🍐#111: How to do dev tool LinkedIn ads, awesome Reddit meme ad, and dev tool brand archetypes

Hey,

Was wondering recently about my dad jokes. What is the uppear🍐 limit? Ok, found it ;)

This week on the agenda:

• Bell curve meme Reddit ad from Flagsmith

• LinkedIn video ads for tech audiences with Itamar Ben Yair

• Dev tool brand archetypes from Maya Spivak (and my add-ons)

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

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

PLGTM - The GTM Conference for DevTools Companies

PLGTM is a go-to-market conference for GTM teams at product-led & DevTools companies that brings together over 400 leaders and professionals across Sales, Marketing, and Marketing Operations in San Francisco on May 20, 2025.  

This year we have executive-level speakers from Twilio, Sauce Labs, Fivetran, Clay, Amplitude, Databricks, and many more. It includes VP Growth at Amplitude, VP Marketing at Twilio, Marketing Executive at Databricks, etc. 

If you are in a GTM role at a devtool company, you shouldn’t miss this opportunity. Grab your tickets now! 

Developer marketing insights

1. LinkedIn video ads for tech audiences with Itamar Ben Yair

Episode #4 of Going Deepear Into Dev Marketing is out. And I loved how tactical this one was. Itamar knows cold audience LinkedIn Ads… well, cold ;)

Why UGC style TikTok ads work

• Bring B2C aesthetics to B2D. Get inspired by people who actually do good ads that drive entire B2C businesses rather than vanilla B2B ads.

• In dev tools, you need more than 5 seconds to explain what the product does. Sometimes way more. TikTok-style video ads with actors catch attention and keep it for long enough so that you can explain what your tool does.

• Startups should focus on cold audiences (prospecting). People who never heard of you. This is where the impact comes from not remarketing.

• If you do something inherently exciting, with a free tier, a good in-feed YouTube ads tactic is to get the influencer to create a piece of content, and distribute that video through in-feed ads.

• Instagram (Meta) ads can be a great way to reach engineers. You find your audience by qualification through a creative. For example start with a generic interest based audience, see who watches 75% of your video ads, find lookalikes to those and serve ads to them. But it only works if your audience on Meta is in 100s of thousands.

• “Every ad should show the product” was a rule at Monday that Itamar has used throughout his career. Even if it is difficult, show the product, talk about the capabilities of the product.

Metrics and optimization

• Optimize ads based on in-platform signals (view % etc), sanity check with sales that leads coming in are good (pipeline).

• Take big bets and see obvious results (or not). Small incremental improvements are hard to see. Don’t scale the budget by 10%, scale it 2x. Make it easy to see that you succeeded or failed.

• Early stage you shouldn’t need any complicated models to see the impact. If you don’t see spikes it is not working

2. Dev tool brand archetypes

I love dev tool branding and I loved this post from Maya.

She talks about 6 archetypes in tech branding right now:

• Mascots: well, mascots ;) (Posthog, MotherDuck)

• Whimsy FTW: hand-drawn, quirky (Notion, fly.io)

• Far to busy building: Looks like a google doc almost (SSI, San Francisco Compute Company)

• 2D Pastel robot overloards: well pastel colors, 2d (OpenAI, Anthropic)

• “Pioneer this”: cosmic, illustrations, another planet (Cohere, 11x)

I’d add a few from myself:

• Classic dev minimalist beauty: dark, minimal, functional (Linear, Resend)

• ASCI: talked about this PlanetScale redesign in the issue 108 (PlanetScale, Turbopuffer)

• Retro: Feels like Windows 95 (AG2.ai, Big Desk Energy)

Ultimately you want to be memorable, consistent, and build rapport. Anything outside of classic dev minimalist requires way more work.. but is also more fun. Pick your poison wisely.

Read Maya’s LinkedIn post ->

Also, you may not remember but some of my first posts on my blog where about branding:

• Branding developer tools: personality, tone, and distinctive assets.

• Brand and brand awareness for developer tools

• Branding developer tools: strategic narrative and brand story

3. Bell curve meme Reddit ad from Flagsmith

I like this Reddit ad creative that uses a classic, devy, bell curve meme.

This is a good creative to use when you want to communicate is overcomplication. As in:

• there are simple "bad" beginner, obviously not working solutions

• there are complicated "you are so smart" overengineered solutions

• there are wise, pragmatic solutions... that look exactly like the simple beginner ones ;)

Plus, with devs, if you can make something not look like an ad you already won.

And there were a few comments suggesting just that:

LOVED HOW Flagsmith did it here:

• They start with a spicy controversial hook: "Test in production"

• They explain their product capability in super simple terms: "Decouple deploy and release with feature flags."

• Their call to action feels low commit, not pushy, no "do it now or..." but "Try Flagsmith open source". Having open-source in there is always good for places like Reddit, HackerNews

• The overcomplicated part of the creative shows that they get their audience. They use jargon that the tribe gets (this part can be tricky sometimes if your understanding is actually way off)

And they got people curious to see how Flagsmith makes this Test in production claim reasonable. I'd check it out if I was working on those workflows.

See more Reddit dev tool ads examples ->

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

• 🎧️ An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth)

• 📺️ From training to growth: How MongoDB scales technical training - YouTube - Instruqt 

• 🟦 Stop messing up with external links | Richard van der Blom | LinkedIn

3. Join our Slack community

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

Check out marketingto.dev ->