🍐#118: Adam Frankl's tips for developer marketers (not just founders), a real-life example of how clear and simple copy wins

Hey,

This week your favorite 🍐 was in Hel. Literally. It is a funny, super thin ( minimum is just 100 meters) peninsula in Poland. I come here every year and always enjoy it.

This week on the agenda:

• Adam Frankl’s tips for developer marketers (not only founders)

• Clear and simple copy wins, a real-life example datapoint

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

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

Developer marketing insights

1. Adam Frankl’s tips for developer marketers (not just founders)

On this week’s episode I interviewed Adam Frankl about technical advisory board, creating content, strategy. Always pushing for examples and tips useful for dev tool marketers and not only just founders.

Adam is perhaps the GOAT of dev marketing but definitely the Triceratops who was the first VP marketing at 3 dev tool startups that became unicorns. It was an honor to speak to him. Learned a ton.

I think I managed to get a few net new insights for me and hopefully for you as well.

We talked about soooo many things it is crazy. Some concepts we touched on:

• Technical advisory board tweaks for dev marketers implementing this (including the chief scientist persona, social media marketing)

• Creating authority and actual thought leadership content as a non SME marketer

• Examples of owning the problem midnshare from Neo4j (graph database newsletter)

• Strategic narrative framing for dev tools + example from sourcegraph

• Technology discovery loop for devs (and getting into those loops)

• Dark matter devs and how to solve it with targeting “alpha developers” who in turn speak to other devs

• Free anonymous piece of product + examples from Neo4j and Sourcegraph

• Adjusted value proposition design framework (pains, gains, jobs to be done, AND changes in the environment)

• Why influencer marketing is the thing to do. Why Adam believes that paid flavor of this doesn’t work. And what you should do instead

• When introductory developer content is actually the play

• Creating research-based content factory with an example from jFrog and Tailscale

• And finally, why Adam’s is even doing this.

Listen/watch to the episode on:

• Spotify

• YouTube

• Apple podcasts

2. Clear and simple copy wins, a datapoint

Came across this example this week:

So they ran two versions:

1. The easiest way to capture and transcribe meetings

2. The API for developers to access meeting recordings, transcripts and metadata

The second option clearly says what it does. And it is the one that gets results ( pipeline) for them.

The first option sounds like what you’d think you should pitch investors. Or something that “even your grandma would understand”.

But this is not how you capture interest of people who are searching for the solutions to the problem they are trying to solve.

For those people you will be better off explaining what you actually do. Especially when you are speaking to devs.

See my article on “What should be on a dev tool landing page” ->

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 Should DevTool Companies Define SDR Territories? | Reo.dev blog

• 🟦 Announcing fund raise playbook from Unify co-founder | LinkedIn Post

• 🎧️ Shipping 22 products to find the true product - Utpal from Digger.dev | Scaling Dev Tools Podcast

3. Join our Slack community

2300+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Check out marketingto.dev ->