7 ms·

I enjoyed this article, but I'm noticing more and more that everything I read about fly is either a fun/low cost side project, or it's a (very impressive) artic

I enjoyed this article, but I'm noticing more and more that everything I read about fly is either a fun/low cost side project, or it's a (very impressive) article about fly.io internals. There's very clearly a capable tech team, but I'm confused about their target market. What customer success stories am I missing?

swyx 4y ago
i dont work at fly but i do work in devrel and this is pretty common. its basically a joint result of the fact that most content marketing is either about lowering the barriers of adoption and telling an impressive technical story for recruiting and sales; and that most big companies require a lot of hoop jumping to post official case studies; and that fly is still a newish paradigm that most companies haven't yet adopted. i have no doubt they'll come along if fly continues owning mindshare at this level. when its obvious on HN but not yet obvious on the marketing sites you just have to wait a couple years (with some exceptions to the rule, e.g. people often bring up the failure of light table which got significant HN pull and seems to have died out https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=light%20table&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
- recuter 4y ago
  Insightful > i have no doubt they'll come along if fly continues owning mindshare at this level. when its obvious on HN but not yet obvious on the marketing sites you just have to wait a couple years Seems like an accurate observation. Now please elaborate as to why? And how does one shorten this? I am unskilled at devrel and wish to benefit from your experience further. Cheers. :)
  - itake 4y ago
    I think they’re copying digital ocean’s strategy. DO had great tutorials on hosting applications 3-5 years ago. This brought in SEO and social credibility.
  - swyx 4y ago
    nothing really to do with devrel skill level, just a noted pattern others before me have already observed. hn is a community of technical early adopters that care more than the average social network about substance. so likely to be earlier than most other signals in recognizing up and coming success particularly in the tech domain. as for shortening... i'm writing https://dx.tips/ https://dx.tips/ and have a couple of related posts coming up on that
- tptacek 4y ago
  It's much simpler here: we just like writing, and we especially like writing about the parts of the system we like or find interesting. Other than having a feel for how to write for this particular audience, there's no strategy to it. Case in point, the last big thing we had run here was, theoretically, part of a series of recruiting challenges --- for a role we've paused hiring for. If we had any strategy, we'd have held off on it for a couple months and ran it when we were actually hiring. But Ben really liked the piece, and so did the rest of us, so up it went.
ilyt 4y ago
Well looking at this post comments the targets seems to be "people that don't care their shit isn't working"...
chasd00 4y ago
you probably don't hear much about success only when things go wrong. Wasn't fly stood up in response to downfall of Heroku? It felt like a knee jerk thing to me but overall i feel like the sentiment is positive toward fly.io. Growing pains hurt, I'm rooting for them.
- paxys 4y ago
  > you probably don't hear much about success only when things go wrong Which is exactly why companies hire marketing, PR, DevRel, business development, salespeople, account executives. Hiring a bunch of smart engineers and hoping everything will automatically turn out great is a losing strategy, but that is the one fly.io seems to be focused on.
- vhodges 4y ago
  Nope, they predate the Heroku changes by a number of years. I did have occasional outages (lost db connection). They seems to usually resolve themselves. I ended up shutting down the (unused) app since it was under attack.

swyx 4y ago

i dont work at fly but i do work in devrel and this is pretty common. its basically a joint result of the fact that most content marketing is either about lowering the barriers of adoption and telling an impressive technical story for recruiting and sales; and that most big companies require a lot of hoop jumping to post official case studies; and that fly is still a newish paradigm that most companies haven't yet adopted. i have no doubt they'll come along if fly continues owning mindshare at this level. when its obvious on HN but not yet obvious on the marketing sites you just have to wait a couple years (with some exceptions to the rule, e.g. people often bring up the failure of light table which got significant HN pull and seems to have died out https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=light%20table&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

recuter 4y ago
Insightful > i have no doubt they'll come along if fly continues owning mindshare at this level. when its obvious on HN but not yet obvious on the marketing sites you just have to wait a couple years Seems like an accurate observation. Now please elaborate as to why? And how does one shorten this? I am unskilled at devrel and wish to benefit from your experience further. Cheers. :)
- itake 4y ago
  I think they’re copying digital ocean’s strategy. DO had great tutorials on hosting applications 3-5 years ago. This brought in SEO and social credibility.
- swyx 4y ago
  nothing really to do with devrel skill level, just a noted pattern others before me have already observed. hn is a community of technical early adopters that care more than the average social network about substance. so likely to be earlier than most other signals in recognizing up and coming success particularly in the tech domain. as for shortening... i'm writing https://dx.tips/ https://dx.tips/ and have a couple of related posts coming up on that
tptacek 4y ago
It's much simpler here: we just like writing, and we especially like writing about the parts of the system we like or find interesting. Other than having a feel for how to write for this particular audience, there's no strategy to it. Case in point, the last big thing we had run here was, theoretically, part of a series of recruiting challenges --- for a role we've paused hiring for. If we had any strategy, we'd have held off on it for a couple months and ran it when we were actually hiring. But Ben really liked the piece, and so did the rest of us, so up it went.

ilyt 4y ago

Well looking at this post comments the targets seems to be "people that don't care their shit isn't working"...

chasd00 4y ago

you probably don't hear much about success only when things go wrong. Wasn't fly stood up in response to downfall of Heroku? It felt like a knee jerk thing to me but overall i feel like the sentiment is positive toward fly.io. Growing pains hurt, I'm rooting for them.

paxys 4y ago
> you probably don't hear much about success only when things go wrong Which is exactly why companies hire marketing, PR, DevRel, business development, salespeople, account executives. Hiring a bunch of smart engineers and hoping everything will automatically turn out great is a losing strategy, but that is the one fly.io seems to be focused on.
vhodges 4y ago
Nope, they predate the Heroku changes by a number of years. I did have occasional outages (lost db connection). They seems to usually resolve themselves. I ended up shutting down the (unused) app since it was under attack.