🍐#81: Great idea for Reddit ads, developer chic, and what should you ask in dev interviews

Hey,

Your favorite pear🍐is taking a longer vacation. This is week one of four and I love it so far. Wish me luck ;)

This week on the agenda:

• When you talk to devs, what should you ask?

• “Developer chic” and great developer brands

• Promoted full-article post on Reddit by WarpStream

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

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Developer marketing insights

1. When you talk to devs, what should you ask?

Many folks, me included are huge proponents of talking to your users. Talking to devs. But say you do get them on a call. What exactly do you ask?

I really liked the following post:

Jon Itkin, talks about positioning/messaging for early-stage startups.

And this post he shared good questions for figuring out your product positioning:

• What kicked off the buying cycle?

• What led you to look for a new solution?

• What option came to mind?

• What were you looking for?

• What set our product apart?

• What changed after using it?

Ask these, follow up with “why is that”, “tell me more” and you are golden.

Read post and comments on Linkedin ->

2. Promoted full-article post on Reddit by WarpStream

What if you not only posted entire articles on Reddit but also promoted them?

This is what WarpStream did and I like it.

A few weeks back I shared an example of a company posting not a link with a snippet but an entire article on Reddit.

WarpStream is taking it to the next level by promoting it as an in-feed Reddit ad.

I love this trend 100%:

• Platform first: don't force you to click out, read the content here

• Ads as distribution: treating paid options as a distribution channel

By doing that you assume that if your piece of content gets read by the right people it will lead to business outcomes.

People don't need to go to your site to be retargeted by ads and attacked by pop-up banners.

That is a very fair assumption, especially with devs.

But even generally in B2B SaaS and social channels like here on LinkedIn, that concept of zero-click content, coined by Amanda Natividad, is gaining traction. I'm glad it does.

See more dev tool Reddit marketing examples ->

3. “Developer chic” and great developer brands

As I am on vacation I started going over my saved post archives on LinkedIn.

Found this one from Maya Spivak about great dev brands and “dev chic”:

There are some great brands listed in there so if you are looking for inspiration when it comes to branding do take a look.

Three brands mentioned there that I rarely talk about but are fantastic:

• Motherduck

• Oxide computer

• Charm.sh

Check them out!

See more dev tool marketing inspiration and 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.

See how to work with me ->

2. Bonus links to check out

• 📰 Drive adoption of your B2B product with tutorials 

• 📺️ How DevRel teams can turn developer motions into revenue. - YouTube - ReoDotDev 

• 🎧️ The role of sales in early stage startups | Enterprise GTM podcast

3. Join our Slack community

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

Check out marketingto.dev ->