Very cool, thanks for sharing! I have writing work on the side for engineers, if you know any. Great way to get your writing skills going while getting paid to play with tech.
I actually started at DevRel and quickly understood that if you swap writing blog posts for writing whitepapers and website copy, you can easily make significantly more money.
Also, better and more understood KPIs - if I made this really good solution diagram and slapped it on a one-pager that I templated, and then the AE sent it to a customer and it made a sale move 1.2x faster, that's tangible results.
And the numbers don't even have to be insane; I remember building a dashboard as a head of DevRel that was made entirely out of vanity metrics. Today, I don't even make dashboards anymore - the results of my sales collateral are simply evident by the pipeline moving forward.
Also, I'm sorry to say, but so many DevRels are primadonnas - they won't go on sales calls, but they'll go to conferences. If they don't go to a conference every month, then they're not "getting what they came here for". Demand generation is beneath them, since "I don't look at leads, I'm building a community". Bleh.
Much better to work with people - as cutthroat as they may be - who push me to create better content that drives results.
Also led me to creating my first productized service - https://syntaxcinema.dev - and that's been going very well for me recently.
I think that product tutorials are somewhat of a black art. On the one hand you have:
1. Keeping the flow moving and the video fast-paced and interesting
2. Adding aftereffects and other visual niceties
3. Pointing out the relevant bits with zooms, highlights, etc...
But on a deeper level, you also have questions of:
1. Am I using the right sample app to demonstrate my use case?
2. Is the feature I'm using bulletproof? Do I need to change something in the DOM of the application since that feature is not 100%? Do I need to not show a piece since it's irrelevant? Do I need to speed through or flip over from things while they're running / fetching / compiling / generating etc...?
3. And, maybe most importantly, what is the message I intended to deliver? Is that a product overview? A documentation-oriented video? A demo for a conference or a customer? Who's my audience? Am I speaking to them?
I've been doing videos for a while, and I found that the second part of the problem is actually not as easy as one would assume.
I applaud great YouTubers for that - they cracked how to do walkthroughs of products that are not only technically interesting, but also visually pleasing.
Your site looks great. Your service is very needed.
My only advice is to stop apologizing for not offering pricing on your website, both here and on your website. Seriously: cut it out. Go right now and remove those <10 words that imply you have something to explain. It's completely normal to have a conversation about something like this before you commit to building it because if you don't have chemistry, you're not going to take the gig.
What you do is the literal best-case scenario for value based pricing. After having read "The Win Without Pitching Manifesto" by Blair Enns, some of the comments on this thread feel like mosquitoes trying to get in between your toes.
If you absolutely must, you can say something that alludes pricing that won't get you fired by your board. However, even that is too much word, because what you do only "costs" money until it either a) launches the company or b) keeps a failed company from having spent way, way more.
Okay, maybe I do have a 2nd suggestion. It's not as urgent: consider morphing the 3/5/7 minute "products" into "products" that reflect the typical reason those lengths work eg. "The Product Video", "The Explainer" and "The Demo". Even in this thread, people get hung up on the length instead of the goal of the outcome.
It's much more useful for all parties to think of them not as lengths, but formats.
TL;DR: stop apologizing, consider doubling what you charge
Oh definitely low four figures. Can’t imagine doing it for five figures (maybe I should imagine harder) and for less than that it’s just not an interesting pursuit financially for me (given the amount of work required and how much I think my time is worth).
Low four, so say like $2,000 for a five minute video? Why not list $1,999 for a five minute video on your website? For an open source side project, that's maybe out of reach, for a company, that's peanuts (so they'll readily pay it). Or; how much haggling do you do? It's a very neat product, but how much time do you spend on sales emails to get to a price?
Because the first person to say a number in a negotiation tends to lose.
Because maybe they aren't selling five minute videos. The point is not ever to create five minutes of video. The point is to clearly explain what a product does, and that process is going to be wildly different depending on whether the product makes any fucking sense. You usually don't know if you're going to be able to work with a client until you talk to them.
If someone is sexy and charming, you'll probably go home with them for free. If someone else is neither sexy nor charming, they better be prepared to put something pretty amazing on the table or you're going to pass.
