 We're gonna talk about like DevRel and social and making friends online and stuff. I made this video and I was kind of like bemoaning the fact that like DevRel and DevEducation was kind of in this weird spot and people didn't really know how to package it and deal with it. And you wrote this really interesting tweet. It says, in my opinion, the high value function of product content is building community following around the product which for developer products would be better served by DevLog content rather than education, customer success content. Companies ask for education but they really want cool friends. I know that both of you are in this realm right now where you're kind of like developing a community around TL draw and excitement around TL draw. So how do you think about this function in your business and what kind of like led you to write that? I had a bad experience trying to do community education content for a company called Framer. It was an education role that was also very public facing and community facing. And by the end of it, I felt like the education side of that ended up frustrating the people who are interested in this space because I was trying to fit all of that community action and that content and like you could do so many cool things with the product but I was trying to like squeeze it through this like fairly narrow tunnel of education creating tutorials, creating guides, creating, et cetera. In a way, doing education for a product company felt like it was an impossible ask that that wasn't really the ask. And so for TL draw from the very beginning like I had that kind of content muscle kind of worked and I continued to do that and use this project and some of the ones that came before it as a way of like experimenting with that content like what can I do in order to like achieve actual goals without having to do something that felt very high investment with a potential low outcome and that wasn't really clear that it was needed. You know what I mean? Like what does make sense? What would make sense for this type of problem? You all have been doing like really great stuff with Twitter where like literally it's just like sometimes gifts of like, hey, this is a cool feature. Look at how cool this is and then like people go off and then just repeat that but like in their own mindset. Well, how do you describe that? I guess, right? Like that explosive community energy thing. I guess we actually talk about it quite a lot. It's hard sometimes when you're trying to put out content like that, right? Like I find it hard to put out content that feels almost like low effort in a way. You know, because I think, you know, like I get it when you're putting out something you've made on the internet, you know, you want to sell it. You want to advertise it. Totally. But like no one's interested in that, right? Like no one wants to be sold to. Like I think we were chatting earlier and you said about, you know, you scroll down some Twitter feeds or like LinkedIn or whatever. And there's lots of adverts. People are trying to get you to do something. And I think when we're putting out that kind of content, like we don't need them to buy something from us. We just need them to like us, right? You just need like, so I find it hard. When I make something cool, like say I'm messing around with an experiment and it surprises me. Like I have to stop that initial like gut reaction to say like, this is the most amazing thing to ever come out of London. You know, like no one wants to hear that. No one wants that rubbish. But the best thing to do is to just genuinely take my actual reaction and put it into a tweet and like make it more human in a way, you know? So I think there was like one of the tweets was like, I just like, I can't believe this works. I can't believe this was my genuine reaction. And so it's kind of hard and it's kind of easy, but it's very deliberate. Don't tell anyone. Kind of hard, kind of easy, very deliberate. This is like maybe the best summation of like, of all of this I've ever heard. No, no, it is true though, because it is. It when it happens, it feels like like magic because I'm sure that for as many times as you've done that, you've maybe put something out there and it just kind of didn't get picked up. People didn't really care that much and they're like, oh, it's cool that you're excited about that, but I don't care. First off, like before tech and design and any of this, like my background was in fine arts, right? And one of the things that my kind of generation of artists who I guess grew up on Facebook and social media like, you know, was new. One of the things that you, we did a lot was just constantly be sharing work in progress. You know, there's a particular way of writing about your work that was meant for an audience that wasn't artists, et cetera. And there was another way of talking about your work among other people who were engaged in the same craft in the same sort of like work of the artist, right? And I was always like, I love doing studio visits. I love having those conversations because they were, yes, they were about the concepts behind your work and the meaning of the message and the work, but there were also a lot about like the craft of the work. And though, you know, like you have an hour conversation about like different inks and stuff like that. And I think that when it comes to like any product, whether that is a developer tool or an end user product, if you ask yourself like, what is the most interesting conversation that we could have about this product? Like if I wanted to tell someone about Teal Draw, is the most interesting thing that I could share with them, here's the business case for Teal Draw or here's how to use