VS competitor ads are hard to pull off with devs. Not impossible though. 👇
So the problem is that:
@Convex does it really nicely here:
And even though this is by a "aggressive" competitor marketing hundreds of devs liked/bookmarked this tweet.
Good job!
How to design the navbar product tab? This is what @PostHog does 👇
Figuring out what to put in the navbar is tricky:
The "Product" tab is especially tricky.
It can get overloaded with a ton of content.
I like how Posthog approached it:
I like it.
In a mature category, it is safe to assume that people know about other tools.
Especially devs.
I love how Axiom owns its unique selling point and how it stands out from the competition.
Takes guts but I love it.
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:
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...
Action-focused copy is usually better than "sign up".
But sometimes it is hard to find a good copy for this.
Some teams like Vercel or Auth0 do "Start building "
But that doesn't always work.
I really like this "Get API keys" CTA copy.
Now for the Hero section I really like those two CTAs:
Really great job imho.
There are a lot of boring vendor t-shirts at conferences.
And they get boring results.
I like this bold design from GitGuardian:
Nice.
Great SEO tactic.
What folks from Cronitor did is:
This can be used for many dev-focused tools as by definition they use commands which can be templated.
I've heard about it originally from Harry Dry over at https://marketingexamples.com/seo/cronitor
What to put in the header when your dev tool does a lot?
I like how Appsmith approaches it.
In their case, they have multiple use cases they want to showcase.
But you could use the same idea for many features or products.
Show multiple clickable tabs:
A bonus idea is the "Try cloud" | "Self-hosted" CTA.
It communicates right away that you can deploy that dev tool anywhere.
If the self-hosted deployment is important to your customers let them know.
You don't want them to look for it and drop from the page trying to find the FAQ.
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.
It's a nice template for ads on socials.
So you have:
Ideally, I'd make it dark to stand out in the feed and make the CTA about that value as well.
But still, great ad imho.
I like how this post shows:
All in one visual post.
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:
All of that in a single diagram.
Now that is a dev-focused header visual.
Beautiful mockery of classic conversion tactics from PostHog website.
So what do we have here:
I have to admit I chuckled ;)
And I bet many devs who don't think of marketing very highly chucked too.
That builds rapport. (hopefully) makes you one of the tribe rather than another faceless corpo.
BTW, they used it as a bottom of the homepage call to action.
I like it.
Most of the people who scrolled there are not going to buy anyway.
But they may share the website with someone who will.
Good in-place code pattern.
I can go and see different code snippets without moving to other parts of the website.
At the same time, I can read explanations and value propositions.
I like how "view documentation" is such a strong CTA with so much going on here already.
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:
So what did they do right?
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.
Fantastic all-text Reddit ad from Latitude.
Dev ads are hard. Promotion on Reddit is harder. Running a dev ad on Reddit that gets 50 comments and 90 likes is expert-level hard.
But folks from Latitude managed 🔥
They used one of my favorite Reddit ad formats: all text.
Here is what I liked:
Great execution. Chapeau bas Latitude.
Vs pages are a classic SaaS marketing.
But I like how Ably adjusts them to the developer audience:
"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.
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.
How to communicate the flexible part of your plan?
Many dev tools have 3 plans:
Especially the ones doing some flavor of product-led-sales or open-source go-to-market.
Now, the Team plan is often a self-served version.
And for many dev tools, this part is partially or entirely usage-based.
So how do you present it?
You can just have "+ what you use" and explain it in the big table below.
But if you have just one usage dimension then why not do it here?
Resend does it beautifully communicating right away that it starts at 20$ / month and grows with the amount of emails you send.
Very clear. Very nice.
Subtle but effective dev blog CTA -> info box.
Basically a plain article in-text CTA but there is something special about it.
It looks like a docs info box.
It is not a "buy now" style call to action but rather a subtle "you may want to know about X" push.
But for it to really feel like an info box it needs to connect to the section of the section of the article around it.
Otherwise, it will just feel like an intrusive ad anyway.
PlanetScale does a great job here.
They link the part of the article about the sharding library Vitess with their product that was built on top of it.
