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  • ๐Ÿ#16: Product tab design, open-source repo growth hack, and "give-first" content

๐Ÿ#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:

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:โ€ข How should you name tabsโ€ข What should go whereโ€ข Should you have "resources" or divide it

๐—ง๐—ต๐—ฒ "๐—ฃ๐—ฟ๐—ผ๐—ฑ๐˜‚๐—ฐ๐˜" ๐˜๐—ฎ๐—ฏ ๐—ถ๐˜€ ๐—ฒ๐˜€๐—ฝ๐—ฒ๐—ฐ๐—ถ๐—ฎ๐—น๐—น๐˜† ๐˜๐—ฟ๐—ถ๐—ฐ๐—ธ๐˜†.

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 ;)

๐—œ ๐—น๐—ถ๐—ธ๐—ฒ ๐—ต๐—ผ๐˜„ ๐—ฃ๐—ผ๐˜€๐˜๐—ต๐—ผ๐—ด ๐—ฎ๐—ฝ๐—ฝ๐—ฟ๐—ผ๐—ฎ๐—ฐ๐—ต๐—ฒ๐—ฑ ๐—ถ๐˜:

  • 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.

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. โ€œGive-first contentโ€ in developer marketing

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

So โ€œgive-first contentโ€ 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 ๐——๐—ถ๐—ด๐—ถ๐˜๐—ฎ๐—น๐—ข๐—ฐ๐—ฒ๐—ฎ๐—ป, ๐˜๐—ต๐—ผ๐˜€๐—ฒ ๐˜„๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ ๐—›๐—ผ๐˜„-๐˜๐—ผ ๐˜๐˜‚๐˜๐—ผ๐—ฟ๐—ถ๐—ฎ๐—น๐˜€.

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

Things like:

  • โ€œHow To Create a New User and Grant Permissions in MySQLโ€

  • โ€œJava SimpleDateFormat - Java Date Formatโ€

  • โ€œHow To Use docker exec to Run Commands in a Docker Containerโ€

I saw this tweet the other day:

"Create tutorials you wish to see in the world"

- Harpreet Sahota, DevRel manager at Deci AI

This is exactly what DO has been doing.

And thanks to that โ€œgive-first contentโ€ DigitalOcean managed to establish itself as a go-to place for sysadmins to find tutorials. Nice.

Important to note that sysadmins are their audience :)

๐—๐˜‚๐˜€๐˜ ๐—ฎ ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ๐—บ๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ฑ๐—ฒ๐—ฟ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ฎ๐˜ ๐˜†๐—ผ๐˜‚ ๐˜€๐—ต๐—ผ๐˜‚๐—น๐—ฑ ๐—ฐ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ฒ ๐—ฐ๐—ผ๐—ป๐˜๐—ฒ๐—ป๐˜ ๐—ณ๐—ผ๐—ฟ ๐˜†๐—ผ๐˜‚๐—ฟ ๐˜๐—ฎ๐—ฟ๐—ด๐—ฒ๐˜ ๐—ฎ๐˜‚๐—ฑ๐—ถ๐—ฒ๐—ป๐—ฐ๐—ฒ.

Otherwise, whatever traffic you get is mostly useless.

Something about pears ๐Ÿ

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:

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Talk to you next week, Pears!

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