it or anything like that. Like sometimes, yeah, like that's important. Like some people would be interested in that, but especially if you're talking to other makers, other developers, other people who are engaged in this same process of making a technical tool that people like is usable and that solves all these problems and stuff. The most interesting content might be, check out all these weird edge cases inside of this interaction that seems easy once you figured it all out. And when you look at that, especially the earlier kind of like Twitter content that sort of found, made the foundation, the cultural foundation for Teal Draw, it was that, how do stickies work? Or like, why do some apps let you rotate them and others don't? Should we, like, you know, how does our arrow work when it's like a little arrow or whatever? It ends up being product education and it ends up being like just generally interesting. But the motivation is in the tone and so forth. It's much more like kind of craftsperson. It's like shop talk. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, let me show you something. Yeah, exactly. And honestly, like when you have a product that is as visual as Teal Draw, you get away with publishing that. Like it's all shit, like shit, but fuck it. But I think that that attitude of letting people in enough to see the parts of the project that are like really special and that are like worth talking about to the type of person you're talking about. Like that's how you build a, again, like not necessarily a community and not like a pipeline, but how you get cool friends. You know what I mean? Like how do you get people to come over to your studio? It doesn't like this. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, you wanna be a good date. I don't know how to say it like, you know? And if people are gonna give you their time and their time and so forth. So I guess that's how I was thinking. Yeah, no, no. I think about it the same way. Like I think sometimes we use like some different words for it. Like you say cool friends, like say community, you know? But I usually say date, I say, I don't know. But sometimes I feel like, you know, like I see how much hard work goes on from team members. And I think it's sometimes it would be a shame to only show like the final stage of it. You know, like, hey, we've been working for like 12 months on a new system or a new, and I think some people think they can only show that when it's finished. And it doesn't seem right, you know? Like there's so much hidden juice there, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like all of these bugs we fixed. I think like don't be ashamed of showing the bugs that you fix because like that's your hard work. And I think like you say about like product education part of it is about look how much hard work we put in. Yeah, because for us it's a special sort of like, it's especially aligned with the company because yeah, whatever we make an SDK, we're ultimately our biggest competitor is like someone just doing the stuff themselves. It really does like comments and other real time stuff. And it's like, you know, here's how to build comments, you know, and it's like a second person description of, you know, first here's how you're gonna do it. And then these are the problems that you're gonna have and all this, and it just goes on for like 3,000 words. And it has a great effect of discouraging me from ever building the comment system, even though I'm gonna build a comment system. Because it's like, you know, it's like, I found that, you know, I would probably have changed a few things in terms of tone, but like, I feel like we do that naturally. Is that like by sharing that work in progress, it's also, yeah, sharing the craft and the quality. But I do think it's hard. It's like emotionally hard for some people online to do that. Because you have to show your half finished work. You have to show your bugs. And I think like once you get through that, then things go better. And I remember like before some of the make real, we had like a meeting the week before the make real stuff went viral. And you were like telling me like, people want to see the behind the scenes stuff. You know, like, share your thinking, you know, I'm like, oh, I don't know, I don't know. So yeah, well, thanks to you, thanks to you. It was all me. Well, it's interesting because there's a tweet, I don't know if I could find it, but like, it's the CEO of Cloudflare. And they were talking about a transition in their content where they decided to, or they were speaking to future employees, I guess. And so they wanted to talk in this way that it was like collaborative and like opening up the process and kind of that open source type of like mindset and vibe. You know, we talked about like, this is like a function of product, but it almost feels like a function of like engineering as well where you're kind of integrating people into that thought process. It's a, it can be a risk to open up those type of design questions early on, especially if they're like sort of like UX questions, because kind of also our job to make a choice. Here's what we think is best. And the last, you know, of all committees, I would choose Twitter the last to make my design by committee choices. Even, even below Reddit? Like, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, actually, yeah. Well, okay, two things. First, yes, it's a great place to show work and progress content because like good ideas about constraints, especially like, oh, would that work for this? You know, like, oh, damn, I hadn't even thought about that. A lot of really good ideas have come out of those types of questions. Oh, damn. Well, there it goes. Nevermind. Oh, no, it's