- developer marketing newslepear
- Posts
- 🍐#108: Great LinkedIn ad, and behind the scenes of PlanetScale redesign
🍐#108: Great LinkedIn ad, and behind the scenes of PlanetScale redesign
Happy holidays for those celebrating!
Jakub Czakon
April 20, 2025
Hey,
No pun this week, I am tired, sorry, hate to be the party poopear 🍐 …
Got you there ;)!
This week on the agenda:
“32 billion reasons” ad from Aikido
PlanetScale website change behind the scenes
+ a few bonus links at the end
Total pearusing time: 7min
Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:
“TLDR performed insanely well; our Slack was buzzing like crazy. The first TLDR-attributed deal I closed brought in 5x what we paid for the corresponding primary placement."
Want to reach devs, PMs, and founders when they’re actually paying attention?
TLDR newsletters reach over 6 million tech professionals across 10 specialized newsletters—including Tech, AI, WebDev, DevOps, InfoSec, and Data.
Only 3 ads per newsletter = less noise, more attention.
Plus, TLDR's team crafts your ad copy to match their editorial voice and provides a detailed performance report at no extra cost.
Learn more about advertising with TLDR newsletters.
Developer marketing insights
1. “32 billion reasons” ad from Aikido
I love this ad from Aikido Security.
What I Iove the most is that it doesn't say much, it just points. I think it comes from Harry Dry or the book Made to Stick.
But the idea is that the best stories are not something you write. It is something you tell. You don't say, just point.
And this is what folks from Aikido did:
the story is that Wiz got acquired for $32B by Google
often companies that get acquired the quality drops over time
some folks in the dev community (on Reddit) are not happy about it
So they pointed:
They pointed to a Reddit comment (simple screenshot)
They pointed to them being acquired (which is a huge story in the space)
They combined it all with a beautiful pun "32 Billion reasons to check out Aikidko"
Love it! Sometimes I think I live for this stuff ;)
Thank you Marie Jaksman for sharing this gem!
2. PlanetScale website change behind the scenes
This is a sick thread by PlanetScale VP Marketing Holy Guevara.
And I would have missed it somehow if it wasn’t for Cynthia Dunlop who shared it with me on LinkedIn. THANK YOU SO MUCH!
Ok, what thread?
If you don’t know how planetscale.com looked then/now → this is the difference
So it basically looks like an ASCII page. And it looks even better in dark mode:
Ok back to the thread. What are my learnings.
First of they got results:
Signups — 103% increase
Qualified inbound — 57% increase
Pageviews — 101% increase
I know it is hard to really know how much incremental impact the website design drove but still. Impressive.
Building/creating for yourself makes things easier.
Empathizing is always easier when you are/were that person. The most visible example of that is now when I became a parent and see how life looks for parents.
The same applies to devs. If you were a dev before it is easier to have empathy for them. You can build that for any group but the principle aplies.
Another important piece of this redesign is alignment from the very top. Everybody on the PlanetScale Marketing team is technical. Our designers code. Our CEO ran large Engineering teams at GitHub and Facebook. We have all directly faced the problems we solve, so every single one of us is our target audience.
We’re writing for ourselves, which makes it incredibly easy to know what kind of questions we want answered and how to communicate the intricacies of our technology.
Interestingly that was also one of my biggest takeaways from the recent interview with Incident.io founders: it is easiest to build for your current or previous self.
Knowing your dev audience
They are building for senior engineers and PlanetScale is not something you use the first time around. You grow into it. So they leaned into that.
They assumed you will be switching from something, you will know the problems with the current solution. You will very likely be more senior.
We’ve found that when a stressed out SRE or overworked DBA is trying to find a solution to their database problems, the last thing they want to do is sift through a bunch of fluffy marketing material, vague taglines, and gated content.
There is no level of fancy animation or pitch deck that will talk a real company out of their database requirements, which are usually rooted in impeccable reliability, performance, and scalability. Everything that PlanetScale offers.
Measure website through mentions of key differentiators in signups
Messaging that explicitly reflects user pain points (sharding, Vitess, scaling) saw a 1718% increase in relevance signals from inbound forms. The redesign led to more leads who actually needed the product.
And I love this way of thinking about it. Yeah seeing conversions grow would be great but it is likely lagging indicator (the actual to opportunity conversion not CTR). But you can see that leading indicator that shows “have the message landed.
And they managed to do just that.
One way that’s easy to measure is what the people are saying in their messages when they fill out our contact form to chat with Solutions. We offer a managed database platform that solves problems for SMB, mid-market, and enterprises that are often experiencing fast growth and scaling pains. We are the only managed Vitess platform, and Vitess’s claim to fame is sharding.
Naturally, if someone mentions sharding, Vitess, scaling, or any similar terms in their contact request, we feel pretty confident we’re a good fit for them. So we looked back at how those requests changed in the 4 months that our rebrand has been live versus the past 2 years with the old brand. We counted the mentions of “sharding” or “Vitess” and were shocked with what we found.
A whopping 1718% increase in mentions of sharding and Vitess! This is a great indicator that we’re improving our messaging and branding in a way that resonates with our target audience. The audience that has the problems that sharding, Vitess, and an ultra-reliable database platform solve.
Need more developer marketing insights?
1. Work with me 🍐
"You helped us land messaging that clearly states the problem and solution in the words our champions actually use. The homepage is super crisp now."
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."
2200+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.
Reply