🍐#101: Signal sales playbooks, guerrilla marketing ideas, and benefit layers in dev tool messaging

developer marketing 101 (sort of)

Author

Jakub Czakon
March 02, 2025

Hey,

I’ve gone down the dinosaur rabbit hole with my daughter. Talking with chatGPT on voice mode, watching Prehistoric Planet. Results? Learned that my favorite dino isn’t actually a dino but “just” a flying reptile. You got me there Pearodactyl 🍐 ;)

This week on the agenda:

  • Signal sales playbooks

  • Guerrilla marketing ideas

  • Benefit layers in dev tool messaging

  • + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

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Unlike many other agencies, they optimize for your KPIs, get to know your product in detail to do that and combine paid and organic strategies to get you results.

They work exclusively with technical companies such as CircleCI, deepset, Appsmith, and AWS.

Watch a video about how they work, or Book a meeting with Oleksii Klochai (he is also in our community).

Developer marketing insights

1. Signal sales playbooks

There is a ton of talk about GTM engineers, AI SDRs, Signal-based sales, and all that 2025 GTM. Rightfully so. The tools are here, the enrichment (Clay, Freckle), the signal brokers (CommonRoom, Reo.dev, Koala), website deanonymization (Rb2b, Vector, warmly.ai).

But if you don’t make those things actionable, it doesn’t matter that much, does it? You need playbooks.

Found some great ones in this article: “The best automated GTM plays you’re not running” in Kyle Poyar Growth Unhinged newsletter.

Was thinking about extracting a few of those plays in here. But the original article is so well laid out with tools, 1-2-3 how-to’s and no fluff, I think it is just better if you go in there and read it.

2. Guerrilla marketing ideas

What if they don’t let you into the conference room?

Stefan Avram shared his story and how they reacted to it.

They went guerilla and set up a billboard truck in front of the conference area. I also heard/saw about companies doing branded taco trucks or coffee bikes in front of major meetups/conferences. Fun little play, but since this is different (still) it can make a splash.

Btw this is another instance of me seeing those LED advertisement trucks around conferences. Does anyone have a trusted vendor for this? → Let me know.

Also, recently saw this idea of reverse graffiti “ads” on dirty pavements, which I definitely haven’t seen in dev tools yet. Edgy and fun if you ask me.

3. Benefit layers in dev tool messaging

I was reminiscing last week about he things I talked about during these three years and 100 issues. And one of the concepts I found myself sharing more than anything else was this brilliant piece from Zach Goldie.

Features vs Benefits battle is a classic (this is a brilliant interview on this btw, Crossing the Chasm with swyx). Features are fairly well understood, but then with benefits it is never clear how abstract you should go.

And don’t get me started on “at the end of the day everyone just cares about revenue”. If your champion is a senior backend dev, I can almost guarantee that putting “10x revenue” in the header does not spark joy with them. Putting it mildly.

Anyhow, Zach cleaned a lot of my thinking here with those layers of value:

And if you connect that to:

  • Who is the primary reader of a page/collateral/blog post/announcement/whatever. Are you talking to a developer, a team lead, a CTO, or an investor?

  • What is the maturity of the problem/market? Is it an early innovators market, or a pragmatic buyer market already?

  • What is the level of knowledge/context that the person has with this problem? Remember most “beginner devs” are beginners in your problem, but may be absolute experts with 20 years of experience in many other areas.

Adjust levels based on your assumptions and answers to these questions.

If you are interested in this, you may want to read my article on “How to create value props for developer tools”.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"Thanks so much for your time and all the thoughtful feedback coming from the workshop.

I feel like we are in a much better place to start our website rebuild. "

Sarah Morgan, Head of Product and Customer Engagement, Scout APM

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."

Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2000+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

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