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- 🍐 48: Who to address on the homepage, bold Vercel billboard, and why Stripe docs start with one product.
🍐 48: Who to address on the homepage, bold Vercel billboard, and why Stripe docs start with one product.
Jakub Czakon
January 14, 2024
Hey,
My new year’s resolution: be even more pearsistent 🍐 with my pear puns ;)
But srsly, I do have some cool things planned. One is to write down answers to common questions I get in advising. You can already find a few of them tagged as ‘FAQ’ on my blog.
This week on the agenda:
Who to address on the dev tool homepage
Stripe docs start with one product
Vercel Billboard Ad
+ a few bonus links at the end
Let’s go!
Developer marketing insights
1. Who to address on the dev tool homepage?
Had a flavor of this discussion a few times recently:
“But CTO is the buyer, we should talk to them on the homepage”
Imho most of the time you shouldn’t. You should speak to the champion. They will speak to the CTO.
Here is why:
Traffic distribution: The vast majority of the traffic on your dev homepage is not the buyer persona. It is an individual contributor dev who may become your end user.
CTOs don’t evaluate themselves: Most of the time the CTO appoints someone to run a proper evaluation. Typically the very dev who brought the problem/solution to them.
Homepage is not the medium: When convicting buyer personas (not end users) to buy, slide decks, ROI-heavy case studies, and sales calls seem to be the way to go.
This is completely reversed for end-user devs. They visit homepages, they evaluate tools, and they like reading websites (and docs obviously).
But if you “sell” the product to the end-user dev. If they become your champion. Well, they will sell it to the CTO.
2. Vercel Billboard Ad
Just an awesome billboard/ad format for a dev too company coming from Vercel.
What I like about it is:
you catch attention with something different
those who are in your audience get it, maybe they feel more seen
you reinforce that your brand is very developer-focused
you don't forget to put the "obvious" branding in there
and there is a CTA to get people to do something
Simple and beautiful.
Btw, they actually run similar ads on Reddit and it makes a lot of sense IMHO.
3. Stripe docs start with one product
What to say when you have many products?
Dev tool companies over time grow from one product to a suite of products to platforms with products built on top of the core one.
The result is that it is harder to communicate without going full-on fluff mode (my fav "built better software faster").
But for most companies, there is this core capability/product where people start. The entry product. Why not use that?
I really liked what Stripe did on their docs page here:
They have maaaany products: billing, tax, radar, identity etc.
But all of them are built on top of their core payments product
So they focus on getting folks to start with the payments
And make it clear that there are many other products
Even though this is docs, the same applies to homepages and other dev comms.
If you have many products, figure out what is the most important one, the one where most people enter. Focus on that. "Upsell" to other products later.
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
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