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  • 🍐#61: Product Hunt launch playbook, great community section, and a powerful newsletter ad

🍐#61: Product Hunt launch playbook, great community section, and a powerful newsletter ad

Author

Jakub Czakon
April 14, 2024

Hey,

What Brazilian pear-shaped 🍐 dish did I make this week? Coxinha. Yes, I did!

This week on the agenda:

  • Product Hunt launch playbook

  • Great community section from Modal

  • Trieve newsletter sponsorship ad in casidoo newsletter

  • + a few bonus links at the end

Before we start, this week’s sponsor is:

Hyper-relevant, cookie-less developer ads

Reach developers on developer docs/sites like Flask, Jupyter, Linux Mint, or daily.dev.

Serve hyper-relevant ads based on the content of a particular docs page or article. No cookies involved.

Dev tool companies like Snyk, Datadog, or Mongo use it.

Test it out for as little as $1k to see if it works for your dev tool.

Developer marketing insights

1. Product Hunt launch playbook

Matteo Titarelli is a growth advisor specializing in early-stage companies. And recently he shared a playbook he uses for PH launches.

The entire thing is available (for free) as a Reforge Artifact and following it helped Matteo get 3 different tools to the #1 of the day/week on PH.

It is all nicely organized and very tactical. Filled with templates and examples like this:

Super valuable stuff. Highly recommended.

2. Trieve newsletter sponsorship ad

Awesome sponsorship ad from Trieve in the Cassidy Williams newsletter.

Not sure who wrote it but it must have been a dev ;) It is just so refreshingly to the point.

💚 What I like:

  • "What is it": A product description gives you no fluff "what it is". Feels like something from "Hacker News launch" almost.

  • "What it compares to" | "Why should I care": They compare vs a well-known dev tool in the space. And this is great, helps the dev anchor with something they know. Helps them understand why this could be valuable. They even give you a life app where you can see for yourself.

  • "How can I test it for myself": They offer free credits to play with in a cloud version.

This ad does it so gracefully and quickly it is just hard not to love.

{Insight}

3. Community section from Modal

The main message you want to land on your homepage community section is:

"We have a big community of devs who love using the product"

🚧 That helps you tackle obstacles your dev reader has:

  • "is this tool any good"  

  • "do real companies use it in production"

  • "are there people who can help me when I hit roadblocks"

  • "where would I find others using the tool when I have questions"

💚 Modal solves it beautifully by going simple but smart:

  • Join our community header and a call to action to join Slack makes it obvious where users are

  • Wall of love style testimonials give a feel that there are so many users and they love it enough to share that with others

  • They all look like Tweets even though (I presume) some of them aren't. That is a nice trick to boost social proof. People give more value to social post testimonials.

  • They show a face, name, role, and company which builds trust and makes it obvious those are other devs (like me)

It lands the message that this section should land for sure. I really like it.

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:

3. Bonus links to check out

Reply

or to participate.