Developer marketing examples

An interesting option to push people to read the next article.

You use a slide-in triggered on a 75% scroll with a "read next" CTA in the bottom left.

On the aggressive side for sure but when the article you propose is clearly technical it could work.

And if your articles are not connected to the product explicitly you do need some ways to keep people reading and see more of your brand.

"There are two types of companies": Just a beautiful piece of copy from Fly.io

Doing us vs them doesn't always play out well.

But folks from Fly made it snarky and playful and fun.

And they basically said that they are:

• are developer-centric in the way they sell (self-served)
• are actually easy to use
• are great at the developer experience

And this is just such a nice brand play as well.

You just show personality and confidence in this devy snarky way.

I dig it.

This is a simple but great header imho:

• they explain what it is clearly: Stock trading API
• they show the result: trading stocks
• they show the code to drive the "it is for devs" point

Love it.

Why not highlight your free plan?

Most companies highlight their middle paid plan saying it is "most popular".

First thing, yeah, sure it is your most popular plan.

But more importantly, most visitors will not convert to your paid plans right away.

So why not try and capture as many devs as possible on the free plan?

If they like your dev tool there are many things you can do to convert some of them to paid plans.

But if they leave that pricing page and go with some other free tool, you are not converting anyone.

@CircleCI highlights free and they are in the mature, competitive market of CI CD tools.

Idk, it really does make a lot of sense to me.

If people need more advanced features they will choose higher plans anyway.

But if they want to get things started with the basic plans they will choose free or go elsewhere.

I'd rather have them choose free than none.  

Say what we are all thinking. ‍

This tweet is great as it states something that most of us feel.
It is something that you may have had a discussion about with someone recently.
You might have fought about one tool or another.
But at the end of the day tools don't matter.

You can share it with someone as:

• sorry, we had a stupid fight
• rub it in your face :)

‍

I like how they use the black dot to show the mouse movements in the UI.

Simple but powerful and clear.

A great example of a dev-focused Linkedin post format from Khuyen Tran 👇

What I like about this:

• It stands out in the feed with a pink background
• It is helpful and visual. Shows the code and result of the code in one view.
• I know right away what the post is about and why I should "... see more"
• It is a format that can be reused for many scenarios

Just great job!

Pricing in your docs? That is how @Fly.io does it.

You click a pricing page link on their homepage and you go to the docs!

No 3 boxes with the "most popular" being the middle paid plan ;)

They just give it to you how it is. Exactly what you'd expect from the docs.

There are tables, explanations, and links to other docs pages.

Very bold decision imho. It definitely makes them feel super developer focused.

Plus if you do want a more standard, enterprise stuff you see:

"If you need more support or compliance options, you can choose one of our paid plans. These come with usage included and additional support options."

And that page looks like a classic pricing page.

But they focus on the developer buying experience here. Super interesting.

Pushing cold blog readers to try your tool rarely works.

So you need a transitional CTA, something that worms them up.
But it needs to be aligned with the goals of the reader.
And I think pushing folks to a community discord is a solid option.

I like the copy "Discuss this blog on Discord" as it is very reader-focused.
Some folks read the article and have more questions.
They want to discuss it somewhere.

And while you could just do a comments section, a community gives you more options to get people closer to the product.

How to get more ROI from your dev conference booth? -> Add obvious CTAs.

Yes, giveaway stuff.

Yes, make it nice and branded.

Yes, make it funny, shareable, and cool.

But give people an easy and obvious option to give back and support you and your goals.

I really liked how Union.ai approached it at the recent MLOps World conference:

• A simple folded paper info with CTAs right next to your giveaway
• CTAs to GitHub stars, Linkedin, and Slack community

Just a nice little tactic but I bet it squeezed a bit more of that ROI juice that we all need in 2023 ;)

Your dev tool is faster/more scalable/more X -> show it with benchmarks.

For some tools the entire unique selling point is that they are faster.

You build your messaging around that, put a flavor of "fastest Y for X" in the header and call it a day.

But devs who come to your website cannot just take your word for it. They need to see it, test it.

For some tools it is possible to just see it for themselves, get started.

But you cannot expect devs to really take a database or an observability platform for a spin.

As to test the speed or scalability on realistic use case you need to...

... set up a realistic use case. Which takes a lot of time.

But you can set that use case and test it for them. With benchmarks.

I really like how Astro approached it:

• they list out known competition by name
• they hint at technical reasons for why they are faster
• they shows those benchmarks high on their homepage
• they link out to the full report and mention the trusted source

If your usp is that you are faster/more scalable/ more whatever. Back it up. This is the nr 1 thing devs on your website need to trust you with to move forward.

How to present benchmark results masterclass from RavenDB

The biggest problem with the software benchmarks that you run is?

People don't trust you. Especially when the results are good.

𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁. 𝗢𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆.

People from RavenDB do it by:

• Showing where they ran it (AWS, Linux)
• Showing exactly what infra they ran it on. Extra points for making it interactive.
• Explaining how they ran it with code snippets and setup
• Copy is also very to the point, technical, docs-like

This looks solid because it feels like I could re-run what they did myself.And so I trust them and I probably won't ;)

This is a really clever billboard campaign.

Show don't tell they say.

And Segment did exactly that by putting billboards with the wrong location printed on them (LA in SF etc).

The theme/message was "What good is bad data?" which was exactly what they wanted to convey.

What I like about is the alignment between:

• campaign creative
• campaign theme
• product value

This is hard to do imho so big kudos to them 🎉!

Downside?

Reportedly many folks who saw billboards didn't get that it was intentional and Tweeted at them about the error.

Or maybe they were next-level jokers...

People want to be valued by their tribe.

One of the ways to do that is by being helpful.

So they want to share things that have a "smell" of insight.

Tool stack/workflow/pipeline chart makes them feel that way.

‍

Sometimes your product just wins on price.

I like how New Relic owns it on this page:

• They show you price comparison graphs
• The CTAs are focused on helping you compare the prices
• They use jargon specific to the category to drive the price argument: "peak usage", "overages and penalties", "SKUs"

After reading this I'd trust them to give me a solid price estimate and that it will likely be cheaper than Datadog.

Obviously price is not the only reason why we choose tools, but if that was a problem I had with Datadog, they have my attention.

A freaking developer TV.

They took this "be a media company" to the next level.

They created entire TV around their company, audience, and products.

