🍐#98 Ideas for marketing differently, "Whatsup message" ad, and {Your product} alternative campaign

Hey,

This week was tough. My daughter got sick but I tried to work a bit while caring for her. Not the best idea.

The culmination was me taking a call on “listen-only”, my daughter vomiting, me trying to do a hand-formed bowl, and with the pearfect 🍐 timing, my CEO asking me for my input. Had my hands full so to speak.

This week on the agenda:

• Ideas for marketing differently from Greptile

• “Whatsup message” ad creative from Axual

• {Your product} alternative campaign idea

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 6min

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Developer marketing insights

1. Ideas for doing marketing differently with Greptile

This was a fantastic episode of Jack Bridger’s Scaling Dev Tools podcast. Worth watching not just listening actually.

They discuss crazy ideas like a Developer-focused energy drink ;)

And a campaign where they sent out high-end cookies to ICPs in San Francisco. They used Paradigm AI to figure out who actually is mostly in the office. It is crazy this world we live in. Love it.

My takeaways:

Go for Memorable, Not Massive

• High-retention stunts beat cheap mass impressions.

• Real example: Daksh’s cookie boxes with Steve Ballmer’s “DEVELOPERS!” recording. A few people saw them, but nobody forgot them.

Turn Wild Ideas into Action but Start Scrappy

• Don’t reject “crazy” marketing ideas too soon. Start small/scrappy. Grow them when you see traction.

• Start scrappy. Validate every step before scaling.

• Energy drinks evolved from stickers on cans to custom flavors to professional design.

Apply the “Low Impressions, High Retention” Formula

• Novelty drives word of mouth: weird is memorable.

• Costs can be higher per recipient, but sticky brand recall can yield a stronger overall ROI.

Personal Touch at Scale (Use AI Tools Like Paradigm)

• Don’t blast every lead on LinkedIn—be precise.

• Greptile used Paradigm AI to identify which San Francisco-based companies (50–500 employees) actually work in-person. They extracted addresses and in-office details automatically.

• Focus on the right 1,000 instead of the wrong 100,000.

Show People You Care (Especially with Physical Outreach)

• Quality over quantity: Ship good cookies/pizza/energy drinks, not cheap filler.

• Brand association matters: “If you care about small details, you likely care about your product.”

Idea of Above Git or Below Git (Know Which You Are)

• “Below Git”: Individual developer tooling (like Copilot). Each dev can choose a different solution.

• “Above Git”: Team-level tools that require org-wide buy-in (like Greptile’s AI code reviewer). This means a different sales and adoption approach.

Mindset for Sales (Especially for Tech Founders)

• Sales isn’t sleazy—it’s problem-solving for the right audience.

• If your product works, find the people who truly need it. Make the ROI obvious.

2. {Your product} alternative campaign idea

Oleksii shared this awesome example with me, not dev tools but I wish people did that. Btw if anyone saw a dev tool example of this pls pls share it with me.

So this tactic mostly applies to market leaders or companies whose competitors are betting on your brand name with comparison pages: {Your product} alternative.

Nothing against running this playbook btw. Even wrote an article about this: How to create a good dev tool comparison page.

Anyhow, Screaming Frog, a well-known SEO tool approached it this way.

Googling “screaming frog alternative” ranks their page at the top.

The page is this hilarious article comparing different animals like Howler Monkey, Snapping Shrimp, and Laughing Hyena. It even has the format of a classic comparison article.

You can’t help but smirk and think of Screaming Frog as a fun company.

Another great example that was linked in the original LinkedIn post is Zendesk Alternative. Zendesk created a website for an imaginary alternative rock band. 

And a short film where they talk about “some guy who stole their name for a computer company” and that very company coming in and paying them to do an album on customer service software. I mean common this is good.

And everyone wearing Zendesk t-shirts and stuff and mentioning that Zendesk is “Customer service software”. Way to play the game differently.

3. “Whatsup message” ad creative from Axual

Zach Short (who btw has an awesome ad example gallery) shared this idea for an ad creative:

So basically:

• You go for a screenshot of a Whatsup message (or Telegram or whatever else) + some CTAs in text, not the image.

• The (edited) convo shows one person asking a friend for help, and the other answering with a simple dev-to-dev pitch of a product.

Anything that doesn’t look like an ad has a better chance of being noticed. So you at least get a better chance of being noticed. I go deeper into that in: How to advertise to developers: deep dive into paid developer marketing.

Obviously, like everything, over time your audience’s radar starts detecting new types of “banners”. And eventually becomes blind to them. But this hasn’t been overused yet I don’t think. Especially not in dev tools. So you may want to give it a go.

See more dev tool ads 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

• 📰 Building an Audience Through Technical Writing: Strategies and Mistakes – Hamel’s Blog

• 📺️ DevRel: What to avoid, when to hire, and how to succeed

• 🎧️ Did HubSpot Lose 80% of Blog Traffic? Here’s What Actually Happened

3. Join our Slack community

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

Check out marketingto.dev ->