Piggybacking for Popularity: Crafting Demos That Ride the Hype Wave

Lizzie Siegle: Thank you, John. I think we can check off who am I from this read me. But that's me. I love making demos and that's a hand detection app. Video coming soon.

Love my demos. Capitalize on current trends. And I'll be sharing some of those lessons learned. Check. What is piggybacking?

Leverage Trends for Engaging Content Creation

To me, piggybacking is building content that rides the momentum of existing hype. That content can be videos, gifs, docs, blog posts, tweet threads. Lot you can make. Lot things a lot of things classify as content to me. And that hype can be around a trending event.

NBA finals, the WNBA finals, Oscars, Tonys, we're in New York, A product launch. My teammate Craig Dennis is wonderful at this. Check out his videos. He will time it so when a new model is launched or new API, he ships a video that day. I don't know how he does it.

Pop culture, movies, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, just something that's popular in people's mind share. It can be a viral meme or a TikTok sound. Yesterday, I was enthralled with the astronomer CEO astronomy CEO. How to make a meme, but that was on my personal account. And holidays.

I love following fun holidays. I'm a big fan of the big ones, Christmas, Hanukkah, Chinese New Year, but also international talk like a pirate day, national tell a joke day, just like fun ones, Mean Girls Day. And this read me will be made available at the end, you can click on the links and give me some of that some of those views. Why should you piggyback? It depends.

To me, this I call these social media hits. They will take off right away because it's trending, because it's in people's top of people's minds, and those differ from what I call SEO hits, where people will search it, it will solve a problem, like, how do I use this database? They might not click on it right away, but over time, it will probably collect more views than a social media hit, than a trending topic. Mindshare is fleeting. Strike while hot.

Let's dig into some case studies. Here we have using Python and Twilio messaging to find out if the Suez Canal is still blocked. This this was a blog post made by my former coworkers, Kelly Robinson and Sam Agnew. Kelly is very witty and Sam is very funny. And he taught me so much about building technical content that is trending.

This lesson, moral of the story, be entertaining, be funny. I wish I thought of this. And Sam has built some of the blog posts that have performed the best on that company blog. Go, Sam. Here is ChatGPT over SMS.

When ChatGPT got big, I was on a cruise in the middle of Europe with my mom on a mini sabbatical. And for like one and a half weeks, I was like, I need to get home to my laptop to build this app. And luckily, I was the first one. No one built it for one and a half weeks. That kind of relates to this multimodal Gemini chat app I built.

I think it was like a Friday in December. It was a night. And I did not know that they were launching this and they did not have a multimodal chat app. Example, I was like, I need to build this. I'm the first born eldest twin.

Importance of Timing in Content Development

I love being the first. And the docs were not quite there yet, so that took me some digging. But these apps, the ChatGPT SMS and multimodal Gemini chat, were not that technically challenging. Moral of the story, lesson learned. Timing trumps complexity.

And Google PMs, Gemini PMs shared this. They reached out to me. I helped them. I made their life easier. They appreciated that someone built on this, and because there were no examples like it, they shared it.

Thank you Gemini team. Gemini team. Here we have a Dune meme. Developers around the world can now build AI applications with Meta Llama three

Speaker 2: easy This

Lizzie Siegle: happened when I was my second week of Cloudflare. I was working remotely from Hawaii. This was last minute. Sorry, Ricky. I did not tell you.

And, I did not want people to know. I thought it was gonna be like onboarding. I was like, I'm gonna be on Zoom, camera off. But, trends do not wait for you. They do not happen on your timeline.

Moral of the story, be prepared to make something whenever, wherever you are. And, some of my product leaders, directors shared this. They were happy with this. And, I have been chasing that high since. They have not retweeted some of my other demos.

Oh. Maybe they like Dune. Wait. Was it Dune too? Maybe.

Engage Niche Communities for Better Reach

Here's an app from my former colleague and friend Diane Fan. She is a Porter Robinson fan. He's an EDM artist and he released an album called Secret Sky. Her app involved fans, users taking pictures of the sky above them and plotting it on a map. So that was that was a few things.

There are a few reasons why this was good. Why it did numbers on Reddit. One, this is a niche community. Niche communities show up, they will give you those numbers. Two, Porter Robinson, she tagged, retweeted, and the hashtag was good.

Although, sometimes wonder if the hashtags work now because I don't pay for Twitter, but you know. And it's very visual. I love that interactivity. I love maps. And it's like very communal.

It's like, where are you? Where are you? Here we go. How do I make that bigger?

Speaker 3: My devs import OS and get client from $20 s. This gets a package for SMS from the helper library. Add now your SID and all token, the FMC. Them see. You

Lizzie Siegle: can view this on your own after. This was not my voice. Thank you to my former teammate Christine Sunu for also helping me write this. This was a TikTok sea shanty based on a trending TikTok sound. It was the Volumin sea shanty that was trending for a while.

Remix Popular Culture for Viral Success

Moral of the story with this video, remix what's popular. There's a reason why Weird Al I like that guy. Oh. Okay. Case studies.

Onto some rapid fire demos. We have Wordle SMS. When Wordle got big, I built a Wordle clone via SMS in one day. Hustle to match that moment. Steven Smith by commentary, Upload a video, get commentary by Steven Smith about this was basketball.

