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🍐#87: How do you get your first 100 users, growth stack at Mintlify, and learnings from 100 episodes of Scaling DevTools
Have a great week ahead!
Jakub Czakon
October 27, 2024
Hey,
I found a dream place for me to live. Pearland🍐Texas USA. I am seriously considering going aspirational and changing my LinkedIn location to that asap. Thoughts?
This week on the agenda:
Learnings from 100 episodes of Scaling DevTools
How do you get your first 100 users?
Growth stack at Mintlify
+ a few bonus links at the end
Total pearusing time: 5min
Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:
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Developer marketing insights
1. Scaling DevTools Podcast turns 100 … episodes
It is no secret that I love this podcast. It's one of my favorite shows for sure.
And a few weeks ago Jack looked back at the first 100 episodes and wrote down his learnings. There are so many great insights in there that I will not even summarize them. Go in and read through it.
But what I will do is give you a few episodes that I shared the most so far:
Oh, not in the top 3 but I did do an episode: “The four pillars of developer marketing”. Solid stuff too
2. Growth stack at Mintlify
You rarely see dev marketers share what tools they use to grow. But Flo, who many of you know from our Slack community, recently did just that:
I thought using GitHub as CMS was interesting. Flo explains:
A few additional tools mentioned in the thread I didn’t know about:
Usermaven: analytics for marketers and product people + AI insights. I like privacy-centric Plausibile but Usermaven looked great.
Replug.io for link management (shortening, UTMs, QR codes). Dub.sh is another great option.
Screen.studio for screen recordings (I like Tella.tv btw).
3. “How do you get your first 100 users?” Hacker News Thread
Saw this Hacker News thread recently:
And extracted a few interesting comments/answers for you:
“Yes. Surprise surprise, most businesses generate most of their initial sales via cold calls/emails/DMs/other automated marketing. That’s the real world”
“Talks at meetups for the first 100.
Hacker News for the next 10,000.”
“Reddit is incredibly powerful if you are building something niche and are already a part of the community.
Also, the results are compounding because some of my posts get good SEO traffic so I still get a handful of users from Reddit every day.”
“Show HN: Did quite well.
Post to Reddit (r/sideprojects, r/saas, etc): Did better than expected. 40 sign-ups to our waitlist over 24 hours.”
“Targeted Google ads (for the type of product we were building) pointing to a landing page where we collected email addresses.”
“SEO.
Whether you can rank for a specific thing people are searching and looking for is also a good litmus test of
1) is there demand for your thing ... are there people searching Google for your solution, and
2) is the market not so extremely saturated with competitors that you're able to rank?”
“Not a successful founder but successful at creating traffic. Technical blog posts worked super well for me, in terms of SEO and spotlight (> 100K visitors in just 2 months).
HN frontpage does help a lot, finding the right subreddit too, being featured in technical newsletters was really key though.”
“Linkedin for a B2P product.
I posted a few questions asking if anyone had similar issues, and got directly in touch with about 20 people who responded to involve them in customer research, then kept in touch with them as I was developing the product for feedback.
Those 20 by word of mouth led to a bunch more people trying it out. It's difficult to put a specific number on whether that was 100 or a bit more or fewer, but a few cycles of word of mouth from happy users got me over the 100 users easily.”
“We built up a partner network worldwide, so we had to find relevant partners who would help serve our potential customers in the relevant way that already had those customers.
They are easyish to find and approach because they are trying to achieve a similar goal, although sometimes more generically if they are integrators (selling software, hardware and services).
Sometimes they sell a competitive product so our USP had to be tight - such as not requiring a year of services to start up but maybe an hour or two.
Others were complimentary tech partners and very kindly helped spread the word, and got a foot in the door for direct engagement.”
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."
2000+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.
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