Contents
My favorite developer marketing channels
One of the top things that people ask me is "Which channels should I choose to market my dev tool?".
There are many, too many for you to explore especially if you are an early-stage dev tool startup.
So you should focus and really test out a channel before you jump (or add) another one. And most people don't give them a proper go.
They try it out a little bit, don't see immediate results, and jump to the next shiny thing.
Now, how do you focus and choose the ones that you should try first?
The "ideal scenario" answer I give people is to ask your ideal users.
While it is not a full answer, especially at the beginning, I stand by it. Whenever you have a chance, ask your ideal developer (user or not), where you hang out online, and follow up.
For example, if they say Linkedin ask, who do you follow, what do you like about them? If they say Youtube, ask how do you find good videos to watch.
Even if it is just one sentence at the end of each conversation you can get over time it will build out a solid user understanding.
Another quick thing is to add an open-form question in your registration flow asking "How did you find out about us?". That will give you some insights. Not a silver bullet but helpful.
Ok, but say you don't yet have that many users or can't ask or you just want a better answer from me ;)
Ask yourself this: "Do people search for a solution to this problem right now?".
And there seem to be two groups with not much in between:
- For some startups I talk to the answer is obviously yes. Their users search for "How to do {job to be done}?" and end up on their site (eventually).
- For others, it is not really. They are building completely new categories, changing the way teams work. Disrupting.
Both are fine, they just require different approaches. The way I see it:
- The first group should rely heavily on search (both Google and Youtube), answering questions in the communities, and explaining how your solution is better than X.
- The second group needs to "go out there and evangelize". I am talking about building personal brands on socials, running social ads, going on podcast tours and conferences, sent Pull Requests to open-source repos.
So think for a second about which group you fall under and proceed accordingly. Ideally, you'd do all of those things but your resources are limited so proceed accordingly.
Ok, without further ado here are my top channels.
Devs themselves (word of mouth)
Yep, I said it before and I will say it again.
The best people at marketing to developers are the developers themselves.
So make sure that your product experience is good enough for devs to share with others.
Also, remember that if it is really bad they will share that too.
SEO content
As a wise man once said “Most devs google, some search on duckduckgo” so SEO is important.
Devs go about their day solving problems, finding new problems, and looking for solutions to those problems. They search and you want to get in front of them.
Now, what do they search for?
A good place to start looking is:
- How to do X: Jobs to be done / use case type content. Check out how DigitalOcean does this at scale.
- Tools for X: Listing tools in a category with some framework for comparing them.
- X alternatives: Options for switching from a particular tool.
- X vs Z: Comparing your tool with a competitor or two competitors.
But not all content is meant to be searched.
Some examples from my gallery:
New Relic vs Datadog comparison page
Blog content (non SEO)
You can write pieces that have a different distribution in mind than SEO.
Opinion pieces or deep dives on a particular tech written by devs are great examples of a valuable content that will not rank.
But if you write non-SEO content, make sure to understand how it will get distributed.
Cause without a distribution strategy no one will read it.
You can write articles with a particular (sub) Reddit or Slack channel in mind. Or you can write for your newsletter or Twitter follower audience.
Or write things that you know have a good chance of getting on top of Hacker News.
Tailscale writes incredible content that constantly gets picked up by someone on HN and gets them great results.
You can also rely on content platforms to distribute it for you.
Some examples from my gallery:
Great article in-text CTA from DigitalOcean
Newsletter subscribe CTA on Interrupt blog
Developer-focused blog slide-in CTA from Snyk
Developer-focused blog CTA from Snyk
Content syndication (Dev.to, Medium, Hacker Noon)
If you are writing pieces that can get you results on their own (as in you can just post them anywhere and they will bring people to your site) you can try content platforms like Dev.to.
You don’t own the channel, and can’t pull many conversion levers you have on your site but they will distribute your content to their audience.
And many folks go to those places to consume content and rely on the platforms to surface relevant, interesting stuff for them.
GitHub (open source repos)
A tactic I particularly like is basically this.
Heard about it on this podcast episode "Growing with open source projects - Josh Thurman from Uffizzi" but saw it in many variations.
Anyhow it goes like this:
- You go to popular open-source repositories
- You create integration and connect your product
- You submit a Pull Request doing everything you can for the OS repo maintainers (so that they don't have to)
- They agree cause it is a win for them and a win for the OS repo users
- You just gained brand awareness and trust from that OS repo users
For this to work IMHO, your product needs to have a free tier that lets those OS repo users test it out, ideally, it is visual so that people can easily see value and lightweight.
