On this episode of the podcast we’ve got Niall Cusack, Co-Founder and CTO of Outcaster, to chat with us about the problem of ‘posting-fatigue’; having to post essentially the same messaging to a slew of social channels, and individually tracking each of them to measure engagement. It’s a problem that plagues DevRel and tech companies, as well as just about any business that has a social media presence. So what can we do about it?
Well, this is where Outcaster comes in. It’s a platform that allows individuals and companies to create progressive web apps that will collate their content into a one-stop-shop. This allows you to curate all of your content directly, rather than having to tailor all different messaging for all different channels. This is music to our ears here at Voxgig, as like many startups, we face this problem too!
If your job involves anything to do with DevRel, you’ll know that part of the brief is not only creating content, but getting it out there to the right eyeballs. And sure, there are services that let you post to multiple channels at once, but you still have to track all of those channels. Outcaster removes the burden of this task.
Niall tells us a little about his history, from developer, to startup employee, to startup co-founder. He talks about the inevitability of audience loss when switching platforms (it’s not you, it’s just the system), but how this might not always be a bad thing. While audience loss seems like a setback, it also gives you an opportunity to focus more on the members that you’ve retained, and pour the support they’ve given you back into the community.
This was a fascinating discussion that will ring true for all the multi-channel posting people out there. If you want to know more, just remember to follow @Voxgig on Twitter… or Mastodon… or LinkedIn… oh dear.
Reach out to Niall here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niallcusack/
Check out Outcaster here: https://twitter.com/Outcaster_io
Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast
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Join the Dublin DevRel Meetup group here: www.devrelmeetup.com
Interview Intro
Richard Rodger: [0:00:00] Welcome to the Voxgig Podcast. We talk to people in the developer community about developer relations, public speaking and community events. For more details, visit voxgig.com/podcast. All right, let's get started.
Today I’m speaking to Niall Cusack of Outcaster.io. As a dev rel, have you ever despaired of the number of places you have to post your content? There seems to be a new technical blogging site popping up every week. Niall might just have the answer. Let’s find out what he can do. [0:00:34]
Main Interview
Niall Cusack
Richard Rodger: [0:00:36] Niall, welcome to the Fireside with Voxgig Podcast. It’s great to have you here today and we are in a real, actual podcasting studio, which is awesome. [0:00:43[
Niall Cusack: [0:00:44] It’s really exciting. Thanks a million for having me, Richard. [0:00:46]
Richard Rodger: [0:00:47] You are a co-founder and CTO of Outcaster.io, so what do you guys do? [0:00:53]
Niall Cusack: [0:00:54] We’re trying to push the deal, or change how content is distributed. We are a platform that allows content creators to create aggressive web apps that will collate a creator’s content so their posts, their podcasts, their video and their livestream’s all in one place.
So that they can curate their content for their specific audience rather than having to make multiple pieces of content for different channels. Rather than having to have a WordPress blog and a Spotify account and a YouTube account and having to worry about curating your message for each of those individual social media channels, we’ll have one spot, one place for their audience to consume. [0:01:39]
Richard Rodger: [0:01:40] This is a problem that’s close to my heart, because obviously, we do a podcast, but then where does it go? We have a homepage for the podcast, but you’d like to get it out into different channels – LinkedIn and Mastodon and all sorts of places like that. And because it’s focused on the technical world, developer world, we also like to publish things on [Hasher and Dev.2?] Time: 0.02.07 and places like that. So, you’re constantly dealing with all these different destinations for content.
And even as an individual developer advocate, you also have this issue where you’re generating – part of your job is to generate all this content, but it’s also to get it out there in some way. So, that’s – I thought that Outcaster – the idea of Outcaster.io sounded particularly relevant to that kind of problem space. But maybe you want to talk a little more about the features and what it actually does. [0:02:41]
Niall Cusack: [0:02:44] Just to go back to your point then on distribution on content. I know there’s the software there that will distribute content out to multiple different channels at once. But what you’ll have to do then is track each of those channels and then track your audience across each of those channels. It becomes overhead upon overhead upon overhead.
What Outcaster will let you do is distribute your content out to a single channel and then your audience follows that channel itself. So, you’re not – the overhead of having to track multiple channels, across multiple different social media networks or across multiple different websites or whatever it is that your – or wherever it is that your content is distributed to, it’s all brought inhouse in one place.