I respect people really going all in.

How to write a "What is {MY CORE KEYWORD}" article that gets to the top of HackerNews? 👇

First of all, almost no one succeeds at that as you write those articles for SEO distribution, not HN distribution.

To get an SEO-first article on HN your content quality bar needs to be super high.

But you can do it.

PlanetScale managed to get their "What is database sharding and how does it work?" on the orange page (kudos to Justin Gage!).

Here is what was interesting about that article:

𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼.

• ❌ No "In today's fast-paced data-driven world enterprises work with data" stuff.
• ✅ Just  "Learn what database sharding is, how sharding works, and some common sharding frameworks and tools."

𝗛𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗸𝗲𝘆𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗱𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝘃 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿.

💚 Speaking peer to peer, not authority-student:

• "You’ve probably seen this table before, about how scaling out helps you take this users table, all stored on a single server:"
• "And turn it into this users table, stored across 2 (or 1,000) servers:"
• "But that’s only one type of sharding (row level, or horizontal). "

𝗨𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗷𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲

Things like:

• "Partitioning has existed – especially in OLAP setups"
• "Sifting through HDFS partitions to find the missing snapshot "

𝗔𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸

🔥 Look at the section "How database sharding works under the hood" with subsections:

• Sharding schemes and algorithms
• Deciding on what servers to use
• Routing your sharded queries to the right databases
• Planning and executing your migration to a sharded solution

🎁 𝗕𝗼𝗻𝘂𝘀: 𝗽𝗹𝘂𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆

Section "Sharding frameworks and tools" shares open-source tools (every dev, but HN devs in particular like OS projects).

And there as an info box, you have the info that Planetscale comes with one of those OS projects deployed.

Just a beautifully executed piece of content marketing.

What if your next swag was a donation? That's what Cockroach Labs did.

Ok, so the typical way of doing swag at a conference is to give out t-shirts for badge scans.

And then folks either wear them or throw them away (or keep wearing them when they should have thrown them away but that is another story).

After the conference you take leftovers with you, ship them home or, you guessed it, throw them away.

A lot of throwing away for a badge scan if you ask me.

Cockroach Labs decided to do something completely different.

They donate a few $ to a great charity @Women Who Code for every badge scan they get.
I love it.

An extra benefit (and where the idea originated) is that with this, you can do virtual badge scans too.

Articulate a deeper thought.‍

Sometimes you want to tell the world something but you don't know how.
When somebody articulates what you were thinking you just want to share that with them.

This is what this tweet is about.
A deeper thought with some parallel examples to back it up.

Funny ad, that makes fun of ads.‍

But it actually communicates that you don't care about the ads but more about something else, like:

• docs
• code examples
• integration
• backend
• UI

Classic remarketing ad. But things are classic because they work 👇

Youtube remarketing is one of the most popular ways to stay top of mind with devs who visit your site.

Lots of devs spend time on Youtube so it is a solid match.

But, "buy now" style ads rarely work because if they wanted to try/buy they would have already.

They need something more.

That "more" is often trust.

They simply don't trust you, your product, and your company.

They don't think you are the real deal and will solve their problems.

But you can build that trust. And to do that you can use testimonial-style ads:

• use case explained in the voice of customer/developer
• real user sharing their story
• clear product branding

That is it.

Show enough of these and % of people will trust you and convert.

How to do a dev-focused brand video and get 10M+ views?

Making a memorable brand video is hard.

Doing that for a boring tech product is harder.

Doing that to the developer audience is next level.

Postman managed to create not one but three of those brand videos that got from 4M to 10M youtube views.

The videos I am talking about are:

• "I am gonna push some buttons"
• "Together"
• "We did this"

So what did they do right?

• They are all short playful stories touching on values coming from a centralized API platform.
• They hint at the motif of space which is a clear part of Postman's branding
• They do show the actual UI of the product

Honestly, I am not exactly sure what special sauce they added but those are just great videos that you watch.

And I definitely remember them and the company which is exactly what you want to achieve with brand ads.

Is it better to do one big prize or many small prizes?

This is a decision you have to make when thinking about running a swag campaign.

Turns out that a  small number of huge prizes can get you way better ROI on the same budget.

And NannyML has done it brilliantly here.

They are a monitoring tool and they give away monitoring setup.

This is something that actually can go viral. And it did.

Showing code and UI in an explainer video is always a dance and rarely ends well.

You want to show the code to make it devy.
But you don't want to show everything not to overwhelm.

The same goes for UI which should look like your UI.
But show only what is necessary.

It's a struggle but CircleCI does it really nicely in this explainer:

• They blur out all code
• But use colors to make it really look like code
• And the file sits clearly in a text editor (as it should)

They do the same for the UI later in the video.Just a really clean way of explaining things. Nice!

Make login our problem. Not yours.

This is a beautiful messaging of Auth0 solution.

Login

Simple explanation of what it does/gives you.
Simplified of course

Our problem. Not yours.

You "outsource" this boring but important problem to someone else.
It also has a feel of SaaS in there.
They will take care of it.

‍

How to promote your important company event? How about right there in the header.

A typical approach to promoting events on your site is to have them in the Hello bar (right above the navbar). This is a solid option of course.

But what if this is a super duper important event that you really want to push?

Put it in the header.

The header is the most viewed part of the most visited page on your site.

Doesn't get much better than that.

But you don't want to distract people from your value propositions and main CTAs too much.

How do you do that?

This is how Vercel did with last year's NEXT.js conf.

• above the H1 headline so as not to break the flow
• prominent but not more distracting than it needs to be
• has conference logo, crystal clear copy, and an event CTA

Nice execution on that pattern.

Adding CTA in dev-focused articles is hard.

You don't want to be too pushy, but you do want to get conversions.

DigitalOcean strikes a great balance with its in-text article CTA design.

They make this CTA look like an info box that you'd typically see in the documentation.

It is clear that it is a Digital Ocean CTA but it doesn't feel pushy.

It feels like a piece of potentially useful information.

Love it.

Say what you do and how you do it.

What:

• Supabase owns it with an "open-source firebase alternative"
• They don't streamline project delivery or anything. ‍

How:

• Value proposition around speed of set up
• Then jargon that hits the spot with your ideal developers
• Short, and to the point. 

CTA (bonus):

• "Start your project" action-focused
• Documentation. With devs, this is always a good alternative CTA

I like how this starts with a [WHAT IT IS ABOUT] scroll stopper.

