🍐#16: Product tab design, open-source repo growth hack, and "give-first" content

Hey,

Ok, maybe I wasn't su-pear busy, but it felt like it. 

So I:

• hiked in the Polish mountains and ate way too many potato pancakes

• joined product-led sales community from Pocus. So many gems in there.

Here are my insights this week. 

Developer marketing insights

1. How to design the navbar product tab

This is what PostHog does 

Figuring out what to put in the navbar is tricky:• How should you name tabs• What should go where• Should you have "resources" or divide it

𝗧𝗵𝗲 "𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁" 𝘁𝗮𝗯 𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗸𝘆.

It can get overloaded with a ton of content:

• Some teams put docs, and product videos there.

• Some show features, integrations, and code examples.

• Some go with solutions and per person per industry pages.

• Some just put everything in there ;)

𝗜 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗴 𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝘁:

• They use the word "features". Most devs like it more than other options.

• They show the data stack with which the tools integrate. That is an important obstacle handler pretty much always.

• They include customers in the product tab. Most devs want to see the product and may not go to the "customers" tab. This is a nice way to add social proof and increase conversion to user stories pages.

•  They show customer logos and the results they got from the product. Again more social proof without clicking out.

• They use "customer stories" rather than "case studies" which again feels more devy.

I like it.

See more dev marketing examples ->

2. How to make use of popular open-source projects to reach your dev audience? 

Solve problems for maintainers in a publicly visible way.

Josh Thurman shared how they did it at Uffizzi on the Scaling Dev Tools podcast.

Basically:

• Uffizzi offers an ephemeral environment as a service

• They created PRs to open-source projects integrating their product (test environments) for free

• Maintainers are happy to accept help as they offered lots of value for free

• OS project users see their product value in public OS repos

• Some devs get interested enough to test it out at work

Win-Win-Win

Takes work as you have to integrate it into all those OS repos but if it works why not.

Plus you can test it on 3 popular projects in your space and see if there is traction.

Listen to the full episode: 

3. “Give-first content” in developer marketing

Mitch Wainer, former CMO at DigitalOcean talked about this idea on a podcast episode.

So “give-first content” is basically company-agnostic content that gives value to your audience/ICP expecting nothing in return.

It's important that it really expects nothing. 

 It could be podcast writeups, example tool stacks, or deep dives into concepts.

But in the case of 𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗢𝗰𝗲𝗮𝗻, 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗛𝗼𝘄-𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗹𝘀.

Helping people solve their problems as they are building software and searching for answers online.

Things like:

• “How To Create a New User and Grant Permissions in MySQL”

• “Java SimpleDateFormat - Java Date Format”

• “How To Use docker exec to Run Commands in a Docker Container”

I saw this tweet the other day:

This is exactly what DO has been doing.

And thanks to that “give-first content” DigitalOcean managed to establish itself as a go-to place for sysadmins to find tutorials. Nice.

Important to note that sysadmins are their audience :)

𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲.

Otherwise, whatever traffic you get is mostly useless.

Something about pears 🍐

You can cut pears at the age of one. 

Here is the proof (ok ok, not a real knife or pear but still). 

I hope you learned something new.  

If you did:

• Forward this newsletter to a friend who does dev tool marketing.

• Reply to this email. Questions, comments, feedback. I answer every email.

Talk to you next week, Pears!

PS. Need more developer marketing insights?

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• previous issues of the newslepear