Our features, we have blogging; we have podcaster audio. For developers, it could be a podcast; it could be a talk like this. It could be an insight into day to day, and video as well; we have streaming and we’ve got live streaming as well. We’ve got video on demand and live streaming too – probably more clear on that.
You can have your own tutorial or video series, so you might to do an introduction to View.js or MySQL or something like that, and have a follow along. But you can also mix that in with the day to day on yourself, or little snippets. I personally work in the world of PHP and Laravel, and there’s a site called Laracasts which is brilliant for follow-on courses.
But then I have to go on to a different place to look at a guy called Aaron Francis; he’s a really good guy in the space. He does an awful lot of work with PlanetScale and he does a great series on MySQL itself, on the basis of the introduction, but also on indexing and caching. And then the little bits and pieces he’s picked up over the years. That’s multiple distributed in multiple different places, but those guys all work in the same space. They could come together and create a single app and have it all in one. And it’s fully subscribeable too, on a monthly or series based or an annual basis. [0:04:35]
Richard Rodger: [0:04:37] And in particular, this idea of being able to measure the content in all these different forums is particularly interesting. I have to admit to my shame that we still track things with spreadsheets. [0:04:53]
Niall Cusack: [0:04:54] Nothing wrong with it.
Richard Rodger: [0:04:54] But I was at DevRelCon recently, hosted in London – it’s one of the conferences for developer advocates. And a company called Snyk – they do security stuff – their team was talking about how they measure all of their developer relations content. And it was very sophisticated measurement system. And I’d go to the DevRelCon website if you’re interested.
But it pretty much all came down to a lot of the scripts that they’d written, a lot of automation that they’d created in house, a lot of spreadsheets. But they’d in house built a whole bunch of stuff to bring all the measurement together in one place. It sounds like that’s the problem you’re trying to solve for content creators. [0:05:40]
Niall Cusack: [0:05:41] Yeah, there is that. There’s the overhead of the admin of tracking each of the individual channels or responding to different cultures within those different channels themselves. But also, we have analytics that will give you instant access to that, all those measures, in similar ways, but with none of the heavy lifting involved of having to update scripts or adjust them as those different media channels adjust themselves. It will grow with your content and with the platform as it grows itself. [0:06:05]
Richard Rodger: [0:06:08] One question I have is why now; why is it happening now? You previously worked with a startup – I know it was a couple of years back – that was integrating with Facebook. And it seemed for a time like Facebook was the only place to be. Why is everything fracturing now? Do you- [0:06:24]
Niall Cusack: [0:06:25] People’s attitude towards consuming content has changed an awful lot in the last couple of years. The advent of things like Netflix, Disney+, all those very high-level streaming services – then you’ve got places like Substack; you’ve got your WordPress blogs. There’s – it’s almost like the fragmentation that happened within the Android market for a front-end developer having – or sorry, an Android developer having to manage all those different size screens and operating systems, and different levels and devices. [0:06:54]
Richard Rodger: [0:06:54] Yes, what fun.
Niall Cusack: [0:06:56] What fun we all had.
Richard Rodger: [0:06:57] We’re both traumatized mobile devs.
Niall Cusack: [0:06:58] By those, completely. Our web developers – whatever it is, there’s that disparity and you have to manage all those different things in different ways. But with Outcaster, it’s one space; there’s none of that worry, it’s done for you. There’s templating there in terms of getting a site, a customizable site up in place, or a PWA. And we’ll have a drag and drop builder at some stage in the future, once we kick on with regards revenue or investment. And we’ve a brilliant roadmap of features which I’d love to go through during maybe a secondary visit to this conversation. [0:07:32]
Richard Rodger: [0:07:34] We’ll see in a year’s time.
Niall Cusack: [0:07:35] In a year’s time, exactly.
Richard Rodger: [0:07:35] With a series A in hand.
Niall Cusack: [0:07:36] A series A in hand or back pocket or a bank account, whichever, yeah. But there’s a growing disillusionment with the channels that are there at the moment. You can look at Twitter at the moment and Elon Musk has taken it over. [0:07:51]
Richard Rodger: [0:07:51] Exactly. Enough said, right?
Niall Cusack: [0:07:53] The strategy’s changed and they’re already going to Mastodon, but people have problems with Mastodon. And then they go – have live conversations on Discord and then you’ve got a community there as well. But they become overhead for the end user then as well. They’re constantly hopping between different channels to consume that one piece of content or get that one conversation they want for that one person that they’re willing to follow or that community they’re willing to follow.
