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- 🍐 #60: Dev GTM newsletter, amazing homepage header, and a powerful navbar CTA to playground
🍐 #60: Dev GTM newsletter, amazing homepage header, and a powerful navbar CTA to playground
Jakub Czakon
April 07, 2024
Hey,
How did a pear disappear and then appear again? It’s a pearadox (triple)🍐 ;)
This week on the agenda:
New “Developer GTM” newsletter
Amazing homepage header from Clickhouse
Powerful playground CTA in the navbar from Prisma
+ a few bonus links at the end
Let’s go!
🪧 Promo
One of my favorite dev marketing teams at Sentry is looking for a (mid-level) Technical Content Manager Contractor ($55-$75 / hour)
You’ll manage SEO blog content delivery (calendar, edits, proofreading, writers) and distribution of it through socials.
In their words:
“We’re so much more than error monitoring software. We’re also performance monitoring software.”
If you chuckled you’d have fun working with them ;)
Developer marketing insights
1. New “Developer GTM” newsletter
There is a new dev-focused newsletter in town (yass!).
Paige Paquette and Ceci Stallsmith are putting together a series of interviews with some dev-focused GTM heavy-hitters and packaging it as a ”Developer GTM” newsletter.
Here are the first 3 issues + one quote from each to give you a taste.
How do you know when you’re ready to hire DevRel?
“When the people already doing the components of DevRel that would be owned by a DevRel person can no longer sustain it!
…
By the time you hire your first DevRel, someone was already doing the work, just ad-hoc and reactively, and now you want to put some more structure and strategy around it so get ahead of the ball.”
“A common trap startups fall into is they decide they want to do more research, and then just go chronologically – “let’s do research for the next thing we’re shipping!”
Instead, you should look at your next 6 months or 1 year. Ask yourself, “if I could increase my confidence on 2-3 things on this roadmap, what would those things be?” ”
“The biggest mistake is growing too fast without having solid cohorts of community elders,
…
If you grow too fast, you don't have the time to build the relationships you need with the people who are going to be your top contributors and who are going to help you grow and scale the community. “
Definitely worth subscribing to.
2. Amazing homepage header from Clickhouse
This has to be one of the better dev-focused headers I've seen in a while.
Headers should deliver your core product message and get people interested. That is true at any stage but early stage especially.
You want everyone, even those folks who just take a look and leave to remember. You want them to recall it in their next conversation around this topic.
There may be supporting messages for sure but there is always that one core thing. Make sure it lands.
In the case of Clickhouse, that core message is that they are a database that is fast at a huge scale.
Their supporting messages are:
they are best at analytics and real-time apps use cases (where speed/scale matters)
they are a very popular open-source project
And they deliver that beautifully with:
Headline
Clear as day headline speaking to value delivered at a level that builds rapport with their audience.
Not "Give users seamless web experience at scale" but "Query billions of rows in milliseconds". I like that little touch with "rows" which makes who they speak to obvious
Subhead
Subhead supporting it with "fastest and most resource-efficient DB"
Talking about the use cases "real time apps and analytics" and it being open-source
Calls to action
These CTAs make the audience feel at home.
There are docs in there + clear "we are open-source" CTA
Visual
That supporting visual is just amazing.
It shows the value in the most believable way you could deliver it here imho. Query and an Output that shows the size of the database and speed of the query
Social proof
Social proof in the navbar, almost 34k stars and a GitHub icon.
It is a way to get people to that repository, check it out and leave a star.
There is more social proof below the fold with big logos and stuff but the GitHub icon and stars make it immediately clear that this is a project that people care about.
It is remarkable how brilliantly simple it is all presented. Just fantastic work IMHO.
3. Powerful playground CTA in the navbar from Prisma
Simple yet powerful CTA in the navbar resources section.
The resources section in the navbar is mostly navigational. Well, the entire navbar is ;)
But you always have that one action that is more impactful than others.
And I think that a Plauground is a great option. You get people to see how your product works. You let people play with it and see for themselves.
Not many next actions can be as impactful as getting people to experience the product.
Especially if you are a heavier infra tool that people cannot really test out in that first session. I mean, you won't really create a realistic example of your core database in 15 minutes to see how that new tool that you just saw works.
Making this CTA "big and shiny" and showing a glimpse of what will happen after clicking is great too.
Two changes I'd test out:
Making the copy more descriptive performs better. Like "Launch playground", "Play with Sandbox", or something around "Run an example project/app/environment".
Showing something more exciting about the product (or playground/tour) on that visual
But the core idea behind making the playground your core navbar resource section CTA is just great.
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.
2. Join our Slack community
1500+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking about things like this:
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