🍐 #54: What should marketing do at each stage, developer GTM report, and a fantastic navbar tab design

Hey,

I am in Tenerife right now and found an awesome local wine.
Super clear pear 🍐 and that “water on stone” minerality.
Palo Blanco from Envinate. Figured I’d share as they export it too.

This week on the agenda:

• Developer go-to-market report

• Fantastic Supabase product navbar tab design

• What should marketing do at each stage of the dev tool startup journey?

• + a few bonus links at the end

Let’s go!

🪧 Promo

Heard of PLGTM conference yet?

2 days: April 16-17 in San Francisco. 

Talks from people leading PLG-heavy GTM motions at developer-first companies like Jam, Prefect, Nylas, Sauce Labs, Hex, New Relic, and Deepgram.

And you can get 25% off your ticket with the code "Pear".

Check out PLGTM conference ->

Developer marketing insights

1. What should marketing do at each stage of the dev tool startup journey?

Not all marketing tactics are made equal. Especially at a dev tool startup. 

Depending on the stage in which you are, I suggest the following. 

‍No product market fit yet: 

• Focus on getting feedback. Try to get people to talk to you.

• Try many different channels at a small scale to see where you get the most feedback/interested folks coming from. 

• Prioritize early-adopter-heavy channels where people don’t have super-high product expectations. 

‍Have product-market fit:

• Focus on finding one scalable channel. Make sure that it has a product-market-channel-model fit.

• Scale this channel. Optimize it. Make it efficient. Find tactics that support the growth of it. 

• Focus the vast majority of your efforts on this single channel. 

‍Have one scalable channel:

• Diversify your channel portfolio. Add more scalable channels to your mix. 

• All channels saturate. All have limitations. Be ready for when your scalable channel cannot deliver the signup/pipeline numbers you need.  

• Make experimentation and finding new channels part of the process. Divide the budget into 80-20 between optimization of the scalable channel and experimentation on new channels. 

Read the full article ->

2. Developer Go to Market report

Folks from Reo.dev published an interesting report on GTM for developer-first companies.

They connected developer activity in the docs/open-source repos/product/website/discords/installations with the sales data in the CRM.

The core of the report was to answer the following question:

Does more dev activity mean higher purchase intent?

It could have been that your free tier or open-source users will just not convert. And whatever metric you are growing will not convert to revenue.

The reality is that yes it does convert to purchase intent. And it is the most visible at the bottom of the funnel (Sales Qualified Account, Opportunity etc) where teams were 3x more likely to have a high dev activity score.

But the qualification could be biased due to scoring that includes dev activity, right?

Here was another interesting thing, though:

Any good devrel knows it intuitively. The “invisible” devrel activities do impact sales (but don’t get credit for it). This is a good data point for your next budget discussion.

Anyhow, it seems that including that dev activity in your sales scoring systems is a logical next step.

And if you do, then your sales team can reach out to high-dev activity accounts (ideally the buyer persona not dev users) and have a bigger chance of closing it.

Read the Developer GTM report ->

2. Supabase product navbar tab design

The product tab in your navbar is likely the most visited one on your site.

And there are a million ways of organizing information in there.

But ultimately, you want to help people understand what this product is about at a glance.

Even before they click. Even if they never click.

And how do you explain your product to devs?
By answering common questions:

• "What are the capabilities/features, specifically?"

• "What do people use it for in producution, specifically?"

• "Ok, so how is it different than ... I used before/use now?"

Supabase does it really nicely:

• They show features + give a one-liner explanation

• They show customer logos + a one-liner on what they got from it

• They list the most common competitors with links to deeper comparisons

Very solid pattern imho.

What I'd improve:

• Make the third testimonial copy more dev-centric, more specific -> It reads "... to become top 10 mortgage broker"

• I'd add a link to a page with all comparisons -> what if I don't see mine?

See more dev tool navbar 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

1400+ 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

• 📽️ Mastering High-Volume, Low-CAC Marketing: Strategies from Gorgias, Vercel, and Hypergrowth - YouTube - SaaStr

• ✍️ How Snyk created a developer-first security company

• ✍️ Community Contribution at: GitLab - Community Inc.