not even further away. Oh, sorry, sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. We just pushed it. We pushed it. Okay. Here's what it was. You can edit that. The other thing that I was gonna say is that, okay, let's say you just finish a project and now you wanna promote it. You're starting from a place, whatever, now it's April and it's gonna take some time to get that out. You're only gonna have so many times of repeating, hey, this is done, check this out. Before people like burn out on that message. Whereas, if you just share the fact that you're working on a problem, like that work and progress content also like is a huge promotion of like, hey, someone's working on this problem. Like they might not be done yet, but they're working on it and you're able to tell that same story like dozens of times more than you could have if you just wait until it was over and then say, hey, we have new sticky notes. Is that you're able to like, be like, sticky notes are coming. Yeah, yeah. We're doing the work on sticky notes. Like it's happening. And I think Figma recently released this great like multi-selection box product that had come out and Niko, the designer behind it, was able to use the Twitter account for Figma to share, you know, a Steve-like thread. It's great, I'm so happy to see it. But like, really like that sort of like, let me take you on a kind of a deep dive into this problem, not only like how it works, but like, here's why it was hard and here are the things that we overcame and working on it. And it's a little bit like an engineering blog, but for kind of the UX design, it's awesome. Yeah, yeah. And like my only complaint was that, you know, well, like, why am I only seeing this now? You know, like, I know you've been working on this for six months, like, I would have loved to be, you know, see the ups and downs along the way. I think not every product can do that for various reasons. But if you're, especially if you're early and there are no rules and who cares? What are you going to lose? Yeah, I think it's just such a good, that type of visibility, it pays off in ways that are just hard to predict and hard to sort of like roadmap. But, you know, it's all good. I mean, that's the thing, like, when things happen, it's sometimes unexpected. Like you mentioned earlier about how, you know, when we put something out, maybe it explodes in a good way, maybe it just fizzles out, whatever. Like, and we've talked in the past about thing, like if every tweet does well, then we're kind of not being experimental enough. We're not kind of not pushing it hard enough. Like if you're only doing safe posts of content, then you're not gonna cut through or make a mark, right? So like, yeah, sure. Like we have a tweet that fizzles out or backfires or something every now and then. But then one in a hundred or one in 50 or one in 20, we'll turn it into like, hey, like we got Sam Altman fired, whatever, right? I, listen, there's some crazy theories out there. I'm not gonna deny anything, but the... I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I think a big component of this, it does relate to education also, and I'm sure, Michael, you can sympathize with it. Like educational content takes a ton of time to make. Like, so much work, yeah. So much work, yeah. And also like products change and the things you've recorded broke. Like I broke, like had content break on me because like the product changed underneath it. Like it's high investment of time. And while that is really good for some things, and I'm very glad that there are high quality tutorials out there, you do not need a high quality tutorial in order to make cool friends and to tell a development story or anything like that. Like honestly, like the kind of, like I don't think we're exactly a fire hose or a shotgun type of approach, but like the reason why I kind of settled on Twitter gift threads so much early on was that like, I can do this without dramatically changing the way that I build this product. Interesting. Like it can kind of be the chaff that occurs like as I'm doing the development. Yeah. And then I can share that and it'll serve that as well. So it's a little bit like, I don't know like burning your wood dust to warm your workshop. Yeah. But you're gonna make it anyway. You might as well like deploy it or something. Yeah, Brad Frost has this really great concept that I've come to really enjoy. He calls it creative exhaust that he had to get into this pattern of sharing that creative exhaust where it's like, you know, he's always like kind of like working and pushing against this thing. And there's this energy that just falls off of it naturally. And if you find a way to capture that and share that, like that is audience building, community building, like friend gaining as we've repeated a couple of times. And it is a hard skill because sometimes you're exhausted from just doing the work. And you're like, I don't have time to talk about this with the people on Twitter today. We can just fucking, just post. Post. Post out like this. I have posted a gift of my own stuff every day for like five or six years now. Five or six years. Well, I switched to Master Don't, you know, but they're still posting on Twitter on Teal Draw. But like, I feel like it fuels you more, right? Because you get people, okay, it's not about the likes. I would do it even without the likes. But like, I don't know. I would never have met Steve and come to work here if I didn't post every day, right? I got a job here because Steve saw a tweet and we're both in London, right? And here I am. I wouldn't have done any of this work if I wasn't like trying to build bridges. Like not everyone is gonna be your friend, but some people would, you