[herodoturtle]

This is a very interesting way to promote a product, credit to the author (who is an industry veteran it seems).

I had no idea what Fauna was. I just clicked the link here because the title caught my eye (I work with databases quite a bit).

The opening paragraph immediately grabbed my attention - "My first deep dive into SQL was in 1987, just before I became the first technical person at Microsoft to work on SQL Server." - woah!

So I read this entire article, which is very well written and easy to read but mostly affirms what I already know.

And then I get to the final section where they promote Fauna - and so now I know about Fauna too.

Kudos to these folks, in my humble opinion, this is marketing done right.

[probablypower]

This is interesting, because I have the exact opposite response to these sorts of articles.

I think any bias or personal interest should be declared upfront in media (articles, videos, podcasts, ...) rather than appear as a 'common consumer' talking about a pain point in a relatable way. It really rubs me the wrong way when an article ends with a bait-and-switch, where you realise the entire article was manufactured to make you relate to their product's business case.

Obviously this method must resonate with people, like yourself, otherwise it wouldn't become so common. I guess I'm just the 'B' in the A/B testing that results in this type of marketing.

[xwowsersx]

I don't think there's any bait-n-switch unless you're unaware you're on fauna.com. Content marketing is well understood and at least in this case it isn't trash content someone spit out in 2 mins in order to lure you to their site. I don't see anything wrong with a company/product delivering value to you in the form of quality content and in exchange they are afforded an opportunity to run your eyes over their product offering.

[naasking]

> It really rubs me the wrong way when an article ends with a bait-and-switch, where you realise the entire article was manufactured to make you relate to their product's business case.

I'm not sure you have to take an adversarial interpretation of that tactic. If you don't find yourself agreeing with the setup, then you aren't a prospective customer, but if the article was informative to that point at least you now understand the existence of a domain that you're not aware of. Isn't that the point of reading technical articles? In the future, you might find yourself in that position after all.

[zzzeek]

agree, I have to look at the domain name, the title / sidebar , etc. to see up front, "OK this is yet another 'we think we have a better SQL' startup", then I skip the whole thing.

A site that's about "here's our product and why you might like it!" without getting into some "SQL, well you know, it has shortcomings" which is just unnecessary.

[austhrow743]

Why would your original assumption not be that the Fauna website exists to promote Fauna?