🍐#136: Learnings from 10 years of sponsoring developer events, chat hack from Stripe and an X ad from ClickHouse

Hey,

Remember, remember, its almost December and you’re still reading the pear🍐. Thank you! To all the Thanksgiving readers and everyone else who is opening this just to see how dry my jokes can get ;). Thanks for reading!

This week on the agenda:

• Learnings from 10 years of sponsoring developer events

• Case study X/Twitter ad from ClickHouse

• Website chat “hack” from Stripe

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 8min

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

New: The Dev Influencer Playbook by Plug.Dev

This guide breaks down how Dev Influencers and YouTubers drive full-funnel growth, from awareness through to adoption.

Learn:

• Which content formats work at each stage of the funnel

• How to structure campaigns vs. annual programs

• Repeatable influencer motions used by leading DevTool teams

Read the full playbook, here.

Developer marketing insights

1. Case study X/Twitter ad from ClickHouse

You know that I am a big fan of ClickHouse product marketing. Their older header is one of my fav things since sliced bread:

Example: Clickhouse header design

And their comparison pages/campaigns are great too imho -> talked about them in How to create a good dev tool comparison page.

And this is their ad I saw on Twitter recently:

I liked:

• the Netflix (customer) visual but in ClickHouse colors → nice touch but a simple attention grabber

• hook on Netflix scale with numbers that give a hint that this will be at least somewhat juicy

• promise of walking you through their (Netflix, the customer) optimizations. Again hinting at some technical areas that will be discussed

• Not a mention of your product. The entire ad is about their customer, and learning how they do great engineering at scale. Interesting.

Then the case study they link to looks like this:

So they start with a TLDR that actually frontloads a ton of good info (a concept from “Writing without bullshit”, one of my favorite books).

Right after that in the intro they go into details of the scale plugging gently but proudly that Netflix uses ClickHouse. They also hint at this being written or co-written with Netflix engineers and keep it mostly about Netlfix and their scale of problems.

And the first H2 is again curiosity grabbing “Inside Netflix’s” logging architecture which makes you want to keep going.

I really like this campaign idea and would be curious to know how it actually performed but looking at the engagement + quality / focus of the content I think it might have.

See more dev tool ads examples ->

2. Website chat “hack” from Stripe

Saw this post, btw I like Casey Hill’s content as it is always actionable, big or small things but action-first. Not really dev-marketing though but hey, you can’t have everything, or at least not at the same time.

So basically the problem is that you have that anonymous chat that you don’t expect would ever help. You don’t click (as often) because you thing you’ll just get some flavor of a form or get asked 5 bad questions that end in “Do you want me to search the docs” kind of thing. Followed by “was this helpful?” ;)

The tweak is to humanize it:

• show how many human reps (sales/support) are available

• show people in there to make it obvious that these are human

As far as I understand Casey asked their team and they said it significantly pushed the % of people starting a convo.

Something to try.

See more dev tool website examples ->

3. Learnings from 10 years of sponsoring developer events

This is a great post and it was super nice to see that it was inspired by my question in the marketingto.dev community “What are your do’s and don’t, success stories, and learnings for sponsoring/promoting at developer conferences?”.

Reminder that I should ask questions in there way more often as the caliber of people in there is just insane.

Anyhow, the real story is this amazing 4k + guide from Christophe Dujarric:

A Guide: Frugality in Offline Events

My takeaways from this:

• You won’t actually sell anything → you’ll meet devs. You may meet champions / prospects, sometimes maybe a buyer persona. But mostly end-user devs. Proceed accordingly with your copy, activations, and expectations.

• If you don’t like any sponsorship option, talk to organizers. Most often then not they will try and figure something out together with you. And they want to get feedback from potential sponsors anyway to build better packages in the future.

• The actual logistics is really hard. And heavy as you need to carry the stuff yourself, assemble yourself, think on your feet and maybe even drive to IKEA to make last-minute fixes/tweaks. Don’t underestimate how hard it is for those things to look easy.

• Minimal, reusable booth setup: two rollups, a back wall, tablecloth, desktop banners, an a screen. Branded, with messaging and QR codes. Simple.

• For swag only do stickers (because stickers!!!) and edu content like books/reports/cheatsheets especially when your teammate is the author.

• Pitch instead of demo ?!? → this one I am definitely not sold on but it is an interesting take. I am however 100% sold on having a great discovery-style pitch.

I’d add a trick I used at recent conference that worked great for me after those discovery conversations:

• After each conversation with devs/leads/prospects/customers I’d record a message dumping as many details and context as I remembered.

• But more importantly I’d recorded that straight into a chatGPT project (through transcribe feature).

• The project would have a system instruction prompt to organize it by role, pains, competitor mentions, jobs to be done, etc.

So much saved time. And so much detail ready to be used.

See more dev tool conference 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

• 📰 LLM traffic: What’s actually happening and what to do about it | Matt Henderson (Head of Growth @Sentry) newsletter

• 🍎 YC startups website are almost always really nice. How did they do it? Is there someone they use? | Reddit thread

• 🎧️ Rage Bait and Technical SDRs | Code to Market podcast

3. Join our Slack community

2400+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Check out marketingto.dev ->