That is coupled with a big block of code that has:

• input -> code
• output - > results from console

(presumably) when you click "See more" you get the rest of the text post.

What CTAs should you choose for your open-source project homepage?

Was always wondering what is my default.

There are many options: "See docs", "Get started", "Sign up", "Start X"

But in open-source you want people to start playing with it, install it.

So what should you choose?

Recently came across Astro homepage and loved what they chose.

"Get started"

• Takes you to the quickstart in the docs
• Is action-focused copy
• Sets obvious(ish) expectations

Install code

• Gives you copy-pasteable install command
• + it shows the code to make it more devy

Whatever I choose I will actually get my hands dirty.

I think this will be my default from now on.

Ideating how to do dev tool billboards?

I like these from Snowflake.

Especially the customer showcase ones as the format can almost be copy-pasted ;)

One more interesting thing about those billboards though:

• folks from Snowflake placed just a few of them strategically in the cities
• And changed content of the billboard often

By doing that they seem to have billboards everywhere, fight ad fatigue, and stay top of mind.

Love it.

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗛𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗿 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲𝘀?

The general tip is simple. Create content that the HN audience finds interesting.

𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝘆𝗽𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀:

• Something that feeds curiosity (how does X work, why did Y happen, what is it like to do Z)
• Something real, transparent, and written in first person (real stories)
• Something technical and focused on the dev or founder crowd

But how do you actually do that?

𝗢𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗲𝗱 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀:

• Get your technical founder or core developers to write articles
• Those articles are focused on the technical challenges of building your product
• Again, don't write what your product does but rather how you build it. Mistakes you made, ideas you tried, technical challenges you had to overcome.
• Share real value with that dev audience. And to give people real value, you need to have folks who actually understand their problems. Those are typically senior devs/founders.
• You will inevitably hint that you are building a product and the folks who are interested in your product and you will go deeper.  

That was exactly what folks from CockroachDB did at the beginning.  Heard about it on one of the episodes of the Unusual Ventures podcast with Peter Mattis from Cockroach Labs.

𝗘𝘅𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗶𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗼𝗳 𝗛𝗡:

• "CockroachDB Stability Post-Mortem: From 1 Node to 100 Nodes"
• "Serializable, lockless, distributed: Isolation in CockroachDB"
• "How CockroachDB Does Distributed, Atomic Transactions"
 
Kudos Cockroach Labs team and thanks for sharing!

Well done templates gallery from Vercel.

For developer-focused products, having an examples/templates/code samples gallery can be a powerful growth lever.

✅ It helps people:

• understand what you do
• see if anyone did what they want
• get started with something real-life(ish)
• get a feel for a product without committing to it yet

Just a great touchpoint in the developer journey.

💚 And Vercel does this one really well IMHO.

They start with an easy-to-find CTA in the navbar resources section. Bonus points for adding one-liner descriptions that make it clear what is on the other side of the click.

On the templates library page, they give you solid use case navigation with tags. And each template tile has a result thumbnail and a one-liner description. The beauty of this is in the simplicity and what they didn't put in here.

Each template page shows the result, gives you a tutorial on how to use this, and clear CTAs to either see this live or deploy yourself. Bonus points for the "Deploy" action copy (instead of "Sign up").

Kudos to the Vercel team. They are one of my favorite inspirations.

How to do a dev-focused brand video and get 10M+ views?

Making a memorable brand video is hard.

Doing that for a boring tech product is harder.

Doing that to the developer audience is next level.

Postman managed to create not one but three of those brand videos that got from 4M to 10M youtube views.

The videos I am talking about are:

• "I am gonna push some buttons"
• "Together"
• "We did this"

So what did they do right?

• They are all short playful stories touching on values coming from a centralized API platform.
• They hint at the motif of space which is a clear part of Postman's branding
• They do show the actual UI of the product

Honestly, I am not exactly sure what special sauce they added but those are just great videos that you watch.

And I definitely remember them and the company which is exactly what you want to achieve with brand ads.

Came across this classic What is Segment brand video while watching an interview with one of the folks behind it, Maya Spivak (she is awesome btw).

What I like about it is that:

• it is fun, not formal, builds rapport
• it introduces the core problem the tool solves
• it shows the tech and explains it in a way that is simple but not simplistic

And it follows a flavor of the classic AIDA format:

• Introduce problem
• Agitate it, make the viewer feel it
• Explain obvious solutions + problems with it
• Show how your product solves it
• Tell people how to start

Putting all that in 90 seconds is hard.

And even though this video is 4 years old it could easily still work today IMHO.

Really solid baseline to s̶t̶e̶a̶l̶ get inspired by ;)

Nice Reddit ad from kftray.

This is a simple ad format but lands the message:

• Clear, transparent "What it is" and "What it does" in the Headline
• Basic screen share video that shows both the code (terminal) and the  UI (product app)
• Unblocked comments make it more confident and spark conversation

An interesting fact is that there is no call to action?!

They say "Kftray is an open-source" which is enough for those interested to google "kftray github" or just go to GitHub and find it. And makes the ad less pushy which is a nice touch on Reddit.

But the most important takeaway is this. If the problem is real to the dev audience you target you don't need to go fancy. Just show how you solve it.

I love this dev tool header copy from Neon.

❌ They could have gone with "We make your data fly" or "10x your database developer efficiency" or other stuff like that.

💚 Instead, they spoke in a clear dev-to-dev language:

• What it is: "fully managed serverless Postgress"
• Benefit in technical terms: "Autoscaling, branching, bottomless storage"
• How they do it: "Separate storage and compute"
• Obstacle handling for current Postgres users: "generous free tier"

Simple, clear, and to the point. No fluffs given. Love that.

"But we are selling to the boss of a boss of that developer user persona"

Then let that dev champion understand what you are doing and bring it to their boss.

"But we are going pure top-down"

Then does that boss of a boss of a boss actually evaluate your infra tool themselves or send their architect?

Maybe 90% of your site traffic is the buyer-persona CTO. But my bet is, it isn't even 1%.  

7k likes on an event promo post to the dev audience.

I don't think I've ever seen 7k likes on a developer company post on Linkedin.

Ok, this is Github, but still.

