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🍐#82: How to find the tool stack of any company, dev tool user research, and a dev marketing playlist
Jakub Czakon
September 22, 2024
Hey,
Your favorite pear 🍐 is back from vacation. Well rested and ready to go.
This week on the agenda:
How do you find the tool stack of virtually any company?
New dev tools user research newsletter (+ learnings)
My developer marketing podcast playlist
+ a few bonus links at the end
Total pearusing time: 6min
Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:
How to use social proof to build credibility
If you've read a few last issues you know that TLDR has been a long-time sponsor. They give you a great way to connect with software devs, AI/ML engineers, DevOps, InfoSec, etc...but that's not the topic for today.
Today I wanted to share a few learnings from how they're using social proof to effectively convince dev marketers to advertise with them.
Here's their new social proof page.
Strong initial impression - From the headline you immediately know who would benefit from advertising with TLDR (tech marketers) and how (reach their audience)
They start with a video testimonial from a trusted voice in the dev marketing community Flo Merian (one of the admins of our dev marketing slack)
Case studies provide potential outcomes - Their case studies feature other dev marketers + companies in the dev space. All of their case studies showcase a meaningful result or KPI.
Social proof is all relevant and relatable - Not all social proof needs to be a case study. TLDR uses a mix of case studies, short testimonials and logos to be relatable and relevant to marketers.
Developer marketing insights
1. New dev tools user research newsletter (+ learnings)
Shili Li is a user research advisor helping dev tools. Ex Apollo GraphQL, ex AWS, ex Auth0 to name a few. Knows her stuff.
She launched a newsletter recently, “Dev Tools Research” where she shares gold after gold. Read everything she published so far.
My takeaways from the first 4 issues.
Three core questions devs want to answer when evaluating: What does the product do, How much does it cost, How hard is it to integrate
Ask devs to complete sentences like: “The three primary benefits of this product are…”, “This product is best for…” and similar
To see how easy people expect things to be ask the questions “What does an ideal hello world look like” and “What do you expect to accomplish in 1 hour? “
You want to create a dev journey map with key moments (start searching, signup, activation etc) and triggers, pain points, and barriers for each
Find 5-10 people who are activated and 5-10 who aren’t. Comparing them reveals insights
Ask “how easy was it to choose a pricing plan on a scale of 1-10”. Follow-up with why.
There is a great list of 9 questions to ask during each interview. Use them during each interview but you may want to double-click on answers or skip when don’t apply/don’t add much to what you already know.
This is a fantastic case study showing how to do this sort of research properly
Dev exploring the website looked at the live code snippets, docs, pricing, and the vs alternative comparison page. By the way, those comparison pages are something I feel the founders underestimated. I wrote about it here.
Seeing real devs navigate your site and what they are actually excited about makes finding improvement ideas clear. You just feel the reactions of devs to certain things like live apps or code.
2. My developer marketing podcast playlist
Recently I was talking to someone who followed me and they asked for podcast recommendations.
And realized that I haven’t mentioned my developer marketing playlist here or on LinkedIn in a long long time.
So here it is:
Podcast episodes about dev marketing, GTM, sales, devrel
Each episode I actually listened to and learned something from
147 episodes and counting (I add something every week)
Thought you might like it.
3. How do you find the tool stack of virtually any company?
Gonto from Hypergrowth Partners wrote a great article on “Mastering Developer-Led Outbound”.
There are a few great insights in there but the one that I found brilliant was how you can find out what the tool stack pretty much any company has internally.
You can do that by going over their Terms and Conditions. Companies need to provide that info. Especially big enterprises that care about compliance.
You can do that at scale with scraping and automation.
Then you reach out to companies that are a good fit for tool replacement/upgrade/addition.
Never thought of it before but will use it now.
Need more developer marketing insights?
1. Work with me 🍐
"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. "
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
3. Join our Slack community
"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
1900+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.
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