2 hours and generally people there have a short attention span. we tailor the content for those conditions and pragmatically it seems to work (at least for the twitter algorithm, if not for some people)
- Conversely for “HN content” we aim to go in-depth and we don’t shy away from technical content.
- If we think the topic is somewhere in-between these two, we will write it more for a “reddit audience” - blog posts that are technical in nature, but nothing too in-depth.
The memes are mostly Ant (my cofounder). we also have a #memes channel in slack which is surprisingly active (and a bit geekier than the twitter ones). For the blog content, everyone at Supabase is expected to write about what they build and we all pitch in on editing.
> make sure you’re not scaring off the serious enterprise buyers
We probably are scaring them off, but they sound like hard work anyway
> measure any real growth as a result of the success of this twitter account
We don't have anything sophisticated enough to attribute the growth to any particular channel - it's not really something we spend time on. We see most of our growth during our product launches (Launch Weeks primarily).
We've tweaked it a bit since this post however based on the learnings from last time, we're actually running one next week - it will have more pre-recorded video content
The immaturity (or redditness) of their twitter is why I stopped following them. I don't want my feed filled with their memes and dumb questions, it does not add value for me, and gets in the way of other content that might.
I'm overall fine with immaturity. I'm also overall fine with making references/memes/whathaveyou. Overall.
However. I think it's made people think they're funnier than they are. Recognizing a thing is funny and being funny are two different things. And sharing a meme is just recognizing. Even if you were the first person in some subsection of your group to have shared it, someone else still made it. You're still repeating, verbatim, someone else's words.
Now, there's also the case where responding with the right reference or meme can be funny. But it's not sharing Fry's "Shut up and take my money" meme when the Lego Group releases the next piece of buildable 80s nostalgia.
And I think that's the problem you are having overall as well. Because "wrong answers only" is just not funny the 501st time you've seen it. I think if there were a little more novelty, it would be different.
I'm more after the middle ground, and that is pretty broken (twitter's fault)
The problem is that accounts post a mix of content and I only want a subset. Mostly it's about what I don't want, food pics, family & vacation photos, memes... that's not why I'm on twitter. Unfortunately, their feedback mechanisms are woefully awful and cannot seem to grasp this concept, or basic user preference.
I do and am (un)pleasantly surprised how they find interesting ways to get by them... it's pure text matching rather than regexp or semantics based. But still, this is limited to textual content, and they will still show you the tweet because of the reply or quote tweet...
however, I cannot say, "don't show me photos of food, family, and vacations" I've tried to say these tweets are not relevant, but they still push the same garbage to me
Yea, as somebody who is bad at social media marketing in general it’s interesting to read. Things that appeal to me definitely do not translate into good marketing.
resonates with folks like you, and memes are typically more shared among people who like memes. But then you push away a lot of other users. Are the likes and interactions on twitter converting? Or are people just following for the hot takes and entertainment?
How do you know that is transitioning into a successful campaign with the type of users they need to cross the chasm? (tl;dr you'd have to be on the social / marketing team to see their private numbers)
Supabase has more than just solid positioning -- I don't see how they don't put almost every postgres-as-a-service company out of business and also remove the need for frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django, etc. They're basically solving an absolutely massive pain point for developers.
https://www.crunchydata.com/ This group deals in enterprise grade postgres only. Why would someone even consider replacing them with Supabase?
The main problem with adoption, I suspect, is that their self-hosting story is not great and their per-app pricing is not that friendly beyond a handful of apps. Might be one of the reasons their growth is no longer accelerating. They seem more focused on adding product lines than in making one really great.
Also, their main interfaces are "click buttons in a UI" or "write SQL". Why is this something a Rails, Django, or devs who code should consider changing too?
People might consider switching to supabase to get the real-time engine, the integrated auth, and the automatic REST API. They won’t lose any capability to write Rails/Django/whatever, but they’ll just have to do a lot less of it.
The problem, as others have pointed out, is that they are not being original and the fun is gone. How many times is a standup bit funny? Is the majority of content just posting memes? Do you have any technical content which doesn't throw a bunch of memes in for the imagery?
It's not that I don't enjoy memes, the Ukraine Meme Force is making epic ones, but I don't want this from the companies I purchase from dominating my feed.
One would hope that have a better analytics and conversion tracking setup by now, which would go further to see how well they convert into actual users, paid or oss.
