Thread by @QuinnyPig

I often say that you should sponsor @LastWeekinAWS because you should. @davidcheal took me seriously and filled out the form!

I read his pitch, chatted with him a bit, declined to take his money, and have his blessing to deliver my feedback via Twitter thread. Let's begin.

First, I don't usually see the sponsor forms; it was passed to me. There's an editorial firewall!

Second, I won't take people's money if sponsorship won't help them.

David's product is thermite.red. Sponsoring me won't help him.

You're greeted by a mountain of text. People never read nearly as much as you'd think they would. The tagline ("meaningful insight into AWS usage") is half of the AWS partner network and a third of their own services if we're being honest.

Those four things it devolves into doing are all about what Thermite does. This is a common failure pattern for v1 offerings! It's normal! David is doing a good job!

What comes next is the realization that customers don't care about what he's built; they care about a problem.

If people ask you how you do what you do, often they're not going to become your customers. The customers instead talk about outcomes and their pain points. So what pain does this solve?

The first three of those items are pretty generic. Dress this up in Powerpoint a bit and you can probably raise 2-5 million bucks in VC. The fourth one though – that's something novel.

It automatically generates pretty reports in Word, complete with charts and such? I've never seen this before and it's super valuable.

I would basically toss everything on this page in the trash and replace it with the following tweet instead.

Explain this: To people who understand this:

"Thermite explains something complicated and obnoxious to business users" is a massive win. Include a few screenshots of what it does!

At the end of the page we see this, which has a similar theme, but it's unclear whether Thermite is a report, a Word doc, a breakfast cereal, or a SaaS app.

The only three options on the page for navigation are these.

The bottom of both the sign-in and login page feature this, which can be rephrased as "I enjoy it when computers kick the everloving shit out of me." Power to @davidcheal, but that's not what customers care about.

The "Contact us" button is simply a mailto link.

Okay; let's unpack this a bit.

I'll suspend disbelief and register an account. This thing spins for quite a while. All I've done so far is given and confirmed an email address and a password.

A page reload unwedges it. Fair, it's early days. Then I'm greeted with this.

Wait, I can whitelabel it? It's aimed at consulting firms? First I'm hearing of this! That's a sales proposition; "Nessus for AWS Consultancies."

Next step on the walkthrough. Hmm. Ideally it'll tell me what perms to set, and I really hope it assumes roles but it doesn't look like it.

We'll upset @ben11kehoe later. Next, there's this thing. Okay, not much to say about it.

The red ".red" keeps making me think there's an error or whatnot.

Not a bad first pass at collaboration, if you can countenance inflicting Amazon Cognito upon your colleagues. RBAC probably comes in later.

This absolutely needs to not require an account / you to be logged in unless @davidcheal enjoys answering 50K support requests a week once he finds traction.

And this is what it finishes with. Okay then!

One thing that absolutely must be on the site before account creation is something about who @davidcheal is. Giving you credentials to an AWS account requires a fair degree of trust. Talk to me about data security, who you are, give me contact info, etc.

Inside of the app's docs stuff we see that David has spent more time getting the services arranged with their sub-services and the proper logos than @awscloud ever has.

Ah, I can grant it a role after all!

Skipping ahead, I have a shitposting account just for this purpose. Yay! The perms are unfortunately "ReadOnly" which is WAY too broad for anything prod. There's also a disconnect between "first time new user" and "person who built this" as far as flow goes.

(You can always benefit from having someone who has no clue what monstrosity you've built kick the tires on it to find the sharp edges. Maybe even before you ship it to customers, AWS service teams.)

And the task failed. At a guess it's trying to query regions that aren't enabled in this account and not exception handling properly, but that's a completely blind shot in the dark.

Now then, enough engineering. Onto why sponsoring my nonsense won't help @davidcheal reach his goals...

The @LastWeekinAWS newsletter has ~30K subscribers. More to the point, they're people who presumably work with AWS and might be able to buy or influence the buying of a variety of enterprise SaaS things. The long term value of a customer is enormous.

I'm talking "buy out every sponsorship slot in advance for the next ten years and you still turn a tidy profit" enormous.

Sponsorship is inherently a top of funnel activity; getting more eyeballs on your offering. For that to work, you have to have a working funnel that turns people from tire kickers into customers.

"Nobody visits my site" means that you haven't gotten that far.

"Everyone who visits doesn't try my demo" means you have a conversion problem.

All sponsorship can do is turn up the volume of people who come to your site with a vague idea of what it is that you do. That's all. You've got a chance to give prospects a glimpse of what you do, and a hook to entice them.

It's clear that @davidcheal is onto something with Thermite; a few more cycles and it's got the glimmer of something valuable and interesting. I hope he charges for it! Right now there's no pricing information.

But right now taking his money would deliver almost no value to him; @LastWeekinAWS readers would see it as a curiosity at the moment. His value proposition is still unclear.

Pro tip: if you can't help someone, don't take their money.

So that's where we'll leave it for now. @davidcheal will sand off the rough edges, have a better story, and one day sponsor @LastWeekinAWS, just as you should.

I will now field questions! Hit me.

Bingo. I've got a lot of respect for small companies who let me do things like this. I don't give large companies the choice. And as always, nothing I do on Twitter is sponsored content.

https://twitter.com/dreadpir8robots/status/1445912019429855238?s=20