🍐#62: Top podcast for dev tool founders, bomb header copy, and how to do template galleries

Hey,

What is a pear doing in a library? It’s pearusing 🍐 ;)

This week on the agenda:

• My favorite podcast for dev tool founders

• Well-done templates gallery from Vercel

• Bomb header copy from Neon

• + a few bonus links at the end

Before we start, this week’s sponsor is:

Common Room connects signals from product/docs/repos/slacks/socials to accounts. Showing you who may be ready to “talk to sales”.

For example, here is a playbook for finding active accounts in your GitHub repo. Basically:

• connect your repo ->

• set up contributor filters ->

• set up alerts and automations ->

• start reaching out (hopefully to the buyer persona not the dev).

They have a free plan so you can just see if it works for you.

Developer marketing insights

1. My favorite podcast for dev tool founders

Jack Bridger has created and maintained my favorite show for dev tool founders so far: the Scaling DevTools podcast.

It is filled with tactical, real-life stories from founders, first marketers, and dev tool GTM advisors.

I do listen to pretty much every episode. And I keep sending links to tips on “How X did Y” from the pod to founders/marketers who ask me for advice.

Here are three great episodes just to give you a taste:

2. Bomb header copy from Neon

Folks from Neon did a great job with their homepage header copy.

They could have gone with "We make your data fly" or "10x your database developer efficiency" or other stuff like that.

Instead, they spoke in a clear dev-to-dev language:

• What it is: "fully managed serverless Postgress"

• Benefit in technical terms: "Autoscaling, branching, bottomless storage"

• How they do it: "Separate storage and compute"

• Obstacle handling for current Postgres users: "generous free tier"

Simple, clear, and to the point. No fluffs given. Love that.

"But we are selling to the boss of a boss of that developer user persona"

Then let that dev champion understand what you are doing and bring it to their boss.

"But we are going pure top-down"

Then does that boss of a boss of a boss actually evaluate your infra tool themselves or send their architect?

Maybe 90% of your site traffic is the buyer-persona CTO. But my bet is, it isn't even 1%.

See more dev tool header examples ->

3. Vercel templates gallery

Just a well-done templates gallery from Vercel (they are one of my favorite inspirations if you couldn’t tell already 😉 )

For developer-focused products, having an examples/templates/code samples gallery can be a powerful growth lever.

It helps people:

• understand what you do

• see if anyone did what they want

• get started with something real-life(ish)

• get a feel for a product without committing to it yet

Just a great touchpoint in the developer journey.

And Vercel does this one really well IMHO.

They start with an easy-to-find CTA in the navbar resources section. Bonus points for adding one-liner descriptions that make it clear what is on the other side of the click.

On the templates library page, they give you solid use case navigation with tags. And each template tile has a result thumbnail and a one-liner description. The beauty of this is in the simplicity and what they didn't put in here.

Each template page shows the result, gives you a tutorial on how to use this, and clear CTAs to either see this live or deploy yourself. Bonus points for the "Deploy" action copy (instead of "Sign up").

See more dev tool blog examples ->

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

Sarah Morgan, Head of Product and Customer Engagement, Scout APM

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

• 🎥 This is how Winglang got 400 GitHub stars in 3 days - YouTube - Nevo David

• ✍️ I asked 100 devs why they aren’t shipping faster. Here’s what I learned - Greptile

• 🎧️ How Cockroach Labs Found Product-Market Fit: Peter Mattis on Leveraging Open Source Software