This is a 26sec video where they go:

• "What happens when a CEO..."
• "... builds an app LIVE in 18 minutes ..."
• "... in front of 15000 people..."
• "... with Copilot X for the first time?"
• "What could go wrong?"
• "What it Live"

This is a job well done:

• Super slick but minimal design. Feels a bit like that famous nextjs prisma conference tickets.
• Offers a live coding session which is one of the event types that devs like cause it is real.
• Plays powerful music, but no voiceover that would make it feel more corporate.
• Dev to dev, conversational copy. + this final snarkiness appeals to devs.

And they could have done:

• Copy: "We are happy to announce our CEO streamlining business value for the enterprise"
• Design: Show people at previous events and stuff that you saw a million times
• Offer: Talks from industry leaders (that  are customers using your product)
• Voiceover and music: Boring corporate classic.

This is how to promote an event. LOVED IT!

Great example of programmatic SEO from Snyk.

They created a page called snyk advisor.

It is a repository of pages about open-source packages.

Each page is created automatically out of publicly available information.

Enhances it with Snyk-generated security scans and reports.

It builds awareness for other Snyk products in the security space.

A lot of those pages rank high in google for the {package} keyword which is incredible.

And when people land on the package report page the CTAs to Snyk products push conversions.

Interesting dev blog CTA idea from V7.

CTAs in technical articles is a tricky subject:

• Go too aggressive and "obviously an ad" and devs ignore it or get angry
• Go too subtle and you may not get the readers attention at all

I like how V7 approached it here:

• They add a separate (aside) section but it is subtle, feels like a part of the article
• They use a GIF image creative that catches my attention and simply shows the product
• They used various  anchor link CTAs. Interestingly these often get more clicks than buttons

What I'd change/test is making this CTA not a generic value prop but something closely connected to the rest of the article.

Sometimes your pricing is just complex. But you can still make it work.

If you want devs to convert, make it possible for them to estimate the cost.

@Mux does it nicely with a calculator:

• They give sliders for dimensions that are obvious to the dev
• They give (pre) select boxes for things that are a bit less obvious
• They show additional costs
• They give you a clear final price estimate

What is crucial is that the calculator dimensions need to be understandable and familiar to the reader.:

• If you use expected industry concepts (view count, upload, users) you should be fine.
• If you use weird obscure concepts the best calculator will not help.

The goal of this is to make it possible for a person to get an estimate right here right now.

Not have to setup a meeting with half the team to figure your pricing out.

There are many things that I like about it.

• A clear value proposition: Explains what it is: an open-source alternative to a well-known product Shopify.
• Shows code and what the code does visually. Great product explanation.
• Adds a social proof with "#1 JS ecom platform on GitHub:". When you have 16k stars you should use it!

Overall with very little effort, I understand what it is, and what it does.

And I can go and dig deeper for myself or spread the word with my circles.

Great flow of the explainer. 

Starts with the outcome "Build search UX".

Goes straight to code and 1-2-3-results format. 

Explains every snippet of code as it is added.

Ends with a nicely presented result: a working search on a website.

No voiceover just code and screenshots.

And it's only 45 sec !!!

Mixpanel primary CTA is to take an interactive tour.

They take you to a 30min video + a guided UI tour.

Not a signup.

That is because with products that have long time to value (like analytics, observability etc) dev will not see value in the first session.

I mean to really see value you need to see real data, real use cases. And if you were to actually test it would take weeks.

That is why many companies do demos. But demos have their own problems (and most are bad).

Interactive tools make it possible for me to explore the value without talking to anyone.

I love this option.

Conference activation idea: Tetris competition at the booth.

It is hard to get devs to your booth if all you offer is a "do you want to see a quick demo" spiel.

You need to get a bit more creative than that.

💚 The team at Storyblok ran a Tetris competition:

• Playing station at the booth to make sure people come by
• Live leaderboard for when people were not playing + to get folks to play again
• Branding around the playing station for those who take photos to share it on socials
• A cool devy prize (mechanical keyboard) to build some additional reason to play talk about it

Afaik it was a big hit and I can definitely see why.

📒 A few more notes:

• make it live at the booth, not available online -> you'll get no buzz for it otherwise (made this mistake)
• try to get organizers to give you a few minutes of the schedule to give away prizes
• if you can connect the game to your product in a memorable way do that.  

btw, I read about it on DX Tips. You want to check out that article on dev conferences from DX Tips

Memes are good top-of-funnel, awareness-type content.

Many companies use them on socials as they can "go viral".

But.

You need to either:

• connect the meme to your company/product value
• make the meme so good that people follow your account

I like how Datree connects it to the product here.

They are a Kubernetes configuration tool and talk about exactly that here.

They do that with jargon too "k8", "config". When used well it can help you belong to the tribe you are marketing to.

If you have an API product presenting it in an exciting visual way is hard.

But Deepgram managed to do just that.

They go for an autoplay presentation that has four acts:

1. Context: playing an audio file showing a spectrogram -> sets the context that this is something audio
2. Code: They show the code from one of the SDKs being typed. And they show tabs at the top with other important SDKs to convey that this is not Python-only.
3. Result: Shows the output of running the code, a transcript, and an AI-generated summary and topics.  
4. Layers: Takes the points above and layers them in one viz to communicate that this is all part of one product, just different "views" of it.

And the delivery is just slick and elegant. Kudos team!

btw, Mux, the video API has a similar design of their visual. I think it is just a great visual element for API products.

A great example of a quote-style ad.

I like it because:

• Trust: it builds trust via G2 crowd reference and an actual person mentioned
• Value/benefit: the quote talks about what the tool does and what is good about it
• More trust: links to G2 crowd profile, NOT your page -> more trust especially when I don't know the brand yet

Great stuff.

Navbar is a hugely important conversion lever on the dev-facing website. I saw it move the needle by x times in some cases/conversion events.

So, what does a good one look like?

Auth0 did a great job on their developer portal. But the learnings can be applied to your marketing website too.

What I like:

• They have an explicit division between docs and resources (you can do without it but I like it)
• Community (with all the events, forums, support etc) is clearly emphasized and discoverable
• When you click on the navbar tab you get an extensive mega menu with many options
• Each item in the mega menu gets a one-sentence description of what you'll find there

That makes it easy for devs to explore. Without having to click out to see what each tab/item means. And when devs know what you mean they are more likely to actually click out. And convert.

This is one of the more devy blog designs I've seen in a while.

It has this docs-like feel.

