Contents
My go-to developer marketing agencies, advisors, and consultants
I talk a lot to dev tool marketers and founders. Often, they ask me for recommendations for developer marketing agencies, consultants, or advisors.
Figured I’d put it all together, organize things a bit, and give you a lay of the land. The way I see it of course.
Ok, when thinking about getting outside help I see two core dimensions: packaging and specialization.
When it comes to the packaging of the service you can get:
- Advisor: someone helps guide you and your team and proposes ideas but typically you do the implementation.
- Consultant: someone who implements on top of advising
- Agency: Like a consultant but you get help from the entire team. Their offerings are often packaged into productized services.
- Fractional: someone comes in to work almost as your employee for 1-2 days a week.
The second dimension is specialization (depth vs breadth). The help you need may be general (dev marketing strategy) or very focused (launching on Product Hunt).
Obviously, both generalists and specialists, advisors, and agencies will be well-versed in most of the aspects of developer marketing. But everyone has areas where they are really good at and like doing.
With that in mind here are the buckets of services I see:
- Developer marketing advising (generalist)
- Developer marketing agencies (generalist)
- Developer messaging and positioning
- Developer content marketing
- Developer ads and influencers
- Developer tool launches
- Developer branding and PR
- Open-source monetization and growth
Ok, let’s get to it.
Developer marketing advising (generalists)
Jakub Czakon
Figured it's my blog, I should probably pitch my stuff too ;)
I am a practitioner first, and an advisor second. I help early-stage developer-first startups do more smart and less dumb things.
Think of me as a booster for your team when it comes to choosing and scaling channels, improving developer experience and conversion, and brainstorming strategy.
- I have a few slots every week for 60-min strategy sessions. We can talk strategy, tactics, brainstorming, whatever you need right now. Book a session ->
- I also do longer-term advising. We meet weekly/biweekly and I help you hit your dev marketing goals. Reach out ->
Service packaging: Advisor
Pitch:
Practical advisory for early stage dev tool startups
Adam Frankl
Dev tool startup advisor.
Service packaging: Advisor
Pitch:
“I help startup founders create developer categories and grow developer adoption.
First Marketing VP at 3 dev-facing unicorns: JFrog, Neo4j, & Sourcegraph”
Developer marketing agencies (generalists)
Hypergrowth Partners
Dev tool growth agency / investment fund run by Martin Gontovnikas (ex Auth0) and Guillaume Cabane (ex Drift).
Service packaging: Agency
Pitch:
Hypergrowth Partners invests its partners time and knowledge to help portfolio companies reach hypergrowth in exchange for equity.
Catchy Agency
Developer Marketing Agency
Service packaging: Agency
Pitch:
“The Leading Developer Marketing Agency
Our team helps the world’s largest technology companies build, grow, and manage developer marketing programs.
With a foundational understanding of technical concepts, Catchy creates and executes on strategies that drive value.”
Developer messaging and positioning
Zach Goldie
Landing page copywriting and positioning consultant.
Service packaging: Consultant
Pitch:
“Landing pages for dev tools
Copywriting and positioning consultant, optimizing key marketing pages aimed at selling to software engineers”
FletchPMM
They focus on positioning and messaging for early stage startups. With services specifically focused on redoing your homepage.
Service packaging: Agency
Pitch:
Let's rewrite your confusing homepage.
We'll help you sharpen your positioning and messaging so your product is instantly clear to your best-fit customers.
Developer content marketing
Draft.dev
A developer content agency that creates technical developer-focused blog articles as a service.
Service packaging: Agency
Pitch:
“TECHNICAL MARKETING CONTENT FOR SOFTWARE STARTUPS
We create blog posts and tutorials designed to reach software engineers.”
Wizard on Demand
They focus on creating technical content but have more services including information architecture on the website, SEO, paid campaigns and more.
Service packaging: Agency
Pitch:
We help deep tech and developer-stack companies create persistent differentiation through hyper-specific technical content marketing campaigns.
Every Developer
Technical content strategy for developer-focused companies
Service packaging: Agency
Pitch:
“Attract More of the Right Developers
A technical audience will sniff out anything that seems like traditional marketing.
We use our D.E.V. Content Framework to find your unique viewpoint that will resonate with developers, engineers, and architects.”
Nick Moore
Content writer and editor specializing in creating opinionated content that appeals to software developers and technical executives.
Service packaging: Consultant
Pitch:
"Great content combines the appeal of a strong opinion with technical acumen to prove that your company isn’t here to push its product but to offer real value."
Sarg.io
An agency that creates Twitter Content for Developer Tool companies.
Service packaging: Agency
Pitch:
“Twitter Content for Developer Tools
Developers spend up to 2 hours per day on twitter.
We help startups reach developers using twitter content.”
By the way, Supabase does a great job marketing their dev tool on Twitter or other social media. Check it out for inspiration.
Developer ads and influencers
Itamar Ben Yair
He is a hands on consultant helping early stage startups find traction. I like his pragmatic and down to earth mindset that he shares in his substack newsletter btw.
Service packaging: Consultant
Pitch:
Build a growth engine for your startup
plug.dev
A tool that connects dev tools with developer influencers.
Service packaging: Productized service
Pitch:
Where dev tools do influencer marketing.
Engage millions of developers through data-driven campaigns with massive reach across youtube, twitter, linkedin, newsletters and more.
Developer tool launches
Flo Merian
Flo helps developer tools launch — on Product Hunt and beyond.
He's launched 42+ dev-first products in the last 2 years (including Developer Marketing Examples) and is the 2022 Product Hunt Community Member of the Year.
Service packaging: consultant
Pitch:
Your copilot for launching new dev-first products and features. #keeplaunching
Developer PR and branding
Maya Spivak (marketing.fan)
Maya is a fantastic marketer with this special gift for creating powerful branding experiences.
Service packaging: Advisor
Pitch:
After 15 years of fangirling on behalf of just one tech startup at a time, she's gone indy.
That means yours is a brand we can build to #standom too! Here is the place you can read more about how.
Open-source monetization and growth
Nevo David (Gitroom)
Novu specializes in open-source marketing especially at early stage.
One of his signature services is helping startups growh GitHub stars to their first 1k stars through dev.to articles and Reddit postings.
Service packaging: Consultant
Pitch:
GROW YOUR OPEN-SOURCE LIBRARY
Emily Omier
She focuses on monetization of open source projects. Her podcast "The business of Open Source" is really cool too.
Service packaging: Consultant
Pitch:
ACCELERATE REVENUE GROWTH
Accelerate your journey from free open source project to profitable open source company.
What is next?
Talk to them, they know their stuff.
When/if you do, please let me know what you thought (good and bad).
I'll be happy to update this article... and I would love to know how they did myself ;)