🍐 #34: When to set up a sandbox, great round announcement, and an awesome blog CTA

Hey,

In Sanskrit pear is “Amrita Phalam” which translates to “Fruit of Immortality”. Hopefully this 🍐will stay as long in your memory ;)

This week on the agenda:

• When should you set up a sandbox?

• Great funding round announcement from Fly.io

• Aside call to action from ExportSDK

• + a few bonus links at the end

Let’s go!

Developer marketing insights

1. When should you set up a sandbox?

I like what Joel Hans said here.

Many dev tools are or want to be PLG. They want to let people play with the product ASAP.

But for some products, sending people straight to the app is not the solution to reach THE “aha” moment. Especially for those that rely on connecting real data, infrastructure components etc.

You can get them to experience some value, AN “aha” moment. But not the real “I see the other side aha moment”.

You want them to feel what it will be like when they go through procurement, deployment on their infra, setup, and populating the dashboards. You want to skip weeks or months of internal work. 

In those situations, sending devs to a sandbox can be a great option. Let them experience value on dummy but realistic data. Let them play around but don’t expect them to go through mountains of work to feel it.

Now, I believe the product tours can also be super helpful. Plus you can do them on top of the sandbox. But if I had to pick one I’d go with a sandbox.

Read post and comments on Linkedin ->

2. Fly.io round announcement

"There are two types of companies": Just a beautiful piece of copy from Fly.io recent round announcement.

Doing us vs them doesn't always play out well.

But folks from Fly made it snarky and playful and fun.

And they basically said that they are:

• are developer-centric in the way they sell (self-served)

• are actually easy to use

• are great at the developer experience

And this is just such a nice brand play as well.

You just show personality and confidence in this devy snarky way.

I dig it.

See more dev tool PR examples ->

3. Aside CTA from ExportSDK

One of the top-performing conversion flows in dev-focused articles.

"Aside CTA" in the "How to do {jobs to be done}" article.

You know the drill:

• Explain how to X without your tool

• Add an "Aside" CTA showing that it can be done with your tool

And Export SDK executes it (almost) perfectly:

• They subtly move you from article to CTA but show that the article ended

• They explain what the tool does and what the offer is

• They show a visual of how the tool solves it

• And they give you a clear link to click

One thing that could be tested and changed is putting this "Aside CTA" mid-article and not at the end (tip from Martin Gontovnikas).

A good thing to try if you are running the "How to do {jbtd}" article strategy.

See more dev tool blog CTA 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!

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3. Bonus links to check out

• Pinecone’s journey from seed to 10,000 sign-ups per day (Article)

• 5 Tips on How to Target Developers with Your Content Marketing (Article)

• A curated list of awesome developer-first tools products. (Github list)