But is just a bit more fun and loose than most docs would allow.

Here is what I like:

• smells like there could be value with code all over the place
• shows visuals taken from another devy channel, Twitter/X
• hints at social proof through Twitter/X engagement

And if your posts are code-heavy, then a docs-like experience is where you want to be anyway.

But you can spice it up with things that wouldn't fit the docs.

Like a Twitter/X embed or a meme.

If your dev tool's USP is that it is faster -> Show it in the header

I like how folks from Bun focus on the fact that they are a faster library.

They show the benchmark as the key visual on the homepage header.

I love it.

If you think about it how else do you really want to show that you are faster?

This is believable, especially with a link to the benchmark so that I can dig deeper.

They show competitors, they don't pretend they don't exist.

And they talk about being faster left right and center.

I mean, they drive this "we are faster" home for me.

If that was important to me, I'd check it out.

This is one of my favorite our dev tool vs competitor blog posts.

With these pages, you want to explain when you are better.

But you don't want to berate your competitor.

And above all, you want to help people make a decision.

Chances are (almost 100% ;)) that you are not better for every use case. And your developer audience knows it.

But there should be use cases, tool stacks, or situations when you are the best option.

Talk about those. Dev to dev.

@Convex did a great job in this post that I think can be a template for how to write these:

• They start by saying what is the same. That sets the context.
• Then they say good things about their competitor. Shows respect and understanding
• They follow by listing 3 key differences/situations when you should consider them
• And they go ahead and explain each of these differences deeply

After reading that post you are fairly convinced that if your situation matches the one described and if it makes sense to use it.

Love it.

An ad that doesn't feel like an ad.‍

I like that this is almost a meme.

But it still explains what the company does.

Love it.

The "Resources" tab is the most loved and hated tab for developer marketers.

Ok so the common problem is that you have lots of different resources:

• docs
• product videos
• meetup videos
• recorded webinars
• learning center guides
• blog articles that don't talk about your product
• and so much more stuff

You want to showcase them in the navbar but where do you put them?

Under product? Company? Docs?

How to make sure that people don't go to your blog to read about your product just to find out that you talk about the industry problems there?

Enter the "Resources" tab. The "Miscellaneous" of the navbar world.

And typically it is just crammed with all stuff that doesn't fit anywhere. Just like any respectable misc folder would.  

How do you deal with that?

Snyk approached it in a clear and logical way:

• Add sub-navigation
• Make it clear to devs which parts are about the product and which ones are not
• They use "Using Snyk" and "Learn & Connect" that could be extended to "Using {Product} and "Learning {Category/Problem}"

I love this (and already stole the idea for our site).

Great above the fold

The subheader explains the value proposition.

Header handles major objections:

• is it easy to implement?
• can I extend it?

Then we have 3 CTAs but they are super focused on devs: 

• Signup (using action-focused copy)
• See docs which is exactly what many devs want to do before signing up
• See examples, again exactly what most devs want to see before signing up

Then it goes on to explain how it works with a simple, static graphic.

This whole thing makes me feel peaceful.

That CTA.

You go straight for the install/download.

I don't know if you can go more developer-focused than that.

It sets the tone for the entire homepage.

And let's be honest (almost) nobody actually clicks that "Sign up" button in the hero section.

How to get people to sign up for your office hours?

Why not put it on your docs homepage?

Btw, I really like the concept of office hours.

• You give people the option to "get a demo" and answer their questions
• But you don't make them schedule anything, they can just come (or not)

You get your devrels or product to do those weekly and then you just have to figure out how to get people there.

Classic options are to put info in onboarding sequences, in the app, or on the website hello bar.

But Flatfile had another idea. They put it in their docs homepage header.

I find this idea brilliant as many people who browse your docs (especially for the first time) are in that evaluation mode and would actually want to do that.

Plus calls to action in the docs get more respect by design ;)

When you promote your feature/product launch on Reddit, it can easily end up being "not well received" to put it mildly.

I am talking downvotes, negative comments that get upvoted  and break the discussion. Or good old crickets.

But Reddit can also be a fantastic source of audience feedback, peer validation for your product, and some of the most vocal advocates you'll ever find.

I really liked how Tom Redman from Convex directed the discussion in the Reddit thread under their laucn post:

• Transparent intro: who you are, what you know

• What you like about the tech: why you think it is valuable to the community

• Community-focused call to action: helpful, feedback-first (not conversion-first), disarming with "if I can't answer I'll ask"

The launch post itself was great too:

"Open sourcing 200k lines of Convex, a "reactive" database built from scratch in Rust" that linked to the GitHub repo.

Doesn't get much more to the point and devy than that.

Just wanted to share this classic dev tool branding campaign.

There is even a book about this from Jeff Lawson at Twilio.

But I recently saw someone share on HN that it got changed to "How can I reduce acquisition costs by 65%". Made me a bit sad.

But perhaps after years and years of working it stopped delivering any additional brand awareness/affinity.

Could they have come up with another flavor of "Ask your developer."?

Maybe. But maybe at their levels of mind share you are playing a different game.

The good thing is, you are not at that stage ;)

And f you pull off something that is 1% of the success of that famous Twilio campaign you can make your brand noticed and remembered.

I know we are in the year of doing what brings results right now. And branding campaigns may not make the cut.

But maybe we can (and should) afford to do something that helps us deliver that pipeline next year or a year after that?

What to say when you have many products? 

Dev tool companies over time grow from one product to suite of products to platforms with products built on top of the core one.

The result is that it is harder to communicate without going full-on fluff mode (my fav "built better software faster").

But for most companies, there is this core capability/product where people start.  The entry product. Why not use that?

I really liked what Stripe did on their docs page here:

• They have maaaany products: billing, tax, radar, identity etc.  
• But all of them are built on top of their core payments product
• So they focus on getting folks to start with the payments
• And make it clear that there are many other products

Even though this is docs, the same applies to homepages and other dev comms.

If you have many products, figure out what is the most important one, the one where most people enter. Focus on that. "Upsell" to other products later.

This body cross-section is just awesome.

It makes it obvious that I can connect it to my workflow.

This is a must for dev-focused pages imho.

What I like:

- there are many integrations listed

- I can see the code and that it is easy to use

- The CTA is to integration docs, awesome!

‍

This is one of my favorite header patterns for dev tools lately. Layered video visual from MUX.