But if your product is all that, and many dev tools are, it is a really cool channel to test.
Youtube
Devs watch youtube, and many of them love video tutorials
Most devs actually use it in a similar way they use Google just to watch videos on particular problems they have.
So proceed accordingly.
There is a great resource from swyx with examples of great dev Youtube channels.
Some examples from my gallery:
Hand-drawn tutorial video style from Robusta
Hacker News
This is 6M+ devs a month afaik. So if you can pull it off and succeed here try it.
The audience is very marketing-averse but there are some ways of giving yourself a chance.
In short, speak to curiosity, go with 1st person dev-to-dev tone of voice, cut the fluff (and then cut some of that fluff again), go deeply technical (get your devs to write on things they know). And you should be fine.
Easy right? Yeah…
But some companies can do it and have really great success with this channel. I wrote an entire deep-dive into how Tailscale does marketing on Hacker News.
Some examples from my gallery:
fly.io Hacker News launch description
If there is a subreddit about the technology that is closely correlated with your user base be there.
If not in person then use something like Syften to do social listening around your product/problem/category keywords.
You want to make sure that when people search on Reddit for ”{your product} review”, or “best tools for x” your product is mentioned.
Also, more and more devs seem to search “X Reddit” on Google.
Stack Overflow
Every dev's best friend, stack overflow, is a place where every question gets answered and all the code is (almost) ready to be copy-pasted.
Not quite but you get the point ;)
And if you can have your devs be there and answer questions. Or better yet some of your devrels are already active there, then this channel can have an impact.
That said, if you don’t it may be hard to make this channel work. It is not a place to just jump in and say “You can also use our product to solve it. Does that answer your question?”.
Communities (Slack and Discord)
If there is an active slack or discord around your tech, the programming language you focus on you may want to send your devrels there.
First just look at what is happening, how people behave, and how other vendors behave.
See what “goes” and what doesn’t and they act accordingly.
Be helpful. 9 times give, 1 time take.
Oh, and spamming it with webinar links or “we wrote an amazing article on X” is likely not going to work.
Devs spend more time than they would like to admit on Twitter.
And so you want to be there.
You can use tools like Followerwonk to find relevant people or accounts to follow and interact with.
One of the best dev-focused companies at marketing on Twitter is Supabase. I once went through 4 months of their feed to extract some nuggets. They use a lot of memes to reach their dev audience of full-stack web developers.
Some examples from my gallery:
Meme tweet format from Supabase
Hand written diagram tweet format
Good Twitter thread format: nice hook
Influencers
This is a channel that is getting more and more popular.
Dev-focused companies want to use many smaller but targeted influencers to reach their audiences.
Haven’t tried this channel yet but I want to give it a go.
You may want to check out Yard which is a productized service that helps with that.
Partnerships and integrations
Typically, your dev tool is solving some problem but needs to integrate with other tools in your developer’s tool stacks.
Figure out what those tool stacks are (your product team is likely already doing that) and then look at which tools are a good marketing opportunity.
You want to find companies that are small enough to still care about you and big enough and on the rise to have an impact on your bottom line.
Paid ads
From my perspective Google search, Youtube, Twitter, EthicalAds, are good places to try.
Generally, devs don’t like ads but it doesn’t mean all of them and it doesn’t mean they don’t work. They do.
Some of the greatest developer content marketing engines like DigitalOcean use remarketing heavily.
If you can afford it and there are podcasts in your space that many users mention you may consider sponsoring the show and putting your ad in there. From my research, I found out that devs actually don’t block them (or hate them that much). You can find a long list of developer podcasts here.
By the way, I wrote extensively about developer ads here (this article even got to the top of Hacker News).
Some examples from my gallery:
G2 quote Linkedin Ad format from Algolia
YouTube shorts ad from Digital Ocean
Joke ad format with a transitional CTA from sdworx
Live events (and swag)
While live events didn’t fully recover post-pandemic and many people mention as low as 30% show-up rates vs pre-pandemic for the same events, it is still a solid option to try.
Devs still love dev events.
This post about is going deep into how to get the most out of marketing at live events from swyx.
Some examples from my gallery:
Promo T-shirt design from GitGuardian
"It doesn't suck" shirt from Bare Bones
What is next
Okay, I hope you learned a thing or two about reaching devs in their favorite channels.
Now the best thing to do is to just go at it.
If you need some inspiration this is my developer marketing examples gallery with a ton of swipe files from various marketing channels.
Good luck!
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