In this episode, Jason Niedle interviews Jakub Czakon, CMO of Neptune, discussing the challenges and strategies in marketing DevTools, particularly in the AI space. Jakub shares his unique background, insights on leveraging AI in marketing, and the importance of understanding the target audience. He emphasizes the need for trust-building with champions and buyers, the role of events in engagement, and the evolving landscape of pricing models in technology. The conversation highlights the intersection of data science and marketing, offering valuable takeaways for tech leaders.
Takeaways
- Jakub Czakon has a diverse background in chess, physics, and data science.
- Marketing to developers requires a unique approach and understanding.
- AI can significantly enhance marketing strategies and audience understanding.
- Building trust with champions is crucial for reaching buyers.
- Engagement through events and conferences remains important in the tech space.
- Understanding the audience’s information sources is key to effective marketing.
- The future of pricing models in tech is uncertain and evolving.
- Influencer marketing is challenging but can be effective with the right approach.
- Using AI tools can streamline marketing processes and improve outcomes.
- Extracting net new knowledge from within the organization can drive content creation.
Sound Bites
“Understanding your audience is key.”
“You should speak to the champion first.”
“You need to extract net new knowledge.”
BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle (00:00)
Today we’re talking with Jakub Czakon, CMO of Neptune, about early stage DevTool growth.
Welcome
to Beyond SaaS. I’m Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos. We solve growth problems for tech companies through strategy design, cold email, educational campaigns, and more. Today, I’m really excited to talk with Jakub from Warsaw, Poland. Thank you for calling in.
He is the CMO of Neptune and Neptune gives AI researchers the same level of control and confidence when training models as software developers have when they’re shipping applications. So the teams that are training the AI models need the proper tools and Neptune is making that happen, which is really amazing. And I imagine you’re on the cutting edge of a lot of things in that realm. And Jakub has referenced himself as an ex chess pro, ex trader, physics major, and soon to be ex data scientist. So I think there’s a lot we can talk about right there.
And again, like I said, he is calling in from Poland today. So welcome, Jakub .
Jakub Czakon (00:57)
Okay, how’s it going? Great to be in the show.
Jason Niedle (00:59)
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Tell me about your background really fast before we get going.
Jakub Czakon (01:02)
Yeah, it’s very focused in one direction as you can see. No, I guess I’ve always been interested in learning and going deep into things. Even before chess, I went to music school, so I played piano and clarinet and then discovered chess and thought that was super interesting and spent probably way too much time playing
and learning, it was fun. 15 years, I think, of my life I put into this. On the way, discovered physics, which I thought was extremely interesting and went into and studied theoretical physics. But then that wasn’t enough, I guess, and then did a second degree in finance, which eventually
Jason Niedle (01:30)
Mm.
Jakub Czakon (01:42)
combining those two degrees, there was one thing that would be in the middle of it, which is data science, instead of looking at data. through that, I
ventured out a little bit into trading, sort of combining a lot of those things and then into data science and spend, many years doing data science modeling, back when it wasn’t maybe as, sexy as it is today, although it’s still super sexy and it’s, was, you know, very sexy back then and super interesting. And I guess that curiosity would just like, push me into places that seemed hard and difficult to people. And, and that seemed hard and difficult to me.
And basically at our startup in Neptune what happened was we hired and fired marketing team, hired and fired consultancy, maybe just stopped working together and then at some point during an interview someone on the team said, hey maybe you want to learn marketing and I’ll advise and
That’s how I got into marketing. I thought it was a very difficult, very murky, not clear cut, intersection of so many things that I’ve done before and so many things that I haven’t really touched ever that I found marketing to be extremely fascinating.
Jason Niedle (02:45)
Mm-hmm.
So think in some ways we have an overlap. I studied music at USC for a year and thought I was going to be a musician and then realized I didn’t really like practicing and it wasn’t that fun to make a life out of it so that I thought I was going to be a lawyer and I got my degree in philosophy on the logic side of things. And I think that in marketing, and I imagine you may feel the same way, but there’s an element of creativity like how do we attack this problem and what do have to do that hasn’t been done or do it in a different way?
Jakub Czakon (02:57)
Wow.
Wow.