So I had a humanizing surprising video. I happened to break my coworker's ankles playing basketball, and I thought that was very funny. Use pop culture hooks to have fun, poke fun at yourself. And even if you don't like Stephen Smith or basketball, you can still see the connection. You're like, I could make that Obama, JFK.

Who else is big? Someone's voice. They're like, in his style. Like, I like the style of Ted Lasso. I've been on a Ted Lasso kick.

NBA finals voting app. This was a stateful poll with Workers AI and Hono. People love interactivity. I'm a simple woman. I see a button or two, I click.

I love that dopamine hit, and so do other people. And it's easy to explain. International joke day generator. This one did not do many numbers, but it was a small holiday. I built it in like half an hour.

I reused some code. Always be building. Just because it doesn't perform, doesn't mean it did not help someone or inspire someone. And I think people in the community like to see that you're constantly building. You're constantly trying.

You're constantly contributing to the community. Mask detector with ml5.js. This was visual. It was like, are you wearing a mask on a video call? You think people like to see their faces?

I know I do. And often, I wanna see that code. I was like, does this work? If I saw a mask detector app, I'd be like, does it work? A lot of AI companies, as an aside, don't do live demos, but I think they should.

I'm like, what are you trying to hide? That was I digress. Rapid fire demos. Be authentic. Yeah.

Measure Success Beyond Just Views

Not everything lands and that is okay. How to measure success? You can look at likes, replies, comments, views. I like looking at the GitHub trends graph. It's interesting to see when something got a lot of views of, like, who shared it, who posted it that got those views, that view graph to spike.

Hacker News, upvotes and comments, and just general developer love. I love getting messages or emails that's like, this helped me. And even if it didn't help a lot of people, it helped someone and they took the time to share that with you. And I think it's really cool when developers I don't know or who don't follow me or I don't follow share something that I made. I'm like, I don't know you.

How did you find this? Something worked. So keep posting, cross posting to different platforms. Final takeaways. You can make one project and it can be an SEO success.

It can be like kind of how to use a database. And it can also be a social media hit. Like, how I use this database to play in with my brother to for a father's day gift for my dad. And, I want you to ask yourself, why do you build? To solve a problem, to have fun.

Think that's something we should not use loose track of, loose sight of. Thank you to my manager, VP, Ricky, and former VP, Andrew. Hello. For inspiring me to have fun and try new things. Build fast, tie it to the moment, have fun.

People can tell. It's contagious and it will get people talking. QR code. Thank you for your time. I would love to hear you hear what you have to say about demos that you're working on.

I'm Lizzie. These are the this is the read me with the links. Thank you.

MC: Thank you, Lizzie. Awesome. You can hang out up here. We're gonna bring Eric and Chuck back up for a minute too, and Wei is going to run around. If anyone has questions for any of our three speakers, just raise your hand, and any of them will be happy to answer a question.

I see one in the front there. Here, and you all can pass this amongst yourselves.

Eli: Hi. So I've got a question for Lizzie. My name is Eli. I'm from a company called Arris. So we do enterprise software.

So my question is how to ride the hype wave and, and create these, like, engaging trendy demos when maybe your product isn't super trendy or engaging on its own. Solves great problems, but not necessarily in, a TikTok bite size, like, that's really cool.

Lizzie Siegle: It can still take off. I think you have a that's tougher I think to explain but if you do it well, like that is a major skill of simplifying something complex and also making it fun and that's surprising. And I think that would take off even more because people don't expect it to do so.

Speaker 2: Okay. Cool.

MC: Awesome. I think we have time for one more.

Audience member 1: This one's for Lizzie. I loved your demos. That was super cool to watch. Question in terms of, like because I know you used, like, some copyrighted materials in your, like, demos and trends. How do you no.

Navigating Legalities in Trendy Content

No. No. This this is, a huge thing in the industry. How do you tackle like the balance between like trying to stay up with trends and be interesting but also like the legal uses of like fair trade use and things along those lines? Just Yeah.

What's your like thoughts and opinions?

Lizzie Siegle: What's that saying? Ask for forgiveness not permission. Legal teams have reached out to me pretty quickly or my teammates have also been like, watch this and then take it down or I edit it. That's my honest opinion. I feel like overall, I don't get enough views to like really ask for it but like you should be safe.

MC: Okay. We have Lizzie's boss adding some color commentary here.

Other lightning talk spaker: Yeah. I'll I'll say First of all, I should have requested to not go after Lizzie. I'm going next. It's just like Lizzie's the toughest act to follow. My theory and like, like I've been part of teams that have gotten cease and desist from Nintendo, from, Marvel.

Like, I feel like if this thing has been successful enough that we get a cease and desist, then we should do a victory lap. And so I'm not the legal team's most favorite person, but, like, what what are they gonna do? They're not gonna, like, actually sue us. They're just gonna make us take it down. So, you know, you know, I don't think is this q and a recorded?

But I'll just say, like, have getting in trouble for the IP is a great problem to have.

MC: And, Lizzie and Ricky will be doing legal office hours in the landing later today. Give our speakers a huge round of applause. Thank you.