know? And you do it enough time, cross your fingers a lot and it might work out. I can only make one guarantee, which is that if you post gifts on Twitter I will hire you to work at Teal Draw. It worked for me. Yeah. It worked for me. 100% of the people in this room. Really? I mean, this is a very small room. Wait, I'm, oh, sorry, this room. I think many of the whole office. Actually, like, Alex as well. And this is again, like, why I think education is like too narrow a path in order to sort of fit your community outreach or whatever, I don't know. Some of the best tweet threads, deep dives, whatever that have come out of Teal Drive were like, could have been engineering posts or, you know, could have been talking about, like, I don't know, they could have been LinkedIn positioning chat, I don't know how to say that. But like, yeah, if you're doing cool work and there's a low, low, low barrier to sharing that, and if you can make that low, low barrier, it's like not offensively shitty, but like charmingly shitty. Charmingly shitty. You know, that might have to be the title of this thing. And the go for it, like, and if it doesn't work, that's fine. It was a tweet. It was like, who cares? I just delete my tweets that don't get many likes of my personal account. You lose those. This is reminding me of something that I heard that was really profound. It was an interview between Chris Thiele and Ben Folds. Of the five, yeah. Of the five, yes. And I think Chris said something to the effect of art is getting up on stage, rehearsed and just breathing. And we don't do enough of that. And I think so much of this conversation just brought that back to mind, this idea of we're afraid to maybe embrace the art side of this, which is to have that communication and just stand in front of people and just be who we are and breathe and show the work that we've been creating along the way. And that may be a little abstract, but I do think there's something very, there's something very there. People want to, they want to like admire and celebrate like hard achievements. And we don't allow them to a lot of the times because we want to like just polish it up so much that it like barely even resembles who we are anymore. And that's a shame. I'd like to see more of the stuff that you all are doing and like the progress that you're showing. You know, I have a phrase, normalize sharing scrappy fiddles.option 24. I think, yeah. It's just. Well, we can win. I'm not even, I'm. In itself is a scrappy fiddler of a of a of a, of a maxim. Exactly. Exactly. I appreciate you. Exactly. I'm sorry. It was too perfect that it wouldn't, it wouldn't have that. You know, it wouldn't. Exactly. Drop people in. There is a sort of like, you have to be willing to sort of die on stage in order to get on stage type of thing, right? I don't know. I think that there is a sort of a professional trust that of course doesn't really exist on something like Twitter, right? But like, you can like pretend it does, which is you just trust that like you're not the only person who's ever had a bug, that has ever like struggled with a piece of user experience or implementation or something like that. I don't know, maybe it's just me like, I just presume everyone's super like tied up in terms of their, or like buttoned up in terms of their lives. Like I also presume the best, you know, like that, you know, like you're descending to share your bug with me, but everything else is going fine, you know? And so it's like, no one cares. No, like you can, you can share your work, scrappy fiddles or otherwise. It's just, yeah. You got it. I think you hooked him. I think giving an opportunity for that professional sympathy is the kind of studio visit moment or something like that. Yep, yep, yep. Been there. Something like that, you know? And then when you do have something to celebrate, now you have people to celebrate it with. The sort of the victory lap kind of stuff that we were doing in November was like make real, really felt earned in a way that wouldn't have to have just come out anyway. So many people were commenting like, hey, I followed TealDraw before they were called, you know, like I was scared when Steve was battling arrows on his own. Someone shared my like GitHub activity blog to say like, you know, he's been grinding for years in this thing. Actually, it's an angel investor, so I can't make fun of him. No, but it's great. It's awesome. Yeah, it was fun to see you. I love that. Well, I think that that's a great place to end. I think that everything that you've talked about, like that art, the community, like feel, like I can feel it. And I'm glad that we got a chance to talk about it because it feels different. It feels unique and warm in a way that is uncommon. And so thanks for sharing everything with me today. It's awesome. Thank you. I'm glad you could join as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're pretty good. Yeah, you do. Yeah. Where can people find you all and, you know, if they want to follow along in your personal journeys or also like TealDraw. TealDraw, you can follow at x.com slash TealDraw. And of course, TealDraw.com for the app. And if you're into, if you're a developer, we're on GitHub. GitHub.com slash TealDraw slash TealDraw is the repo for the SDK. I have a blog at SteveRuiz.me. You have a blog. Yeah, toadpond.com, baby. Toadpond.com. Toadpond.com. And on YouTube as well. Oh yeah, YouTube. I forgot about that. Toadpond. Toadpond on YouTube. And then I'm on Twitter at SteveRuiz. OK. OK. OK. Thanks so much, y'all. This was absolutely fabulous. Thanks for sharing everything that you're doing. It's been great to watch and great to learn more right now. So thanks. See you out there, huh? Yeah, thanks.