🍐#110: How to do social listening, my take on attribution, and Terminal Shop stunts on React Miami

Can you pronounce Chruszczobród?

Author

Jakub Czakon
May 04, 2025

Hey,

Recently passed through this Polish city of Chruszczobród. If you are not Polish and can pronounce it → congrats. If you are Polish and are not laughing → even more power to you. If you are wondering what it has to do with pears🍐. No idea.

This week on the agenda:

  • Terminal Shop stunts on React Miami

  • Attribution, incrementality and decision making

  • How to do social listening from the co-founder of Octolens

  • + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 7min

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Developer marketing insights

1. Attribution, incrementality and decision making

In episode 2 of Going deepear into dev marketing I talk attribution. Solo. To myself, like any marketing pro should about attribution. The only way.

Here is a TLDR + some extra comments.

Why do you even want to track/attribute:

  • Justify the spend (keep the leadership happy).

  • Decide what to 2×, 5×, or kill (keep yourself happy).

If the data doesn’t change a budget or a tactic, throw it out.

It should help make decisions. Good enough > perfect:

  • Treat attribution as directional, never absolute. Look for insights that drive your decisions. Not clear-cut answers that make decisions for you.

  • Strive for incrementality (did this program made impact). Giving a flyer to people entering your store doesn’t move the needle but attributes perfectly.

A simple early-stage “playbook”:

  • Run one big swing at a time. Spend enough that success looks like a 3-10× bump in core metrics. You’ll see it without fancy dashboards.

  • Self-reported attribution (open text “How’d you hear about us?”) + a quick AI classifier = instant channel buckets. Ignore the 40 % gibberish; the rest is gold.

  • UTMs only for debugging. They’re nice, not mandatory, IMHO. For example, no one clicks your billboard ad, (almost) no one clicks “visit‐our-site” in a YouTube description. But you should see it in self-reported, branded search, and MMM


When you “grow up” to multiple working channels:

  • Layer in a bare-bones Marketing Mix Model: weekly impressions per channel vs. weekly demo requests / activated sign-ups / opportunities. Even a spreadsheet regression tells you which lever moves faster.

  • 2 Years x 10 Channels = 104 weeks or ~100 data points—enough for a basic regression analysis.

  • The coefficients are your channel impact weights; that’s the directional insight you are looking for. MMM tools sell you.

To be clear, Marketing Mix Modeling tools like Paramark or Recast go into all the modeling details that you will skip. So at some point you either want someone who understands the details to model your MMM or to buy the tool. Btw for the hackers out there this is an open-source MMM tool Robyn to tinker with.

For more of my thoughts on attribution, proving ROI, budget allocation:

2. Terminal Shop stunts on React Miami

On the latest Code to Market podcast (which you really should subscribed to btw) Gonto and Hank talk about some great marketing happening around React Miami.

Something I loved was folks from terminal.shop. They did stunt after stunt after stunt creating such a shareable, fun content and so much brand awareness this is crazy.

And those are what, 3-4 guys doing fun stuff, recording it raw, and talking about it. And I am sure they are growing their dev products as a side effect.

Ok, so the first thing I saw was this Terminal Feud (like Family Feud for devs ;)). So good.

Than low-production interviews but still giving you the MTV-vibe of inside the cool-kids club feel. And this time there was even some professional branding involved.

And then they recorded a rap song together with other devs and obviously a video of them recording it.

And you know what they sell? Coffee over a terminal. Which is such a stunt in and of itself.

I just love so much about this.

With marketing a side project like this you can do anything and it flies. They do things so differently, so B2C influencer style it is just memorable and fun.

AND I am sure it grows their core dev businesses as a side effect. I presume this is at least somewhat calculated but the beauty of how they do those things is that it feels so “not growing business” you can never really tell. Amazing stuff.

+yes the fact that they are already well-known in the community doesn’t hurt the play for sure ;)

3. How to do social listening from the co-founder of Octolens

I often talk about social listening as an important tactic early on. Even in my recent “How to market API products to devs” article, I talked about the importance of capturing the existing demand. And one of the key ways of plugging into your audience talking about the problem you solve, or the beef they have with your competitor is social listening.

Who better to talk about it (especiall in dev tools) than Charlotte Schmitt, co-founder of Octolens which was previously part of crowd.dev before they joined the Linux Foundation.

And spoke she did:

And here is the guide link if you don’t want to click out.

The Mistakes section is just so good that figured I’d copy-paste:

The 80-20 on this is probably:

  • Set up triggers on core keywords: Your brand name, Product category, Competitors, Core pain points. If too much signal → refine with buying intent like “recommendation, alternative”

  • When you see a good discussion answer like a human. Answer question first (if makes sense), say who you are, plug in your tool as an option that solves it. I shared a great example of this from StackOverflow a few weeks back.

A few examples of good answers from the article:

Documenso, open-source document signing tool.

Octolens founder themselves:

Good stuff.

Read the original article, check out Octolens, and start joining conversations that you really should be a part of.

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