🍐#112: Comparison of the comparison pages dramma, and is faster a good value proposition

Hey,

Just read the “Trading Game” and “Shoe dog”. Loved them. Any recommendations for your book worm pear🍐?

This week on the agenda:

• Comparison of the comparison pages: incident.io vs PagerDuty

• Is faster a good value proposition?

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 7min

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Developer marketing insights

1. Comparison of the comparison pages incident.io vs PagerDuty

I know founders/marketers think about comparison pages differently. Some don’t want to talk about competitors ever. I am in the camp that if it is useful to your users/buyers, put it out there. Comparison pages very much included.

But competitor comparisons can be spicy and this is exactly what happened in here ;) especially when those pages are not useful, not truthful, and spit out some flavor of “we are the best on everything” frog watch. Don’t know frog watch meme?

Anyhow, CMO of incident.io called out PagerDuty on their subpar comparison page claims on LinkedIn and in a blog post:

Here are my learnings from this:

• Different is better than better: Explain your philosophy/focus/angle. Nobody is best for everybody. But you can (and should) have a different approach to solving the problem (could be how, who, what).

• Respect the competitor: it builds trust, makes it more likely that your claims on how you are different and for whom and when you are better land

• Don’t show all green: When you show comparison tables show what you have and don’t have. Make sure that those claims hold water. Make sure those tables actually help your audience choose (254 columns with no diffs available will likely not help)

• Rely on Voice of Customer from switchers: ask customers/users switching from your competitor why they switched. And then focus on those points on the website ideally featuring those quotes.

Really fun read.

If you want more resources on this I shared a bunch of examples and an article on good comparison pages with a template:

2. Is faster a good value proposition?

I was running some errands this week and listened to two back-to-back episodes of Scaling Devtools on my way to the thing and from the thing.

It was pretty funny as the guests opinions contrasted so heavily on value props that work. Both awesome ppl and great episodes in my view. Figured worth sharing my 2 cents about it since I have a slightly different view then both of them ;)

Ok, so in the first one Jason Lengstorf from CodeTV talked about (among other things):

• the importance of consistent message (I agree with this one)

• feature-focused messaging being not defensible in the long term (which I agree with for sure)

• “faster XYZ” and/or other feature-focused messaging being bad as it ends up being a comodity (this one I disagree with strongly)

In the second one, Kyle Galbraith, founder of Depot talked about:

• “faster builds” being their main value prop that resonates very well with their audience

• constructing ROI-based stories showing the productivity gains from that “faster builds” value prop (that is also connected to less time wasted context switching)

Of course there was way more gold in those episodes but I as I want to talk about “faster” value prop I’ll stay with that. Here is how I see it.

No value prop is really defensible long-term. You can try and stay with a single story but almost everything becomes commodity over time. As long as you own the category of that commodity you are fine.

When you are in the early market talking to innovators you 100% can talk about features and it lands better then value you get from it (great interview with swyx on this). And early stage startups are in early markets or are differentiating vs incumbents and creating pockets of markets they serve better (or they should).

Generally speaking about capabilities, things the feature unlocks is imho the best way to approach it generally. But connecting this to economic value can backfire when you talk to devs. Try saying that you 3x revenue with your next framework and see what happens ;)

“Faster” is a good value prop if this is the differentiation for you market segment.

Not in a caricatured version of “Build better software faster” which says nothing, and coincidentally is often proposed by non-dev-focused marketers who want to “speak about value”. Yeah, dev tools are productivity tools so they should help devs work faster ;)

But it is a good value prop in the actual sense of doing faster builds, faster inference, faster websites, faster queries it does matter to some folks. If I want fast queries at scale I do care about “faster”.

Just two examples I liked:

Header with benchmarks from Bun

(Old) Clickhouse homepate header

BUT from my experience devs don’t care about the economic value of getting more done in the same time. They don’t care about saving the $ for the employer (most of the time).

They care about not wasting time on stuff they feel should just work. Their boss or their bossses boss cares about the $.

In fact devs seem to have almost reversed relationship to $. Often they “automate” things they will do twice in their lifetime spending 2 weeks on it. Why? Cause they freaking enjoy building. This the the key.

And wasting less time is not the same as doing things faster. Which, very dev-focused Depot, actually says in the header.

More resources on value props and messaging in dev tools:

• How to create value proposition for developer tools

• How to test if what you created will resonate with developers?

• Who to address on the dev tool homepage?

• Examples of dev tool hero sections

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

• 📺️ How I think about Developer Marketing | Matt Palmer from Replit

• 🍊 What if we made advertising illegal? | Hacker News Thread

•  🟦 “If I was Head of Events with $1M budget” Jonathan Khazarian | LinkedIn

3. Join our Slack community

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