Jason Niedle (03:17)
How do I monitor and see is that working or is that not working and how do I do more of what works? But then how do I make more creative to see what might work?
Jakub Czakon (03:22)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Yeah, no, no. Yeah, exactly, exactly. then, you know, so like matching those things together. I did my master’s thesis on supernova bursts, right? And I remember, you you do something like that and you analyze it and basically, what I analyzed was which model of the universe was most likely to be true, right? And you do that based on the data of, some stars bursting out,
millions of light years away, right? then you go to marketing and people, you know.
There’s one side of the table where they want to attribute everything and then there’s another one that doesn’t want to touch any attribution. And then you look at it from that lens of, if we can attribute bursting stars to certain probabilities of models of universe to be more likely than others to be true, then I think you should be able to do something with attribution incrementality in marketing. And I think it’s a difficult problem, especially
when
you have so many different channels, so many different things that are happening, but solvable and to your point, yeah, like at the end of the day, if you think from those first principles, I think that’s what helps, like at the end of the day, we’re talking to people at the end of the day, we want to grow the business, and a lot of
those things in between are smoke and mirrors that make it harder, I guess, to understand that maybe we put ourselves or maybe somebody selling tools or ad platform puts in front of us. But if you think first principles and studying philosophy or physics or things like that helps a lot with that, that’s the way to go.
Jason Niedle (04:55)
I think this is the first time that I’ve related, heard a relationship of supernovas millions of light years away to marketing and to see how those might overlap. Usually in the beginning of the podcast, I ask people for a golden nugget, so our listeners get a quick tip, and I forgot with you because you’re so interesting, but do you have a golden nugget?
Jakub Czakon (05:10)
Oh, yes, I do. And that’s something I had this big goal for this year to really, really use AI wherever I can.
Partially to understand better what’s happening, right? Then where are the limitations and partially because I do see a lot of volume doing it. So my nugget is combining tools like ChatGPT with voice recording and live transcription tools like VoiceType. That’s what I’m using. So basically what you do is you record sometimes a very long message, right? Where you explain the entire context of something that you want done. And then you
paste into ChatGPT and you get your results but
I just find it extremely valuable when it comes to really not blocking myself with the context. And the more context you put, the more info you put, the better results you get. That is extremely, extremely valuable. Maybe a bonus tip also connected to ChatGPT users, just like whatever you get out, especially marketing, a lot of the things we get from it is then we want to use it in different places, right? And put them in front of our audiences and reviewing
it, telling ChatGPT to roleplay your ideal customer profile, roleplay a set of different personas as they are going through the content, the piece, the landing page, the ad, or whatever you created, and see what they think about it, what they like, what they don’t like, what they would change, what they would tweak, what language doesn’t resonate, what language they would use, if they were talking to a friend, and things like that. And that is extremely valuable, you know, because it’s sort of
It’s obviously, ideally you’d have a person, your ideal audience in front of you, reviewing that copy or reviewing that page or whatever, but that’s almost never the case that you’re able to do that easily. It’s at 9.15 in the morning.
Jason Niedle (06:59)
Yeah, well I love that because a lot of times I say, here’s my ideal customer profile right with me and we kind of bounce ideas back and forth. But then at the end to say, okay, good, now I want you to role play through it and I want you to tell me your responses as this ICP and then, okay, good, now I want you to tell me how would you take what you just read and tell a friend, right, in the similar thing. So I think.
Jakub Czakon (07:21)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Niedle (07:23)
That’s such a great extra layer that you can add on top of that to really get what you want. And also like be critical and because lately they just rolled back a whole release where it was basically kissing everyone’s ass and saying whatever you wanted it to hear, right? And I think we want a little bit of that pushback. So being specific about the pushback is probably also important.
Jakub Czakon (07:43)
Yeah, yeah, that’s a very good point. know, I think ChatGPT is very similar to any other tool that you’d use. And if you really understand how that tool works, you can really get a lot of from it. Maybe connecting that to chess and those things is like, if you really understand how a rook works, but like really deeply understand how a rook works, you see different things versus,
Jason Niedle (08:06)
Hmm.