So that video design pattern in here is this:

• A looped video on the right that...
• Starts by showing code (MUX video): right away I know this is for devs
• Then it shows me a player (MUX player) that shows the result of that code
• Then it goes to show the analytics (MUX data) of people viewing/interacting with that video
• Ends with all parts of the video code/player/analytics layered on top of each other to drive that this is part of one

There are a few bonus learnings here as well:

• "video infrastructure": that framing communicates that there are many tools I can pick and choose from. + it feels like Stripe for video which is a good framing in dev circles.
• "stream billions of minutes of video every day" hints at their benefit and core use case (streaming at scale)
• They show all the products Video/Player/Data right in the header making it clear what this video infrastructure means. And the layered visual explains it further.

btw I really like that branding. Custom font makes it so memorable. It is, isn't it?

Developer-focused Reddit ad. 33 upvotes, 30 comments.

So @Zesty is a company that targets devops folks and helps with cloud cost optimization.

And they decided to run Reddit ads.

So they:

• Chose the format that works with devs on (some) subreddits
• The funny message that connects to their main value prop
• Made it clear that they solve that problem in the copy
• Added clear(ish) branding

And they got 33 upvotes and 30 comments.

Some of the comments were technical.

One comment that got 67 upvotes was actually

"Okay, this ad is pretty funny"

And I agree, this is a pretty funny ad that I am sure brought them some brand awareness and clicks.

I love the design of this crossover section on the Tailwind homepage.

I see the code and the result next to each other.

I see how I can get that result with code.

It is interactive and catches my attention.

It makes me feel inspired.

Great job Tailwind team!

A classic dev tool blog call to action that is somewhat underused these days.

Was going through Martin Gontovnikas blog and found a post from a couple of years back.

He called this "Aside CTA" and the idea is this:

• You write an article about a problem X
• You don't mention your tool much (or anything) in the article
• But your product helps solve that problem
• So you add an "Aside" at the end where you say that you could also solve it with your tool

Why this can work well with devs is:

• You write a genuinely helpful article
• You don't "pollute" the article with your product
• You add value first with content
• You let people "upgrade" their solution experience with your tool
• You are explicit about what your tool does and what the content does.

Definitely a classic that is worth trying.

Read Gonto's article.

Dorky joke right?

But it does two very important things beautifully.

It gets a smirk (from some people) and when it does you know you just moved someone closer to your brand.

It has a clear CTA which is hard to do with joke-format ads.

This subtle call to conversation/check us out does the job.

Love it!

Thinking about your next conference giveaway idea?

‍How about a coconut? Datafold did just that!

Coconut + logo burned on it + a person who can open them up

=

A memorable, shareable, fresh (literally), and wholesome conference experience.

And I bet it didn't cost an arm and a leg too.

It goes to show how creativity matters when planning those things.

Thinking about doing a similar thing in Poland... with potatoes of course ;)

Gonto shared an interesting play that they tried at Auth0 when he was running growth there.

So the story goes like this:

• They wanted to increase brand awareness of Auth0.
• They found influencers who were maintainers of open-source frameworks that had landing pages.
• They went to them and offered to redesign these landing pages for free.
• The trick is they redesigned it in the same branding (colors, patterns, layout) as the product (Auth0).
• That made people think those are related (even though they weren't) which increased the brand perception of Auth0.
• They also asked the influencers/maintainers if they could add retargeting pixel to the redesigned site.
• Which helped them serve relevant ads to visitors of those open-source frameworks.

I think that doing just the sponsorship for the retargeting pixel could work.

But when you add that branding consistency between the sponsored site and the product the CTR is better.

Interesting one for sure.

Make it about belonging.‍

Something some people can deeply connect with.
Nostalgia is a very strong emotion.

It feels good to be a part of something as well.

Code-style ad format on Reddit.

Code can speak louder than words (sometimes).

It makes your value prop real and concrete to the right audience. 

Simple and powerful messaging.

They say what they do. Zero fluff.

They make it easy for devs by explaining how they are different than (obvious) competitors.

They add a little developer-focused social proof.

How do you show "save time" to devs?

It is often hard as it is not objective.

But there are options.

Spotlight does it beautifully by showing two implementations next to each other solving the same task.
It is obvious which is faster and saves time.
Great stuff!

Many dev tools have complex pricing and packaging.

Say your dev tool/platform has many product offerings.

And you offer usage-based pricing but also enterprise plans but also per-product options, and additional customizations.

But you want to present it in a way that is manageable for the developer reading your pricing page.

Mux solves it this way:

• they direct people to the proper parts of the page in the header
• they give self-served prospects a link to the calculator and metering
• they give enterprise/high volume people a "talk to us" CTA
• they give people who want just a single tool (not the whole platform) a CTA to a dedicated pricing page
• they squeeze in a "start free" CTA + info about free credits
• they give navigation to FAQ, features table, and the calculator

Extended headers on pricing pages are not common as they add friction.

But sometimes adding friction is exactly what you need to do.

Mux managed to make this page (and their offering) easy to navigate by adding a little bit of friction at the beginning.

Maybe you don't browse plans right away but at least you don't waste energy (and attention) on the parts of the page that doesn't matter to you.

Good stuff.

"How fast do you ship?"

Not many dev tools answer that on their homepage. PostHog does.

In a typical (enterprise) sales process, people often ask:

• what is on your roadmap?
• how fast do you deliver new features?
• what has your product progress been like last year?

And you show them the roadmap or get someone from the product on the next call.

But I haven't yet seen dev tools talk about it on their homepage.

But why not?

Devs who want to buy self-serve want to know it almost just as much.

After all, they won't be able to twist your arm to build that custom feature cause "we are your biggest client and we need it".

I like it, it builds trust, it shows me you are transparent,

And it shows me that those features I can see on the public roadmap will come true.

Simple yet powerful CTA in the navbar resources section.

The resources section in the navbar is mostly navigational. Well, the entire navbar is ;)

But you always have that one action that is more impactful than others.  

💚 And I think that a Plauground  is a great option. You get people to see how your product works. You let people play with it and see for themselves.

Not many next actions can be as impactful as getting people to experience the product.

Especially if you are a heavier infra tool that people cannot really test out in that first session. I mean, you won't really create a realistic example of your core database in 15 minutes to see how that new tool that you just saw works.

🔥 Making this CTA "big and shiny" and showing a glimpse of what will happen after clicking is great too.

