Make it real: Show the whole process - Lu Wilson from tldraw
tldraw's "Make Real" demo took the company from 14,000 Twitter followers to over 50,000 in a matter of weeks. It started as a one-week assignment from the founder: get 200 likes, however you can.
Lu Wilson, also known online as todepond, is a software engineer at tldraw, the infinite canvas library, and runs their build-in-public presence alongside a YouTube channel of their own.
We get into how a single-week challenge to get 200 likes on Twitter turned into tldraw's biggest growth spike of 2023, why sharing the whole process — including the parts that don't work — beats only posting finished launches, and how a team makes even a genuinely boring topic like databases feel visual and shareable.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
How did the 'Make Real' demo actually start?
It was around October or November last year — we'd just closed an extension round of funding, picked up some new customers, and wrapped up a new version of the library. Normally my to-do list is pretty long at the start of the week, but this particular week Steve, my boss, just said: your job this week is to get 200 likes on Twitter. I asked what timescale we were talking about, and he said within a week. So I built a little demo using Sawyer's earlier experiment as a starting point — the key difference was putting the generated website back onto the canvas so you could annotate it. That night it got 200 likes. The next day we added the feedback-loop piece and it got 2,000. After that it was just a chain reaction.
Who was Sawyer, and what had he originally built?
Sawyer is an employee at Figma who built a small experiment on a canvas using tldraw — he drew a UI mockup, and right after the GPT Vision API came out, realized he could send that drawing to GPT and have it generate a real website. We saw it and were blown away. What we added was the ability to put that generated website back on the canvas and start a real feedback loop: GPT returns a website, you annotate or cross something out on it, send it back, and get into that back-and-forth. Some of these sessions ran for hours. It's a genuinely different way of building something quick, or a prototype, than sitting down and typing code from scratch.
How much did your follower count actually change during that period?
We were at around 14,000 followers on Twitter before this. During the period we were going viral we jumped to about 40,000, and we're now above 50,000.
Was that a one-off, or does it reflect something the team does consistently?
From our side, we were doing the same thing as usual — sharing what we're working on is genuinely part of the company culture here — we were just really going for it that particular week. When we're working through something hard, like a difficult problem with arrows, which is usually what we're working on, it's nice to share not just the end result in a launch week, but the entire process of getting there.
Is it hard to come up with these demo ideas, given how well the team already knows the library?
It's less about finding the ideas — there are about 8 or 9 of us now, and we all know this library really well because we're the ones building it, so we already have pretty clear ideas of fun demos and mind-blowing concepts. It's sometimes a bit frustrating, actually, because we build tools that enable really fun stuff and then don't always get to use them ourselves as much as we'd like, since we want to make sure they work for other people first. So a lot of what we're doing is showing the community what's already possible with the library, so other people take it and build their own fun things on top of it rather than us having to build every example ourselves.
If someone's working on something less inherently visual, like a database, does any of this still apply?
We're lucky that we work on a genuinely visual problem, and it's part of our job to make the most of that. But even with something like databases — which, no offense to Supabase, I find pretty boring — I think this is the best time to be sharing visual content on any topic, and if it's not visual, you can just make it visual. I went to a Supabase meetup during their launch week and had no idea this visual, AI-native way of interacting would work so well with databases. You could cross out a row to delete it, or we tried an experiment where you could draw a picture of a piece of fruit to insert it into the database. Just showing a drawing editing a database suddenly makes something as dry as a database feel visual.
Beyond AI vision APIs specifically, is there a more general version of that advice?
No matter what the problem is, I'm certain that engineering and developer teams already have all sorts of diagrams, scribbles, tables, and visualizations floating around while they're working — on paper, in a notebook, on a physical whiteboard, or hopefully a virtual one like tldraw. If that's not happening on your team, just try it: try visualizing the non-visual things you're working on. Whenever I'm working on something with no visual representation other than text, that's my cue to stop and think about how to represent it visually so other people can engage with it — and sharing that publicly is basically an invitation for that audience to join your team's process. If you make something visual, you make it more accessible. Anyone can understand a drawing; not everyone can understand 16,000 lines of TypeScript.
A lot of what tldraw posts is GIFs rather than static screenshots. Is there a deliberate process behind that?
Yes — we actually have a whole internal guide on how to make a good GIF, which we walk new starters through. There's a technical side: quirks of the software we use to keep compression good, making sure it runs at 50 frames per second, that kind of thing, mostly stuff Steve and I have picked up over the years. And there's an approach side: a GIF should ideally be 8 seconds or less, and it should invite the viewer in — a lot of our more popular ones start with a little swoop of the cursor, just to draw your eye and make you think about what's about to happen. It's a big part of the culture here.
Multiple people post from the same tldraw Twitter account. How does that actually work without everything getting mixed up?
Me, Steve, and Alex all post from the same account, sometimes within minutes of each other, and that requires a huge level of trust on the team — everyone being on the same page about the messaging we want to put out. People often ask how we manage to post so many tweets, and the honest answer is there are three of us doing it. That's also why the posts end up varied, because everyone's posting a different kind of thing. Nobody's checking anyone else's posts before they go out — there's a shared tldraw vibe and a shared value around building in public, but no formal review. Sometimes I'll think about posting something a bit more unhinged and stop myself, thinking that's too far — and then five minutes later I'll see Steve has posted almost exactly that, which just reminds me we're all working from the same instincts in good faith.
Do you make an effort to post the same content across LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and so on?
We mostly focus on Twitter, and I think we know we've done well when other people start reposting our stuff elsewhere and effectively do that cross-posting job for us — it would be a lot more work to actively post everywhere ourselves. Part of the point of posting in a fairly low-fidelity, informal way is that it's also an invitation for other people to make their own content about tldraw.
Does a more playful, meme-heavy tone risk undermining credibility as you go after bigger, more enterprise customers?
It's something I think about, though I can't speak for the whole team. We put out different kinds of things with different tones — some demos are purely there to spark imagination and show you something's possible that you didn't think was possible before. Other things are much drier but more directly helpful, like sitting in front of a camera to explain something a lot of people were asking about in our Discord. We also put out release notes walking through recent changes on tldraw.com, which have their own more matter-of-fact tone. But in all of these, there's still a playful vibe underneath — it's not one or the other, and we're still figuring out exactly where those lines sit as the company grows.
What's actually different about how you approach release notes versus a 'look what we just discovered' post?
With release notes, part of what we're showing is that we're working on this thing day in, day out, fixing bugs so our users don't have to, and sharing some of the slog behind that — it genuinely is hard work sometimes; I spent an entire day this week just dealing with canvas sizing. With something like a new discovery, we're sharing the excitement of that moment instead. In both cases we're trying to involve our followers in the actual development of the library, just shining a light on different parts of it. We deliberately don't want a polished branding front, because people are smart enough to see through that — it's much more effective to just build in public and let people into the real process.
What would you tell other founders or dev tool people about building an audience like this?
Don't be afraid of sharing the whole process — you don't have to wait until you've released or finished something. People are interested in every part of that journey, the bits that go right and especially the bits that go wrong, so don't be afraid to share your mistakes and bugs too, because people often don't realize the hard work sitting behind a tool. It's always surprised me which bits land and which don't, but more often than not, more of it is interesting than I'd expect, probably because we're in it every day and it feels normal to us. The worst that happens if you share something is that people don't notice — that's fine, you just post again. The best that happens is something like Make Real, where your whole user base explodes. So give it a shot, and I'd genuinely like to see what people make — send it my way.