🍐 #71: My interview on "The Modern DevGTM Brew", tip on content distribution, and a pattern breaking pre-roll ad

Hey,

Ever seen a pear fruitlet? Yes, I just learned the term and yes, it is a baby fruit ;). Saw it last week in my in-laws’ garden. Here you go 🍐 👇️ 

This week on the agenda:

• My interview for The Modern DevGTM Brew on dev tool website principles

• Why you should re-use the content that worked before

• Great pattern-breaking pre-roll ad from Sentry

• + a few bonus links at the end

Before we start, a word from this week’s sponsor.

Wizard on Demand is a technical content marketing agency.

What they do is:

• develop specific ideas for content that is loved by the readers and delivers results that you care about (signup, demo, trial, qualified sales pipeline)

• write technical blogs, landing pages, case studies, e-books following an interview-based approach with your subject matter experts

• design illustrations and diagrams to make the content look great and share well

• distribute the content for you via SEO, paid search, and paid social (LinkedIn, Twitter/X) including ad copy and creatives

Unlike many other agencies, they optimize for your KPIs, get to know your product in detail to do that and combine paid and organic strategies to get you results.

They work exclusively with technical companies such as CircleCI, deepset, Appsmith, and AWS.

Watch a video about how they work, or Book a meeting with Oleksii Klochai (he is also in our community).

Developer marketing insights

1. My interview for The Modern DevGTM Brew

Had a ton of fun chatting with Achintya from Reo.Dev for “The Modern DevGTM Brew podcast”.

We talked about guiding principles for creating good dev tool websites for companies going bottom-up developer-focused. What should go there, who you should focus on, what to prioritize.

Watch the full episode on YouTube ->

Btw the lineup for the podcast is fantastic. I can’t wait to listen to other episodes. Subscribed already.

2. Re-use the content that worked before

So two weeks ago I posted this on LinkedIn and got almost 200 likes, 20+ comments etc. That is a great post for me. But it is not what is important.

It is also one of the fantastic examples of dev tool billboards but that is not why I wanted to share it either.

What is interesting is that it was the 3rd time I posted it and it got the most engagement ever.

I originally posted it about a year ago and got 50 likes, then reused it 6 months later with similar results. And this time it got around 4x that.

So the learning is this. If a piece of content:

• worked for you before

• your audience got value from it

• you know it is still relevant today

• reuse it, tweak it to make it up to date but use it again

It is better to re-share something valuable than post a half-baked new idea that you don’t even think is that great. And chances are your audience just hasn’t seen the previous iterations anyway.

3. Pattern-breaking pre-roll ad from Sentry

Pre-roll ads are obviously invasive and annoying, especially to devs. But they are also prime real estate in the ad ecosystem.

You can choose not to do them at all (fair option). Or try and make them more fun and less annoying ;)

I like how Sentry handled it in this 16-second video:

• They start with a funny, disarming hook. A pic of a cat pic ;). It catches my attention and stops me from clicking "skip ad" as I want to understand what it is about.

• They show how those pics didn't come off well and introduce the company saying "Sentry can't fix that". That keeps me interested enough to see what it does.

• They show a straightforward, short product video with the actual application screenshots and zoom-ins to show pieces of the product for the rest of the video.

Basically they managed to "buy" 11 seconds of attention with 5 seconds of a pattern-breaking hook.  In the world of pre-roll YouTube dev-focused ads, I'd say this is a win.

Also, I don't know the results of the "Sentry can't fix that " campaign, but I like how this builds curiosity. Even with that slogan alone.

See more dev tool YouTube campaign 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

• 👓️ Marketing lessons from OpenAI, Retool and Stripe 

• 📺️ My outbound-to-inboud method for open-source cold outreach - YouTube - Nevo David 

• 🧵 David Park on X: "How we added $100,000 MRR with influencer marketing step-by-step:”

3. Join our Slack community

1700+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Check out marketingto.dev ->