It feels natural and I am sure it gets clicks and if not then product awareness.
Explain a concept clearly.
Good visual with concrete numbers makes this example easy to understand.
Because it is beautifuly explained people want to share this with their network to be perceived as helpful (and smart).
Interesting dev blog CTA idea from V7.
CTAs in technical articles is a tricky subject:
I like how V7 approached it here:
What I'd change/test is making this CTA not a generic value prop but something closely connected to the rest of the article.
Create a connection with your ideal customer profile.
"Wrong answers only" questions are great for that imho.
Devs like diagrams.
When you explain a complex concept in one diagram it is just very shareable.
If you are interested in reading more there is an entire "blog post" when you click see more.
Just a very solid content format.
When selling dev tools you typically have 3 "buyer" levels:
Individual dev:
Team lead:
Org lead:
How does Postman solve it?:
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.
Is this brand campaign 💩 or ❤️?
I like it a lot actually.
It gets attention, it is memorable, it gets reactions.
And It does speak to a product message: that you have better developer experience than other tools.
It definitely beats flavors of "5x developer productivity".
How to show integrations on your dev tool homepage?
Every dev tool needs to integrate with other libraries in the space.
And you want to show how well integrated with the ecosystem you are.
But you ctually want to do a bit more than that.
You want devs to see how easy / flexible / clean it would be for them to use it.
That is why instead of showing just logos from your ecosystem it is good to show the code too.
Meilisearch does that beautifully:
I am sure this is getting more clicks than just a list of logos.
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:
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.
I like that this is both strong and subtle.
It comes right after I've delivered a smell of value with a technical intro.
And I can see that there is more value to come after thanks to the table of contents.
The CTA itself feels like an info box in the docs rather than a typical subscribe CTA.
Good stuff.
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 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 ;)
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.
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:
Just a nice little tactic but I bet it squeezed a bit more of that ROI juice that we all need in 2023 ;)
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:
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.
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?).
Devs have a love/hate relationship with "Book a demo" call to action.
Mostly hate though.
Especially if what they want is:
Let's just say that sitting through an hour demo call with a salesperson just to get the pricing is not what most devs love to do with their time.
But there are moments in the buyer journey when devs do want to have that live session:
Then, having a live session/demo is the fastest way to move forward.
@PostHog handles this dev journey reality nicely with:
This approach solves both scenarios really nicely.
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:
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.
Great above the fold
The subheader explains the value proposition.
Header handles major objections:
Then we have 3 CTAs but they are super focused on devs:
Then it goes on to explain how it works with a simple, static graphic.
This whole thing makes me feel peaceful.
A nice example of making navbar more developer-focused.
Ask for GitHub stars with a link to the repository.
It does three things:
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.
Show how product components fit together.
A good diagram is such a good solution to that.
They use the same colors and eyebrow copy that was used for body sections.
It all clicks now, I get the full picture.
I like how this starts with a [WHAT IT IS ABOUT] scroll stopper.
That is coupled with a big block of code that has:
(presumably) when you click "See more" you get the rest of the text post.
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.
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:
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 ;)
Classic widget PLG loop.
Algolia really crashed it with these. Here is how they made it so successful.
Some time ago I did some research on Algolia marketing looking for gems. Found quite a few as they are truly amazing at this.
One angle that is bringing a lot of traffic to their site is that classic PLG widget.
So what they did is:
And the sites that brought the most traffic were:
I love this tactic as it aligns:
Win Win Win
When you find those "Win Win Win" tactics/strategies you are golden.
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!
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!
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:
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.
Sometimes you have an article, report, or event you want to drive people to.
And it is important that they read it.
What Plaid did here is an interesting way of putting it right in the hero section without making it overwhelming or distracting.
I like it.
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:
Afaik it was a big hit and I can definitely see why.
📒 A few more notes:
btw, I read about it on DX Tips. You want to check out that article on dev conferences from DX Tips
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:
But the core idea behind making the playground your core navbar resource section CTA is just great.
Really good product navbar tab from Supabase.
The product tab in your navbar is likely the most visited one on your site.
And there are a million ways of organizing information in there.
