I am thinking a lot about marketing and evangelism at the business and personal levels lately. To be honest, I never stop thinking about these things. But as I work to ramp up my new startup Naftiko, I am thinking a lot about what really matters when it comes to a digital presence for Naftiko, API Evangelist, and Kin Lane—as well as my other domains. While I have a platform stack of the tools I use internally, I wanted to take a fresh look at what matters when it comes to my online presence in a very noisy digital marketplace.

Your Domain
Everything begins and ends with my domain. Or it should. I’ve always subscribed to the publish on your own site and syndicate elsewhere (POSSE) philosophy. This is how you maintain control over your intellectual property. Your websites, blogs, and anything else you can point a subdomain at are the most important part of your online presence, and everything else is secondary, but still can be very necessary building blocks inhow you operate online.

Primary Social
The social media landscape is a mess today. I built API Evangelist on Twitter, but I am unwilling to use that platform since the rebrand. Really, the social media stack that matters today for me is LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon. I really do not have the time for much else, and I think the days of spreading across many different network are over, and you should really find where your customers and partners are, and work to dial in your approach there.

News
I still subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds in my feed reader to get my daily news, but I also still rely on Reddit and Hacker News for information, and sharing of information when it makes sense. I’d say I am at 90% consumption to 10% contributing to Reddit and Hacker News. However this may change as I work to play a louder role in the space again. Both still seem to have their upsides and downsides, but remain relevant when talking about tech.

Podcast
Next comes the podcast, or more specifically the video and audio content. Publishing to YouTube, and then syndicating audio podcasts to Apple and Spotify is the baseline for me. These things expand and grow as you gain traction, but these three destinations are the baseline. The YouTube channel is the center of video syndication, with other shorts distributed to LinkedIn and Bluesky as it makes sense, but primarily optimizing around the YouTube algorithm, with Apple and Spotify’s support.

Source Code
Everything I do is artifact-driven, with Git, or more specifically GitHub at the core. GitHub is where I host 75% of my work, with about 75% of that work publicly available across GitHub organizations. Using GitHub orgs and repos to manage many different APIs, standards, tooling, and websites is how I manage my domain. Beyond that I historically have maintained a large Postman presence, and I am increasingly using DockerHub, which are all tied together using GitOps.

Business
I have used to maintain a wealth of business profiles for my businesses over theyears, but really it seems like Crunchbase is the last man standing in this realm. But I am also increasingly using G2 for data and research, and preparing to use as a place to contribute information as I get Naftiko up and running. I will occasionally be doing more research on other places you should be registering your business and professional profiles, but for right now, Crunchbase and G2 seem like a good foundation.

Messaging
The common messaging landscape for me right now is spread across Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp, with social media direct messages playing a significant role—especially on LinkedIn. All of the API standards ecosystems I tune into are available on Slack and Discord, and most of my partner, investor, and other conversations are happening on WhatsApp. This provides a manageable messaging landscape that I sometimes have to augment with Microsoft Teams as is required by customers and partners.

Newsletter
Up last is the increasingly large role that the newsletter is playing as the web and social media becomes noisier. My personal, API Evangelist, and now Nafitko newsletters play an essential role in aligning what I am working on and communicating each week. Newsletters align my work, and provide a direct connection with my audience and customers, and is something I will be continuing to invest in as I grow Naftiko, and continue to keep API Evangelist tuned into the changing API landscape.

Presence
This list represents what matters to my online presence as we close 2025. Showing up as references in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini seem like another section worth eventually considering. We’ll see how the next six months play out, and possibly add that to the strategy. I think it is more important to stay focused on what I am capable of today. This list is manageable. This list is doable. This list is proven—event with the changes in the social media and search engine landscape—we will see how long that holds true. 

This reflects what I am planning to support Naftiko’s go-to-market function. It isn’t rocket science. It is something I can do on my own until we can afford to expand the marketing team. It also is something that seems sensible, informative, and useful. People can tune into what Naftiko and API Evangelist are doing via some common channels. Next, I’d like to further flesh out each of these areas to better understand why they matter, and the data, processes, and content required to keep them going.

I like to think through my online presence like this. It helps me feel more confident about how I leverage the online world to do what I do. Every time in the past in which I have found success online it is because I possessed a clear vision of what I was doing. Now, I’ve strayed from that many times, but I am always confident that with a little bit of work I can always find the right approach that will adjust with whatever the shifts in the landscape are over time.

“Shrinking in a corner, pressed into the wall; do they know I'm present, am I here at all?” ― Lang Leav