Dev tool marketing campaign examples

brand
campaigns
ads
billboards

"What good is bad data" from Segment

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 ๐ŸŽ‰!

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...

campaigns
video

Cloudflare TV

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.

campaigns
social posts
swag
linkedin

Big prize swag campaign from NannyML

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 ย 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.

campaigns
developer experience
copy
vs competitor
landing page

VS page format from Ably

Vs pages are a classic SaaS marketing.

But I like how Ably adjusts them to the developer audience:

  • For each criterion, theyย say why it matters
  • Theyย link to their resourcesย to extend further why Ably works great there
  • Theyย use a lot of developer jargonย to make it feel like a dev wrote it for devs
  • They go over a lot of different categories to make this comparisonย deep enough to be valuableย for the buyer
video
youtube
campaigns
brand

"Between to Nerds" Video from SST

This is one of the most interesting content pieces I have seen in dev tools recently ๐Ÿ‘‡

Comes from @SST and believe it or not is a comedy video created to promote integrations.

That's right.

So SST integrated with Astro and instead of creating "just another how-to use X+Y" video they created this:

  • A copy of "Between Two Ferns" comedy show
  • With one of the founders of Astro framework which they integrated recently
  • Where they don't really talk about integration too much ;)
  • And reportedly got a ton of signups from this

It was a fun brand play but got way more views than a tutorial ever could.

And it connected with their audience in a human way that will be remembered (and shared).

Nice.

copy
campaigns
hacker news
product launch

fly.io Hacker News launch description

Hacker News developer audience doesn't love promotion to put it mildly.

But some dev tool companies manage to make this audience their biggest ally.

Fly.io is one of those companies.

And they had a super successful product launch a few years back. ย 

So how did they do it?

  • "Who"
  • "Problem"
  • "What" and "How"
  • *Speak "dev to dev". Spec no fluff.

Let's go through these in detail.

Who are you? Why should I listen?

  • show your face
  • Say who are you and
  • hint at why should I trust you

What is the problem really?

  • Describe how you discovered the problem
  • Agitate that pain, explain technicalities deeply
  • Share your stories dealing with that problem (ideally obvious solutions that didn't work)

What does your product do and how does it work?

  • Say what it is, like a technical spec.
  • Say what it does, like really, low-level job to be done
  • Explain how you solve it, be deeply technical

Speak "dev to dev"

  • use technical jargon and relevant terms: "docker image", "global router", "VMs", "root filesystem"
  • don't explain like I am 5, explain like I am 5 years in my dev journey "we convert docker images into a root filesystem, boot tiny VMs..."
  • Don't use words that don't really mean anything and just take space. Speak MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive)

By doing it this way you have a chance of gaining love from the prolific HN crowd.

Fly.io definitely did, and is still reaping rewards with constant HN exposure.

campaigns
product led growth
free tools

Hacker News search by Algolia

Algolia gets over 80% of referral traffic from a single free tool they created called Search Hacker News.

But why does it work so well for them?

Hacker News doesn't really have a native search experience.

Algolia gives devs an amazing search experience out of the box.

So folks from Algolia created their own website where you can search Hackernews... with Algolia search engine.

Of course, when you click on "Search by Algolia" you get directed to the website and can learn how to set up a similar search, which you have just used yourself.

What I love about this:

  • solves a real problem for the audience Algolia is after (many software devs read hacker news)
  • it shows rather than tells how Algolia's search works. And it works amazingly.
  • it feels almost like an extension of HackerNews with the same brand colors and design.

And looking at the results it delivers.

brand
campaigns
billboards
ads

"Ask your developer" billboards from Twillio

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?

video
campaigns
brand

Auth0 campaign: Make login our problem. Not yours.

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.

โ€

campaigns
github
product led growth

GitHub PR growth loop from Snyk

Beautiful growth loop that uses GitHub PRs to spread awareness even internally in the org.

And just one dev needs to sign up for the product to start it.

Works like this:

  • New user signs up for Snyk
  • they connect their GitHub account
  • Snyk finds vulnerabilities in their repositories
  • Snyk-bot creates Snyk-branded PR to fix them
  • other devs in the org see and interact with the PR
  • some follow links to check out Snyk
  • some of them sign up for Snyk

Heard about it onย Lenny's podcast episode with Ben Williams (the story starts at 20:53)

... and then signed up to see the actual PR.

I really love this one as it allows you to spread inside the organization even if everything is on-prem and you never get to see it.

Those PRs are just working behind the scenes doing marketing for you.

