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  • 🍐#17: Sales in dev tools, SEO growth loop, and a pricing page idea

🍐#17: Sales in dev tools, SEO growth loop, and a pricing page idea

Hey,

"Publish or pear-ish" is what they say in academia. So I finally hit publish on an article I was working on for a while. 

Apart from that, I:

  • Visited London. Breakfest at Dishoom, dinner at Gauchos. Happy days.

  • Added a section at the very end of newslepear with a few bonus links. Thanks for all the feedback and ideas, Francesco!

Here are my insights this week. 

Developer marketing insights

1. How to sell to developers (tldr; you don't)

Finally finished writing my article on selling dev tools. 

Wanted to go deeper into the sales side of the dev tools GTM. 

Here are my takeaways:

  • Think of users (devs) and buyers (team leads, CTOs) as connected but separate entities. 

  • Give users what they need to adopt your product and hopefully share it with other devs. 

  • Talk to them about adoption, solving use cases. 

  • Give your buyers reasons to buy at a team level and organization level (enterprise). Give them economical reasons to buy this for their devs. 

  • Have a free and commercial tier of your product and think carefully about what goes where. 

And above all don’t sell to individual devs, educate and enable them. Sell to their boss. 

2. SEO growth loop from Snyk  

Ben Williams was a VP of PLG at Snyk and now advises on PLG and shares gem after gem on Linkedin.  

In this post, he talks about Snyk Advisor.

The idea behind this growth loop is simple:

  • Figure out what problem your audience searches for often: compare OS packages on security

  • Find the long tail search intent: "{package} security", "{package} vulnerability"

  • Choose intent that is close to your product but complementary

  • Create SEO optimized pages programmatically

  • Add CTAs to your core product

  • Profit

They executed it beautifully and it was a huge success. 

3. Put pricing in the docs?

That is how Fly.io does it. 

You click a pricing page link on their homepage and you go to the docs!

No 3 boxes with the "most popular" being the middle paid plan ;)

They just give it to you how it is. Exactly what you'd expect from the docs.

There are tables, explanations, and links to other docs pages.

Very bold decision imho. It definitely makes them feel super developer focused.

Plus if you do want a more standard, enterprise stuff you see:

"If you need more support or compliance options, you can choose one of our paid plans. These come with usage included and additional support options."

fly.io docs pricing page

And that page looks like a classic pricing page.

But they focus on the developer buying experience here. Super interesting.

What do you think about this one?

Something about pears 🍐

Croque Monsiour with pears? 

Oh yeah. 

Mushrooms, walnuts, blue cheese, and some pears on top. 

Yummy!

I hope you learned something new.  

Talk to you next week, Pears!

Need more developer marketing insights?

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