Dax Raad is the creator of SST, an open-source framework for building serverless applications on AWS.
We get into the marketing theory behind Between Two Nerds, his Between Two Ferns-style parody with Astro founder Fred Schott, why he thinks most dev tool marketing departments are just going through the motions, and why he now treats making a good video with the same seriousness as shipping a good feature.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at [email protected].
What is SST?
SST is a framework for building applications on AWS. AWS is a giant product with a million services in it, and most people trying to build something can't just go in and expect a good experience — I don't think anyone expects a good experience with AWS. Our focus is looking at all the different ways you can do things in AWS, narrowing that down to the roughly 5% of things people generally need, and building a framework around those concepts. We typically focus on serverless technologies, so whatever you deploy through SST works whether you have one user or a million — everything scales automatically. We looked at all the rough edges and points of confusion people run into and tried to simplify them, so you get a decent experience on day one, but your codebase still works on day 100, day 1000, and beyond.
You made a Between Two Ferns-style video with Astro's founder Fred Schott to announce an integration. How did that idea come about?
In January we'd just finished a big rewrite and launched SST 2.0 after a crunch period. We looked at where the product was — not perfect, but in a much better place — and decided the focus now had to shift to marketing. I'd been thinking for a year about how dev tool marketing doesn't really work anymore. My insight was that almost all dev tool content — feature walkthroughs, demos, tutorials — is aimed at people already interested in your product, further down the funnel. That's education, not marketing. Real marketing has to happen at the very top of the funnel, when someone has no idea who you are, and you need to give them a reason to stop and look at something you made. No tutorial is ever getting a million views — only people already familiar with you watch tutorials. So our approach became: go for hits, and accept that most of what you make won't land, but it needs at least a chance of landing big. We'd just finished integrating with Astro and wanted to market it, so instead of a how-to video, we asked what people would genuinely enjoy watching. I pitched Fred, who I was already friends with, and he was immediately in.
How did you actually prepare to write and perform something like that, given you're an engineer, not a comedian?
I spent a day watching every single episode of the original Between Two Ferns and, honestly, approached it like an engineer — I wrote down all the joke patterns, because the jokes really do follow a format built on misdirection: one thing said, then a punchline that veers in a different direction. There are only so many of those formats. I wrote them all down with blanks where the content should be specific to the guest, then read everything I could about Fred and Astro and filled in the blanks. When I filmed it, I genuinely thought it was terrible — even during editing, from having watched it so many times, I assumed it would bomb. But when I showed it to the team, everyone loved it, and I realized maybe it had actually worked despite how mechanical the whole process felt to make.
What did you learn from actually filming it that surprised you?
Watching Between Two Ferns, it looks completely smooth and real, and I was nervous wondering how anyone could be that good at delivering it live. Then I found a behind-the-scenes clip and realized: nobody's actually that good at it — it's essentially fake. After nearly every line, the other person bursts out laughing, and it's stitched together entirely in editing. That was true of our video too — what you saw wasn't close to what actually happened; I took clips of Fred listening to me and spliced them in as if they were his responses, which is what made it look appropriately awkward. One thing I didn't know going in: you should say 'reset' out loud after laughing so everyone consciously resets their expression before the next line — otherwise you end up visibly more giggly by the end of the shoot, which you can actually notice happens a bit in ours.
You mentioned the jokes hit much harder because they were so specific to the dev tools world. Why do you think that is?
There's an episode of Modern Family where a dorky real-estate-agent dad is asked to host an awards show, and his family, worried his notecards are full of terrible jokes, hides them — but when he finally reads them, the specific audience loves them, because they land exactly because they're so narrowly targeted. It's the same thing here: jokes that would never land with a general audience hit far harder with the right specific one. My wife read the script and found parts of it funny even without fully understanding the references, because she understood who was being made fun of. But it hits a hundred times harder for someone who actually gets every specific reference.
For most companies, announcing a dev tool integration is not exactly exciting content. Why do you think nobody else is doing something like this?
Most dev tool companies already have marketing departments, people hired full-time to do exactly this — but it feels like nobody's actually thinking hard about it. They're just doing the expected motions: a release happens, you write a blog post, you post it. If you actually think hard about why you're doing any of that, you'd probably stop, because it doesn't provide much value. We realized there wasn't a single company we could point to and say 'copy exactly what they're doing.' That's hard, because you have to invent a lot yourself, but it also means the bar is incredibly low — even on the comedy side, most funny tech content recycles the same junior-versus-senior-engineer jokes, so you don't have to be amazing, just have a genuinely unique angle.
Are you planning to invest more heavily in this kind of content as you grow?
We're raising a Series A over the next six months, and a good portion of that is earmarked for marketing specifically — bringing in genuinely talented people, whether an actual comedian or someone who already makes great content on YouTube. We don't want them pitching our product directly; we want them to keep doing exactly what they're already great at, just bent slightly toward a general tech audience. Any traditional marketing department at a big tech company would probably call this a bad idea or too weird, but because we're small, we can do whatever we want.
Does the same 'go for hits' philosophy that applies to product also apply to marketing?
