🍐 #65: Ultimage guide to dev tool websites, "the only proof that counts is social proof", and funniest ever dev tool explainer

Hey,

How do pears get around? They drive campears 🍐 ;)

This week on the agenda:

• “Only proof that counts is social proof” and other learnings from Adam Frankl

• The Ultimate Guide to Building Dev Tool Websites (co-written with Ben Williams)

• Funniest dev tool explainer ever from Wasp

• + a few bonus links at the end

Let’s go!

Question

I'll be co-hosting a podcast episode this week with David Nunez who was Head of Docs at Stripe for 5 years (until 2022).
What would you ask him?

Developer marketing insights

1. The Ultimate Guide to building Developer Tool Websites

So proud of this! Together with Ben Williams (PLGeek) we wrote “The Ultimate Guide to Building Developer Tool Websites”.

High-level principles coupled with tactical examples. Actionable stuff, and super relevant to anyone who is building/revamping their site. It comes with a solid meme too ;)

𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁𝘀:

• Adopt a developer-first mindset and culture

• Focus your homepage on the developer

• Make docs prominent

• Use social proof from real devs

• Use an install command CTA

• Offer a playground, sandbox, or product tour

• Create a template/code sample library

• Add an integrations section with code snippets

• Value before paywall - let devs test

• Make it playful!

Ben is a fantastic PLG operator and advisor who ran product growth at dev-facing companies like Snyk and Cloudbees. It was awesome to write this together and learn through the process.

Cleaned up many thoughts I had on the subject. I'll be sharing this article with dev tool founders a ton.

Read the article->

2. “Only proof that counts is social proof” and other learnings from Adam Frankl

Vidya Raman is an investor (including dev tools) and hosts “The Enterprise GTM podcast” (many dev GTM episodes in there).

In the recent episode, she interviewed a dev tool marketing legend, Adam Frankl early stage startup advisor and first marketing VP at 3 dev-facing unicorns: JFrog, Neo4j, & Sourcegraph.

“The developer-facing startup with Adam Frankl”

A few takeaways from this episode:

• The only proof is social proof: what you say is an assertion. What other devs say is evidence. Especially when they are using your tool in production. Let devs sell your product, collect those testimonials, enable word of mouth, reward it.

• Market pain/problem/category, not the product: I’d add a caveat to this. I agree with Adam 100% if you are at an early stage and the problem/solution space is not well defined yet. But if your startup has an angle on the existing category, market product, and differentiation. People have already spent millions marketing the category and getting people solution-aware.

• Marketing should start on day -1: You want to be out there talking about the problem/pain that you think is important. You want to validate that people care enough about the problem. If finding devs who care about the problem is difficult, then marketing the solution to that problem will be impossible (and frankly pointless).

• Start as the point solution: Adopting a platform takes time and effort. Adopting a solution to a problem people have today is 100x easier. Start as that point solution. It will be easier to get adoption and sales.

• Grow to a platform organically: Once your point solution is successful you can start building additional products for adjacent use cases or personas. It should build on the success of the first point solution. Later you can move to a platform. That time comes when there are many “good enough” solutions in adjacent categories. Devs/buyers look for tools that work well together.

3. Funniest dev tool explainer ever?

Let's face it, introducing a problem in an explainer video is often boring. Especially if the problem is

How do you introduce a SaaS boilerplate? Good luck pitching faster time to value or something.

Wasp did something out of the box:

• They start by googling "how to buy a Lamborghini"

• Go to a Rebbit thread where people talk about starting a SaaS on boilerplate. But it is paid.

• Go to Google again and type their positioning ;) "Free open-source SaaS starter".

• Go to their product and show it.

Got me hooked and kept me watching for sure.

Also, funny is memorable so you will get a better recall too.

See more dev tool video examples ->

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.

See how it works ->

2. Bonus links to check out

• 👓️ Stop wasting time on ‘community’ | LinkedIn 

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

• 👓️ I almost got banned from Hacker News | Jeff Geerling 

3. Join our Slack community

1600+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Check out marketingto.dev ->