🤔 2 changes I'd test out:

• Making the copy more descriptive performs better.  Like "Launch playground", "Play with Sandbox", or something around "Run an example project/app/environment".

• Showing something more exciting about the product (or playground/tour) on that visual

But the core idea behind making the playground your core navbar resource section CTA is just great.

"See docs" is one of my favorite secondary CTA on dev-focused pages.

TailwindCSS takes it to the next level by inserting docs search right into the header CTA.

This takes devs directly to the page they are interested in rather than have them try and find things for themselves.

They could have searched the docs in the docs, of course.

But this is just this slightly more delightful developer experience that TailwindCSS is known for.

Nice post format.
I like it for dev tools that have both API and UI components.
You show code and what it produces in one view.
You can add additional things to the vis part of it for more context.

Classic Auth0 campaign coming back in 2023.

I love how simple and powerful this message is.

You can outsource a dull but important problem of authentications to them.

That is all the say.

But it is enough to get you interested and understand what they do.

Usage-based pricing is loved by devs. But has its own problems.

Ok, so first what are those problems?

Value metric:

• users don't understand your value metric
• even when they do, they cannot map it to their usage patterns.

Predictability and procurement:

• it is easier to predict the headcount than the usage
• per user pricing is obvious, everyone across the org understands it

But devs love usage-based pricing:

• it is "fair", you pay for what you use
• you can scale up/down as you need

It is great for a dev tool company:

• you align user adoption, the value created, and monetization
• as org-wide usage so does the invoice

But pulling it off is not as easy as you may think.

Choosing that value metric, packaging it, and presenting it is a struggle.

@Appsmith solved it in the following way:

• give people an option to go with a usage-based pricing
• but cap a per-user cost at $X a month
• it guarantees a better deal than a flat per-user pricing
• but gives you the predictability of a per-user pricing

Very interesting approach.

Newsjacking is a great marketing tactic.
Especially when you can connect it nicely to your product.
‍

And GitGuardian, a tool for secrets management does it beautifully here.
They ran a story on how Toyota suffered from a data breach.
Because they didn't manage their GitHub secrets properly.
‍

Brilliant.

Just an awesome billboard/ad format for a dev too company coming from Vercel.

What I like about it is:

• you catch attention with something different
• those who are in your audience get it, maybe they feel more seen
• you reinforce that your brand is very developer-focused
• you don't forget to put the "obvious" branding in there
• and there is a CTA to get people to do something

Simple and beautiful.

Btw, they actually run similar ads on Reddit and it makes a lot of sense IMHO.

Funny and memorable competitive billboard ad from @Statsig 👇

You have a big incumbent, everyone knows them. Use it to anchor your brand.

And tell the story of how you do things differently.

👀 But first, make people see you. And remember you in the next conversation when the big known brand or a category comes up.

And being funny is one of the best ways of getting attention and being remembered.

💚 I love how folks from Statsig did it here. Such a playful pun on the feature flag category incumbent Launch Darkly. Job well done.

Btw, this was shared by Oleksii Klochai in the Developer Marketing Community (you joined yet?).

Understand who is reading. Add social proof that speaks to them.

Social proof is about showing people/companies who are similar to the reader that they got success with the tool.

Company logos can be good if your reader knows and likes those companies.
But if those are random companies, I am not sure how much value does it bring.

Devs care what other devs who use your product have to say about it.
That's why I like testimonials.

Not the crafted, clean ones with features and values.
But the real stuff. Real devs sharing real stories.

Bonus points for "Okay, I get the point" button copy.
It changes from "Show more" when you click.

Nice!

Using memes in the product release.

If you understand your ICP (in this case open-source backend devs) it may be a great idea.

An additional benefit is that people may share a meme... that actually has a link to your announcement.

VS competitor ads are hard to pull off with devs. Not impossible though. 👇

So the problem is that:

• You want to list problems people have with the competing tool.
• But you don't want to come off as too negative and aggressive.
• And you want people to not think those are just "some bs claims to sell your tool"

@Convex does it really nicely here:

• They start positively by acknowledging that some people do "Love Firebase"
• They tag the competitor to build trust in the claims they are making
• They list problems people have with the competitor explicitly in voice of customer: "request waterfalls", "weak react support", "managing end-to-end consistency"
• And they link to a deeper vs competitor page for details

And even though this is by a "aggressive" competitor marketing hundreds of devs liked/bookmarked this tweet.

Good job!

How to do a dev-focused brand video and get 10M+ views?

Making a memorable brand video is hard.

Doing that for a boring tech product is harder.

Doing that to the developer audience is next level.

Postman managed to create not one but three of those brand videos that got from 4M to 10M youtube views.

The videos I am talking about are:

• "I am gonna push some buttons"
• "Together"
• "We did this"

So what did they do right?

• They are all short playful stories touching on values coming from a centralized API platform.
• They hint at the motif of space which is a clear part of Postman's branding
• They do show the actual UI of the product

Honestly, I am not exactly sure what special sauce they added but those are just great videos that you watch.

And I definitely remember them and the company which is exactly what you want to achieve with brand ads.

Interactive product tours are all the rage.

But how do you make them work for the dev audience?

How do you deal with:

• Explain your complex dev tool value proposition quickly
• Show both code and UI elements
• Make devs feel great developer experience of your product
• Push devs to the conversion action without being to pushy
• And do all that without overwhelming

That is hard.

But Vercel somehow made it.

This is by far the best product tour I have seen so far.

What I love:

• Great, clean navigation that lets me go back if I want to
• They use their slogan "Develop, Preview, Ship" to reinforce the product message
• They show both code and the UI
• The CTAs are visible but subtle enough not to distract

This product tour is what dev tool startups will aspire to for years (or months ;) ) to come.

Mark my words.

Memes that resonate with your ICP (in this case website backend devs who use PostgresSQL).

Content like this helps people find their tribe.

And then those memes can get folks to follow your account.

If you mix your content well you can then push them further down the funnel.

Need one more call to action idea for your dev tool blog?

How about starting an article with it?

Sounds weird but if done right it can work. Even with devs (or maybe especially with devs).

Earthly did and they are known for great dev-focused content.

Ok, so how does it work?

You start your article with a contextual call to action where you explain:

• Who you are and what your product does
• And how that is relevant to the content of the article
• Link out to more product-focused pages, ideally relevant to content

And then you let people read.