Exactly. People have already internalized this on the product side — everyone knows that if your product isn't a genuine hit, just slightly better than alternatives, you'll fail; average results don't get a startup off the ground. That same logic applies to marketing. You can have a marketing hit the same way you have a product hit, and you need both in the right order — a big marketing hit that sends a flood of people to a mediocre product is just a leaky funnel. We made sure the product itself was in a good place before leaning into this. A big inspiration for me was ThePrimeagen — an individual making content, not a company — because his videos are so entertaining and distinct that ten seconds in, you're not going anywhere. That made me realize there's a whole other lane here beyond 'I'm trying to teach you something' — sometimes you're just trying to entertain someone, because when people sit down to watch something, they're choosing between you and Netflix, not between you and a tutorial.
Do you think this approach works better for reaching senior engineers than junior ones?
That's a real dynamic — most educational tutorial content skews toward people newer to a topic; established engineers tend to look something up only when they hit a specific problem, not sit down to watch educational videos for their own sake. I've done that myself occasionally, like watching GraphQL talks when I was first learning it and had zero context. But outside those specific moments, most of the time I'm not watching a full video, so the only way to capture someone like me is through a completely different angle. That was our January theory: make content that has nothing directly to do with SST and still convert people into trying it. Within the first 30 minutes of posting the Fred video, someone retweeted it saying they had no idea what SST was but were going to go try it after watching — and ten minutes later, tweeted our docs saying how cool they were. We validated the entire theory within the first hour.
Could anyone replicate this kind of comedic marketing, or does it depend on it being genuinely you?
You have to find an angle that's genuine to you specifically. The roasting style really does come naturally to me — it's how my friends and I have always interacted, so making content off that trait works because it's easy and authentic for me. If someone else tried to directly copy this format without that same natural fit, it probably wouldn't land nearly as well. You have to figure out what's uniquely you and find content that branches naturally off that.
You mentioned initially feeling above typical YouTube tactics like clickbait titles and thumbnails. What changed your mind?
I went through the same phase I think everyone does — looking at what's successful on YouTube and cringing at exaggerated thumbnail faces and clickbaity titles, feeling like that was beneath me. Then I watched a video by a hugely successful science YouTuber explaining exactly why he makes his titles and thumbnails that way — if you don't capture attention, nobody ever sees the actual video, so what's the point of it being good at all? His videos are genuinely some of the best content ever made on YouTube, so I couldn't credibly claim to be above him. I realized the common misconception about clickbait is that you say something false to lure people in and then deliver something unrelated — if that's what you're doing, the YouTube algorithm actually detects and punishes it. Done properly, the title and thumbnail just get someone curious and excited, and the video delivers exactly on that promise. It's just packaging for a genuinely good product. Underneath my resistance to it was really just fear of feeling embarrassed, dressed up as feeling too good for it.
How much has your content actually improved since you started, and how long have you been doing this?
I've been doing this part-time alongside everything else for about six months, and I've gotten many, many times better in that window. In hindsight, I was entitled to think my content should just work on its own merit — and honestly, looking back, it wasn't even that good back then. It's a skill like anything else; you develop it over time, and you'll look back at what you made a year ago and cringe, but the improvement curve is fast if you keep at it.
How important is YouTube specifically as a channel compared to other platforms?
It's an incredible machine compared to every other platform — we're honestly not even doing that well on it yet, since we've only made a handful of videos rather than dedicating real time to it, but we know we have to, because nothing else finds the exact right audience for a good video the way YouTube does. If the video itself is good, the algorithm is remarkably good at finding every single person who'd genuinely like it and showing it to them. No other platform gives you that kind of reach.
As a very small team, can this kind of marketing carry a company all the way through, or is it a phase?
We're just three people, and staying small means you have to find leverage wherever you can — marketing is a massive lever, because a really good channel means you never have to worry about whether the right people will see a good idea when you have one. As we raise money, we're not going to hire a hundred people; a real chunk of that capital is going toward marketing specifically, treated with the same seriousness as everything else we do. A full-time marketing hire might cost around $150k a year in the US — for that same money, there are insanely talented people already making content on YouTube who could produce far more reach for us than a traditional hire, if we gave them that kind of budget instead. That's the kind of high-leverage opportunity we're excited to keep finding.
Do you think you can eventually bring in outside help — filmmakers, editors — without losing what makes this work?
A big part of why we can operate this way is there's zero communication overhead — when I personally hit a rough edge somewhere, I can translate it directly into a joke for content, without having to explain the underlying context to anyone else. That's a real challenge to solve as we grow. Our plan is to bring in people for quality, not to replace the ideas — someone great at filmmaking, lighting, basic production quality, or editing for engagement, who can also give us honest, harsh feedback. I don't think we'll ever fully offload where the ideas come from, but having talented people to bounce off works the way writing rooms do. I think about shows like Silicon Valley and Halt and Catch Fire — one a comedy, one a drama — that both captured incredibly specific, true details of the tech industry while still being genuinely great shows on their own. That clearly requires a mix of people who've lived the experience working with people who know how to shape it into something well-crafted. I don't fully know how to replicate that yet, but I'm looking forward to finding out.
What's the one thing you'd want a dev tool founder to remember from all of this?
If you're building a company, you don't just need to do marketing — you need to be one of the best marketers in your space, or you're just doing the default of posting on LinkedIn, which won't give you any real leverage. There was a time I hated marketing and thought I'd never enjoy it, that it sounded boring. Find a way to make it something you genuinely enjoy — find content you actually love, and you'll probably enjoy making more of it. That's exactly what happened for me; I'm now just as excited to work on a video as I am to ship a new feature, and that excitement is what makes doing more of it sustainable.