So, they’re hopping between different cultures of the same community across a number of different channels and they’re not getting the messages they need in the one place, and then they end up quitting it. They just put the phone down or the device down and step away from it, going, “I’m going to step away from this.” And then that’s a potential customer for a content creator lost, or a potential future sale or a potential brand advocate or walking, talking billboard possibly even. [0:08:37]
Richard Rodger: [0:08:39] You’re betting on the emergence of micro-communities. [0:08:42]
Niall Cusack: [0:08:43] Exactly, yeah.
Richard Rodger: [0:08:44] Communities everywhere, to quote Andy Piper, who’s the head of dev rel at Mastodon. And that’s – I definitely agree, that’s a trend at the moment. How did you end up doing this? You’re a coder by trade and you have been inside a few startups and see what startup life is like, and now you’re doing it yourself. Are you nuts? [0:09:07]
Niall Cusack: [0:09:08] I am, yes, completely. I’ve two young girls as well, both who can’t tie their shoelaces yet, so that’s on top of it all. [0:09:14]
Richard Rodger: [0:09:14] Congratulations.
Niall Cusack: [0:09:15] Thanks a million. You’re juggling that and you’re juggling the stress and strain of a startup and trying to get it up off the ground. And it’s a difficult space to try and get up off the ground in, because there’s so many big players in the space. And then some people, some content creators, have their established communities. And there’s a worry that when they leave their platform to go to a new platform they’ll lose a percentage of their audience, and they will. [0:09:37]
Richard Rodger: [0:09:37] Look what happened to Joe Rogan, right? [0:09:38]
Niall Cusack: [0:09:38] It did.
Richard Rodger: [0:09:39] He did a – where did he move to? He moved off the public podcasting space onto Spotify; was it? [0:09:45]
Niall Cusack: [0:09:45] Yes.
Richard Rodger: [0:09:46] And he did lose audience?
Niall Cusack: [0:09:48] Yes. We estimate around 20% of your audience will definitely be lost. And then it swings up or downwards from that. [0:09:53]
Richard Rodger: [0:09:54] Here’s the question, and it’s something that we struggle within communities that we run and help run. Because a lot of senior management in technology companies would tend to fixate a little bit on top-line numbers, like how many actual listeners do you have to your podcast? How many people have turned up to your online event or whatever?
It’s a source of continuous frustration in the developer relations community, because the quality of the audience matters a lot more. Because that level of engagement is what ultimately leads to people using your API or whatever. Not – it’s easy to write listicles and get 10,000 views, but that audience isn’t – not much use. Are you going to – I know you said you would do metrics, so from a personal angle, are you going to deal with understanding the quality of the audience as well? Are they coming back every week or month or whatever. [0:10:55]
Niall Cusack: [0:10:56] We have the analytics working, and that was during the initial discussions of the key features for the platform; that was something I pushed for hard. Because if you can’t measure it, you don’t know how well you’re doing. That for us internally is a metric that we needed, but also for the content creators themselves. They get access to that information or a subset of it at least, rather than overwhelm them once they’re looking at their dashboard.
We see that once people come onto the Outcaster platform, about 95% of them engage with installing the progressive web app as an app on their phone. And then comeback rate is close to 100%; they’ve subscribed, so they’re paying their monthly or annual fee so they’re committed to getting the content. And it’s usually an area of interest that they have a specific interest in.
So, it’s not like they’re hopping onto Netflix at the end of a night and sticking something on for brainfood; it’s – or sorry, to make the – chewing gum for the brain. They’re logging on because they’ve a specific they want to engage with and they need to engage with possibility, in their professional life or personal life.
The need for a metric, it’s great; it’s essential. You can see what people are looking at; you can see how long they’re listening to it for or viewing it for. All those different metrics, they’re the headline metrics that people would want to engage with. But you can also see where your audience is engaging from. We use Matomo, which was Piwik originally; it’s all GDPR complaint, which is very important nowadays. [0:12:26]
Richard Rodger: [0:12:26] Yeah, very, absolutely.
Niall Cusack: [0:12:30] We can pull out whatever metrics people need and want around individual posts, your listenership on your audio, your viewership on your [inaudible] Time: 0:12:37. And then I’m working on integrating livestream at the minute, so we’ll have those figures available as well. 0:12:44]
Richard Rodger: [0:12:45] Awesome. The other group that this would be interesting to, of which I am one, is open-source maintainers. Have you ever seen the XKCD cartoon where it’s the stack of open-source or the stack of enterprise software platforms. And there’s one tiny pillar, which is some guy in Wisconsin, who’s been doing it for – or maybe it’s Ohio – I don’t know. It’s just one guy in his bedroom building this incredibly important piece of the fundamental stack of software.
