🍐 #80: My process for devy t-shirts, gallery of YC websites and is this "bad advertising"?

Hey,

This is the 80th issue. Saw this and felt old. Googled “the oldest pear tree” and it is a 612-year-old Romanian Sticea's pear tree🍐. Saw that and felt young again.

This week on the agenda:

• Great dev-focused ad or “bad advertising”?

• My process for t-shirt copy creation

• Gallery of YC dev tool websites

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

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. Gallery of YC dev tool websites

Sefa created this fantastic resource. As it says on the tin:

• 30 Y Combinator dev tool websites

• organized in 19 categories

• in one Figma file

Take a look!

See the Figma gallery ->

2. My process for t-shirt copy creation

I’ve been working on creating copy for t-shirts we give away at AI/ML conferences.

Judging from the fact that people wanted to buy them off of one of our sales reps when we ran out of t-shirts suggests that there was interest.

My personal favorites:

This is my process for coming up with this stuff:

• Go to the relevant subreddit, find top discussions

• Go over comments and extract the most common/upvoted concepts, acronyms, jokes, and one-liners

• Go to ChatGPT and ask it to propose puns including those concepts. Give it as much devy context, and good examples as possible.

• Find the ones that are close to something good. Many will be very bad, significantly worse than my pear puns ;)

• Refine them by tweaking things manually, asking ChatGPT to try this and that. 20 more versions etc.

• Talk to your team. Some of the best ideas came from combining this process with human-human interactions (thanks Patrycja!)

• Pick the ones that are closest to your product/benefit/value if possible. This is hard but sometimes doable.

Enjoy! And if you come up with something good, please share. I’d love to add things to my library ;)

See more dev tool swag examples ->

3. Great dev-focused ad or “bad advertising”?

Saw this Tweet the other day:

This is a great ad, I shared my thoughts on it before. But I know many folks don’t feel this way.

Going over the comments devs love it (obviously). But what caught my eye was this:

Many people think “this is bad advertising”. It excludes. This is exactly why getting these types of ads approved is hard in many orgs. The founder/C-levels/board says:

• “I don’t understand it”

• “Where is our full logo”

• “Ok but where is the value”

• “We don’t explain the benefits”

• “We are excluding non-tech people”

But that is the point. The more you focus on one group, the more you “exclude” another. And when you are marketing to devs focus on devs.

That applies to ads, but also your messaging, website, content, everything.

Focus on your target audience, don’t explain so that “everyone understands”. Explain so that the devs you care about “get it”.

See more dev tool billboard examples ->

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

• 📰 The Ultimate Guide to Advertising on Reddit 

• 📺️ Commercial Open Source Business Strategies | Heavybit 

• 🎧️ Vivian Dufour - co-founder of Meterian - enterprise sales for startups | Scaling DevTools

3. Join our Slack community

1800+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Check out marketingto.dev ->