🍐#122: Github signals monitoring and outreach success story, effective dev tool messaging and correlation is not causation

Hey,

This week your fav 🍐 has been catching up and getting over a jet lag. But also going over photos from that Vancouver trip. This is easily one of my top cities to go to. So much green and hiking around, amazing food, very walkable, good coffee. What other cities should I visited that match that description?

This week on the agenda:

• Effective dev tool messaging and correlation is not causation

• Github signals monitoring + outreach success story

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 6min

Developer marketing insights

1. Effective dev tool messaging and correlation is not causation

Came across this post from DevPMM newsletter (by Marek Nalikowski):

One of the key insights is that good messaging is context + differentiation. I love that. Marek shares the latest approach from one of my product marketing heros Anthony Pierri, where he talks about adjusting their approach to differentiation first positioning.

I think it has to be when you have all those chatGPTs, all those tools and competitors. One thing that will always remain is differentiation.

When you double click on it differentiation is why you even exist. If you don’t have a good answer to that question then why did you built it in the first place?

Also, a good reason doesn’t necessarily need to be product-focused. It can be distribution focused. If you are an ex big 7 CTO, have 100k followers and you launch an almost exact copy of existing tools, this will likely be enough to cause trouble.

Ok, long tangent ;) the article is great, do read it please:

• Marek went over all devtools mentioned on Scaling DevTools podcast

• Chose six that had really clean homepage messaging: Depot, Signoz, ngrok, Lago, Temporal, and Neptune (nice to mentioned, kudos to my awesome PMM Patrycja Jenkner)

• Went deep on each company’s messaging dissecting into pieces what makes it good

He also touched on something I find crucial. Correlation is not causation. Especially when it comes to early-stage messaging. 

Ok, so there were many way more successful startups featured on the pod that didn’t make Marek’s list. But their messaging wasn’t very clear and/or served a completely different purpose then you may expect. Their messaging may actually be slowing down their user/customer growth. You never know.

In clear terms you shouldn’t apply messaging ideas from mature, successful, established companies to your early stage startup.

I’ll give you an example. One of my fav dev tool companies Snyk had an incredible focused, clear messaging for years.

Today, just visited their site it says:

So it went from clear, explaining exactly what it does, how is it constrained to a slogan that could go on the billboard in SF and anyone can sort of get it. Sort of because the product could be almost anything in the security space ;)

And it changes because your market changes from niche, innovators to more mainstream and pragmatic to almost everyone as you are speaking to people from high-level buyers, to potential employees, to public investors on that homepage.

It is a natural progression but important thing to understand. We talked about it a bit in our Ultimate Guide to Dev Tool Websites together with Ben Williams who ran growth at Snyk for years.

The main takeaway is, when you are early, don’t learn messaging from successful mature companies. Use https://web.archive.org/ and see how they looked when they were “your age”. Learn from that and you’ll be fine ;)

2. Github signals monitoring + outreach success story

This is a great story coming from Kubegrade one of the Reo.dev customers. Doesn’t happen often when a case study is worth sharing not for trust building reasons btw so good job Reo.

Oh, and the you can build this workflow yourself… or you can use one of the signal tools like Reo.

Ok, so the play is:

• They tracked activity in their GitHub repo and competitor GitHub repo

• They qualified high-intent people

• They enriched it with LinkedIn profile links and emails

• Reached out on LinkedIn with a following message

That gave them 22% response rate, lots of convos and 5 demos. Not too bad.

Read the LinkedIn post + they link to a deeper write up in there too.

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

• 📰 The #1 GTM Play That's Working Right Now To Drive Pipeline | GTMBA newsletter

• 🎧️ Three Levels of Ad Landing Pages | Code to Market Podcast

• 🎧️ Paul Copplestone, CEO of Supabase - don't kill your channel | Scaling DevTools

3. Join our Slack community

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