Jakub Czakon (08:07)
you just understand sort of that it moves in horizontal vertical and then it can castle if there’s a king and there was no stuff happening before but that’s that’s just surface level and I think there is there’s always a lot beyond the surface and and so understand the tools and don’t add the new tools just understand the ones we have that’ll be yeah
Jason Niedle (08:21)
I love that.
For sure.
Jason Niedle (08:26)
Hey, it’s Jason with a 10 second note from our sponsor, Tethos. I wanted to offer you our Hypergrowth Playbook. It’s a free guide that I put together, a compilation of our first 20 or so episodes of learning from the show, which includes book recommendations, golden nuggets, and the amazing learnings from all these tech leaders. Simple to get it, just drop the word GROWTH in the comments and I’ll send it to you, or head on over to tethos.com/playbook and that’s T-E-T-H-O-S dot com slash playbook, and you’ll have it right there. All right, back to our episode.
Jason Niedle (08:56)
Tell our audience a little bit about Neptune.
Jakub Czakon (08:58)
Yeah, as you mentioned, we help AI researchers build models in a more efficient way. We do that by helping them log all of the metadata of the metrics as they’re training the models, which helps them to deep dive, to debug, to monitor, to do things like that. Basically, that means that we’re the sort of visibility tool, observability tool.
for training.
What it means for us is that there are not that many companies that are training models and they need that deep visibility. So it’s a very challenging and interesting thing for me as a marketer where we work with some of the biggest teams out there, including Poolside or Akyra or Thinking Machines and some that I cannot talk about just yet.
Jason Niedle (09:44)
Hehehe.
Jakub Czakon (09:45)
Teams that are working on some awesome things and they’re building amazing models in different areas and those folks are at the cutting edge of training models. Those are the best researchers who they will find. The trick there is that you as a marketer you have to get to those teams and there are not that many of those teams and those folks they really don’t want to talk to you. So that’s a very interesting challenge.
Jason Niedle (10:06)
They don’t? I thought they’re knocking your door down.
Jakub Czakon (10:08)
Yeah. Yeah. it’s maybe more likely to hit an AI researcher with a stone. if you were to throw it somewhere, in San Francisco, but, but either way, that’s, that’s very, interesting to work with those personas. What helps me is, that I was never, sort of state of the art, top AI researcher, but
I did contribute to some of the state of the art models at some point, so I know how the sausage is made, so to speak, to an extent, so it helps me empathize. And I think in lots of those things in marketing, the empathy is one of the superpowers and it’s easiest to be empathetic towards yourself or your past self.
You know, there are folks who can do that with completely foreign audiences, right? And they can really, really understand it. But I think it’s easier if you can, be that sort of first layer of review, first layer of does that resonate? if you see something and you’re like, wow, it’s just something is off here, then that’s good because you can push yourself, you can push, your team to do better.
Jason Niedle (11:08)
You present a problem that’s not unique to you in that there’s a small target audience, they’re critical and they’re tough to reach. So what specific things are you doing that work or you thought would work and don’t work? Like how do you reach this tiny audience, tough to reach And what tips do you have for people out there?
Jakub Czakon (11:25)
Mm-hmm.
I mean like with every audience is to understand where they are, right? And you can do that through asking people, where do you get your information online? And then following with like, okay, so who do you follow? you’re here, so whatever situation you have, you can ask people, you can go to reddits and places like that, figure out where people are, etc, etc. You can now with tools like Clay and others,
figure out sort of which companies are more likely to do a certain thing that you want them to do, have certain attributes that you want to later use to find those companies, right? So that’s how we can build those lists and figure out one, where people are, similar people to those that you serve, and then two, figure out what those attributes are that define those
companies that define the people, right? Within those companies, your champions, your end users. In DevTools, is often that sort of problem of,
the buyer is not the champion most of the time. And so we have the users who are very loud influencers, sometimes champions. And then you have the buyers who are footing the bill, but they don’t want to talk to you. And they will only talk to you if their team comes to you. So you got to do, you know, some sort of bottom up, ideally combined with some trust building that lands on that
Jason Niedle (12:37)
Mmm.
Jakub Czakon (12:44)
buyer too. Yeah, but generally I think that’s part of like understanding who you’re going after having those lists of accounts. I mean the smaller the market, easier it is for you to define who are those people there, right? And have a big chunk of that market as a list. And then you can start figuring out how to get to that list of people, right? In our case, we know
you can find a pocket of your market on LinkedIn. You can be almost certain of that, right? And so it’s a good place to start. So we do lots of stuff there on LinkedIn.
