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  • 🍐 #26: Devtools newsletter, Algolia search widgets, pricing page copy

🍐 #26: Devtools newsletter, Algolia search widgets, pricing page copy

Author

Jakub Czakon
July 01, 2023

Hey,

Realized that “lepear” means to cry in Galician. Hopefully, you don’t shed too many tears reading my dev marketing stuff.

This week on the agenda:

  • Devtools brew newsletter

  • The strategy behind Algolia search widgets

  • Pricing page copy from Retool

  • + a few bonus links at the end

Let’s go!

Developer marketing insights

1. New dev tools newsletter: DevTools Brew

Morgan Perry is a founder of a dev tool startup called Qovery. He runs a weekly newsletter where he shares learnings from the best dev tool startups.

Basically, he writes tldrs of dev tool founder interviews, packaged in a way that you just read it every week. Not all is growth/marketing related but you can always find something juicy.

Some dev marketing highlights from previous issues:

  • “HashiCorp CEO: 5 Lessons Learned from Scaling at Every Growth Phase”

  • “How Sentry Built Their Open Source Solution”

  • “Developer Marketing For Early-Stage Startups – What the PostHog Team Has Learned”

  • “How Snyk Found Product-Market Fit”

  • “How Algolia Built Their Most Customer-Friendly Pricing Model Ever”

But there are many more. Worth a follow for sure.

2. Algolia search widgets

Classic widget PLG loop.

Algolia really crashed it with these. Here is how they made it so successful.

Some time ago I did some research on Algolia marketing looking for gems. Found quite a few as they are truly amazing at this.

One angle that is bringing a lot of traffic to their site is that classic PLG widget.

So what they did is:

  • They gave away their search box for free (under conditions)

  • They made sure that folks who do get it for free have some (ideally a lot of) overlap with their target audience.

  • People who added that search box got the branded "Powered by Algolia" version of it

  • Some devs who used the sites with the Algolia search box liked the search and went to their site

  • Some of them started using it and spreading the word further

And the sites that brought the most traffic were:

  • Hacker News search (that is not exactly the widget but a standalone site)

  • Fontawesome (site with fonts for devs)

  • Open-source documentation sites (they give away free docsearch to OS projects)

  • SteamDB (gaming site)

I love this tactic as it aligns:

  • the value their product provides

  • the value that site users get

  • the value that the company gets from developers finding out about it

Win Win Win

When you find those "Win Win Win" tactics/strategies you are golden.

3. Retool pricing page copy

Most dev tools have two deployment options:

  • SaaS

  • On-prem / private cloud

And then companies present it on their pricing page with some flavor of two tabs.

And you need to name them somehow.

And how you describe those things sometimes adds confusion for your buyers:

  • You put “your server” > then does it scale to a more robust infra?

  • You put “on-prem" > then can I deploy on private AWS cloud?

I like how nice and simple solution Retool used on their pricing page:

  • "Cloud (we host)"

  • "Self-hosted (you host)"

Explicit, obvious, and to the point.

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. Work with me

  • I have a few slots every week for 60-min strategy sessions. We can talk strategy, tactics, brainstorming, whatever you need right now. Book a session ->

  • I also do longer-term advising. We meet weekly/biweekly and I help you hit your dev marketing goals. Reach out ->

2. Join our Slack community

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3. Bonus links to check out

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