I have a framework; it’s up on GitHub, microservices framework. It’s been around for about 11 years. It’s picked up a load of plugins over – if you hang around for 11 years, you get a load of plugins, some of which we maintain ourselves, some of which are maintained by third parties. That means I care about 150 repos on GitHub, and GitHub does nothing for me to help – issues all over the place.
And you try all sorts of strategies, like deleting old issues and trying to categorize everyone. And then you try and open a repo and somebody had posted a question; it’s six months old, and you’re like, “Oh my God, I let that person down.” And any of the content around it is scattered all over the place – blog posts, random conference talks, all that sort of stuff. It feels like that’s a probably niche group, but it feels like that’s a group that Outcaster would be useful for. Because you do have these – there’s a lot of open source and a lot of it is just small, focused communities, not millions of users. [0:14:32]
Niall Cusack: [0:14:32] Yeah, absolutely. A lot of people think open source is free, and it just happens and it appears in front of you. But open source needs funding, so Outcaster’s a perfect platform for that, because you can contribute an amount each month or an amount each year. [0:14:48]
Richard Rodger: [0:14:49] My God! Could you solve the open-source funding problem? That’d be interesting. [0:14:52]
Niall Cusack: [0:14:53] It would; it would be nice.
Richard Rodger: [0:14:55] Because the experience of subscribing to someone – and I subscribe to a few people on GitHub, but it’s very clinical. There’s no… [0:15:03]
Niall Cusack: [0:15:04] It’s not personal.
Richard Rodger: [0:15:06] Yeah. I’m not – the moments that I’m most likely to subscribe to somebody is when I’m experiencing their content, but that doesn’t happen on GitHub. You have to make this conscious decision at some later point to go off and press the Sponsor button on GitHub. So, many people have – are looking for this – how to solve this problem, how to solve the problem of funding open source. I wonder; I wonder. [0:15:29]
Niall Cusack: [0:15:29] How many people do you know who use your framework? And how many people do you engage with and how many products do you know have been built using that framework? [0:15:35]
Richard Rodger: [0:15:36] Yeah, it’s hard to count, right?
Niall Cusack: [0:15:39] There’s no idea.
Richard Rodger: [0:15:40] I have no idea. There are – we’ve had them on the podcast – there are SaaS platforms that try to focus specifically on measuring open-source impact. But again, they don’t help with the community and the content side. It’s how many issues are you generating, or how many downloads? Whereas the content generation side of things is – that’s the hard work, trying to understand is it working; is it worth doing. Sign me up! [0:16:20]
Niall Cusack: [0:16:22] It’s – one of the things you learn when you resent – and that might be open source or our product, is that without engagement from the end user, you’ll never understand what the problems are. So, you can do your research beforehand – we interviewed 2,000 people, 2,000 content creators, surveyed them all before starting the Outcaster platform. We were reasonably confident that what we were building was the right thing to build, but you launch and there’s this whole new set of features and problems.
For open source, if I was starting a project in the morning, I’d love to get early feedback from feedback from people who would have invested in the idea or invested in the framework, who are possibly willing to engage in an open-source project themselves. And follow that journey, so it becomes not just an end product, but becomes a learning resource. It becomes a point of reference for writing documentation. You get constant feedback.
Some of the popularity around some of the more modern frameworks in the JavaScript world, or even in the PHP world, which has modernized an awful lot in the last four or five years, is the clarity around documentation and the cleanness of it. So, getting early feedback on that.
And there’s a guy called Caleb Porzio, he’s written a library called LiveWire. And he engages every single day with his community across multiple channels, to get feedback on where to go next with the library or what problems people are having, or where it fails in documentation, Imagine all that in one place. It reduces Caleb’s overhead massively in terms of hours of engagement. He might get content written by the community itself and plug into the documentation, rather than having to spend hours type that out himself, even with the advent of something like ChatGPT asking him to- [0:18:02]
Richard Rodger: [0:18:03] Yes, that was going to be my next question, the cheesy one. Are you going to do ML stuff? Have you thought about using ML to help the content creators? [0:18:11]
Niall Cusack: [0:18:12.] Yeah, but that’d be – we will. We have talked about it; we have part of AI and ML on the roadmap. But we try and push them away from that. If we’re doing menial tasks, absolutely engage with it. AI is there to augment and support people in their work, not replace it. And it becomes very obvious after a while, having read AI generated content, that it’s not something that’s been thought about. It’s a collation of regurgitation that is not always accurate either.