But ultimately, you want to help people understand what this product is about at a glance.
Even before they click. Even if they never click.
And how do you explain your product to devs?
By answering common questions:
Supabase does it really nicely:
Very solid pattern imho.
What I'd improve:
Mux does a few things beautifully in this header.
Value proposition:
Animated visual that is really good for dev tools:
A classic "It doesn't suck" campaign.
Afaik, Barebones ran the first version of this campaign 20 years ago and it was a huge success.
It is so simple, it just speaks to that inner skeptic.
It doesn't say we are the best, we revolutionize software.
It says it doesn't suck.
That is way more believable and makes me think that there is a dev on the other side of that copy.
And there is something cool about this message that makes me want to wear it to the next conference.
Good stuff.
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.
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.
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 ;)
I really like this Reddit ad from Sentry.
Powerful simplicity.
They don't do:
• long value-based copy
• fancy, in-your-face CTAs
• creative that feels "professional
They go for:
• focus on the pain
• creative that speaks to that pain
• low-key CTA ", get Sentry" rather than "Get Sentry Free!"
• building rapport with the dev with copy "If seeing this in React makes you 🤮"
And through simplicity and focus they deliver a message:
• Stack traces in React are not much fun
• They seem to understand that
• Sentry helps you solve that
Good format.
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!
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?
"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:
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.
I like how they use the black dot to show the mouse movements in the UI.
Simple but powerful and clear.
I love this copy. It answers:
It doesn't talk about the value as it is obvious to devs.
Obviously, it will save time and make things safer.
Don't talk about it.
Good format of the tweet copy.
Start with the hook.
Then validate it with more story.
Then open a knowledge gap with a thread.
I like this idea of showing how your dev tool works.
With developers, you almost have to explain how it works on your homepage.
Many products do some version of Step 1 -> Step 2 -> Step 3 -> Success.
I really like how @SST approached it with a timeline.
I find it more engaging than those disconnected steps.
And when I follow this journey the final and logical step is to try it out. Get started.
Looking for a good dev-focused case study format?
People tell you to follow a classic Hero > Problem > Solution > Results.
They tell you to show numbers, talk value, etc.
And it is true. Great format.
But packaging this for devs is hard.
For example, putting numbers in there, and framing it in a "save 28min every week" is a recipe for losing trust with that dev reader.
That is if you can even get those numbers from your customers.
I like how @LaunchDarkly solves it.
Hero section:
Case study body:
They keep the content down to earth and devy but still frame it in a value-focused way.
I like that that they speak in the currency that devs care about.
Wasted time.
Before: "Took 2-3 weeks to ship"
After: "Can ship experiments every day"
The cool thing is you could actually use this hero section format and then have a more technical user story below. By doing that you could speak to the why and how.
That depends on your target reader for this page of course.
Anyhow, I do like this format and I am planning to take it for a spin.
There are three CTAs actually.
Common knowledge suggests doing one, maybe two, they do 3:
Devs want relevant and practical.
Also, devs love docs and examples and check them before signing up.
Action-focused copy is great as well.
How did this super basic ad get so much engagement on Reddit?
First of all, the value prop is succinct, to the point, and says what it is.
No "streamlining", "boosting", or "democratizing" is involved.
No clever tagline or pains, benefits, or values just says what it is.
But what it is, is "free and open-source" which is what many devs, especially on Reddit want to hear.
And Heroku is a known brand so if you know what Heroku does, you know what Kubero does.
I liked that they linked out to the GitHub project too.
Not 100% sure if that would perform better than a landing page or home. But I see how it feels more in sync with the channel you are running your ads on.
The screenshot? I don't like it but perhaps it doesn't matter as much here?
What do you think?
Oh, and if you read the comments, you'll see that people actually talked about the project, said that they liked the ad etc.
Good stuff.
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:
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.
Nice and clean code example.
Clear copy, what it does etc.
Calls to action with links to Github and website.
Really long code example which looks great when clicked on.
Very cool project.
You type in your GitHub name and see your history in 3d.
And Voila!
You have an intrinsically viral brand awareness campaign.