Jason Niedle (13:09)
Mm-hmm.
Jakub Czakon (13:15)
there are conferences, and I think now, events and conferences and things like that. I mean, people are still hungry for that. And I think now with, so much good stuff that comes from AI and so much good stuff that comes from creating that content and sort of, being able to create more of it, hopefully more good content based on first hand experience, but we both know it’s not always the case.
People get bored with it and with the bad one especially, And more importantly, they just seek this human connection. So I think the events and we’re going to events, we’re going to conferences, stuff like that. And I think that part is only going to get stronger in DevTools,
our little pocket of the market but generally I think people will want that you know will want events for sure.
And, I don’t think that the firsthand experience content that may be formatted or curated with AI is ever going away. If anything, I like to be positive and think that AI is giving opportunity to many people, many fantastic, devs who would want to share their opinion, would want to share their thoughts, but maybe English wasn’t their first language. Maybe they never wanted to put enough effort and work.
Jason Niedle (14:06)
you
Jakub Czakon (14:31)
in there but now it’s just easier for them to record some stuff maybe and then get it converted into different pieces of content and you can do that sort of first hand deep first hand valuable insights that are not yet Googleable because nobody wrote about them right but I hope we’ll see more and more people sharing those nuggets of wisdom
Jason Niedle (14:47)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, for sure. So you mentioned this idea of having a champion and then the buyer is elsewhere, right? And you have to kind of bottom up trust building to get from the champion to the buyer. How specifically are you doing that at Neptune?
Jakub Czakon (15:08)
One of the things that I find both at Neptune, you know, tricky, is that yeah, like you want to talk to both, but,
how do you talk to them and where do you talk to them is another thing, right? And I think there’s this feeling that you should speak to the buyer everywhere, which I think is a big mistake. So one example would be, people want to speak to the buyer on the homepage, right? And I think especially in DevTools,
you should first speak to the champion, land that message on the champion, and then there are places where you can speak to the buyer where devs wouldn’t even go, right? So one example would be, let’s say you’re a dev tool, you can have solution pages and solution pages for different industries that are focused on the buyer personas that show their ROIs etc, etc, right? But not, that’s not the message you start with. That’s, that’s not the message that you, in my opinion, at least, should have
in the header or in the first few sections, right? Because that’s where you will lose the dev. The dev is going to be doing that evaluation. The dev is going to be sent to that page because maybe they saw a post somewhere, some good article on Hacker News or maybe your ad that they found, that was funny or interesting or not. Maybe they heard from someone at a conference and they go to your site and if you
speak to the buyer on that homepage and it’s not super crystal clear. Where is the message to the dev?
Then you’re in trouble. And then I think there’s like parts of like, you could, some DevTools, especially in the ones where the developer motion is secondary, you can have them elsewhere, right? So homepage speaks more generally, and then you have the developers page where, you send people to, and then on developers page, talk to the developers, but you start from a different angle. But I think that part of like understanding what’s your motion, right? How do you get
those customers,
look at your customers, look at the won deals, the lost deals, how do they come to you? Right? In DevTools, a lot of those deals will come through, some flavor of PLG, whether, you know, sort of open source with a hosted, things out there, right? Like the, in that sense, or like pure PLG, they would come, they would sign up for a free one. There’s the same in DevTools that you sign up over the weekend for your hobby project. And then you
bring it to work on Monday, that’s what you want and then you want people to you know test it out maybe use the self-serve tier you know on a credit card from a team manager.
Jason Niedle (17:20)
Hmm.
Jakub Czakon (17:28)
and not really talk to anyone until you start hitting the bigger quota, bigger usage, more teams are starting to use it and that’s where you reach out to them, right? And then that’s where the buyer personas start becoming more more important and you outreach to them, speaking with ROI, speaking to them, sending them to various assets that you have. But the
Jason Niedle (17:35)
Thank
Jakub Czakon (17:49)
buyer is not primary and I think that’s the part that people miss and they try to go from the top
which is not a bad play if this is what you want to play. But if you claim and you want to be a DevTool and a bottom up DevTool, you’re self-served, your tool, the champion is the end user. It’s a fix on on pushing data from, I don’t know, Kafka to Snowflake. I saw a startup doing that recently or something like that or like a front-end tool.
