🍐#137: Learnings from Clerk’s experiment, stickers inspiration library, and an interview tip for founders

Hey,

Some may say this was a pretty big week:

• my second kiddo was born, on the very same day when…

• we announced that Neptune is getting acquired by OpenAI (“subject to closing conditions”),

• and I officially finished decluttering our kitchen.

Poetic. Almost as if it was written somewhere that some journeys end when others begin (I will miss you 12 weird knifes I never used).

As pear 🍐 what comes next for me -> for now, I’ll focus on making sure that all those closing conditions are subjected properly ;) … and try to get some sleep whenever I can.

This week on the agenda:

• Clerk’s experiment with turning off newsletter partnerships

• Developer stickers inspiration library

• User research tip for founders

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 8min

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

Turn developer content into a reliable growth driver

No content team yet? No problem.

At Draft.dev, we bring the strategy, production, and distribution across many content types: Blog posts, videos, social collateral, comparison pages, lead magnets, and more.

We helped VCluster 4x their blog traffic and build up to hundreds of thousands of monthly pageviews in the past two years. We'd love to do that for you too.

Book a call to see if we can help.

Developer marketing insights

1. Clerk’s experiment with turning off newsletter partnerships

So this is a fantastic story and a reminder that some activities may have significant incremental impact even if they are not attributable.

Not much to add to this so just read Alex’s post.

I had a similar experience one time when I looked at our Twitter ads a couple years back. I saw that they didn’t drive much activated signups. Being data driven as I was, I pushed to turn off those ads. To my surprise signups, direct traffic, and google search dropped by a solid %.

So, being data driven as I was ;), figured lets run a geo lift test and we ran Twitter ads for some geo’s and didn’t for others. The results clearly showed a lift for geo’s where we ran ads.

The moral of the story is that you want incrementality not attribution. And that there is truth in the famous marketing saying “50% of marketing budget is wasted, you just never know which half”.

After all you'd much rather “waste” 50% while driving ROI from the other 50% (albeit unknown one) than not waste anything but drive poor results.

Itamar Ben Yair summarized it perfectly in our podcast interview:

Here is that interview if you are interested (lots of gems on attribution/incrementality):

Also, my two articles on the subject:

2. Developer stickers inspiration library

You probably remember that last week I shared a conference sponsorship guide where the author said that there are only two types of swag he does: stickers and educational materials.

Figured it would be cool to share this sticker inspiration library:

I came across this one on Hacker News.

Got to say that thread had a few interesting discussions too. Here are three useful comments that are sort of obvious but when people design stickers (or decide not to) they forget about them:

See more dev tool swag examples ->

3. User research tip for founders

This needs an intro so pls bear with me. But there is a great learning for dev tool founders here, I promise ;)

Listened to a podcast recently where a scientist spoke with a conspiracy theorist (sort of). And while it was obvious (as I know the host) what he thought about the matter it was fascinating to see him talk to the guest for 2 hours, learning a ton about their position.

The main (and fascinating) learning was that the host, instead of explaining why the guest was wrong, listened, asked follow-ups, presented thought experiments to get even more insights. Through that he understood/learned a ton about the guests worldview and beliefs. A ton.

I know how hard it is to do as you hear someone and you just know they are wrong and this is how I prove it. But then you don’t learn anything new. People get defensive, aggressive, dismissive, talk over each other etc.

And what I realized while listening to this was that user research conversations, especially as a founder are very similar. You talk to a dev who explains their workflow, situation and “you just know” how wrong what they are doing is. You want to jump into convincing them that “this is the way”.

The problem is that when you do that, you don’t learn much about their worldview and situation.

So the next time you run a user research interview (or speak to a conspiracy theorist) try and learn more about their position, ask follow-ups. Learn, not convince is the goal of those things.

Besides when you know where people are coming from with specific details convincing them is 10x easier anyway.

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

• 📰 Why Developers Hate Your Content (And How to Fix It) | Tech Audience Accelerator

• 📰 Inside my developer marketing stack | Lucas Stahl blog

• 🎧️ When sales and product led growth meet, with Railway's Angelo Saraceno | Scaling DevTools podcast

3. Join our Slack community

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

Check out marketingto.dev ->