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- 🍐 #64: How not to do webinar signup forms, fantastic all-text Reddit ad, and MVP of a dev tool website
🍐 #64: How not to do webinar signup forms, fantastic all-text Reddit ad, and MVP of a dev tool website
Jakub Czakon
May 05, 2024
Hey,
I spent last week in a cabin in the woods. Writing. It was fun. On the last day, I spotted a pear 🍐 ;)
This week on the agenda:
How not to do developer webinar signup forms
Fantastic all-text Reddit ad from Latitude
What is an MVP of a dev tool website?
+ a few bonus links at the end
Before we start, this week’s sponsor is:
You know Common Room.
They surface and score activity in your product/docs/repos/slacks/socials and enable your devrel and sales teams to take the right actions based on account behavior.
Seeing that Orbit got acquired by Postman, and crowd.dev by the Linux foundation they did two things.
First, they sent kudos for building fantastic community products to all the teams involved. Congrats people!
Second, they gave users of crowd.dev and Orbit 3 months free on all paid plans (if you sign up by the end of May).
Join the likes of ClickHouse, Confluent, Snowflake, Temporal, and others.
Developer marketing insights
1. How not to do developer webinar signup forms
Saw this post by Tim Benninks from Hygraph and figured I just have to share.
Yes, getting a business email is great for data enrichment, for qualification, for automated sequences. But giving a business email is not that great for the dev who just wants to see your webinar.
They know the next chapter of this story. The one when they get emails and LinkedIn requests. For weeks. Then they try to unsubscribe and there are hoops to jump over. So they finally give up. Or mark you as spam.
And they just wanted to learn something. After work, perhaps, for their pet project. Maybe they wanted to check how your product solves that problem.
Maybe they would test it on Sunday, and bring it to work on Monday. Or maybe they would just learn something about your problem space and your product. For free and anonymously. Thankfully this will not happen. But hey at least your CRM is happy.
2. Fantastic all-text Reddit ad from Latitude
Dev ads are hard. Promotion on Reddit is harder. Running a dev ad on Reddit that gets 50 comments and 90 likes is expert-level hard.
But folks from Latitude managed.
They used one of my favorite Reddit ad formats: all text.
Here is what I liked:
They start with who you are and what your product is. I love that they put it right in the title. Having open-source in the title helps too, it just makes you more trustworthy by default.
They introduce themselves as a technical founder. Makes it more likely to get comments as you are technical, you are a founder, you are a human (not a brand) so you will answer questions.
They apologize for the ad. Acknowledging that this is an ad makes people less combative.
They explain technically what it is. Use technical terms. It's very dev to dev.
They give devs an easy way to try it. And they chose Github, not their website. That is great. It makes it even more developer-centric. More trustworthy.
They ask for feedback and contributions. Not signups. And the more feedback they get (as comments) the more visible and trustworthy the ad will get.
Great execution. Chapeau bas Latitude.
3. FAQ: What is an MVP of a dev tool website?
The way I see it, the minimal viable dev tool website, has a homepage, docs, and pricing. You also need a solid navbar showing login, signup, contact us, and maybe a GitHub icon if you are open source.
Docs will typically be somewhere else and owned/done by someone else, typically the product or technical writing team. But they need to be visible on the website. If they are on you, spend time on them. They will be one of the most important marketing assets for you.
At the beginning having an About Us or Company page may also be important. It builds trust when you haven’t built your brand yet.
That would be it. It supports the core needs of the developer and lets them self-serve. Everything else is extra. But these are non-negotiable. The most important website traffic will go through these pages. Nail them cold. As if you don’t, whatever developer traffic you manage to drive will not convert.
Over time, depending on your product and go-to-market motion you add case studies, comparison pages, blog articles, integrations, code examples or templates, video tutorials, and live sandboxes.
You add whitepapers and an enterprise page. You create feature pages, use case pages, and persona pages. You create resource libraries and courses that organize all this other content. You add community and events pages or developer portals.
But all of that is step two. The core needs to work. Spend your time and prioritize accordingly.
Need more developer marketing insights?
1. Work with me 🍐
Every week I have a few slots for Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage/messaging/ads etc), and longer-term Advising.
"Thanks so much for your time and all the thoughtful feedback coming from the workshop.
I feel like we are in a much better place to start our website rebuild. "
2. Bonus links to check out
3. Join our Slack community
1600+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.
"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Join the conversation