🍐#109 Building dev communities, positioning through anchoring, and I am starting a podcast

Hey,

So do you or do you not want to know how a pear looks like before it becomes a pear🍐? Ok, cool, here it is, a Polish pear tree in spring. Photograph yours truly.

This week on the agenda:

• Building developer communities of craft

• I am launching a podcast.

• Dev tool positioning through anchoring

• I am launching a podcast.

• + a few bonus links at the end

Did I mention I am launching a podcast? Maybe I am the only one who is excited ;)

Total pearusing time: 6min

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

Downloadable File: Customer Lifecycle Journey of Databricks

Databricks is on fire 🔥 

ARR surpassing $3B and still growing 60%+ YoY growth, they've scaled to over 8,000 employees and just raised a $10B round.

We (Inflection.io) wanted to learn their secrets, so spent over 20 hours doing a lifecycle marketing review. We’ve prepared a Figma file with the complete customer lifecycle journey of Databricks and we are giving it away for free! 

Access the Figma file now!

Developer marketing insights

1. Building developer communities of craft + I am launching a podcast ;)

Ok so it is official. My podcast is now live. Called it “Going deepear into dev marketing” . Couldn’t help myself with the name.

Three episodes already uploaded, a few more ready. Sooo many people I want to talk to and things I want to share in this format. Let’s see how it goes.

Here are my takeaways from the first episode on “Building developer communities of craft with Demetrios Brinkmann”:

• Get to know people: when people join just talk to them, get to know them, do a 15-minute chat to learn what they want to get from the community, what their expertise is, where they can chip in etc.

• Tag and introduce members: Figure out who knows about what and then @ tag them in the conversations to engage. On top of that intro/connect people who you think could benefit from connecting in DMs.

• Seeding conversations: ask people you spoke to, to ask questions in channels. Sharing good articles could help show the community is not dead but doesn’t really grow engagement.

• Don’t let questions get unanswered: ask people in DMs to answer, tag people etc. Or try and share resources you saw on the subject so as not to leave people hanging

• Share targeted resources: when you get to know members, either manually, or through surveys, share super targetted resources with them. Courses, blogs, podcasts, etc when you have things that are exactly what they want.

• Build community members up. You see a blog post from someone from community, share it in the slack yourself and start the discussion. Then you can invite them to meetups/conferences, talks, podcast. Whatever social capital you have to give.

• Gating community: making sure that folks who get into the community will add/get value from it. Discussions are shaped by the people who are in it so if you have vendors/beginners those are the conversations you’ll see.

• Seeding community: you can start by inviting selected people through LinkedIn/Twitter. I liked the outreach message: “Hey I’ve spent the last 40 days locked in my house [COVID], and wanted to do something productive with my life. And I started this community. If you want to join, let me know”

• Creating a podcast opens doors: high-influence people take calls with you when it is a podcast when they may not have talked to you otherwise

• Be-shameless channel: for some practitioners, it is one of the most valuable channels. It keeps people in the loop on what is happening in the space. And vendor articles or webinars are actually appreciated by some people as the vendors spend 24/7 working with practitioners in the space on their little piece. Plus if there is no be-shameless you will get spam in intro or general.

• Managing sponsors is tricky: at a certain scale, you want to get sponsors to be able to fund the infrastructure and people to keep it vibrant. But you don’t want to sell your soul to vendors and sell your members as leads to them.

• Community of craft vs small exclusive meetups: you need to live this, this is a huge effort, with content, engagement, etc. It may be smarter to build small exclusive and targeted in-person meetups. Quality over quantity. 20-30 people, not recorded, super focused conversations. And the CTA after that meetup is to join the community Slack.

Follow, rate, leave a review. Of course, any feedback good or bad is always very much welcome:

• Spotify

• YouTube

• Apple

2. Positioning through anchoring and an awesome newsletter.

Was scrolling LinkedIn the other day, minding my business and what do I see but a new dev marketing newsletter. DevPMM newsletter by Marek Nalikowski (dev PMM at Oxla).

In the first issue he talks about “Developer product positioning and messaging examples that slap”.

His devy explanation of positioning/messaging is just so cool. Will steal it and us it with eng founder for sure. Here it goes.

• Product = Core logic / backend

• Positioning = API

• Messaging = Component library

• Copy = UI / frontend

One idea that Marek goes into that I don’t see used enough is anchoring. You anchor on something your audience knows. Now classic example of “open-source Firebase alternative” from Supabase is one.

But there are other flavors of anchoring.

Funny enough just last week I talked to a marketer from one of the startups I advise about my personal framing for what they do just to see if I get it. Something along the lines of “If X and Y had a baby, that focused on Z, and had a developer experience of R”. So yeah I did anchoring positioning for myself.

Ok, I digressed. The example that made me want to share this with you is this beauty from Tinybird.

I am talking about this quote that anchors on three popular tools: ClickHouse, Supabase, and Postgres. This one sentence carries so much meaning to people who know them. Good luck landing that message in less words.

This is the tricky part though. You need to know your audience enough to know what concepts are commonly (enough) known by them to use it. So the non-dev audience will likely not get it at all. But this is ok. You should land messaging for the champion.

And Marek argues that this is how devs naturally think and talk about products.

Cannot agree more. I often ask dev founders “so what does the product do” (having read the website)? How do you explain it to dev friends? How do you explain it to other devs on a meetup or conference? Anchoring is surprisingly common in the way they explain it and very rare in their messaging.

Read the full article ->

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

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.

See how to work with me ->

2. Bonus links to check out

• 🎧️ Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao | Lenny’s Podcast

• 🍊 “But what if I want a faster horse?” Hacker News thread

• 🟦 “Wolf of Wall Street in B2B marketing” LinkedIn post

3. Join our Slack community

2200+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Check out marketingto.dev ->