Just brilliant.
I like the design of this crosshead.
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:
The idea behind this conversion play is to put an "Aside CTA" that is unrelated to the content early in the article.
And get that clicked.
But obviously, if you do that it will be pushy and intrusive.
So?
Nevo David from Novu shared this idea on one of the podcasts:
Btw, Nevo says that cat memes work best.
How to present many features at once?
Sometimes your dev tool has many features/products that you want to show.
❌ Showing all of them as separate sections doesn't work with more than 3. It just gets too long very quickly.
✅ You can go with the tabs pattern where each tab has copy+visual for a feature.
💡 But there is another option that makes a ton of sense when you have many features to show.
Interactive tiles of different sizes.
💚 I like the implementation of that pattern coming from Clerk:
That pattern can work really well on blogs or learning centers too but I think we're going to see more of it on dev tool websites.
"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:
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.
This is how you write dev tool JTBD blog posts.
Masterclass of writing this type of content from @WorkOS imho.
Deep 2000 word guide that explains how to add webhooks the your application.
Goes into examples, best practices, everything.
One thing it doesn't do?
It doesn't push the product left right and center.
In fact, the only CTA is hidden in the very last sentence of the very last section.
Why?
Because most likely, the reader's intent is around understanding the problem at this point.
They want to understand what adding webhooks to their app really means from the practitioner's standpoint.
And they did that beautifully.
Could you have pushed the product a bit more? Sure.
But by answering the actual questions devs came here for they managed to build trust.
And I am sure got their fair share of click-throughs and signups anyway.
Very nice design solution on the homepage.
Classic communication of the world before using your tool and the world after.
Really liked how it felt messy before.
And is nice and clean after.
How to bring attention and trust to a feature section?
Add a testimonial.
Ideally, it should talk about that feature to make your message even stronger.
I like how Appsmith made it animated and it just makes you look.
And you read the testimonial and look at the feature above it.
Good stuff.
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:
By doing that they seem to have billboards everywhere, fight ad fatigue, and stay top of mind.
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.
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.
Marketing through free tools is powerful. And Auth0 implemented it beautifully.
In an old article from Gonto I read about some free tools that Auth0 created years ago.
And those tools are still generating traffic and leads today.
And they are helpful to developers and make the Auht0 brand even more appreciated by the community.
One of those tools is JSON Web Token Debugger.
So how this works for them is this:
Now, Gonto suggested that is important to do it on a separate domain to make it less promotional.
I am not sold on that especially when I know there are companies like @VEED.IO that build "SEO tool clusters" in the /tools/ subfolder of their page and crush it in search.
But either way, if you can solve a real problem your target devs have, no matter how small, you should be able to get some developer love (and $) from the value you created.
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.
How to run developer-focused Reddit ads that get upvoted?
Reddit is well known for anti-promotional sentiments.
Just post something along the lines "you can solve that with our dev tool" and see.
So running ads on Reddit feels even more like a no-no.
Especially if you add problems with bot clicks and attribution as most devs will have some sort of blocks.
But you know your audience is on Reddit.
And for some of us, it may very well be the only social platform they are on.
So what do you do?
This is how @Featureform approached it to get almost 100 upvotes on an ad:
If you are going for brand awareness rather than a direct conversion those types of ads can work very well.
I liked it for sure.
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.
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 do the same for the UI later in the video.Just a really clean way of explaining things. Nice!
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.
Digital Ocean went for an ad for the Hactoberfest in a tricky place.
To keep it in the medium that fits YouTube shorts they:
I think doing YouTube shorts is an interesting opportunity in a yet unsaturated market (as of 2022).
And doing ads that fit that medium so nicely is an art.
Good job DO!
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:
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.
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:
This is a job well done:
And they could have done:
This is how to promote an event. LOVED IT!
There are many things that I like about 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.
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.
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 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:
So what did they do right?
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.
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.
Modal with updates.
Adding a modal with "what happened lately" for users who come back to the app.
Good idea for re-activating users by showing new features or examples.
+ a link to a deeper resource.
A great example of a quote-style ad.
I like it because:
Great stuff.
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:
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.