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- 🍐#124: How to make your dev brand memorable, and what is still relevant from my 2022 interview on Scaling DevTools.
🍐#124: How to make your dev brand memorable, and what is still relevant from my 2022 interview on Scaling DevTools.
Summer slack off
Jakub Czakon
August 10, 2025
Hey,
I know I’ve been slacking off with the Going deepear 🍐 into dev marketing podcast. Apologies. I have 5 more interviews recorded that are waiting to be edited. I promise one of them is coming up next week.
This week on the agenda:
How to make your brand memorable: The Roll from Aikido Security
Learnings from my interview from Scaling DevTools… in July 2022
+ a few bonus links at the end
Total pearusing time: 8min
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Developer marketing insights
1. How to make your brand memorable: The Roll from Aikido Security
I am turning into an Aikido Security fanboy but their campaigns and marketing overall is just soo funny, bold, and gets attention.
Shared a teardown of their LinkedIn Ads, talked about OnlyScans in the issue #106, and now I have another treat. The Roll.
Click out and watch that video.
They took their slogan “No bullshi*t security” and took it to the next level.
So for the Black Hat conference they came in with a campaign around a branded toiler paper ;)
Quite sure this will be one of the most memorable stunts that happened on that conference. And the best thing you can do for you brand is make it memorable.
A few creatives that Madeline shared on LinkedIn:
2. What is still relevent from my interview from Scaling DevTools… in July 2022
Was listening to my favorite pod, Scaling DevTools, and realized that wait a minute, I was a guest ;). It was super early, episode 9, back in July 2022, before everything AI happened.
Was curious what I talked about and how I see those things now in Aug 2025. A whole eternity in AI years later.
Here is what we talked about with Jack.
1. We started with pillars of dev marketing:
Do not persuade → educate, enable, inspire
Who are your developers and where they are
Devs are looking for solutions to problems all day(ish) and/or they need/want to upskill and learning
Let people try and build with your product - or at least give them a smell (docs, demos, playgrounds)
I’d say I am still very much bought into these. Nothing groundbreaking here really but I do believe it helps to organize your thinking and decisions.
The ways to solve for these changed but the core stays clear.
✅ 9/10 relevant
2. SEO strategy
So we were very heavy on SEO, our MLOps blog did 2M+ visitors a year (it ended up being 3M that year if I am not mistaken).
And the way I thought about SEO as a distribution channel was the following:
There are stages of awareness (solution aware, problem/jobs-to-be-done aware, product aware, most aware) and you’ll get readers across the board
Although obviously the more aware people get the higher the conversions would be → “{product} pricing” is going to convert way more than “What is {problem}”
The way to win is to write a better/deeper/more valuable article on a query that you know your potential users are searching.
Ok, so today, imho it doesn’t make much sense to focus on problem-focused articles for SEO distribution. Hold on, it does make sense to do those articles if you have first-hand expertise and you are creating them with a different distribution in mind (say Hacker News).
For the solution aware stage (comparisons) it still makes sense to write it for sure. But do it in a way where you explain how those tools are different. What is your point of view. Why you build a product. Not “my competitor is sh*t” and here is my frogwatch chart.
I wrote a deep dive into this here:
For product aware stuff and making sure the information that is indexed (in Google and LLMs) about your product is correct → of course you want to keep doing that.
✅ 7/10 relevant
3. Many CTAs and navigation nature of interactions
I shared a story of a dev saying to me during a user testing session:
“Show me the options and let me choose”
And then talked about having different CTAs (see docs, examples, templates, sign up, watch demo, launch playground, check out discord, GitHub) to let people choose.
I still like the approach of more CTAs, nav tabs and generally sites/assets heavier on information. But I do believe, more than back then, that it is key to have that clear golden path, that clear next step highlighted.
People should be able to follow your suggested path with little cognitive overhead. Even if you have many options on the side.
✅ 6/10 relevant
4. Thinking of marketing as portfolio of bets
The idea is that your channels are like stock or asset classes and you invest across those with different levels of risk/reward.
Agree with this completely. Even wrote an article about it later:
✅ 10/10 relevant
So overall what I shared is surprisingly still relevant today. I think the reason is probably that I focused on strategy not tactics there (which would have been vastly obsolete). Idk, give it a listen, tell me what you think.
Oh, and if you want to listen to a less ancient ramblings of mine, check out my own podcast Going deepear into dev marketing.
Need more developer marketing insights?
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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
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