All of what Pete says is true. I'm just putting forth that having a ballpark number is useful frame of reference because you don't know how many people aren't calling because they don't want to engage with the unknown so I think you're losing more business than you think. But, it doesn't sound like you're short business in the first place, so what I'm saying isn't relevant.
Oh, half the fun is the sales calls. It’s very much something I can delegate off to a person on my team, but this is relatively new and so the volume is not that large yet. I also really enjoy them!
I treat these more as discovery sessions than anything else. It’s also how I’ve landed on the exact pricing points I have - talking to people, especially when early, is a great experience.
There’s also something to be said about showing prices only in calls - people hate it here (or in general), but there is value to showing the price at the end of the call and not at the start. You get to show the thing to the person, get them excited, and then the price point looks a little different.
The trick is tailoring the sales call to the person - if I can convince them that they should keep me around since I provide a good service, they might pay the price.
Also, there are always discounts as the guy above mentioned;)
As an aside, what I normally do is reply to each form submission with a personal video and an overview (albeit a short one) of what I think the project should look like given their demands. I then drop a price and get on a call, if they want to.
Many do! And the ones who don’t still get a taste of how I think like and perhaps want to talk some more about other things - this is a side-business productized service; I mainly contract with technical startup companies to do their GTM.
It’s actually looking like it’d be a pretty decent lead funnel for that too!
Man, going out on my own was a great fucking decision.
It looks like the webpages are almost a direct copy of one another, one in dark mode and one in light mode, one with a community strip and professional services and one without
I'm a technical product marketer, and I find this type of landing page copying amusing to no end.
1. Where do you see this observability for LLM thing going? What's the end game? Is it like in traditional observability where all formats eventually will converge to one format (which OpenTelemetry is trying to be)? I feel it might be a little bit early to tell, tho
2. I noticed you do auto-detection of the framework used, like LLamaIndex et al. Except for annotations, is there a deeper connection to the LLM framework used? This is auto-instrumentation, so I assume you do most of the heavy lifting, but should users of this framework expect some cool hidden eggs when they look at their telemetry?
1. Huh, good question. Hopefully there will be convergence. We started discussing with other companies in this domain to support or even switch to OpenTelemetry.
2. Nothing specific, except for - as you mentioned - being able to see trace of a RAG pipeline automatically.
While we're on the topic - how does traceloop factor into all of this? What's the connection between the two? I assume the former is the LLM observability platform (Datadog for LLM?) and the latter is your own auto-instrumentation thingie to supplement it?
Please disregard all the naysayers in the comments.
I'm a technical product marketer, this is delightful and saves me so much time.
Wrong audience for the tool, since they focus on things like accessibility and browser support and what you promise to bring to the table in comparison to what you actually bring.
None of these matter - this is a TERRIFIC piece of tooling and I will use it starting literally next week for my work.
We've built what we call an Unstructured Data Transformation Layer. Think about it like an assembly line from raw text to tables in your data warehouse.
We don't use Llamaindex, we have our own (proprietary) piece of tech that does this. We can and have been outputting gold-standard tables on top of a lot of different types of context (legal docs, call transcripts, customer reviews, chat logs, emails, blog posts, social media posts, etc...) and looking to expand to more interesting domains soon.
If anyone wants to hear more hit me up at tom [at] flexor [dot] ai (does this still work or are scrapers smart enough nowadays to just grep for this too lol)
If, by “self-host” you mean “hosted by the cheapest VPS I could find, using an IP address range from the wrong side of the metaphorical rail road tracks”, then yes. If by “self-host” you mean “hosted by myself in a server rack in my house, possibly using a VPN to a respected IP connectivity provider”, then no.
You can partially mitigate it by making sure DMARC, DKIM, and SPF are configured right. There are tools online you can use to verify they're setup right, don't remember which sites though.
I have used mxtoolbox.com in the past. However, I don't know how reputed they are.
Note that the 'big mail providers' won't accept your mails even after you apply every known trick in the book. This is especially true for the two biggest ones that provide free services and hosted services on customers domains.
Hey hey! Would be happy to translate at least the home page and give it a little polish free of charge (I do GTM consulting for developer tools, I do a lot of these homepage refreshes before launches and whatnot).