On existing frameworks, then developers are your user and developers are your champion. you don’t convince the champion, then there’s no way that you can convince them starting with the buyer. So unless you have strong proof points that you can go from the buyer and then the buyer will do the convincing or you can obviously with you and with all the assets that you have and all the brand
Jason Niedle (18:32)
Mm-hmm.
Jakub Czakon (18:43)
love and stuff like that that you have. Oftentimes you have to really think through that lens that, well, your salesperson will actually be the dev who signed up for the free product. They will be selling it internally. So you better gather all the love that you can from the dev before they start talking to their manager or to push the manager to talk to the CTO, etc, etc.
Jason Niedle (18:55)
Mmm.
Jakub Czakon (19:06)
And it gets organization wide. So I think that’s the part that is key, understanding where we’re going and then going from that angle.
Jason Niedle (19:15)
100%. So with this challenge of growth that we’ve been talking about, what’s your growth goal this year?
Jakub Czakon (19:22)
Yeah. So, maybe I, I’ll just add another tip there that I think is, very valuable for when you have those accounts, right? I mentioned those accounts, create those lists, etc. There’s a great framework coming from Snowflake they wrote a book on, I think it was Hillary Carpio showed a book together with another person on ABM, account based marketing and how they think about it.
And they have five levels of engagement of those accounts. So you have target accounts, you have engaged accounts, so they’re are actually engaging with your content, with your people in conference, so what not. Then you have working accounts where people reach out, you start actively reaching out to folks. Then you have the
first meeting, right? Then opportunity and finally closed one, right? And obviously there is more things because, things don’t end with the deal, but those are sort of like the first, you know, the most important stages, right? So, right now with a lot of what we would have been doing, we managed to really engage a big chunk of the list.
And we’re progressing many accounts through that list to those deeper levels. But my goal is by the end of the year, really touch and engage at least half of the accounts that we have. And I think we’re
going to get there. But for me in a marketing front, this is the part where I want to drive the engagement. I want to drive the delivery of the messages that we have. I want everyone in my market to understand what are our differentiators, what is our sweet spot, who do we really help and how. What are the pain points that we solve and make people understand it.
Jason Niedle (20:50)
Mm-hmm.
Jakub Czakon (21:04)
and you measure that through engagement, sort of like the depth of that engagement within the accounts that you have, right? So this is the big goal for me. And I encourage people to use that framework, by the way, when they have, especially if they go, there is reasons for them to go ABM, to go through that framework because
because if you try and go with a classic MQL, SQL, or even the product lag of it with product qualified accounts, PQAs, PQLs, you will be basically looking at it late, as in you don’t have enough depth of understanding of those earlier parts of the funnel.
Jason Niedle (21:45)
Mm-hmm.
Jakub Czakon (21:45)
Right.
And I think now with a lot of the great tools that are coming out, they’re like, tools for signal based selling, just common room comes to mind as the, number one, probably the broker of, those different signals, but there’s many, many others, Koala, Vector, Trigify, many others that are helping get all of those different pieces of the
engagement and help you see that engagement and then help you grow it, right? Like help you understand where to focus your efforts and who to reach out to, etc, etc. So I think that part is important, to look deeper into the engagement of the accounts. And that’s what we’re focusing on.
Jason Niedle (22:24)
I love that. So let’s talk about constraints. If you could wave a magic wand in your business and improve something, grow something, fix something to help supercharge your growth, what would that be?
Jakub Czakon (22:36)
I’d say there’s one thing that I would really love to really understand and so to speak, crack, which is influencer marketing in DevTools. I think devs especially,
they are very prone to follow important figures. And even though that no dev would say that they would fall for influencer marketing, they actually do. the thing is, it’s very hard to be an influencer, like actual person with influence in the DevTool space. So oftentimes those folks are very credible.
That said, there is many success stories of people really cracking influencer marketing. There are more tools that help get to micro influencers now and sort of like, you know, it’s very hard to maybe get those big ones, but the smaller ones you can get.
