🍐#114: Learnings on Launch Weeks from Resend, new PostHog billboards, and why not be "for every company on the planet"

Hey,

Today is a Children’s Day in Poland. Went on a little kids book exploration and found this classic. Special dedication to all the parents reading. Enjoy “Each Peach Pear 🍐 Plum” ;)

This week on the agenda:

• Learnings on Launch Weeks by Zeno Rocha from Resend

• Don’t be “for every company and idea on the planet”

• New (and awesome) PostHog billboards

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 8min

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Developer marketing insights

1. Don’t be “for every company and idea on the planet”

I saw this post the other day and thought it is a good trigger to talk about something I see a lot.

Ok, I know correlation does not imply causation. So much has changed over the last 2 years and there are so many reasons why a startup fails.

But.

I do hear a flavor of “but the vision is sooo much bigger” from founders or marketers who talk to founders ;)

Look, I get it, vision is bigger and it should be. But vision is not your (current) positioning. Especially in dev tools. Don’t put it in places where your target audience comes to understand what you do.

And with a small team you just cannot go after all different segments, all different integrations/communities, all different adjacent product categories. You just can’t be a “software platform for every company and idea on earth”.

Early start narrow, build credibility, build one fantastic product that people rave about. Then go wider.

Once example is Snyk narrow initial positioning.

But look at GitLab in 2015:

Or Stripe in 2013:

If you read any of those big successful dev tool websites today the story they tell is different. And it should be. Over time you speak to a different audience more and more. Including speaking to the general public that will buy their stock.

This is not what you should be doing at an early stage.

How to create value proposition for developer tools (with 20+ examples) ->

2. Learnings on Launch Weeks by Zeno Rocha from Resend

Launch weeks is a fantastic idea started (or at least popularized) by Supabase. You batch all (smaller) releases across product, docs, marketing content into a big(er) launch.

Condensing all those small releases/launches into one gets you a bigger chance to be seen. To “go viral”. It gets the team more excited and motivated too. Consider Launch Weeks especially when you are a “boring dev tool” releasing a ton of “boring” but important features/updates (I wrote about it here).

Anyhow, this is a post form Zeno, CEO of Resend one of the most loved dev tools right now about their learnings on running Launch Weeks.

My learnings/thoughts on this:

• Launch features that are large-impact, visual and requested (or solve common pain).

• Put extra love into art direction. For the latest launch they went with an 18th-century Illuminism-inspired theme. Looked awesome.

• Release features behind feature flags first. Your early requesters become beta-testers and hopefully later a walking social proof during launch weeks.

• Tease the launch a week before. Give people a waitlist to sign up to.

• Have the content ready before the launch week. Blog, X thread, short video email for each day/feature.

• Metrics around feature awareness and adoption (not revenue yet).

3. New (and awesome) PostHog billboards

Folks from PostHog are just goats at this. They are the most snarky, tongue in cheek, developer-chuckle-inducing, corporate-marketing/sales-fun-making, “Let me share it on X”-provoking bunch that has marketed dev tools. Maybe not, but they may very well be just that.

Charles if you are reading. Thank you. I needed this. We needed this.

In the issue #95 I shared their last “design our billboard” campaign. This time they come back with a 60s food industry advertising vibe presenting their suite of products.

Seems like they want to communicate that they are a single platform for product engineers that gives them a ton of different capabilities: analytics, a/b testing, session replays, surveys and more.

They could have just said “all-in one platform for product engineers”. But this is not a homepage, this is an OOH campaign so you need to grab attention. And with so many funny billboards each talking about one feature they delivered that key message loud and clear.

Please enjoy (and click-out to read comments about these on Charles’s LinkedIn).

See more dev tool billboard 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

• 📰 Hacker News Posting Guide | Syften Blog

• 📺️ How We Created A Global Engineering Handbook in 3 Days - Ivan Brezak Brkan (Infobip) | Shift Conference

• 🎧️ Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman | Lenny’s Podcast

3. Join our Slack community

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

Check out marketingto.dev ->