Secretive Marketing vs Loud Marketing?

<p>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&#39;s bed, which is not made, whatever he tells you.</p><p>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&#39;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.)</p><p><br></p><p>Then Zeno from Resend, who now only buys software that has an official MCP, at work and at home. Gonto&#39;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&#39;s version: for devtools, a lot of your users don&#39;t have eyes.</p><p><br></p><p>And direct mail, because outbound email is dying. The ElevenLabs letter that unfolds into a talking cube in Michael Caine&#39;s voice, the postcard Hank sent last year&#39;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.</p><p><br></p><p>Links:</p><p>Ox Alpha and the other stealth models on OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai/stealth</p><p>Resend: https://resend.com</p><p>Clerk: https://clerk.com</p><p>Browserbase: https://www.browserbase.com</p><p>Code to Market meetup, San Francisco, Sep 30: https://ctm.fm/meetup-2026</p><p>Claude Code for Marketers workshop: https://codetomarket.ai</p><p>All episodes + newsletter signup: https://codetomarket.fm</p>