🍐#83: How to plug your dev tool in the comments, Lee Robinson on dev marketing, and a tool for monitoring tool stack mentions

Hey,

If I had a cat, do you know what breed it would be? Pearsian🍐 ;).

This week on the agenda:

• The Ultimate Guide to Developer Marketing (interview with Lee Robinson)

• Tool for monitoring tool stacks of companies based on public mentions

• How to plug your product in the comments the right way

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

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Developer marketing insights

1. The Ultimate Guide to Developer Marketing | Lee Robinson (Vercel)

Lee Robinson, is a legend in developer experience/devrel/dev marketing space. Currently VP product at Vercel.

In this interview, he shared his thoughts on developer marketing and building great dev tools.

My takeaways:

• The free tier is key: try before you buy/adopt is one of the few expectations shared by pretty much any developer group

• Don’t forget that developer experience starts (and ends) with your product. In devtools often devex of the product is the product. API design is your product.

• Write how real humans (devs) talk. Test with “Would you/other devs actually say something?”.

• All docs should have a quick start. Cut the talk, show me how I get to value now.

• Developer marketing is about showing what is possible, what can I build with the tool. Then teach them how to do it. Show demos, then give resources.

• Hype vs reality: balance is key. There is a fine line between hyping up your product and what is possible now. The cost of losing trust is real but you want to stay excited about it.

• Own your mistakes. When you make a mistake, be clear and precise as to what happened. Share those retro notes it builds transparency and trust.

• Playbook for building a dev products: talk to them, listen to feedback, ask follow-up questions, fix what doesn’t work, and tell those devs that it is fixed. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Here is an article on developer marketing from Lee ->

2. Tool for finding/monitoring tool stacks of companies

In the last issue, I shared an idea for finding company tool stacks by looking at the

That got Zach Goldie (who helps dev tools with homepage messaging by the way) to share a tool he recently discovered that monitors public mentions of tools by companies and gives you an API and ready-to-use datasets with that info. Thank you so much, Zach!!!

For example, that would be the list of companies using PostreSQL:

Check out TheirStack ->

3. How to plug your product in the comments the right way

Someone shared an old but awesome article with me recently: “I answered 99 Stack Overflow questions and now 2 million developers know about my product“

And while chatGPT/Perplexity/co-pilots may be making the Stack Overflow less effective the rules of engaging in communities very much apply to your Slack/Discord/Reddit.

Also, I often talk about social listening, setting up trackers like Syften, F5Bot, or Gummysearch, and jumping into discussions around your problem space.

But I haven’t really shared good examples of how people actually join in the conversation doing that. This is one of them.

So what you do is basically:

• Say how the problem can be solved generally

• Say how you can solve it with “a product like mine”

• Show an example of doing exactly that with code

Do that enough times, all in relevant discussions, and see how folks refer to your answers and drive more product signups.

More examples of marketing in communities ->

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

• 📰 How to create “differentiated” SEO content: The Hackmamba's approach 

• 📰 Tailored strategies for effective marketing to software developers | Open Strategy Partners 

• 🎧️ The Developer Tools Playbook with Adam Frankl| Scaling DevTools

3. Join our Slack community

1900+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Check out marketingto.dev ->