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- 🍐#103: Signup form conversion trick, how YC founders get well-designed websites, and how many CTO delegate research
🍐#103: Signup form conversion trick, how YC founders get well-designed websites, and how many CTO delegate research
What's cooking?
Jakub Czakon
March 16, 2025
Hey,
I’ve been making lots of fish lately. I just stuff it with garlic, coriander, lime, salt, pepper, and olive oil. Drop it in the oven and voila. My favorite? Snapear🍐. Ok, actually, it is Dorada but even I couldn’t find a pear pun there ;).
This week on the agenda:
CTOs delegate research
Code snippet on Stych signup form
How YC companies design great websites?
+ a few bonus links at the end
Total pearusing time: 8min
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Developer marketing insights
1. CTOs delegate research → optimize for the dev champion evaluator
A few months back, I wrote an article Who to address on the dev tool homepage?, following what I often hear from founders marketing dev tools: “But CTO is the buyer, we should talk to them on the homepage”
This week I saw some interesting research on this.
Takeaways on how CTOs evaluate vendors:
25% fully hand-off tool evaluation to devs (or other champions). Those are mostly folks at bigger 1000+ people companies. Another 12% delegate functional evaluation, deal with financial/compliance, etc.
22% do initial research, create a shortlist, delegate functional evaluation to devs
13% fully evaluate themselves. Mostly folks at 200-500 people companies.
So this means that probably in over 80% of situations you should assume that the developer (or other champion who feels the pain the most and wants the capability) would be doing the functional “does it do what we want” evaluation.
That means that you want to optimize your marketing on that champion dev, not the CTO (unless they are your champion). This means website, content, ads etc. And then have materials they can use to help CTO drive/delegate the security/ROI/compliance etc.
2. Code snippet on Stych website
13% signup form conversion bump with a dev-focused trust/motivation builder.
Dev goes through your page, clicks the signup button, and sees a signup form. Now you want them to actually sign up.
The V1 approach is to go clean, a few social signup buttons like GitHub and call it a day.
The V2 is to add trust/motivation builders on the page:
Logos -> big enterprises and hot startups using your product always feel reassuring
Testimonial -> fellow dev talking about the product makes your claims real
Value prop-> reiterating what the product does, key capabilities, makes what you can deliver clear
How-to -> showing how you get to that value with a 1-2-3 steps removes friction, makes it feel easier
Now, Stytch went for an interesting V3:
Code snippet -> how about just show it? this is a flavour of that 1-2-3 how-to but extra dev-friendly. They also made the code interactive so that you can tinker with it, make it feel yours already.
And they saw a 13% signup conversion bump. Nice!
Definitely an interesting thing to test out. Check out Stytch CEO talking about it here.
3. How YC companies design great websites?
Yeah, saw this thread and realized I was wondering about those YC startup websites too. Obviously there is always things to be improved (sometimes a ton ;)), especially in positioning/messaging/copy. But those websites often look really slick.
YC startups heavily rely on Framer: they use Framer for quickly launching good-looking landing pages, often leveraging templates.
"A lot of YC companies use Framer to build their landing pages." – u/SnooComics6052
"I built a landing page for my friend's hard tech startup—which raised a couple million—using a Framer template (cost ~$50)." – u/SnooComics6052
"Hell yeah, no need to reinvent the wheel. You can always further customize." – u/Rockpilotyear2000
Components, templates and UI kits: They rely on templates or pre-built UI kits, particularly ones using Tailwind or Shadcn, to build modern-looking interfaces quickly.
"Mix of paid components (Tailwind UI), OS components (Shadcn), color palette and LLM (V0, Cursor)." – u/i_am_exception
"Mostly pre-built UI kits and templates, Figma for quick tweaks." – u/QuailFeeling6823
"I credit UI libraries like Shadcn—they've made it very easy to create high-quality UIs even if you don't have a design background." – u/dmart89
Inspiration from templates and good websites: they use templates or remix elements from various designs they like rather than designing from scratch.
"Ya you can just copy and paste parts you like from the free templates onto yours then just make the colors and design consistent." – u/friesla
"I built my landing page on Framer and just referenced some other successful companies' landing pages for design inspiration." – u/HomeworkOrnery9756
"When I work on new products, I make everyone bring a bunch of sites they like. You then copy from enough things that you make something new." – u/throwaway1230-43n
AI tools speed up the design process: they leverage AI-based tools (Cursor, Claude, etc.) to iterate quickly on UI/UX and design elements.
"I start by describing what I want to Cursor and then iterate by talking. Looks very decent!" – u/Ornery_Ice4596
"I find React components and ask Cursor to implement them how I want. I hate Framer and Webflow's lack of good components." – u/DoctorXanaxBar
"With AI advances, creating a good-looking landing page is now a few minutes' task." – u/Sharp_Place6893
Technical stacks for quickly: they recommend using frameworks like Next.js combined with component libraries like Shadcn and Framer Motion to quickly deliver modern, attractive apps.
"Next.js + shadcn + framer-motion. You are gtg in one afternoon." – u/GentleKant
"Yes, you can get Framer and Framer Motion from npm. I use it in React." – u/trickyelf
Simplicity and clarity over flashy design: For developer audiences, landing pages should prioritize simplicity, clarity, and quick communication of the core message. But nice animations and visuals can help.
"Fonts, colors, and CSS make a big difference. Small additions like transitions and animations really make things feel purposeful too." – u/DilberAdam
"Good design has the right colors, plenty of white space, and great font choices. This is enough for most businesses." – u/Unlikely-Version8447
"Just picking a tool won't magically make your app look modern. You’re gonna need to invest time in learning design principles." – u/Signal-Indication859
Again, it is key to know what you want to say on your website first. Your positioning. What is your target dev, their problem, what is the core use case, what is your differentiation etc. But it doesn’t hurt if it looks nice and slick ;)
Need more developer marketing insights?
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2. Bonus links to check out
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