Brilliant!

campaigns

GitHub Skyline campaign

Very cool project.

You type in your GitHub name and see your history in 3d.

  • engaging 3d viz
  • cool music
  • button to share it on Twitter

And Voila!

You have an intrinsically viral brand awareness campaign.

Just brilliant.

brand
campaigns
ads
billboards

snowflake billboards

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.

campaigns
seo
product led growth
free tools

Snyk Advisor SEO growth loop

Great example of programmatic SEO from Snyk.

They created a page calledย 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.

brand
campaigns
ads
billboards

"Life is too short" campaign from New Relic

Is this brand campaign ๐Ÿ’ฉ or โค๏ธ?

I like it a lot actually.

It gets attention, it is memorable, it gets reactions. ย 

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".

copy
campaigns
brand

"There are two types of companies" from Fly.io round announcement

"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.

blog
copy
campaigns
hacker news
seo

Great "What is {my core keyword}" article from Planetscale

How to write a "What is {MY CORE KEYWORD}" article that gets to the top of HackerNews? ๐Ÿ‘‡

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:

๐—ฆ๐˜‚๐—ฝ๐—ฒ๐—ฟ ๐˜๐—ผ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ฒ ๐—ฝ๐—ผ๐—ถ๐—ป๐˜ ๐—ถ๐—ป๐˜๐—ฟ๐—ผ.

โ€ข โŒ No "In today's fast-paced data-driven world enterprises work with data" stuff.
โ€ข โœ… Justย ย "Learn what database sharding is, how sharding works, and some common sharding frameworks and tools."

๐—›๐—ถ๐˜๐˜๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ด ๐—ธ๐—ฒ๐˜†๐˜„๐—ผ๐—ฟ๐—ฑ๐˜€ ๐˜„๐—ต๐—ถ๐—น๐—ฒ ๐—ฏ๐˜‚๐—ถ๐—น๐—ฑ๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ด ๐—ฟ๐—ฎ๐—ฝ๐—ฝ๐—ผ๐—ฟ๐˜ ๐˜„๐—ถ๐˜๐—ต ๐˜๐—ต๐—ฒ ๐—ฑ๐—ฒ๐˜ƒ ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ๐—ฎ๐—ฑ๐—ฒ๐—ฟ.

๐Ÿ’š Speaking peer to peer, not authority-student:

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

๐—จ๐˜€๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ด ๐—ท๐—ฎ๐—ฟ๐—ด๐—ผ๐—ป ๐—ฎ๐—ป๐—ฑ ๐˜‚๐—ป๐—ฑ๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐˜€๐˜๐—ฎ๐—ป๐—ฑ๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ด ๐˜†๐—ผ๐˜‚๐—ฟ ๐—ฎ๐˜‚๐—ฑ๐—ถ๐—ฒ๐—ป๐—ฐ๐—ฒ

Things like:

โ€ข "Partitioning has existed โ€“ especially in OLAP setups"
โ€ข "Sifting through HDFS partitions to find the missing snapshot "

๐—”๐—ฐ๐˜๐˜‚๐—ฎ๐—น๐—น๐˜† ๐—ฒ๐˜…๐—ฝ๐—น๐—ฎ๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ด ๐˜๐—ฒ๐—ฐ๐—ต๐—ป๐—ถ๐—ฐ๐—ฎ๐—น๐—น๐˜† ๐—ต๐—ผ๐˜„ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ด๐˜€ ๐˜„๐—ผ๐—ฟ๐—ธ

๐Ÿ”ฅ Look at the section "How database sharding works under the hood" with subsections:

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

๐ŸŽ ๐—•๐—ผ๐—ป๐˜‚๐˜€: ๐—ฝ๐—น๐˜‚๐—ด ๐—ถ๐—ป ๐˜†๐—ผ๐˜‚๐—ฟ ๐—ฝ๐—ฟ๐—ผ๐—ฑ๐˜‚๐—ฐ๐˜ ๐—ด๐—ฒ๐—ป๐˜๐—น๐˜†

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.

campaigns
copy
linkedin

Meme focused on product value from Datree

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.

ads
copy
vs competitor
campaigns
twitter

Vs competitor Twitter ad from Convex

VS competitor ads are hard to pull off with devs. Not impossible though. ๐Ÿ‘‡

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!

campaigns
hacker news

Newsjacking by GitGuardian

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

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.
โ€

Brilliant.