Those who find the topic important will remember you and/or maybe click out to see more.

I like it. It's explicit, transparent, and actually noninvasive.

The problem with presenting API is that it is hidden. It gets the job done in the background.

So it is not "attractive" in the way some other dev tools can be.

But you can:

• show the end result and how it gets the job done.
• show how easy it is to use.
• let people play with something interactive to make it real.

That is how Mux, video API, solves it.

Found this awesome crossover on their homepage.

They give you:

• devvy language that just says what it does without high-level fluff
• code, input/outputs
• end result of your API call, to make it real
• demo to get the feel real-time

Love it!

I love this video ad format from Hygraph.

They are reading and reacting to bad reviews.

I saw this in B2C but not in the dev tool B2B. Love it!

So basically how they did that campaign is:

• The marketing team finds bad product reviews.
• Most of the reviews are technical and speak about some features.
• Their employees (at least some devs in there) read them out loud on their phones.
• They react to the reviews, typically explaining what the product does and why.
• They serve it as YouTube short ads and link to the whole 5-minute video on their channel.

Through all that, you get entertained and learn something about their product. This is such a fun format to test out!

Handing #1 dev obstacle: "We can do it ourselves".

Check it out from second 0:35:

‍"I bet you're like
We can do it ourselves, it's not that hard.
We know what we're doing.

First, I hear you.
Second, are you sure?"

This is mastery.
Pointing out ignorance without alienating people.

A nice example of making navbar more developer-focused.

Ask for GitHub stars with a link to the repository.

It does three things:

• shows where your repository is and that you have something I can see
• lets me see that you have a popular repository
• reminds me that I can star it (if I am a returning user)

When selling dev tools you typically have 3 "buyer" levels:

Individual dev:

• wants to experience your value prop
• ideally wants to play/test/use the free tool
• doesn't buy tools but strongly influences buying decisions
• wants to use it right now, not talk to his boss to get a credit card, not talk to sales

Team lead:

• wants to improve teams productivity
• collaboration, developer experience, and happiness are important
• buys tools at a team-level budget
• doesn't want to go through a lengthy sales process but  swipes the card and gets the team on this week

Org lead:

• wants to improve the security and compliance of the entire eng org
• security, control, governance
• buys tools for the entire organization/enterprise
• expects a longer sales process with a lot of moving parts and needs to discuss and negotiate

How does Postman solve it?:

• packages their plans in a way that aligns with those buyers
• different plans have features needed for Dev/Team lead/Org lead
• CTAs are exactly what each buyer wants: Use > Buy > Talk

They even go the extra mile. Something I didn't see too often.

They understand their customer's reality and identified one more level between Org and Team.

Basically a department-level unit that probably has multiple teams but is not at the organization/enterprise level.

I really like what they did hear. Solid.

Not sure how to find developers for audience research interviews?

Sometimes all you need is ask.

I really liked what the founders of this startup did:

• Found relevant subreddits where folks working in MLOps/DevOps and ML are (for example r/mlops)
• Clearly explained why they wanted it: building a startup and doing exploratory analysis
• Clearly explained what they wanted: interviews with mlops/devop/data scientists
• Clearly explained what they will give for it: cash, as simple as that

Sometimes you don't need to overthink it and can just ask.

A docs header worth a thousand words.

For a dev platform or infrastructure tool it is hard to explain where you fit, what you do quickly, and how you connect to existing components quickly.  

Hopsworks docs team does a great job here.

So instead of using words, they use a diagram:

• You get a solid overview of where your tool/platform fits larger context
• It shows you which part of the workflow/infra the platform solves
• Every part of the diagram is a clickable docs link
• Shows where you can deploy it
• Shows what backend you can use.

All of that in a single diagram.

Now that is a dev-focused header visual.

This is a very nteresting approach from PubNub.

They could have published an article on their blog and posted a link to Reddit.

Instead, they just posted an entire article, 3851 words . That post got 360 upvotes and made it to the top of r/rust. Wow.

Never seen anyone do that before but I like this. It could be great:

• when you want to drive discussion around a topic in the community you care about.
• Or when you want to rank for a keyword you couldn't possibly rank for on your own (Reddit will index it later at their 95 Domain Authority).  

Some things I also liked:

• To the point title, and devs really like a real improvement/debugging story
• The use of emojis in the title grabs attention and stops the scroll. Slightly controversial on Reddit but worth a try.

• In the feed, it looks like a deep (long) technical post. That intro is also fantastic because it does tell you what they did which suggests there will be more juicy details later. Love that.

• Shows a sneak peek of a performance comparison chart that you just want to see

• The post has images, code snippets, sections etc. Like a proper article. Also, you kind of need that at 3851 words ;)

Super interesting approach that I want to test out myself.

Which feature/product to show in the header?

How about all?

Many dev tool products are feature-rich. And you want to show those awesome features.

But it is easy to overwhelm the reader when showing so much info.

That is why I really like the header tabs pattern that @PostHog uses:

• You have clickable tabs with product names + descriptive icons
• Copy + Supporting visual (UI, code etc) and a call to action in each tab
• Supporting visuals are in vastly different colors to make it obvious you switch tabs.

This pattern is especially powerful when you want to communicate completeness.

Posthog definitely wants to do that. If you are on that train I'd strongly suggest considering/testing it.

There are three CTAs actually.

Common knowledge suggests doing one, maybe two, they do 3:

• build
• see docs
• see examples

Devs want relevant and practical.

Also, devs love docs and examples and check them before signing up.

Action-focused copy is great as well.

In dev tools, you really can solve the problem for a narrow market and extend to adjacent markets over time.

‍Use that -> Snyk did.

Their value proposition stayed pretty much the same for 7 years!

"Find and fix vulnerabilities in open-source software you use."

But the market they served got so much bigger over time:

• They started super narrow with just one Javascript framework, Node.js
• They focused on solving that pain very well before moving to the entire Javascript language
• Then to other popular languages like Ruby, Java, and Python
• Then to the entire Open Source dependencies
• Then fast forward to today and they do Open source + containers +IaC

Again, their core value prop is the same in 2023 as it was in 2016.

But their target market (and revenue share) grew by... a lot ;)

Isn't that just beautiful marketing-wise?

So the takeaway is this:

Start narrow, solve the problem, and extend to other frameworks/languages/tech can still work.