The Idea

Speaker 0: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first episode of digging the rabbit hole. This is a series created almost in response to having quite a lot of interest into how this whole platform you're watching this show on came to be. Joining me today is my friend and colleague, Matt. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure. Hey, everyone. I'm Matt Minor. Demand gen marketing, all of the things that you think of when it comes to marketing that's kind of undermined domain.

So great to meet

Speaker 0: you. Excellent. And well, we've met the audience might be meeting you for the first time. The in this first episode, I wanted to talk about the inception of directors TV as a project that our team even chose to pick up and work on. And this project was was your brainchild, really.

It's been very much been a team effort to get it to work and get it out the door, but the inception of it was yours. So I'd love if we could talk a bit about why we're even bothering with this, how it came about inspiration, stuff like that.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. So, to give you a little background on me and my background, I come from like kind of when you think of marketing, like everybody hates marketing because marketers ruined it from like the SAS world. So it was all about like, how can I quickly get an MQL? And you probably are familiar with this where people go and download ebooks and you have to give up your email and then you're immediately hounded by SDRs so they can hit that quota and then get the revenue somehow or some way.

And I think that's put a lot of, I think it's I think it's really tarnished marketing because at the core of it is like we just want to connect people with a solution that's going to make their life better. That's it. And last year was my first experience in the dev tool world and actually marketing to developers and engineers and found out that they have very good meters. So the traditional playbooks don't work. And it was hard to learn that as an experience, but I think it made us all better and us as a company better because we realized we have to build relationships at scale.

And the way to do that, I think, is by creating actual good content. And a lot of this came from your domain of DevRel. And how can we marry that with, like, the traditional marketing of connecting people to solutions? So those two things combined with the rise of AI last year that came out of nowhere, and I found a lot of, like, the content being put out was just overly, like it was.

Speaker 0: It's garbage. It's garbage. It's, hey, I generated garbage.

Speaker 1: Exactly. Yeah. Very garbage. And you can't I mean, you could use a tool like HeyGen to create, like, fake videos. But I think the way of the future is no actual one to 1 you watching somebody.

And I think that's why people are addicted to TikTok and YouTube and all that stuff. So kind of a long winded answer, but that's kind of where the idea generated was, like an amalgamation of, like, all of these things of how can we create really good content that cuts through the noise that is helpful and doesn't, you know, isn't like us chasing the almighty dollar. Like, how can we actually help the ecosystem?

Speaker 0: Yeah. And, I we will make a good developer relations practitioner practitioner out of you yet, mister Miner, because that's exactly that is the discipline of DevRel. And what this project really has become is almost expanding that outside of just the realm of DevRel, at least at directors and across the entire organizations as we have created shows that not only benefit lots of teams goals, but also get them involved. So that's been really, really pleasant as well. Can we talk a little bit about why we're not just then creating a bunch of shows on YouTube Because that is a completely viable approach.

Right? We could be creating content on platforms where developers already are. And Yeah.

Speaker 1: So no. That's a great, great question and great audience there because, obviously, YouTube is, like, the 2nd largest. It might I think it might have even eclipsed Google is like the largest search engine that people that people use the most used, I guess. And this is one hesitation we had when we were coming up with the idea and producing shows. And we're basically taking, we're taking YouTube out of the

Speaker 0: we're taking YouTube out

Speaker 1: of the equation and we're going to build it ourselves, which is like, but there's billions of people that use YouTube and we're starting from ground.

Speaker 0: So discovery engine. It's a discovery engine.

Speaker 1: Exactly. Yeah. So, actually, I had a great conversation with Anthony Canada, who's the CEO over at Audience Plus, which they have a platform that does what we're doing with with, DirectTV. They built like a sass around it all around own media. They're really building that.

They're doing a really good job. And I actually asked that question. I was like, look, we're we're basically discovering this or we're basically abandoning this giant discovery platform and starting from scratch. And he was like, you know, when you go to YouTube, like, very seldom do people hang out on YouTube, watch out like hours of content like they do on Netflix. They they go to Netflix to binge.

They go to YouTube for like the quick highlights. And same thing with TikTok. Like you go to TikTok, you've got 30 to 62nd videos and you're just scrolling through kind of that. Yeah. Getting that endorphin hit and then like going to the next one sort of thing.

So he's like, well, what he said was we're finding a lot of companies are starting to put their best content on YouTube and like cutting out the short snippets, the best bits, the highlights, basically, and then pushing people back to their own media because that's what own media is like. You you own the audience. You're not, renting it from YouTube or Google. You're giving them the good stuff. And then if they really, truly like what you're doing and you're getting by it, then they'll come to your platform and subscribe.

So that's the reasoning behind it. It's kind of an interesting dynamic for sure. But

Speaker 0: the the not the renting your audience is something I was hoping you were gonna say because I think that's that's so so true. And the other benefit of owned platform and not just own media, but own platform is you get to you get the almost editorial decision around the curation of content. I feel like on YouTube and other platforms, their recommendation engine doesn't work always in the benefit of your audience, right? It works in the benefit of the goals of the platform. And you can present it in the way that makes sense for you and your audience.

