Will Hoekenga

I looked at every @MailChimp home page ever and made a visual breakdown of how their product positioning and brand have evolved. It was fun! There are lots of pictures. copygrad.com/2018/01/02/mai…

Notice they're not ignoring AI. It's the only link in this open letter! But the way they talk about it feels much different than what their customers are seeing everywhere else. This takes a lot of alignment between product, marketing, and leadership.

I like this big messaging swing from @helpscout. Go to their competitors' homepages and you'll find "AI-first" front and center on more than one. This really stands out, and feels true to the brand they've built.

For a deeper dive into 37signals' copy, this post I did several years back on the history of the @basecamp homepage has a lot of fun stuff: copygrad.com/basecamp-copyw…

I’ve been thinking a lot about the @heyhey homepage from @37signals lately. They’ve long been among the best software companies at copywriting, but the page’s headline leads with something I often steer clients away from — the word “WE.” And yet…I think it works for them in this case! But why? “Because they’re 37signals, duh,” wasn’t a satisfying answer to me, so I recorded a quick breakdown of the 3 main reasons “we” works here — and how to figure out if you can pull it off in your own copy. It comes down to something I call the Earned We...

@rosszeiger @descript Agreed, big fan of the product as well

@willhoekenga @descript They're crushing it on all fronts right now! Marketing and product

This new product page from @descript has some of my favorite copy I’ve seen recently. It’s for their cheekily named new product Underlord — an AI editing assistant for video and podcast content. As a copywriter, it was a delight to go through. And there are a lot of great lessons you can take from it to apply to your own copy. I broke them all down in this video (which I made using Descript, of course!) What stands out to you about this page?

@andrewmason @descript The hard work shows for sure! Love what y’all are doing.

@willhoekenga @descript Really appreciate you making this - I'm so proud of the work this team did and it's awesome to see it get noticed. Took a lot of time and hard work to get this voice dialed in!

@johnmorgan @descript

@willhoekenga @descript

Building always-on, business-critical AI applications or agents on a constantly updating and growing volume of unstructured data requires resilient and fast data infrastructure.  I am super excited to finally announce @tensorlake's open-source, real-time data framework, Indexify. ​ Real-time processing: Optimized for tasks like summarization, extraction, embedding, and parsing, Indexify works well with frequently updated data. It can ingest any data modality at scale, with incremental updates that don't require re-processing entire documents. ​ Reliability, Multi-Cloud and Hardware Acceleration: Indexify reliably processes data even during transient infrastructure failures, ensuring high availability . Extracted data is automatically stored in storage systems. Pipelines can run on GPUs, CPUs, and across multiple clouds for flexibility and resilience. ​ Observability: Fully observable, Indexify allows you to identify bottlenecks in extraction pipelines and retrieval APIs for semantic searches and SQL queries. ​ Indexify has been tested on AWS with hundreds of thousands of documents and images to ensure production-readiness. ​ It comes with retrieval APIs for RAG applications, autonomous agents or any AI application. It's fully extensible, allowing you to bring any model into pipelines. ​ Blog Post: medium.com/tensorlake-ai/… GitHub: github.com/tensorlakeai/i… Website: getindexify.ai Discord Community: discord.gg/vxQPZpp7bV

@benmelinjones just shot you an email

Also, this is the article that brought the James Baldwin quote to my attention. I recommend reading it: theathletic.com/1841111/2020/0…

Black Lives Matter

@bouncepassos "So don't waste your mind on playing time, or fairy tales of playoff climbs, Poeltl's all the way down the line" 🎶 (I'll see myself out)

@SethPartnow 100% — it's truly confounding that the league and its broadcast partners seem to not understand having JVG / jaded former players whine through every game might not be a great way to help people enjoy the product

@willhoekenga Having flagship programs talk about the game and what’s going on at least as often as they yell at clouds or pine for a past age that didn’t actually exist is probably the quick summary.

Yup. And this is a big reason a lot of people keep coming back to improving the presentational elements of the game to give people the ability to more accurately describe what they do and don’t like

@SethPartnow That's a challenge you have to overcome with improving any product. Can't depend solely on *what* consumers say, you have to dig into *why* they say it. And be open to the possibility that they're not always going to be able to tell you exactly what they want

I’d love to have this and related convos more often. Aesthetics are incredibly (and considering its entertainment, *primarily*) important. But how can we address the things people don’t like if they can’t describe the actual problems they have accurately?

@BradleyBanning It's the same! Just mixed in a big punch bowl and not shaken. Also with fresh nutmeg on top

I am thankful for this punch 🙏

@ferventfinance It's the fresh ground nutmeg on top. Really ties the drink together

@willhoekenga Looks magical.

@SoniaBaschez @danshipper These are fantastic! cc @SamanthaElise11

@willhoekenga @danshipper Thank you sooo much!! Here are some of my fave photos of you and Samantha 😉😍

One year ago, I got to marry @nbaschez in front of family and friends on a gorgeous fall day in Manhattan. It was truly one of the best days ever... surrounded by so much love and beauty... and one of the best parties. 🥰 I can’t believe it’s been a year—I love you Nathan! 💞