campaigns
copy
developer experience
ads
reddit

"We blew our budget on X" format

Funny ad, that makes fun of ads.โ€

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

  • docs
  • code examples
  • integration
  • backend
  • UI
video
youtube
campaigns
brand

"Together" video campaign from Postman

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.

copy
campaigns
vs competitor
blog

Convex vs Firebase blog

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.

campaigns
hacker news

Early CockroachDB articles on Hacker News

๐—›๐—ผ๐˜„ ๐˜๐—ผ ๐—ฐ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ฒ ๐—ด๐—ผ๐—ผ๐—ฑ ๐˜๐—ฒ๐—ฐ๐—ต๐—ป๐—ถ๐—ฐ๐—ฎ๐—น ๐—ฐ๐—ผ๐—ป๐˜๐—ฒ๐—ป๐˜ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ฎ๐˜ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ฒ ๐—›๐—ฎ๐—ฐ๐—ธ๐—ฒ๐—ฟ ๐—ก๐—ฒ๐˜„๐˜€ ๐—ฎ๐˜‚๐—ฑ๐—ถ๐—ฒ๐—ป๐—ฐ๐—ฒ ๐—น๐—ถ๐—ธ๐—ฒ๐˜€?

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

๐—ง๐—ต๐—ฎ๐˜ ๐˜๐˜†๐—ฝ๐—ถ๐—ฐ๐—ฎ๐—น๐—น๐˜† ๐—บ๐—ฒ๐—ฎ๐—ป๐˜€:

  • 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?

๐—ข๐—ป๐—ฒ ๐—ผ๐—ณ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ฒ ๐—ฝ๐—น๐—ฎ๐˜†๐—ฏ๐—ผ๐—ผ๐—ธ๐˜€ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ฎ๐˜ ๐˜€๐—ผ๐—บ๐—ฒ ๐˜๐—ฒ๐—ฐ๐—ต๐—ป๐—ถ๐—ฐ๐—ฎ๐—น ๐—ณ๐—ผ๐˜‚๐—ป๐—ฑ๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐˜€ ๐—ฑ๐—ฒ๐—ฝ๐—น๐—ผ๐˜†๐—ฒ๐—ฑ ๐˜„๐—ฎ๐˜€ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ถ๐˜€:

  • 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. ย 

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

๐—˜๐˜…๐—ฎ๐—บ๐—ฝ๐—น๐—ฒ๐˜€ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ฎ๐˜ ๐—ต๐—ถ๐˜ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ฒ ๐˜๐—ผ๐—ฝ ๐—ผ๐—ณ ๐—›๐—ก:

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

video
youtube
ads
campaigns
brand

Postman "We did this" campaign video

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.

campaigns
product led growth

Algolia search widget in fontawesome

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:

  • They gave away their search box for free (under conditions)
  • They made sure that folks who do get it for free have some (ideally a lot of) overlap with their target audience.
  • People who added that search box got the branded "Powered by Algolia" version of it
  • Some devs who used the sites with the Algolia search box liked the search and went to their site
  • Some of them started using it and spreading the word further

And the sites that brought the most traffic were:

  • Hacker News search (that is not exactly the widget but a standalone site)
  • Fontawesome (site with fonts for devs)
  • Open-source documentation sites (they give away free docsearch to OS projects)
  • SteamDB (gaming site)

I love this tactic as it aligns:

  • the value their product provides
  • the value that site users get
  • the value that the company gets from developers finding out about it

Win Win Win

When you find those "Win Win Win" tactics/strategies you are golden.

ads
campaigns
video
youtube
brand

"I'm gonna push some buttons" video campaign from Postman

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.

campaigns

Open-source project landing page redesigns (almost) for free

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)ย as the product (Auth0).
  • That made people think those are related (even though they weren't)ย 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.

Iย 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.

campaigns
seo
product led growth

Product-led SEO tactic from Cronjob

Great SEO tactic.

What folks from Cronitor did is:

  • For every combination of "cron +" they created a website
  • Those simple websites rank for particular keywords like "cron every 11 minutes"
  • When you land on the page you get a command you need that solves your problem
  • And you get a nice explanation of their paid tool for monitoring cron jobs

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

โ€

campaigns
developer experience
swag
brand

Promo T-shirt design from GitGuardian

There are a lot of boring vendor t-shirts at conferences.

And they get boring results.

I like this bold design from GitGuardian:

  • they go for anime which is loved by many devs
  • it feels and looks like an anime t-shirt, not a vendor t-shirt
  • they use their core message "Keep secrets out of your source code"

Nice.