🍐#100: Getting pear-sonal, numbers, and learnings from 3 years of writing about dev marketing

wham, bam, thank you ma'am

Author

Jakub Czakon
February 23, 2025

Hey,

Hope you brought your fun hat today as we celebrate issue 100 of the developer marketing newslepear 🍐🎂 ! At least I do. Look what I got from my new favorite uncle → Chad Geppetto. So nice of you uncle. And only after 35 tries, 25 of them including “no, not candlelight candle”!

This week on the agenda:

  • Getting pear-sonal

  • Numbers, best of, and content

  • Learnings

Total pearusing time: 10min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

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Developer marketing insights

1. Getting pear-sonal

The first thing is first. THANK YOU! Without your words of support, your comments/replies, your thumbs up (to an occasional “crap” emoji) I would have never made it this far. That I am sure of. Thank you, from the bottom of my pear-shaped heart.

Never thought I’d actually make it to #100. Knew of a rule of 100 and all the benefits of consistency and all that stuff. But I started this as a side gig while full-time CMO-ing when my kid was about 3 months old. And it was a monthly newsletter at first ;)

Was surprised how much you all liked it. Then I felt pressure to deliver. Then I didn’t want to disappoint you.

Some of my best stuff was actually great. Sometimes I hoped I had more time to make it great. But then I remembered that I had other obligations and needed to triage. Always kept the bar of “is this helpful to founders and marketers at dev tool startups?”. I hope that every issue has delivered at least that. One helpful thing.

Fast forward 3 years and I am still doing it as a side gig, still CMO-ing, still pushing my dry af pear puns. And if you let me I’ll continue doing just that for the next 100 issues. I hope you are ready.

But some things did change. Let’s look at some numbers and stuff.

2. Numbers, best of, and content

By all metrics I care about this newsletter is overall a big success to me:

  • 1000+ CMOs, marketing managers, devrels, and founders “wait to open this every week”. Their words, not mine. 500+ of them open this almost every week.

  • So many amazing folks from so many amazing dev tool companies read it and occasionally write to me.

  • It consistently gets 65%+ open rate and 10%+ CTR.

These are no rookie numbers as certain traders in certain canine-referring blockbusters may have put it.

And if you look at the best by open rate and CTR this is just crazy.

Best 3 by Open Rate:

Best 3 by Click Through Rate:

Maybe more importantly it pushed me to stay in the loop and create/collect stuff consistently:

It also helped me connect with 25 advising clients and 8 sponsors. And drove a solid chunk of the 2100 amazing folks who are engaging in our marketingto.dev community.

3. Learnings

What did I learn from all this?

Obviously, it's hard to really know where my head was at 3 years ago but I can tell you where my head is now. To keep it short, just 3 thoughts.

You can’t fake real expertise

When it comes to content I tell people to look at what they created and think. Think of a person from your dev audience, imagine you read it to them out loud. Or you send it to them personally. Do they find it useful? Do they think this is good? Would you feel ashamed sending it? Too often the content doesn’t make that bar.

The reason is, not the narrative, designs, or topic. It’s the expertise. Or lack of it. Most often, creating something actually useful is too expensive. Takes thinking, sharing first-hand experience, talking to your users/audience. You may not have access to that at your company.

But this is exactly where the moat is. Look at 3 articles that make it to the first page of HackerNews. Or blogs respected by devs like fly, Tailscale, Charity WTF. There is always expertise, insights, learning, a real story in there.

Yes, some things can help tell that story: formats, templates, ghostwriters, agencies, AI. But it can only help in delivering that first-hand experience, expertise, or point of view. Ideally all three at the same time. You need that if you want to stand out.

First product/company experience is key to word of mouth

I saw somewhere that up to 80% of new signups in dev tools can come from word of mouth. Don’t know about 80 but I did see 40. And how do you impact word of mouth? By creating the product devs love to use. A bit more than that actually.

You want a product that gives you that “omg I love it” experience in the first session. That journey to the first API call, to setup moment at least if not activation should be smooth. From seeing your company on Twitter, googling the name, landing on your homepage, through the first docs experience, peak at the pricing, getting started. Running that first snippet and getting that first win.

If any of this feels bad the chance of devs telling other devs “omg you got to try this” goes down dramatically. And it is a silent thing. No referral programs, discounts, or awesome brand campaigns will ever beat a product that gives you that pure joy of a first experience.

One thing I’d add to that is that positioning and messaging (on your homepage and otherwise) play a big role in that too. You want people to recall you when your trigger word comes up in casual dev conversations. And you want to communicate that trigger concept early in the journey. People may never try your product but still share your name if they understand exactly when to use you. Devs want to be helpful, help them be helpful.

Most of it is “just” good marketing

One of the things that still makes me angry is seeing folks from devrel, product, or just devs talking about something that “marketing just cannot …” and then go on to explain a classic marketing concept.

I don’t understand why people feel they can just shit on us marketers, imply more or less explicitly that we are idiots, and think this is ok. All that while basically talking about good marketing principles but pretending it is something else entirely.

Things like understanding your users/audience, aligning with their preferred way of communicating (test » show » tell), delivering your message in the places where they are, speaking to their actual problems vs pitching the product, packaging/pricing the product in the way devs want to buy (sorry adopt). 4P of marketing right? Product, Price, Place, Promotion.

I hope 3 years from now things will be different. But idk. In the meantime, let’s just continue doing good marketing folks.

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. "

Sarah Morgan, Head of Product and Customer Engagement, Scout APM

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. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."

Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2000+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

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