🍐 #40: What is good and bad dev marketing, awesome YouTube video, and a home page header idea

Hey,

What do you call a pear burger? A Whoppear 🍐 ;)

This week on the agenda:

• Header with speed benchmarks from Bun

• What is good and bad developer marketing

• "Between to Nerds" funny campaign video from SST

• + a few bonus links at the end

Let’s go!

🪧 Promo

If understanding the impact of devrel/dev marketing programs is hard.

And getting people to track all activities that happen all over socials, Reddit, and communities is really hard.

Then knowing what activity drives results like GitHub forks or YouTube subscribers is like “I almost don’t want to try” hard.

And so people give up and move with little to no analytics.

krunch is a tool that helps with that by:

• Giving you magically changing links for tracking activities

• Connecting to your website/GitHub/YouTube analytics to present results you care about

With that, you see exactly which Tweet or Slack discussion drove conversions.

🔥On top of all that, they have just released an AI feature that generates dev-focused copy for socials based on the long-form content you want to distribute.

Plus right now it is free. Pretty neat.

Check them out ->

Developer marketing insights

1. What is good and bad developer marketing

Cecilia Stallsmith is a platform and developer GTM investor, consultant, ex-director of platform marketing at Slack, ex-devrel, and platform ecosystem manager at Box.

Yeah, likely knows what she’s talking about.

Recently wrote an article on the good and bad of developer marketing. Gold.

Here is a TLDR, but go read the whole thing.

Bad:

• Tone-deaf Content

• Do nothing

• Try to out-market a weak product

• Forget about the other audiences

Good:

• Show don’t tell

• Your marketing site matters, but your docs REALLY MATTER

• Be Succinct

• Content marketing has to be high-value

• Provide a variety of onramps

Read post and comments on Linkedin ->

2. "Between to Nerds" Video from SST

This is one of the most interesting content pieces I have seen in dev tools recently 👇

Comes from SST and believe it or not is a comedy video created to promote integrations.

That's right.

So SST integrated with Astro and instead of creating "just another how-to use X+Y" video they created this:

• A copy of "Between Two Ferns" comedy show

• With one of the founders of Astro framework which they integrated recently

• Where they don't really talk about integration too much ;)

• And reportedly got a ton of signups from this

It was a fun brand play but got way more views than a tutorial ever could.

And it connected with their audience in a human way that will be remembered (and shared).

Nice.

See more dev tool video examples ->

3. Header with speed benchmarks from Bun

If your dev tool's USP is that it is faster -> Show it in the header

I like how folks from Bun focus on the fact that they are a faster library.

They show the benchmark as the key visual on the homepage header.

I love it.

If you think about it how else do you really want to show that you are faster?

This is believable, especially with a link to the benchmark so that I can dig deeper.

They show competitors, they don't pretend they don't exist.

And they talk about being faster left right and center.

I mean, they drive this "we are faster" home for me.

If that was important to me, I'd check it out.

See more dev tool benchmark examples ->

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me

• I have a few slots every week for 60-min strategy sessions and longer-term advising. We can talk strategy, tactics, brainstorming, whatever you need right now. See how it works -> 

• You can also promote your product/service/job in this newsletter. But I want to 100% make sure this will add value for the readers so… Let’s talk first ->

2. Join our Slack community

1000+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking about things like this:

Check out marketingto.dev ->

3. Bonus links to check out

• The Fall of Stack Overflow (🍊 Hacker News thread)

• What is Developer Experience Research? ( ✍️ article)

• Product-Led Sales for Developer Tools ( ✍️ article, 🎤 interview)

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!