🍐#120: Teardown of LinkedIn Ads from Aikido, Meme ads success story, and why both DevEx and LLMEx matter

I'm in Vancouver.

Author

Jakub Czakon
July 13, 2025

Hey,

I’m in Vancouver for ICML conference this entire week. Let’s grab a coffee, beer, or a pear🍐 if you are here.

This week on the agenda:

  • Meme Reddit Ads + a note

  • Teardown of LinkedIn Ads from Aikido Security

  • How to get both dev experience AND AI experience right

  • + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

Developer marketing insights

1. Teardown of LinkedIn Ads from Aikido Security

On the latest episode of Going Deepear into dev marketing, I did a teardown of Aikido Security LinkedIn Ads.

I go over their ads in the LinkedIn Ads library and:

  • start with a framework for LinkedIn ads creatives I like to use (that comes from Impactable Ads Agency) that matches nicely their creatives

  • go over different layers/purposes of ads that Aikido uses from product walkthroughs, pure attention-grabbers, testimonials, comparisons and more

Really fun one. Lots of ads to swipe.

2. How to get both dev experience AND AI experience right

Ben Williams (an awesome dev tool growth advisor), shared this article recently:

Your Dev Tool Needs Two Growth Tracks (And Here's Why)

Unlock dev tool growth in the AI era: learn how Augmented DevEx and LLMEx can boost adoption by optimizing for both humans and AI assistants today.

www.plg.news/p/ai-is-redefining-dev-tool-adoption-and-what-to-do-about-it

Since I spoke about a clever approach to AI in docs from Clerk in my recent newsletter figured you’d like this one.

Here are some of my learnings to give you a taste (but do read the thing):

  • You now market to two buyers: devs and LLMs: Humans skim, AIs parse. Build for both or lose half the funnel.

  • Ship “copy-this-prompt” blocks in every guide: Dev picks you -> pastes into Cursor/ChatGPT -> working code in 60 seconds. That’s Augmented DevEx.

  • Expose a /llm.txt (or OpenAPI): Machine-readable spec = your ticket to the AI’s default tool list when someone types “add auth.” That’s LLMEx.

  • Seed the training data everywhere: Open-source demos, Stack Overflow answers, Dev.to posts. More public examples -> more model recall -> more installs.

  • Brand naming matters again: “Clerk” > “SuperSecureAuthPro” because the AI can spell, remember, and autocomplete it. Be unique, short, searchable.

  • Match effort to tool type.

    • Infrastructure (DB, auth): max out Augmented DevEx—devs still choose.

    • Commodity libs (charts, date): crank LLMEx—the AI chooses for them.

  • Publish clear trade-off and pricing metadata: LLMs rank on cost, limits, and gotchas. Give them the fields; win the comparison.

  • Track AI visibility as a North-Star metric: Monitor GitHub “import” counts and AI paste-ins. Rising share = your compounding advantage is working.

3. Meme Reddit Ads + a note

Marie shared how meme creatives crashed it for them on Reddit:

I am a big fan of memes, wrote about them in the context of Supabase some time back. But yeah, great dev creative.

Figured I’d share something that is a good to know when you want to run those things: potential copyright legal risks. For most of those creatives it is impossible to buy loyalties (there are a few notable exceptions like distracted boyfriend but yeah).

Seeing how popular those creatives are both for ads and organic posts and the fact that I’ve never heard of anyone getting in trouble, I’d expect this to be mostly safe. But be on the same page with “your boss”.

One way to solve it is recreate those memes with photos you have rights to, with chatGPT, or both. Not the same thing obviously but way safer.

Btw posting memes from a company account afaik would still count as promo and no fair use would apply.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"Jakub immediately got to the heart of our concerns.

Especially the unique challenges of crafting a marketing and content strategy for a developer audience."

David Burton, Head of Content, Apify

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.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."

Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

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

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