Code to Market

A short one. Two objects and one argument.The spoon: Granola mailed someone a very good spoon with a little note, and it got tweeted. Hank thinks that is what great swag looks like: send the accessory, not the namesake, and make it the thing someone photographs. Gonto calls it "explanation swag", and then, as a Granola user, says he does not buy the love-and-care story unless it shows up in the product. Hank discovers mid-take that he has a Granola affiliate link. It is below. He will split it with Gonto.The argument: what is brand marketing at a startup, and should you hire a brand marketer? Hank gets asked this more than anything else this year (the year "taste" was everywhere). Both of us land in the same place: not until you are hundreds of people. Early on, brand is what every customer-facing person does, in the ads, the swag, the billboards. The real job is getting the weird stuff in early, before a serious designer can delete it. The Octocat and Reddit's Snoo would never survive a brand review today. Browserbase being red is the same move.The otter: Cognition's Devin-the-otter video for Devin Voice, which is silly on purpose, and why that is the right call. Gonto's bigger take: tutorial video is dying, because developers now say "I don't watch YouTube to learn, Claude watches it for me." So developer video has to entertain, and the education that is left is about how to work with your agent, not your codebase. Hank's version: Twilio's old "Ask your developer" billboards are now "ask your agent."Plus the plushies, MotherDuck's different rubber duck at every conference, and Laracon's patches.We are in San Francisco September 30 to October 2. Come to at least one of these:Code to Market meetup, Sep 30: https://ctm.fm/meetup-2026Supabase Select and Unprompted, same week. Say hi.Links:Granola: https://go.granola.ai/ctmThe Devin Voice video from Cognition: https://x.com/cognition/status/2098142686486356185Claude Code for Marketers workshop: https://codetomarket.aiAll episodes + newsletter signup: https://codetomarket.fm

Two questions this week. Is being secretive better marketing than being loud? And what does a devtool have to change now that its users are agents? Also Gonto's bed, which is not made, whatever he tells you.Ox Alpha showed up on OpenRouter, OpenCode and Hermes with no name on it, free to everyone, and Twitter spent a week guessing who built it. There was a Polymarket. Gonto thinks it was the best AI marketing move of the year: the model was good, the smart people did the guessing for free, and everyone tried it. Hank's bet is a lab with a reputation problem hiding the logo so people judge the model on its own. (Since we recorded, Z.ai claimed it as GLM-5.3-Flash. The Polymarket money was right and Hank was not.)Then Zeno from Resend, who now only buys software that has an official MCP, at work and at home. Gonto's list of what a devtool needs to ship for that world: skills for every framework, an MCP that wraps your API, a CLI so the skill actually gets followed, a copy-this-prompt onboarding instead of a signup form, and a homepage that talks about all of it instead of screenshots of the UI. Plus why the MCP hate came and went. Hank's version: for devtools, a lot of your users don't have eyes.And direct mail, because outbound email is dying. The ElevenLabs letter that unfolds into a talking cube in Michael Caine's voice, the postcard Hank sent last year's Code to Market Summit attendees with a QR code to the hidden invite, Browserbase walking Lego sets to offices around SF, and the doughnut play.Links:Ox Alpha and the other stealth models on OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai/stealthResend: https://resend.comClerk: https://clerk.comBrowserbase: https://www.browserbase.comCode to Market meetup, San Francisco, Sep 30: https://ctm.fm/meetup-2026Claude Code for Marketers workshop: https://codetomarket.aiAll episodes + newsletter signup: https://codetomarket.fm

Come to the dev marketing meetup: https://ctm.fm/meetup-2026Gonto and Hank catch up on what they have each been building with agents, and announce the first Code to Market meetup, in San Francisco on September 30.Hank's is small and useful: before an advisory call about email, he had Claude Code read every note he has ever taken on the subject and hand back a call outline built from his own best lines. Gonto's is a whole setup. An assistant named Faro reads his Slack, email, WhatsApp and call recordings overnight, keeps an internal CRM and a wiki only the LLM writes to, tracks what people owe him, and drafts the follow-up when someone misses a date. It also nagged his mother-in-law about some chairs until she took them away. His wife has opinions.Along the way: the two skills Gonto now runs before building anything (Grill Me and 2PRD, both from Matt Pollock), a meta-agent that keeps a build going until the PRD is actually done, what a month of Gonto's agent usage would have cost at API prices, two newsletters that assemble themselves, and Abby, who took the workshop and built herself an Italian-language app.The meetup: San Francisco, September 30, in the evening. RSVP: https://ctm.fm/meetup-2026Links:Claude Code for Marketers workshop: https://codetomarket.aiAll episodes + newsletter signup: https://codetomarket.fm

The stack episode. Hank and Gonto go tool by tool through what they actually run for clients and their own projects in 2026, and what they think is on the way out.Email: Resend for transactional and fast scrappy outbound, Loops for marketing flows (triggers, branching, an MCP your agent can drive), and AgentMail for giving an AI assistant its own inbox with its own permissions. CRM: HubSpot is the new default (B players that pass the ball, one real shared database), Marketo is done, Attio fits VCs, and Salesforce has some hard years coming. Plus: why Clay's power users are moving to code, n8n's chat + MCP bet on making workflows visible to non-developers, the GEO platform race between Scrunch, Gauge, and Profound, Flint for ad and landing-page loops, and why Hank is moving client sites off Framer and onto Replit + agents. And the stat of the episode: only 2% of the US pays for AI. You are not behind.Stick around to the end: we're planning a Code to Market meetup in San Francisco this fall, possibly around the BrowserBase (Sep 10), Supabase (Oct 2), or Resend (Oct 21) conferences. Follow for the announcement.Links:Claude Code for Marketers workshop (next cohort Sep 14): https://codetomarket.aiAll episodes: https://codetomarket.fmWhat's in your stack that we got wrong? Comments are open.

Salesforce bought Contentful, and we think it says everything about where the CMS is headed. Hank's case: the CMS cured "marketers can't ship without engineers," but the cure became its own disease, no creativity and every page looking the same. Now that every marketer effectively has an engineer on call, agent-first editing wins. Gonto explains why he invested in Flint and why the real CMS opportunity was never your homepage.Then the topic everyone got confused about on Twitter: Boris and Peter both said to stop prompting and start building loops, and neither explained how. Gonto breaks down what a loop actually is (an orchestrator agent that launches, tests, and re-tasks sub-agents), and Hank drops the controversial take: managing agents is just middle management, and it's the most important skill of 2026. We get into what happens to junior marketing roles, and why CMOs who can't open a coding agent are getting fired within months.We close on the Founders Fund Mafia video and why it works on every level: known faces, a game everyone played, and a format that reveals exactly what you want to know about those people.Links:Claude Code for Marketers workshop (next cohort Sep 14): https://codetomarket.aiAll episodes: https://codetomarket.fmAgree that managing agents is middle management? Tell us why we're wrong in the comments, and send us the topics you want next.