🍐#138: Learnings on growth from Modal's CEO and Kilo Code Reddit ads

Hey,

People talk a ton about this 9-9-6 culture in SF and now as a pearent 🍐 of two kiddos it feels like I have my own 9-9-6 -> 9 cups of coffee before lunch, 9 minutes of uninterrupted sleep a night, and 6 diaper changes a day. The worst part is I don’t hate it one bit (yet 😉).

This week on the agenda:

• Kilo Code Reddit ads and Scientific Advertising

• Learnings on growth from Modal Labs CEO

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 8min

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Developer marketing insights

1. Learnings on growth from Modal Labs CEO

There are some people I read/listen to where I just find myself nodding my head (almost) all the time. Erik Bernhardsson from Modal is one of them.

Here is what I took from this interview:

Onboarding (at least) to the aha moment shoule be a core product experience, not “growth” or “marketing”.

Modal treats “Hello, Cloud” as the aha moment: pip install, no config, run a Python function in the cloud in seconds really. They optimized the heck out of that with everything from the website to docs to playgrounds to make this feel magical.

That gives devs that feeling of “local, but cloud” that is incredible powerful and important to people -> safety, control but power and scalability that feels delightful. And this is their key value prop as far as I understand.

This has to come from the top, company wide. A key product experience not and cannot be bolted on by growth/marketing to feel this good. You need to care about it a ton. And they do.

Docs are example first, action first.

This one is an extension of the last point → they want people to get to the aha moment of running something in the cloud. They want people to take action.

And they care about them being able to easily do so with a ton of examples, main CTA being a playground on the docs homepage etc. Also, they think beyond that aha moment to the actual activation moment where somebody actually runs their code on Modal, not just hello world.

Put love into error messages

They use errors to nudge you into the right swimlane. Instead of doing classic “vomit” stack traces you get something that helps explaining what to do next etc.

I remember when we did that at Neptune a few years back and made those error messages colored, with links to docs, and explanations written for users (not our devs) this pushed the activation rates by a ton.

Let bottoms-up do the heavy lifting (first). 

They delayed sales/marketing until the product was great, had solid traction behind it etc. Then added content, community, solutions engineers, and (only now) an AE.

I liked how Adam Gross put it with the 1-2-3 framework and the idea that if you start with great PLG product you can (and should) put sales on top of it. But if you start top-down sales-led it is very hard to build a delightful product.

This resource:

And his 1-2-3 framework I also explore in my “How to sell to developers” article:

Benchmark what devs actually feel. 

Modal markets concrete latency outcomes (sub-second cold starts for small containers; ~8–10s for 5GB models like SD, aiming for “a couple seconds”). They don’t just say “fast.” They back it up with benchmarks/numbers and drive that message. I like that.

Sell serverless economics. 

For me price is part of the core experience too. Or actually the pricing model. And the usage-based is a great fit for many dev tools or infra.

But they really take that “lets delight devs” farther and really focus on driving that message of you pay for what you use not wasting $ on idle resources. Erik talks about them saying: “100% utilization billing,” “scale-to-zero,” and “instant spikes to 100+ GPUs” vs just “efficient” or some useless word like that.

Position between commodity infra and model APIs. 

This one is very interesting for me as a positioning geek. Their narrative is something like raw GPUs are cheap but painful, model APIs are easy but you are locked-in with limited control. Modal runs arbitrary code with great developer experience and serverless economics.

I love something about this differentiation. Subtle but powerful at the dev level imho.

Overall this pod was great, highly recommended. Also this interview reminded me of the first time I heard about Erik and Modal -> Scaling DevTools:

2. Kilo Code Reddit ads and Scientific Advertising

As I scroll Reddit way more than I should (ok but I need r/parenting and r/whatcouldgowrong right?) I see lots of ads. Most of them feel invisible, completely off or corporate.

But some are not. Meme ads are one way of doing it as I shared here an here. However, it is always better if you can deliver your message while putting something that memorable, unique only to your brand.

Kilo Code Reddit ads do that.

They run those creatives that are super text heavy, white background, low on design. But this makes them so different than any other ads that are running right now. It makes them look like docs. And judging from the amount of upvotes people don’t hate them.

But more importantly this creative has a benefit of letting you communicate more to people who are interested. Yes, for most people this will not be interesting but so is any ad really. But for those who want to solve the problem of “AI memory loss” you get a few paragraphs of room for ad copy. A huge win.

Funny enough as I’ve been reading Scientific Advertising a book written in 1923 and many of the things described there seem to still work today. A few ideas from that book that map nicely to this ad:

• Most people will not care about your ad whatever you do. The role of the headline is to filter those who do.

• If I want to solve the problem that you solve there is almost no ad that will be too long. Copy heavy ads consistently outperformed copy-light ads every time (unless you are selling clothes)

• Tell the whole story in one ad. You may not get a chance to catch people’s attention for the second time.

And there is more similarities, just these three came to mind. For a book that is over 100 years old it holds water surprisingly well. Or maybe because of that and survivorship bias? Anyway, a solid read.

Anyhow, kudos to Kilo Code for awesome ads (check out their Reddit profile for more of this style).

See more dev tool Reddit marketing examples ->

Need more developer marketing insights?

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2. Bonus links to check out

• 📰 Dirty Pirate Metrics Guide for Tech Founders and Open Source Developers | Literally.dev blog

• 📰 The Content Matrix Framework | Tech Audience Accelerator newsletter

• 🎧️ John McMahon on How to Create and Drive a Sales Process with Urgency | Sales Lessons from Snowflake and MongoDB | 20Sales podcast

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