🍐#19: Competitive ads, community onboarding tool, and dev audience research

Hey,

Thanks for all those little pear-to-pear conversations we are having around the internet. I really do appreciate them.

This week I:

• Found a cool WeWork in Warsaw. If you are ever in town, let me know, and I'll show you.

• the rhubarb season is in full swing in Poland, having a rhubarb bun as I type this. Yum.

Here are my insights this week.

Developer marketing insights

1. Vs competitor Twitter ad from Convex

VS competitor ads are hard to pull off with devs. Not impossible though.

So the problem is that:

• You want to list problems people have with the competing tool.

• But you don't want to come off as too negative and aggressive.

• And you want people to not think those are just "some bs claims to sell your tool"

Convex does it really nicely here.

• They start positively by acknowledging that some people do "Love Firebase"

• They tag the competitor to build trust in the claims they are making

• They list problems people have with the competitor explicitly in voice of customer: "request waterfalls", "weak react support", "managing end-to-end consistency"

• And they link to a deeper vs competitor page for details

And even though this is "aggressive" competitor marketing hundreds of devs liked/bookmarked this tweet.

Good job!

See more competitive dev tool marketing examples ->

2. Dots - automation & insights for Discord & Slack

Came across this one recently and figured I'd share with all the community builders in here.

Pitch:

Review:

Check out dots website ->

❓btw wondering if you'd like me to introduce you to more tools in the future.

Should I go (way) deeper for this to be useful?

Let me know!

3. Infrastructure team's mindset

Saw this Linkedin post from Henry Hund the other day quoting this tweet.

Kelsey's thread is such a great piece of dev audience research.

I really liked these two comments:

So if you built a general solution to a problem, remember that devs won't believe it is opinionated/custom-built (enough) for their use case.

You need to show them through educational content created by other devs.

Better yet create those "How to do {job to be done}" style tutorials that:

• explain exactly how to do it without your product,

• hint at problems and really agitate

• say that your product solves these (and here is a free option to try)

Something about pears 🍐

What do you call a boss of a pear mafia?

Pear-don.

(My own invention. Sooo dry, right?)

I hope you learned something new.

Talk to you next week, Pears!

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Book 1:1 session with me

I have a few slots every week for 60-min coaching sessions.

We can talk strategy, tactics, ideas, whatever you need right now.

Book a session ->

2. Join our Slack community

600+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other developer marketing practitioners are there. We miss you!

Check out marketingto.dev ->

3. Bonus links to check out

• Can My Open Source Company Raise Series A? (blog)

• State of the Interactive Product Demo 2023

• Product-led marketing (Kyle Poyar on Lenny's newsletter)