When I worked as a salaried developer I didn't even check my inbox.
It's hard to email developers.
Angelo from Railway started experimenting with sales emails:
We got a 0.3% response rate for customers already on the platform. Which is … not good. For reference, Ian, who is the best recruiter in the world (we’re hiring) has a response rate of 0.5% on his cold outbound emails.
But. There are also times when you really want to speak to a salesperson.
You know when customers actually did want to jump on a call with us?
When they had a major issue and were emailing us in all caps.
And after those calls, we noticed something interesting. Every customer who ended up taking a meeting with the team grew their usage … like, a lot.
And..
Instead of trying to move used cars, we should be more like a TA in college, helping the developer come to the correct answer for the problem that they had, even if it wasn’t Railway.
But it's also important to know when to reach out. Angelo calls it "precog sales" - trying to tap into when a user really wants to talk to you.
If analytics showed us a spate of failed deployments, that usually signaled frustration brewing on the platform.
Railway built some pretty interesting dashboards used to help the team reach out at the exact right times (when usage is dropping/increasing or they experience frustration etc.).
Interview with Jake Cooper, founder of Railway
This company Railway sounds pretty interesting right?
That's why I interviewed their founder Jake this week.
We got interrupted by a tsunami warning. But apart from that it went great. Here are some takeaways:
Why Railway are fully remote
Jake doesn't actually wholesale recommend. But it works for them because they hire "highly technical, highly autonomous, and highly driven" people. And these people are all over the world.
They're not hiring junior engineers because they know in-person is better at mentoring.
It's chocolate vs vanilla - different ways to run a company.
Having a flat org:
They have a team of 25 and they all report to Jake. He runs 1-1 with everyone every two weeks.
They try to put all communication in public (in discord). Jake initially had no DMs in the company but backtracked: now there are exceptions for e.g. doctors appointment.
Lessons building their own data centers:
They have two data centers already and will have four by January.
- Procuring the hardware is difficult.
- Lot's of archaic systems to e.g. tell people how to rack your equipment. They build a system to "virtualize" the racks.
- Where are dark fiber lines so they can do terrabyte+ transfer rates
- Ultimately, the only thing that matters is storage is close to your compute.
How do Railway attract excellent talent?
- Give them interesting problems
- Give them capacity to push them forward
- Give them the space to do the best work of their life
Hardest problem in DevTools?
Railway is helping build powerful infrastructure without the headaches. Go from idea to production fast.
Helping people cross the "DevOps trough of sorrow".
Jake thinks there is a kinked hose, that if we can unblock infrastructure from being so difficult, everyone will suddenly be able to ship much more quickly.
Do hard things
Risk is not as risk-adjusted as you think. Harder things are not really as hard as you think they are.
And when you have a difficult, audacious problem: great people want to work on it.
DevTool Jake is excited about
Spacelift - for managing application lifecycle for DevOps teams. Jake said it is a bit of a pain to setup but works really well. And Claude helps you work with it.