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- #10: Positioning and messaging of dev products, choosing channels, and Linkedin hacks
#10: Positioning and messaging of dev products, choosing channels, and Linkedin hacks
Hey, how was your month?
Mine looked like this:
Changed the name of the newsletter to "newslepear". Sorry had to do it :)
Linkedin posting. Decided to post examples and industry news on the Developer Markepear page and thoughts (from articles I write) on my personal Jakub Czakon profile. So far people seem to like it.
We finally released the re-branded neptune.ai website. Took inspiration from some of my favorite dev-focused websites. Your feedback is always welcome.
Here are my insights this month.
10 developer marketing insights
1. Dev marketers have the best dev marketing insights
Talked to some of you last month and learned a lot:
Why pricing of infrastructure tools is hard if you don't want to go with storage/compute
How most dev marketing/advocacy teams have a hard time justifying the budget spent on programs
How building complimentary open-source tools can do wonders for your core product
Obviously, I also shared some of my thoughts where I thought it could help.
Got me thinking that those conversations are such a win-win.
And so figured I'll reserve some time every week to talk to you about your problems.
If you are interested, schedule a 30min call
2. Axiom competitor-focused messaging
In a mature category, it is safe to assume that people know about other tools.
Especially devs.
I love how Axiom owns its unique selling point and how it stands out from the competition.
They explicitly say how much more scalable they are vs well-known brands like DataDog, Splunk, SumoLogic, and others.
They don't pretend to be the only company in the observability space.
They just own their unique selling point and make it easy for people to understand why choose them not others.
Takes guts but I love it.
3. Positioning and messaging in dev tools
Solid positioning and messaging discussion taking as an example a saturated VPN market and the developer audience.
You can go high level with a vision or down to earth and feature-heavy.
Long story short, if you can balance it you are gold.
4. Architecture diagram + post explanation
Devs like diagrams.
When you explain a complex concept in one diagram it is just very shareable.
If you are interested in reading more there is an entire "blog post" when you click "see more".
Just a very solid content format.
5. Framework for choosing channels
Now with Mastodon and previously with Clubhouse you must be getting my favorite type of questions from folks.
"Why are we not yet on {INSERT_NEW_FAD}?"
The worst part is that sometimes those folks are right. You should jump on the new trend.
Adam Grenier ex growth at (Uber, Masterclass) provides a cool framework for thinking about those channels.
Three things:
Is your audience really there
What is special about the content people consume there
How does the content they consume there connect to your products
If you think through this lens it is obvious why:
Clubhouse was great for Spotify (audio, small communities around artists),
Instagram is great for apparel brands (visual, status-heavy influencers)
Mastodon is probably good for some dev tools (decentralized, dev-heavy, open, twitter-like)
Is it good for your tool and audience, idk maybe :)
6. Axiom "Playground" CTA
With infrastructure tools, it is notoriously difficult to show people the value quickly.
To really see it they would need to set up everything at their company infra, create dashboards for their use case, and so on.
A lot of work.
That is why creating a sandbox experience is a good way of giving people a taste.
I like the way Axiom calls it a playground and says "Play with Axiom" and "Launch playground".
This copy is good because:
they acknowledge it isn't a real thing (but a playground)
it conveys that it will be interactive and you'll be able to click around
it makes it feel like less work and more, well play :)
7. Individual developers don't pay for tools
"Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools."
One of the learnings from Kite post-mortem blog post.
A very interesting discussion about individual devs not paying for things followed that post in the Hacker News comments section.
The bottom line is this.
Most of the time no, but sometimes maybe (helps if you are JetBrains :)).
8. Linkedin hacks
Tried some of them -> it seems to work.
9. Marketing at Supabase (as a single marketer!)
On the recent Scaling DevTools episode, Ramiro Nunes Docio shares his experience as a single dev marketer at Supabase.
Crazy that they are getting so much done alone.
He mentions:
The importance of founder involvement in marketing
Focusing limited resources on channels that work
Why (and how) launch weeks work
Finding marketing resources in other teams (dev, devrel, product)
and more
10. Lean customer development
Great book about running audience interviews.
1 Pear Fact 🍐
The most popular winter holiday pear recipe is probably poached pears in red wine.
Basically you:
Boil pears in red wine with spices
Put some cream next to it
Enjoy
Happy holidays!
Thanks for reading, pears!Want more developer marketing insights?
Comment, ask questions, share feedback -> I answer every email.
Follow Developer Markepear page and/or Jakub Czakon on Linkedin for daily posts.
Join our Slack community of developer marketing practitioners.
Check out previous issues here, my swipe file developer marketing examples, and the blog.
Want to support my work?
Share it with your developer marketing friends.
You can also ☕ buy me a coffee and I do love coffee ;)
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