But I think that part of really getting more influential folks, ideally who used your product, right? Finding those internal influencers within that, your user base is extremely powerful and getting those people to talk about it because, I mean, you can try and convince people all you want,
if they hear it,
that your product is good from another dev just like them who is using the product paying for it ideally switch from other competitor who is known they talk about those things. This like doesn’t get any better than that, right? So I think that lies at the bottom of it. What’s hard is finding those folks, getting folks to talk unless they already do
Right? It’s tricky. And then you have those things where folks who do talk, oftentimes they talk to more junior level devs, right? It’s sort of like introductory developer content. And that’s a really tricky part from my perspective. But if I could crack one thing, yeah, I’d love to crack influencer marketing.
Jason Niedle (24:30)
I love that. What should we know, particularly, you’re talking to CEOs and CMOs in SaaS and AI companies, and you have a unique perspective, I’m sure, on AI, even thinking through the chess elements of it and thinking how the models are built. What do they need to know? What are one or two things that they should know about AI in the year ahead?
Jakub Czakon (24:51)
I’d say one thing to generally when you think about AI, is that it’s easy to overestimate the next year and underestimate the next 10 years of any new technology, of any big shift. And I think
like here, you can still hear folks talk about AI not being sort of a fad, maybe, it’s like overhyped. And it’s like, well, I think something could be overhyped and still be the most important technology that has come out in the past decade or five.
Jason Niedle (25:21)
Mmm.
Jakub Czakon (25:25)
And I think realistically in AI, we’re not looking at 10, we’re looking at five or maybe three or whatever it is, because we’re moving extremely quickly. And
Jason Niedle (25:31)
Yeah.
Jakub Czakon (25:33)
I would really encourage people to try and think AI first in everything they do, whether that’s in marketing, building products, whatever it is.
try and think where you can leverage AI. Something I mentioned at the beginning, right? Like using it as sort of a peer reviewer, on-demand peer reviewer. There is obviously strategy docs that you could do. You could put a lot of those contexts. You can use deep research to sort of understand different pockets of problems, audiences, or activities within your department, right? Like understanding how exactly would you run whatever, do whatever.
I think trying to think AI first is going to be a big unlock. And like everyone says it, but like really, are you doing it? Are you really trying to think through that lens with every activity? And then are you thinking about the activities that you’re doing through that lens?
As in how are they defensible three years from now, one year from now, two years from now, when, you know, it doesn’t make sense to invest so much into something that is not really providing that sort of net new value to the world, right? If you’re summarizing the best articles out there,
Jason Niedle (26:30)
Hmm.
Jakub Czakon (26:42)
this by design is gonna be worse than AI, every time. So don’t do that, but you could be adding value. You could be, figuring out what net new information can I add, right? Like what subject matter experts I can bring, stuff that you’re doing right now. This is like, you’re bringing new voices.
So I think podcasts are fantastic way of doing it. You can do that internally too. Are you doing it internally, right? Like those are the questions as a marketer, but as any person today in SaaS, would think about, right? And then maybe another thing that is very interesting is the pricing part of it, which I don’t want to get into, but I just have it sort of flagged
in my mind is a very difficult to think about right because seed based pricing is not really going to cut it it doesn’t seem right long term if we have like those teams getting smaller and more efficient but then what is it you know and then you know how how are you really want to
Jason Niedle (27:34)
Mm-hmm.
Jakub Czakon (27:37)
package all those things. mean, obviously it depends, everything depends, but I think pricing is also super interesting in this award.
Jason Niedle (27:43)
Right. And when you’re supplying so
much value with something in some ways that requires so little actual cost to process, you know, like where do you price in the middle of that?
Jakub Czakon (27:51)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like you can always claim the, you know, and go, let’s go value-based pricing, you know, see how much money I’m making you, how much I’m saving you, right? And let’s get a, you know, 10-20% cut of it, right?
but that is only really possible in sales led motions, right? How does that work in the PLG? How does that work in self-serve?
Jason Niedle (28:14)
Mm-hmm.
