newslepear
Posts
🍐 #23: Learnings from DO insider, marketing through free tools, brand videos with 10M views

🍐 #23: Learnings from DO insider, marketing through free tools, brand videos with 10M views

Jakub Czakon
June 10, 2023

Hey,

People say 🍐pear-sistence is key to success. That is why I keep tweaking the format of the newslepear. Let me know if you like it … or not.

This week on the agenda:

Learnings from an early revenue leader at DigitalOcean
Marketing through free tools (with an example of JWT from Auth0)
Devy brand video campaigns from Postman that got them 10M+ views
+ a few bonus links at the end

Let’s go!

Developer marketing insights

1. Learnings from an early revenue leader at DigitalOcean

Read on Linkedin

Kevin Chiu was the Head of Sales and RevOps at DigitalOcean back in 2015/2016.

In this post (that got 600+ likes and 50+ comments) he shares what made DO grow so quickly in a competitive market.

This is what he said was crucial to their growth:

Radical Product Market Fit: they were laser-focused on individual devs and SMBs
UX, simplicity & ease of use: devex was how they broke into an established category
Community and brand: they gave “love” to the community with content and tools and developers loved them back (and still do)
Investing in customer success not sales. Growing dev accounts through more adoption is easier than convincing devs to buy
Strong (internal) RevOps tooling to align GTM teams on a common reality.

Read post and comments on Linkedin ->

2. Marketing through free tools

Marketing through free tools is powerful. And Auth0 implemented it beautifully.

In an old article from Gonto I read about some free tools that Auth0 created years ago.

And those tools are still generating traffic and leads today.

And they are helpful to developers and make the Auht0 brand even more appreciated by the community.

One of those tools is JSON Web Token Debugger.

See fullscreen on dmp

So how this works for them is this:

You understand that your target dev audience has a problem
You realize that helpful blog posts can only do so much
You create a small tool that helps solve that problem
You create content that explains the concept to help build SEO
You link out to that content on the home
You add links to your core product/events or other offers in the navbar
You wait for devs to come ;)

Now, Gonto suggested that is important to do it on a separate domain to make it feel less promotional.

I am not sold on that especially when I know there are companies like VEED.IO that build "SEO tool clusters" in the /tools/ subfolder of their page and crush it in search.

But either way, if you can solve a real problem your target devs have, no matter how small, you should be able to get some developer love (and $) from the value you created.

See more free tool examples ->

3. Brand video campaigns from Postman

How to do a dev-focused brand video and get 10M+ views?

Making a memorable brand video is hard.

Doing that for a boring tech product is harder.

Doing that to the developer audience is next level.

Postman managed to create not one but three of those brand videos that got from 4M to 10M youtube views.

See fullscreen on dmp

The videos I am talking about are:

So what did they do right?

They are all short playful stories touching on values coming from a centralized API platform.
They hint at the motif of space which is a clear part of Postman's branding
They do show the actual UI of the product

Honestly, I am not exactly sure what special sauce they added but those are just great videos that you watch.

And I definitely remember them and the company which is exactly what you want to achieve with brand ads.

See more dev video examples ->