🍐 #58: Who to reach out to in dev tool sales, powerful conference registration CTA, and a SEO article that crushed it on Hacker News

Hey,

Pears are some of the most widespread fruits. They are pearvasive 🍐 ;)

This week on the agenda:

• Vercel NEXT.js conference registration CTA

• Who to reach out to in product-led sales motion?

• Great "What is {my core keyword}" article from Planetscale

• + a few bonus links at the end

Let’s go!

Developer marketing insights

1. Who to reach out to in product-led sales motion?

Ben is a PLG motion advisor specializing in dev tools. We are working with him over at Neptune, he is great. Highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter too.

Anyhow, this point made lots of things clear for me. Paraphrasing Ben’s post, in PLG you want to:

• Identify the account that is engaged in the product beyond a certain activity threshold

• Identify if that account is your ideal customer profile (company size, tech stack, geo, roles, funding round)

• Find the buyer persona in that account’s signed-up users, through SDRs, ads etc

• Only then reach out to the buyer persona, not the developer end-user

It may be that for you the buyer persona is a senior developer end-user as well. That is great.

But if not, don’t burn your communication channels trying to get dev to “hop on a quick call”. It almost never works.

Read post and comments on Linkedin ->

2. Vercel NEXT.js conference registration CTA

How to promote your important company event?

How about right there in the header?

A typical approach to promoting events on your site is to have them in the Hello bar (right above the navbar). This is a solid option of course.

But what if this is a super duper important event that you really want to push?

Put it in the header.

The header is the most viewed part of the most visited page on your site.

Doesn't get much better than that.

But you don't want to distract people from your value propositions and main CTAs too much.

How do you do that?

This is how Vercel did with last year's NEXT.js conf.

• above the H1 headline so as not to break the flow

• prominent but not more distracting than it needs to be

• has conference logo, crystal clear copy, and an event CTA

Nice execution on that pattern.

See more dev tool call to action examples ->

3. Great "What is {my core keyword}" article from Planetscale

How to write a "What is {MY CORE PRODUCT KEYWORD}" article that gets to the top of HackerNews? 👇

First of all, almost no one succeeds at that as you write those articles for SEO distribution, not HN distribution.

To get an SEO-first article on HN your content quality bar needs to be super high.

But you can do it.

PlanetScale managed to get their "What is database sharding and how does it work?" on the orange page (kudos to Justin Gage!).

Here is what was interesting about that article:

𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼.

• ❌ No "In today's fast-paced data-driven world enterprises work with data" stuff.
• ✅ Just  "Learn what database sharding is, how sharding works, and some common sharding frameworks and tools."

𝗛𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗸𝗲𝘆𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗱𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝘃 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿.

💚 Speaking peer to peer, not authority-student:

• "You’ve probably seen this table before, about how scaling out helps you take this users table, all stored on a single server:"
• "And turn it into this users table, stored across 2 (or 1,000) servers:"
• "But that’s only one type of sharding (row level, or horizontal). "

𝗨𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗷𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲

Things like:

• "Partitioning has existed – especially in OLAP setups"
• "Sifting through HDFS partitions to find the missing snapshot "

𝗔𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸

🔥 Look at the section "How database sharding works under the hood" with subsections:

• Sharding schemes and algorithms
• Deciding on what servers to use
• Routing your sharded queries to the right databases
• Planning and executing your migration to a sharded solution

🎁 𝗕𝗼𝗻𝘂𝘀: 𝗽𝗹𝘂𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆

Section "Sharding frameworks and tools" shares open-source tools (every dev, but HN devs in particular like OS projects).

And there as an info box, you have the info that Planetscale comes with one of those OS projects deployed.

Just a beautifully executed piece of content marketing.

See more dev tool content examples ->

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐 

Every week I have a few slots for:

• Workshops: Whatever you can squeeze in 60 minutes.

  We can talk strategy/tactics, do brainstorms/live roasts, or debug your challenges together.

• Teardowns: I run a ~90min audit of your homepage/messaging/blog/ads/socials. And send you a ~30min video with my thoughts/suggestions and the audit doc.

• Advising: Weekly/biweekly coaching sessions and/or async work like reviews, audits, research, or planning.

See how it works and book a spot ->

2. Join our Slack community

1500+ 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

• 🎧️ How LaunchDarkly found product-market fit: Edith Harbaugh on building a developer movement

• ✍️ A Guide to Positioning with Multiple Products, Segments and Personas 

• 📜 GitHub - zudochkin/awesome-newsletters: A list of amazing Newsletters