🍐#22: Product marketing insights, usage based pricing trick, and article header design

Hey,

We are entering this chilled-out, summer pear-iod and I have a little less energy than usual.

This week I:

• Visited a winery as a part of a work retreat. Polish wine is not that bad actually.

• Made Brazilian cheese breads (Pão de Queijo). It is my favorite coffee snack btw.

Here are my insights this week.

Developer marketing insights

1. "People don't care about features!" or do they?

Anthony Pierri is a product marketing expert who focuses on early-stage startups. His content (and diagrams) is 🔥.

TLDR is this:

• In top-down sales-led motions, you talk to executives. They care about ROI, benefits, and the “WHY”.

• In bottom-up product-led motions, you (mostly) talk to users. They care about features, differentiation, and the “WHAT”.

• Now, when talking about features, focus on those features that differentiate you, not the ones that everyone has.

Read post and comments on Linkedin ->

2. Usage-based pricing with a cap from Appsmith

Usage-based pricing is loved by devs. But has its own problems.

Ok, so first what are those problems?

Value metric:

• users don't understand your value metric

• even when they do, they cannot map it to their usage patterns.

Predictability and procurement:

• it is easier to predict the headcount than the usage

• per user pricing is obvious, everyone across the org understands it

But devs love usage-based pricing:

• it is "fair", you pay for what you use

• you can scale up/down as you need

It is great for a dev tool company:

• you align user adoption, the value created, and monetization

• as org-wide usage so does the invoice

But pulling it off is not as easy as you may think.

Choosing that value metric, packaging it, and presenting it is a struggle.

I like what Appsmith chose to do.

They solved it in the following way:

• give people an option to go with a usage-based pricing

• but cap a per-user cost at $X a month

• it guarantees a better deal than a flat per-user pricing

• but gives you the predictability of a per-user pricing

Very interesting approach.

See more dev tool pricing examples ->

3. Article header from Teleport

There are a few developer experience gems here:

• RSS feed: many devs love rss, let them consume your blog that way

• Search: some devs will immediately know this article is not for them. Let them search and stay.

• Clear branding: Some devs will read the article and leave. Make sure they at least remember your brand.

Also, their design is super clean, non-invasive, and simple which makes for easy content consumption and more developer love.

See more dev tool blog examples ->

How can I make this better?

I hope you learned something new. Did you, though?

What would you like to read more about?
Reply to this and let me know.

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

• Leah's Product-led Growth Guide 3.0 (article)

• Just Simply – Stop saying how simple things are in our docs (Hacker News thread)

• Product-Led Sales at Retool: the DoorDash Case Study with Eleanor Dorfman (podcast)

🍐Something about pears

Why was the pear so sad?

It couldn't find its "pear"-pose in life!