Grok is now RubberDuck

Last week, a certain billionaire decided to release an AI model with the same name as our old website. This wouldn't such a big deal if it were a game, or album of music, or even another SaaS app. But AI is all anyone can talk about right now and, given their distribution, it didn't feel like a winnable fight.

It also wouldn't have been a big deal if I had the trademark. It stings a bit - it wasn't registered when I started using it, and it looks like either they just filed or keep updating it. A good lesson in entrepreneurship, I guess. I'm currently filing for a trademark for RubberDuck so I never have to do this again.

This cloud has a silver lining though! RubberDuck is a much better name. It's fun, it's memorable, and it's suprisingly not trademarked. Rubber Duck Debugging is something I've encouraged many engineers to get into the habit of doing, and it's a great way to get unstuck. I'm excited to see where this goes.

I also used this as an opportunity to transition the site to Tailwind, which I've been meaning to do for awhile. In doing so, the design is much more cohesive and the codebase will be much easier for other engineers to onboard if/when RubberDuck starts hiring.

What's next?

Over the summer, the vision behind Grok wasn't very clear. I was throwing spaghetti up trying to see what stuck. This brought growth, but it wasn't sustainable.

Our YouTube channel has been growing really well, with over 1,000 subscribers and almost 70,000 views. I'd like to 10x that in the next year. Rewriting the site has pushed back our content schedule a bit, but we have a few podcast episodes recorded which I'm excited to release!

The newsletter has been growing well too. Operations have been automated, but it's still manually curated every day. I'd like to hire for this eventually. Moving this off the home page was a hard decision, but growth has been steady and doing so has allowed Courses to be the focus for RubberDuck. I anticipate the newsletter will be a fully separate product in the future.

The rewrite of the site has reinvigorated my original plan of a "tech tree for coding". I'm going to start working on that again, by focusing on the Course content. We've been in talks with a few people about creating courses, and I'm excited to see what we can build here.

RubberDuck is the best place to expand your coding skill tree

This blog is also new for the rebrand. Keep an eye out for updates - I'll do my best to share the journey of building RubberDuck here.

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