Right? We've trimmed a bunch of fat. If you look at a YouTube player or any of these platforms, you know, you look at the players and the pages that house the media, and we are very direct. We are very like, here is the content, here is the necessary information to help you get the most of it and move up move on. Now here's the next the next part if there is one or whatever.

Here's some related content. We we have curated that experience quite intentionally for people as well. Mhmm. Yeah. We don't have availability elsewhere.

Speaker 1: No. Yeah. And, like, just personal, like, experience. Like, when I go to YouTube, I have a 2 year old daughter, so I've got Paw Patrol intermixed with like marketing and a mix of music videos. It's it's curated to me and my interests.

But, as like a professional, I I can't go to YouTube and and use it. I I typically go to LinkedIn, which is, you know, another, channel that's own media. I go to, like, Hockey Stack, which is a, they have a own media channel, which is really good. Watch a few videos there, podcasts. I have a few select things I go to, but there's no one single place I can go that has a bunch of really good content to help me get better.

And that's kind of what we're trying to build.

Speaker 0: And these these platforms, like you mentioned, HockeyStack, I've seen their platform too. It's very much aimed at their audience marketers. Right? And there isn't a lot out there that is aimed at this this audience that directors has, which is primarily developers, not exclusively, but primarily developers. There aren't a lot, if any, platforms for them.

So I think that's interesting too. Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of video content out there for developers, curated video content too, but a lot of it is instructional. What we're doing now is we are it's purely around upskilling and continued professional development. And we're trying to and we'll talk about this in a in a future episode of Digging the Rabbit Hole.

We've curated a content library, which is a little more multifaceted around all of the interests that our audience might have.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. And we talked to Jason Linkedorf about this too. And he he also believes this is where media content, it's all going for the developer world. So, it's just really cool to have, like, that mindshare with, like, somebody like Jason, who's obviously doing an incredible job building building a brand, putting out incredible shows.

And I think it is, like he says, like, the the industry is going that way. So it's just cool to to play a part in it in what we're doing with Directus TV.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Awesome. Before we wrap up this first episode of Dicking the Rabbit Hole, was there anything you wanted anything else you wanted to talk about in terms of the inception of the oh, another interesting note that I I have actually. The inception of this platform happened in March 2023, being a very small scrappy marketing team. It it was mentioned, you know, it had some headspace for a few weeks and it never really got off the ground.

Right? It never became a thing we did. The whole thing came up. We finished our 1st leap week, our 1st week of announcements at the end of October 2023, and then there was a void left in our hearts. What what what fills this huge amount of stress now?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 0: And and it literally between, like, the 1st week of November and, like, just before Christmas when we released director's TV, that was the entire window in which the whole thing was formalized, built, content was made and edited and released. It was about a 6 week period, and we continue to work in that scrappy way. There's a future episode on our process and how we've managed to and how we've managed to make this work. But yeah, was there anything else you want to talk about in terms of inception?

Speaker 1: No, I just remember actually, I remember the stand up that we had and I was like, hey, like, like content's like doing really well. What if we just all, like, made our own video series and we had our own, like, Netflix sort of thing? Yeah. And everybody was a content house. Yeah.

Everybody was like, Oh, yeah, maybe one day, because we had so many different things going on. But as time went on and we found content was going really well, and we were able to actually produce really good content. And we have a lot of incredible people, people in this team like, John and Pedro, who are sales reps, and they host podcasts with, you know, engineering leaders and they're willing to jump in. We even did like a.

Speaker 0: Trace talks, by the way, for people watching this. You can watch that now. But this

Speaker 1: is the first place I've worked where everybody wants to join in and help build content.

Speaker 0: Absolutely.

Speaker 1: And like do good content. And I think if you have that buy in with the team, it's a lot easier to pull off. So we're we're continuing getting there. I'm really excited with what we've done so far. And don't sell yourself short, Kevin.

Like, you're the one that pulled all this together. So you're you're the linchpin of all this happening. So it always helps to have somebody like that on the team that can project manage and

Speaker 0: Thank you very much. I'll I'll pay you for that compliment later. Yep. So this is the first episode of digging the rabbit hole. This is, I think it's gonna end up being a 5 part series.

In future episodes, they're all available now. We're gonna release this in in one bundle, for you to watch. In the next episode, we're gonna talk about what gets made, how do we actually, you know, people across directors pitch shows into Matt and I. How do we decide what actually will get built and what are the purposes of different shows? What are the motivations and what are the kind of the decision factors that make that happen.

Then we're gonna talk about the process that we've created that allows us to output such a huge amount of content while not actually having any individual, like, owning director's TV. Like, this is this is one of the many projects that are run, and that is that is enabled by strong processes and playing into our team's strengths and weaknesses and building processes that that, account for those. We'll talk about that as well. Then we'll talk about the actual technical build, this platform right here. It's part of our website.

How does it work? Spoiler, of course, it utilizes directors to manage content, but we'll also dig into the code, and see how that all gets pulled through. And then finally, we will chat with some of our field team around some of the early reception for this platform and how it's been going so far. So I think that's I think that's it, Matt.

Speaker 1: That's it. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 0: Thanks for thanks for coming. And until the next episode, bye for now.

Speaker 1: Bye.