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How do you advertise to the very smart and technical users when they run ad blockers? In my opinion your site would need a really good technical write-up on a

How do you advertise to the very smart and technical users when they run ad blockers? In my opinion your site would need a really good technical write-up on a blog section that walks through how your application solves problems people have been handling manually so that it creates it's own compelling reasons even without having to describe the reasons in sales speak. In other words if the technical people here read your technical write-up they should already have ideas in their heads about how it solves management, audit, compliance and other facets of ssh private key management and public key trusts/identity mapping making their lives easier and freeing up time for them and their management teams. There should be a way to try out your application and ideally a step-by-step instruction for how to self host it. To increase adoption provide people with Ansible, Chef, Docker, Cloud init and other pre-baked scripts so they can just about drop it into an environment with minimal configuration, fire up the required servers and tie everything into it.

jamiesonbecker 3y ago
Excellent advice. Lots of technical stuff on there already, but you're right, a blog would be useful. Maybe content stuff like "Stupid SSH tricks" too.
- LinuxBender 3y ago
  Another reason I suggest a blog is that you can have "sit downs" with people doing SOC1/SOC2 audits, PCI audits and the even more enjoyable FEDRAMP audits. Each blog could have a video showing the real audit and how your solution makes the account management pieces easier. This could be compelling not just to technical people but also to managers and directors that are obligated to pass these audits. So for example, a person changes teams or leaves the company. You make a change in your app and can show that their public keys are no longer mapped to specific shared service management accounts and their user accounts are effectively disabled as it pertains to ssh key trusts.
  - jamiesonbecker 3y ago
    > even more enjoyable FEDRAMP audits ha, that's excellent. This is a really good point. We have already helped a lot of companies going through their SOC2 or ISO 27001, so that's an excellent suggestion. Not sure if companies would want to share their audits on video, though! Maybe we should do more videos, too.
    - LinuxBender 3y ago
      During the sensitive output you could flip the camera perspective to the unhappy look on their face before and the happy look on their face after you have simplified their lives. Or just use a staging environment for PCI/Fedramp as they hopefully don't just have a production environment unless they are wearing the t-shirt. I don't always make changes live but when I do, I do it in production.
PaulHoule 3y ago
I would look at companies that use a company blog for marketing and generate large amounts of content (e.g. "content marketing") https://www.pinecone.io/learn/ https://www.pinecone.io/learn/ https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pinecone.io https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pinecone.io https://www.uber.com/en-SE/blog/engineering/ https://www.uber.com/en-SE/blog/engineering/ which I think is completely positive. Less positive is the kind of spam where you get other people to blog ads for your product, for instance TripleByte sponsored endless blog posts with "hiring is broken" as a major theme to the point where it was outright annoying.
- jamiesonbecker 3y ago
  Thanks Paul - yes, agreed! content marketing == SEO. Is there any way to do ads also or are ads basically dead?
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    HN doesn't have paid ads. The conventional wisdom is to "git gud" at running ad campaignsd on Google and Facebook.
    - jamiesonbecker 3y ago
      We have done both of those, but results were meh. Seems like content is king. That's probably a good thing, since it's how we can effectively compete against competitors whose ad budgets run into 7 figures.
jamiesonbecker 3y ago
> There should be a way to try out your application and ideally a step-by-step instruction for how to self host it. To increase adoption provide people with Ansible, Chef, Docker, Cloud init and other pre-baked scripts so they can just about drop it into an environment with minimal configuration, fire up the required servers and tie everything into it. I know it's not exactly what you asked, but just by the way, installing Userify for the first time can be as easy as curl https://i.userify.com|sudo -sE and then it has pre-built recipes right in the dashboard for Ansible, Chef, Cloud Init, etc. I guess we need to talk about that a bit more! (It also includes a 20 server license for free, so you can use it for a decent-sized project or startup without paying anything.)

jamiesonbecker 3y ago

Excellent advice. Lots of technical stuff on there already, but you're right, a blog would be useful. Maybe content stuff like "Stupid SSH tricks" too.

LinuxBender 3y ago
Another reason I suggest a blog is that you can have "sit downs" with people doing SOC1/SOC2 audits, PCI audits and the even more enjoyable FEDRAMP audits. Each blog could have a video showing the real audit and how your solution makes the account management pieces easier. This could be compelling not just to technical people but also to managers and directors that are obligated to pass these audits. So for example, a person changes teams or leaves the company. You make a change in your app and can show that their public keys are no longer mapped to specific shared service management accounts and their user accounts are effectively disabled as it pertains to ssh key trusts.
- jamiesonbecker 3y ago
  > even more enjoyable FEDRAMP audits ha, that's excellent. This is a really good point. We have already helped a lot of companies going through their SOC2 or ISO 27001, so that's an excellent suggestion. Not sure if companies would want to share their audits on video, though! Maybe we should do more videos, too.
  - LinuxBender 3y ago
    During the sensitive output you could flip the camera perspective to the unhappy look on their face before and the happy look on their face after you have simplified their lives. Or just use a staging environment for PCI/Fedramp as they hopefully don't just have a production environment unless they are wearing the t-shirt. I don't always make changes live but when I do, I do it in production.

PaulHoule 3y ago

I would look at companies that use a company blog for marketing and generate large amounts of content (e.g. "content marketing") https://www.pinecone.io/learn/ https://www.pinecone.io/learn/ https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pinecone.io https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pinecone.io https://www.uber.com/en-SE/blog/engineering/ https://www.uber.com/en-SE/blog/engineering/ which I think is completely positive. Less positive is the kind of spam where you get other people to blog ads for your product, for instance TripleByte sponsored endless blog posts with "hiring is broken" as a major theme to the point where it was outright annoying.

jamiesonbecker 3y ago
Thanks Paul - yes, agreed! content marketing == SEO. Is there any way to do ads also or are ads basically dead?
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  HN doesn't have paid ads. The conventional wisdom is to "git gud" at running ad campaignsd on Google and Facebook.
  - jamiesonbecker 3y ago
    We have done both of those, but results were meh. Seems like content is king. That's probably a good thing, since it's how we can effectively compete against competitors whose ad budgets run into 7 figures.

jamiesonbecker 3y ago

> There should be a way to try out your application and ideally a step-by-step instruction for how to self host it. To increase adoption provide people with Ansible, Chef, Docker, Cloud init and other pre-baked scripts so they can just about drop it into an environment with minimal configuration, fire up the required servers and tie everything into it. I know it's not exactly what you asked, but just by the way, installing Userify for the first time can be as easy as curl https://i.userify.com|sudo -sE and then it has pre-built recipes right in the dashboard for Ansible, Chef, Cloud Init, etc. I guess we need to talk about that a bit more! (It also includes a 20 server license for free, so you can use it for a decent-sized project or startup without paying anything.)