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- 🍐 #70: Dev tool founders toolkit, how to do Reddit comments, and the new fly.io website header
🍐 #70: Dev tool founders toolkit, how to do Reddit comments, and the new fly.io website header
Jakub Czakon
June 16, 2024
Hey,
If your dev tool startup raised a seed round in the US, you can buy more than 1000 tons of pears 🍐. Spend your funding dollars wisely. Just saying ;)
This week on the agenda:
Landing value proposition from fly.io header
Great Reddit post and comment from Convex devrel
(dev tool) Enterprise Founder Toolkit from boldstart.vc
+ a few bonus links at the end
First, a word from this week’s sponsor:
Common Room helps you make a sales impact with the awesome community work your devrel team does.
In this video, you can see how to use Common Room to find:
recent unresolved GitHub issues and bugs
coming from first-time issuers who are Economic Buyers
and send alerts to your internal devrel Slack channel
so that they can engage and make that “I love this team already” first impression (and potentially start a sales conversation)
Developer marketing insights
1. Enterprise Founder Toolkit from boldstart.vc
Came across this awesome resource from an early-stage fund boldstart.vc:
Some takeaways:
“… if I knew we were competing against an internal tool, I’d ask the teams we were talking to for a demo. More often than not they were happy to do this.
I asked them what they liked most about it and what they liked least. I’d find out who the maintainers were and talk to them to understand whether this was a project they felt invested in, or if it was starting to feel more like a burden.”
“… we tried a another approach that still had benefits of NPS, but also addressed the drawbacks. The method we adopted is a combination of feedback scoring and gap analysis.
…
We compiled a list of statements and sent them to users, asking them to rank their level of agreement on a scale of 1–5. The linear scale for the responses is 5 because 10 feels far too broad. 5 gives a good range of responses from strong-medium approval/disapproval, to being agnostic (3).”
“Last year, Snyk ran a customer value study to understand their customers’ perception of value. Snyk’s user is different to its buyer, and while its users can directly see for themselves the value of using the tool, the buyer (in this case the CISO and CTO), needs more convincing.
Snyk identified the top CISO and CTO considerations when buying security tooling as risk reduction, coverage, speed, ease of use, developer efficiency, and reliability.”
A ton of gold lying around in that resource. Check it out ->
2. Great Reddit post and comment from Convex devrel
When you promote your feature/product launch on Reddit, it can easily end up being "not well received" to put it mildly.
I am talking downvotes, negative comments that get upvoted and break the discussion. Or good old crickets.
But Reddit can also be a fantastic source of audience feedback, peer validation for your product, and some of the most vocal advocates you'll ever find.
I really liked how Tom Redman from Convex directed the discussion in the Reddit thread under their launch post:
Transparent intro: who you are, what you know
What you like about the tech: why you think it is valuable to the community
Community-focused call to action: helpful, feedback-first (not conversion-first), disarming with "if I can't answer I'll ask"
The launch post itself was great too:
"Open sourcing 200k lines of Convex, a "reactive" database built from scratch in Rust" that linked to the GitHub repo.
Doesn't get much more to the point and devy than that.
3. Landing value proposition from fly.io header
I love how simple this delivery is. But this is what makes it powerful:
What it does (benefit): "Launch Apps Near Users" just tells you right away what is in it for you
How it does it (features): some specifics in the header that make you understand the how
Visual: doubles down on that "near users" by showing which locations they support
Joke: that little joke "6 continents -> * Antarctica coming soon" makes it more memorable and adds one more point of emphasis to that "near users" story
Bonus points for showing those regions with their balloon logo.
Just loved how they focused their message to the very core and used all of those elements to land it right away. Great job.
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
1700+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.
"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
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