The engineer to OF girlie pipeline

I like that we’re now asking engineers to solve marketing too. After all that talk about product-market fit, the person building the product now needs an audience of their own. Getting it to work was only part of the job. You also need to make people care that you’re the one building it, preferably before you have anything to sell.

Sure, I’d rather follow someone working on something they’re passionate about than a company account trying to sound excited about its latest announcement. But I think we’re underestimating how much this changes what we expect from the people doing the work.

A Copernican shift in marketing

I’d call this a Copernican shift in tech marketing. It used to revolve around the product: what it does, what problem it solves for you. Now it revolves around the people making it. You watch them pursue their ambitions, struggle, change their minds, argue with their coworkers. The company has a life you’re invited into, instead of presenting itself as the answer to your problems.

Part of the reason is simple: building got cheaper. When anyone can ship a decent product in a few weeks, the product alone stops being a differentiator. What’s scarce is attention and trust, and a person is easier to trust than a logo.

This is bad news for a certain kind of marketer. We’ve never had more data about what gets people’s attention, yet I keep seeing “marketing experts” explain the theory while struggling to make anyone care, posting their takes on X with a photo of themselves attached as if that made the opinion interesting. They’re a step behind on what people actually want from content. With llms, a marketing team could produce this kind of behind-the-scenes material itself, but it’s easier to hand the job to people who already have a community in place. I won’t miss the self-righteous “we’re building a community” crowd. But replacing them with engineers who now have to build the product, explain it and get people interested isn’t progress. It just moves the job onto someone who was hired to do something else.

Maybe, right now it seems difficult for them to hire this kind of people, but you’ll see in a year it will become way to easier to find them. It’s not a unique skills if i can teach someone who to gets viral.

The OF funnel

You know who’s a few years ahead of your head of marketing?

The OF girlies.

They went through the phase tech is getting excited about now. Back in 2020, creators were using tiktok to reach people and instagram to bring some of them toward their paid content. In an attention market with porn everywhere and mostly free, the product itself was abundant. They needed a reason for people to choose them specifically.

Coffee, gym sessions, bad dating life, makeup tutorials. You get to know the person, recognize their friends, start following their life. They become familiar, and you want to see what they do next. It’s like watching Friends in the 90s.

That’s the funnel: reach a large audience, give some of them a reason to keep following, and let a smaller number find their way to the paid content. The post doesn’t need to sell anything directly, it builds an attachment that can eventually turn into subscription.

Swap “porn” for “software” and “subscription” for “signup”, and you have the building-in-public playbook.

Authenticity runs out

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against this kind of builder. I like following people who share their work, and I enjoy doing it myself. What bothers me is some of the discourse around it, which feels a bit like bad faith. Many people say they want “authenticity from a builder.” Sure, a builder has more legitimacy because there’s actual work behind the story. That won’t stop the format from getting crowded. We’ll get more public builders, more devrel personalities, and plenty of ordinary projects presented as personal missions. Maybe even agents with names and personalities, sharing their process and failures for people to follow.

Authenticity won’t make all of them interesting. Most people are fairly banal, and even someone unusual becomes familiar once you know their life. Authenticity is a resource that gets used up.

Some OF creators are already past that point. Their content now offers relationship drama, pregnancy speculation and fights with other creators. While tech is discovering the appeal of sharing everyday life, they’re producing reality TV.

What comes next for engineers?

Once the usual updates stop standing out, building in public may come to mean sharing things that have little to do with the work. Personal problems give people something new to follow.

Look at the creator side. Sean Gatz talks publicly about money he owes his wife, following in the footsteps of Adam22 and the “cuck” reactions to his wife filming with another performer. Both reverse the usual masculine image: letting people question how independent or in control you are becomes part of what makes you interesting. Losing face becomes an asset.

Engineers, are you ready to get cucked for the launch?

The tech version might be technical disagreements turned into viral fights, departures treated like public breakups, cofounders posting competing versions of why everything went wrong. These things already happen. I expect more people to stage them deliberately once they notice how much attention they get.

That’s where “people want authenticity” falls short as an explanation. People enjoy getting to know you, but they also want something to happen, whether it’s real or not.

And keeping that attention takes time. If arguing gets more engagement than building, there’s an incentive to keep arguing. The engineer hired partly for their audience ends up doing less engineering. Not to mention that the more of your life you put online, the easier you are to harass or stalk.

And the product?

Some builders will become entertainers because that’s what their audience rewards. Others will discover that making themselves interesting did very little for what they made. People can follow every detail of a cofounder dispute without ever needing the product.

All of this mostly produces hype, and the product becomes an excuse for the story. Ah man, i wish we would just care about products for what they are. You know like liking a product because it just works well..