It's a fallacy to think what you prefer extends to the general population.
By using tactics over strategy, you might get twitter users to follow your twitter account, but are they actually using the product, and the kind of user you really want? Are they going to convert into the high-value enterprise plans they need to sustain their business, or will it attract a bunch of freeloading users who take up support time? Does this meme tactic actually work against your business needs? (by turning away more professionally discorsed people)
just looked up random companies on twitter and found @yeticoolers. looks like all the posts are about yeti products or sports stuff sponsored by yeti. no direct engagement bait.
if yeti imitated supabase, they might post vince mcmahon getting more excited the cooler a beverage gets, or drake doing a "no" gesture toward a warm beer, or "post your favorite thing to keep cool". does any of that sell you on a yeti cooler?
nope, not really, most use it only as a marketing tool, trying to force feed their garbage down our throats, rather than engaging with us as humans, in a conversation.
This is why I quit using Twitter's home feed. Do not do this. I will not take you serious. I cannot stand all these attempts for popularity & likes. It's the equivalent of standing on a chair & screaming "Please like me!"
Maybe I missed it, but I'm shocked they didn't say "Record a video dancing while you type code on a keyboard."
I'm not talking about the "trusted by" section, but now that I'm visiting your site again, I see you've added that. When i looked a year back you only had the second section. "The power of open source" which then shows a ton of logos, including:
affirm, box, axon, youtube, github, square, shopify, new relic, yelp, weave... If these are all your customers, that really wasn't clear to me! And that's awesome! You should be more explicit that they're all your customers.
I thought it was just saying, "hey, all these folks are using this open source thing that we're also using/selling".
Personally, I love this stuff and think the results speak for themselves. I love a good meme and I'm not afraid to say so. If thinking memes are clever and funny is immature, I don't want to be mature.
It seems to me that the only reason that a company would be on Twitter would be to market to people. There are different ways to go about doing that, I suppose, but the path that Supabase has taken seems to be working.
I guess if you don't want to be marketed to by companies on Twitter the solution might be to not follow companies on Twitter.
While Supabase and their communication/blogs are excellent, the Twitter is not at the same level. I’d much rather have product updates and community QA over that cringy memespam. Feels like it was tried to adapt to the medium but the standards slipped in the process.
supabase are executing on social media at a higher level than stripe or snowflake right now. arguably at some point their brand may have to "grow up" but the underdog relatable feel is definitely a fit for getting developers invested in their journey/growth as a challenger brand vs Firebase and eventually AWS RDS.
as a business person/marketer you learn very quickly to distinguish personal preference from what is effective for the audience you are trying to serve (not saying that you should do anything and everything that works, as that path leads to darkness, but as long as it is authentic and has results there is some overlap).
Basically, how Twitter works is, you'll write a bunch of kinda-funny-but-actually-not-really sarcastic tweets disparaging JavaScript and Docker. Some of them will get about a thousand likes/retweets, and at that point the @iamdevloper account will straight up plagiarise what you wrote, pass it off as his own, deny it, and then block your account when you provide proof.
Slightly off topic but I've found as someone who is constantly trying to get people to engage with my products and services that mastodon (fosstodon) to be highly value.
I'll cross-post to twitter and fosstodon and I get much better engagement on average from mastodon.
I'm sure if you have a huge following on twitter it's totally different, but for someone who only has 100+ followers, it's no contest which is better for me.
I struggled to keep reading after the author suggested "wrong answers only" was a useful element to integrate into an engagement feed. Are the target users children?
I take the point - in group signaling can be enormously valuable at connecting to an audience.
However, I'd suggest that "wrong answers only" is so hilariously mainstream at this point that it is no longer selective. It's funny maybe the first dozen times you see it, and after that it is simply a cheap call for attention. It doesn't feel like this would be a positive branding aspect.
To each their own, however. Perhaps this is the look Supabase is going for!
this article is more in-depth than any analysis we’ve ever done internally - perhaps we should add it to the company handbook. in case you want to know how we think about content/marketing internally:
- Twitter content has a half-life of about 2 hours and generally people there have a short attention span. we tailor the content for those conditions and pragmatically it seems to work (at least for the twitter algorithm, if not for some people)
- Conversely for “HN content” we aim to go in-depth and we don’t shy away from technical content.
- If we think the topic is somewhere in-between these two, we will write it more for a “reddit audience” - blog posts that are technical in nature, but nothing too in-depth.