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One of the smartest decisions we made at @Cloudflare was recognizing that the primary purpose of our blog was attracting employees, not attracting customers.
50 replies and sub-replies as of Oct 03 2021
As a CTO your blog is like Christmas. I love all the new features.
True fact. When I have any question about @golang DNS, Security or Scalability, the first question is always: How @Cloudflare solved this problem? 🤔🤔🤔
Interesting angle!
What did you do differently once you had that realization?
Wrote for different audience. Gave control to engineering team, not marketing team.
Why not just hire a marketing team with technical knowledge, so these two can work together? I used to be Content Marketeer at a large digital product studio and was the one who helped engineers share their message.
Would it make sense to do both? Like one section targeted toward customers and one for potential employees?
Probably they don't care. It's negotiations and meetings with the data that will sell their product, not a blog post.
Either way, it's smart from them. Attracting dedicated people to a cause is hard
I share the same view. That’s what we did with the Times Open blog and site at The New York Times. It is important for media companies to develop a culture and reputation for engineering, design, and product.
much for same for us at @CaliberAI. Blog is intended to be instructional, and so partially to drive customers but it's as much about showcasing holistic character of the team (i.e. editors working with machine learning engineers working with product etc.),
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Why not a wiki then? Would love to hear more about this
A blog would attract external attention, but if attention is internal, is it not also more expensive to keep an external, secure, scalable infra?
Attracting new employees. We have a really great internal blog/wiki too.
Make it public
A lot of public posts start as private posts. But if you want to see internal wiki, only one way:
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Working for cloudflare would be a dream 🙂
I'm switching from fb to ms this month, so maybe in a few years time, I'll dig deep into this careers website 🙂
I would bet that at least 80% of employees are customers of @Cloudflare too.
I echo @eastdakota and we also follow the same @Loginsoft_Inc
What is the best way for Cloudflare to attract customers?
Hire great people who build great products and sell them with empathy to customers.
Amazing how few understand that the hating factor to growth in a technology age is trained and empowered brains.
October is a good time to remind us of this
People having problems while hosting their sites 😅
excellent perspective
I worked for a company who understood that the primary way they succeeded was by attracting the best possible employees and doing everything they could to retain them. Great employees attract a lot of business.
Being radically transparent about your mistakes helps you not make the same mistake twice.
It also serves as incredible onboarding material!
Right about that. Almost sad that the birthday week is over. 🤫
At least two more Innovation Weeks planned before the end of the year. 🎂
How can I join the insideers club. My heart won't be able to handle any more innovative surprises. 🤜🤛🙈🤫
True that. Since day 1 you had top notch tech writing that inspired me. (as a techie and as a partner)
I was already sold on your quest for constant improvement but the most recent post by Simona, the follow up on SpeedWeek's tests, was absolutely stellar.
To all those @Cloudflare who create and contribute to your blog culture, keep it going. You've collectively mastered the medium. Every week and often daily I wait for your posts just to learn something I'd never learn elsewhere.
It’s both. But YES very important for hiring and also retaining. It’s a culture builder. Especially when many people contribute.
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company blogs are so important, I remember reading my current company’s blog posts before the interview.
Not a decision
Bang on @MatthewPrince building evangelists inside the team flows outwards to confidence in the product and mission of the company. If they believe, why wouldn’t clients? Nice job!
For rivals.com back in the day, we chose you because I learned about you through your blogs, so influencing developers to influence their company was definitely a side benefit.
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Excellent tactic - I first became interested in cloudflare after you - matthew prince you, not the cloudflare you - wrote about anycast in 2011. I’ve followed you since then & watched for the right opening but haven’t found it yet. Still holding out.
A Brief Primer on Anycast
I wrote a blog post the other day about CloudFlare's globally distributed DNS infrastructure and how each ninja name server we give you when you signup doesn't represent just one machine, but instead a whole cluster of machines in each of the data centers we operate worldwide.
blog.cloudflare.com
Love your blog posts and your technology 👍 very educational
Sharing this internally today @eastdakota, love to see the attitude spread.
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One of the unsmartest decisions you made at @Cloudflare was switching to hCaptcha, it’s shit.
Why do you not attract employees by offering remote work?
you better attract customers though.without them you have zero employees.