🍐#99 Early-stage content, dogfooding, interactive header visual, and a trick for Reddit audience research

Hey,

I got 99 issues and a pear🍐 ain’t one is in every single one. I wonder if everyone gets the reference. The original song is 32 years old. Thirty. Two. I was around that age when I got into dev marketing. I am almost 40 now. And we are almost at issue 100. Expect something special next week. Vamos!

This week on the agenda:

• Interactive visual on the Typesense website header

• A trick for estimating your ICP audience size on Reddit

• Extreme dogfooding, and early-stage content from RevenueCat

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

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Developer marketing insights

1. A trick for estimating your ICP audience size on Reddit

I know more and more folks are doing stuff with Reddit which is awesome.

This is a tactic that helps you estimate how big is your ideal developer audience in a particular subreddit.

Watch the video from Oleksii, but the idea is simple → Reddit Ads Manager lets you do that when you are setting up the ad campaign. You don’t need to run anything. Just play with the targeting.

See more dev tool Reddit examples ->

2. Interactive visual on the Typesense website header

Watch this example on Tella.TV (in case the video didn’t embed properly)

I love how TypeSense demonstrates their “lightning-fast” search right from the start. No guesswork needed. Here’s what they do right and how you can replicate it:

• Go interactive: Instead of a static screenshot, they embed a fully functional search demo. Instantly proves the speed—2 million recipes in milliseconds.

• Lead with one clear benefit: “Lightning-fast open source search.” No fluff. Devs know exactly what they’re getting.

• Address competitors head-on: They name Algolia and Elasticsearch right away, then explain how they’re different. No mystery, just transparency.

Don’t just talk about speed or simplicity. Show it. Give devs something they can test and compare. It’s the best way to stand out in a crowded market.

See more dev tool landing page examples ->

3. Extreme dogfooding, and early-stage content marketing from RevenueCat

Wasn’t planning on sharing another episode from Jack’s pod but just loved this one. Had a laugh a couple of times too ;)

My takeaways:

“We basically told people how to build RevenueCat”

• Educational content as a magnet. Early on, Jacob spent two to three days a week blogging about exactly how to implement mobile subscriptions—essentially giving away the recipe to RevenueCat. “We basically wrote about how to build RevenueCat,” he joked. This comprehensive, step-by-step content outranked Apple’s own documentation and became the company’s first big driver of signups. (I talk about this “Signature Content” idea in this article)

• Earn trust by oversharing. Developers hate fluff. When they find straight answers—even if it’s how to build your product themselves—they trust you. That trust quickly translates to word-of-mouth and developer evangelism.

• Educate on the “Why”, not just the “How.” RevenueCat’s content explained not only how to run pricing tests but also the statistical thinking behind them (from binomial to Bayesian analysis). This built credibility and trust with both devs and growth teams.

Identify sneaky “Should-Be-Simple” problems

• Tackle hidden complexity. Jacob believes any feature that appears trivial but constantly breaks or creates headaches is a goldmine for dev tools. For mobile subscriptions, Apple and Google’s APIs are famously awkward. RevenueCat turned that frustration into an opportunity.

• Flip developer shame into “Hero” status. If you relieve devs from messing with tricky edge cases, they shine in front of their bosses. The dev championing your product becomes the workplace hero.

Build (or acquire) your own guinea pig

• Dogfooding at scale. By acquiring Dipsy—an audio-based subscription app using RevenueCat—Jacob’s team got a ready-made test environment with hundreds of thousands of users. This let them push new SDK features in production without risking a customer’s livelihood.

• Real-Time feedback loop. Instead of waiting on customers to volunteer as “lab rats,” they can now instantly deploy changes, gather real user data, and refine the tool faster.

Authenticity beats corporate-speak

• Humanize your marketing. Jacob’s playful tone (“You get a free T-shirt, I get a free walking billboard!”) shows how a little personality stands out in a dev tool world full of bland, jargon-heavy copy.

• Honesty about flaws. “People sense BS immediately,” Jacob said. Admitting where APIs are weak or your product has learning curves builds deeper credibility. It proves you understand the struggles your users face. (I wrote about this and other things HN dev audience appreciates in this article)

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 we redesigned Graphite's landing page in-house

• 📰 The DevTools Ceiling: great as Open Source, AND a Terrible Business

• 🍊 Ask HN: What other news feeds do you read besides Hacker News? | Hacker News

3. Join our Slack community

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

Check out marketingto.dev ->