Jakub Czakon (28:16)
I mean, me, especially in DevTools, right? Where everyone, you know, wants to, and frankly, I think should do something in self-serve if your end user is a Dev, then how do you actually do it? And usage base is an answer, but
It’s not always possible. Because again, there are problems there, Like usage-based only works if you really understand the value you’re getting from a particular unit. And what if your unit of value is not really understood that well? So what do you do then? Well, typically you do seed-based, but what do you do now? So I think those are very interesting and open questions. And when we talk in a year or two, we’re gonna see some companies that are really changing things up by providing
completely different pricing models that just work in this world.
Jason Niedle (28:57)
Hmm. Yeah, that’s fascinating way. Yeah, and in fact, I wonder too, maybe that’s a question I add to these podcasts. I haven’t thought of the podcast before as net new knowledge. And I think that’s a really interesting way to look at it in many ways, because it is my job to suss and pull that out. But like, where am I contributing and how am I helping to funnel that to net new knowledge and pricing again, like you said, might be, I’m putting a note in here, might be a better one.
question for me to add in here. Any final thoughts? I know I’ve kept you up really late there.
Jakub Czakon (29:25)
Maybe just to add, know, add to one thing that you just mentioned with the Net New Knowledge. There is a fascinating story, maybe, in one of the future episodes, you could talk to some folks from there. There’s a fascinating story coming from Infobip and those folks, they, yeah, they cater to engineers.
And there was a Shift Mag, I think that was the company that they bought, you know, that actually was the key developer company. Anyhow, they wanted to do developer content, but
they didn’t really have dev roles or folks like that, know, or really devs that wanted to write on their team, right? But what they figured is that all of those devs that they have in the company, they have interesting stories. You just need to extract that knowledge. And then, you think, okay, so what are the market, know, marketers could do that, etc, etc. But when you think about it,
And that’s what pushed them was that there’s a better group to extract that knowledge from those devs. And coincidentally, I think there was job cuts at a newspaper, local newspaper, where they were. And what they did was they hired the journalists to basically extract interesting
Jason Niedle (30:34)
Hmm.
Jakub Czakon (30:38)
thoughts and obviously they needed to understand what’s interesting, but they learned that, they extracted a ton of those different fantastic stories coming from engineers and created that into a content machine. So basically, connecting one piece of, line of work that many people claim is disappearing, like the reporters or journalists or folks who writing articles online, because like,
AI can write everything. That said, that’s not the main value of a journalist, right? The main value is in or the reporter, the main value, at least in my mind, is being a fantastic listener, being a fantastic question, asker, if you will, you know, like person who can really prod in places that seem interesting to get more of that insight. And then the stories that would otherwise
never been told get told right
Jason Niedle (31:28)
Mm.
Jakub Czakon (31:29)
And that probably works in every niche, right? But they went extreme in that they actually hired those reporters to report on engineering stories and create a machine there. Yeah, I it was fantastic. I think that those sort of ideas of surfacing that net new knowledge is where the gold is still.
Jason Niedle (31:44)
Super smart.
Mm, I love that. How does our audience find you?
Jakub Czakon (31:58)
If you want to learn more about my stuff, my thoughts on developer marketing, then go to markepear.dev . On LinkedIn, Jakub Czakon on LinkedIn, so you can follow me there for sure. If you’re, by any chance an AI researcher trying to solve problems around training observability and experiment tracking, then definitely check us out at Neptune.ai .
Jason Niedle (32:21)
Perfect. And for that first website, can you spell that out for our listeners?
Jakub Czakon (32:24)
Yeah, so it’s M-A-R-K-E-P-E-A-R. So there’s a pear at the end. .dev Funny enough, that’s a pun on developer advocates who like to call themselves avocados. And I figured developer marketers are not really avocados, but yeah, there’s a fruit to them. So figured I’d go with pears.
Jason Niedle (32:48)
That’s funny. Jakub, thank you so much for being on Beyond SaaS. For tech leadership out there, we’re committed to exploring tech growth, so we drop our episodes twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And you can find me, Jason Niedle, at tethos.com, t-e-t-h-o-s.com. And don’t forget to grab that playbook, which is actually useful, at tethos.com/podcast. If you got some value today, please share the episode with a friend and drop us some questions for me or for future guests and comments,
and feedback, I really appreciate. until next time, this is Beyond SaaS.