I know myself the tone, the style of writing that a lot of the content creators that I follow have. And I’d be able to tell if that – what they produced was written by themselves or if it was in some way aided by AI, at this stage. Because I use ChatGPT heavily myself for doing a lot of the menial tasks that I engage with. You can get used to the language and the structure and the tone, even the rhythm of what’s been written. And if you’re charging people a subscription fee, you’re doing a disservice to them by using AI and ML to generate generic content for them. [0:19:22]
Richard Rodger: [0:19:23] I know I wouldn’t want to pay for that.
Niall Cusack: [0:19:24] No, no-one’s paying for that.
Richard Rodger: [0:19:25] That’s not going to work.
Niall Cusack: [0:19:26] No. It’s like Michelangelo getting Dali together and going, “This is my latest JPEG. Please buy it.” You lose that touch, that subtle human touch, and that tone. [0:19:36]
Richard Rodger: [0:19:38] Yeah, it’s going to be interesting to watch where it goes over the next couple of years. I know you’ve – Outcaster is focused on a wider range of content creators. I believe you’re tapping into Ireland’s biggest crochet network. You have a bunch of crochet creators – that’s all so technical, very technical. [0:20:00]
Niall Cusack: [0:20:00] It is very technical, far more technical than anything I’ve ever done, to be honest. The first podcast we had was Love Island; the second was on online abuse. It was called Trolled, by Ireland’s Journalist of the year, Aoife Moore. She dug into – a lot of the problems she experienced online is online abuse, because she’s on Twitter, because she’s on YouTube, because she’s on her own blogging site as well. She was logging on to engage with the community and check her metrics, but then she got an awful lot of abuse as well. She- [0:20:35]
Richard Rodger: [0:20:36] And presumably Outcaster would be a much safer place, because you don’t have to have this general public, the town square effect. Presumably, that’s part of your features, that you’re going to- [0:20:50]
Niall Cusack: [0:20:50] It is.
Richard Rodger: [0:20:50] -provide safety mechanisms for creators. [0:20:53]
Niall Cusack: [0:20:53] It is – there’s – you can leave comments on each of the individual posts or podcasts or videos. We’re looking at integrating a kind of village of some sort. We’re still working out the specifics on that, but a central place for everyone to communicate on. And that could be something as simple as a forum, but we’re trying to come up with something a bit richer than that at the minute. But the content creators themselves can moderate that content, and what we’re looking to do as well is to engage with AI to – and this is one of the good uses of AI, is to- [0:21:26]
Richard Rodger: [0:21:25] Yeah, is to help with that, right?
Niall Cusack: [0:21:27] It’s to comprehend the sentiment behind what’s being posted in these comments, so we can flag it to a content creator saying, “This is a negative comment.” Negative comments are fine within themselves, but with abusive or disparaging language, we can flag that too, and say, “Ignore this,” or “Do you want to view this?”
And also, the users themselves, flag it to them before they post. This isn’t very nice; are you sure you want to post this? And again, using certain language could be abusive or foul or whatever. And there is places for that, but it’s when it’s personal and attacking, that’s when it becomes a problem, and that’s what we’re trying to solve. [0:22:02]
Richard Rodger: [0:22:03] Yeah, that’s an interesting part of the value proposition. It’s an exciting and interesting space. I would encourage you to not forget about developers, because the features that you’ve described is really interesting, particularly to the underfunded open-source maintainer, because we definitely need tools to manage our communities. Niall, thank you so much. [0:22:25]
Niall Cusack: [0:22:26] Thanks, Richard.
Richard Rodger: [0:22:26] Best of luck.
Niall Cusack: [0:22:27] Thank you.
Richard Rodger: [0:22:27] And come back in a year with a series A, please. We’ll talk to you soon. [0:22:31]
Niall Cusack: [0:22:31] Cheers, thank you.
Richard Rodger: [0:22:32] Take care, bye-bye.
Endnote
Richard Rodger: [0:22:34] You can find the transcript of this podcast and any links mentioned on our podcast page at Voxgig.com/podcast. Subscribe for weekly editions, where we talk to the people who make the developer community work. For even more, read our newsletter. You can subscribe at voxgig.com/newsletter, or follow our Twitter @voxgig. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time. [0.23.03]