As you well know marketing to developers is not easy.
Especially when you are working at a dev tool startup and marketing resources are scarce. You need to do more with less.
This is where leveraging developer marketing tools, agencies, freelancers, and advisors can help you get the job done.
In this article, I focus on the strictly developer-focused ones or the ones I know people in developer marketing and advocacy use.
I give you a high level of what they do, reviews if I found them and links to deeper resources were possible.
Ok, let's do it.
Developer marketing tools
1. Krunch
GitHub and Content Analytics tool.
Pitch:
“Did my {blogs/posts/webinars/tweets/videos} bring traffic to GitHub?
💡 Million dollar question, now uncovered by digital footprint. Let data show your impact on your developer community.“
If you are optimizing the return from your GitHub repo you may want to check out this post on ranking your project in GitHub search engine.
2. Common Room
Community growth platform
Pitch:
“Gain complete visibility into engagement happening in all digital channels. Take action to deliver personalized and authentic interactions across the entire customer journey.”
Review:
3. Orbit
Community growth platform
Pitch:
“The leading Community Growth Platform
Join 7657 businesses using Orbit to grow and measure their community across any platform.”
Review:
4. Dots
Automation and analytics tool for community buildies (on Slack and Discord).
Pitch:
"Build amazing community experiences on Discord & Slack
Delight your members with interactive onboarding and support flows, and save time with detailed insights & various automations."
Reviews:
5. Syften
Social listening tool.
It monitors keywords on Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Product Hunt and many others. You can even monitor some larger slack dev communities.
Pitch:
Monitoring the web's leading communities for you
We're keeping an eye on things 24/7, so you don't have to
Review:
6. Snappify
Code snippet tool.
Pitch:
“This is the place for beautiful code snippets.
Easily explain your code and share your knowledge with the rest of the world.”
Review:
You can see a good example of using snippet-type social posts here.
7. Carbon
Code snippet tool.
Pitch:
“Create and share beautiful images of your source code.
Start typing or drop a file into the text area to get started.”
Review:
8. Excalidraw.io
Whiteboarding/drawing tool that is great for diagrams.
Pitch:
“Excalidraw is a virtual collaborative whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel to them.”
By the way, Robusta does a good job of marketing their tool via hand-drawn tutorials using Excalidraw.
9. Twemex (by Tweet Hunter)
Twitter content research tool
Pitch:
“Get more insight from Twitter
Twemex is a browser extension for Twitter that automatically surfaces the most interesting ideas.
It helps you spend less time mindlessly scrolling, and more time developing your thoughts.“
Review:
10. Tweet Hunter
A suite of tools for Twitter content creators.
Including tools for writing, scheduling, automation, and analytics.
Pitch:
“BUILD & MONETIZE YOUR TWITTER AUDIENCE.
FAST.
Get sales, growth and new networks. Faster than what you're currently trying.“
11. Blackmagic.so
Seems like a complete solution for Twitter creators.
People like Justin Welsh, Daniel Vasallo, and Simon Hoiberg say this is a game-changer.
So yeah, seems interesting.
Pitch:
“Enhanced Twitter for pro tweeters
Superior Twitter Analytics, Increase Engagements, Twitter CRM, Scheduling & Publishing”
Review:
12. Followerwonk
A tool for finding Twitter accounts by keywords, follower counts etc.
Helps to find influencers in your niche.
13. Taplio
A suite of tools for Linkedin creators.
Similar to Tweet Hunter but for Linkedin.
Pitch:
“Grow your personal brand on LinkedIn In 10min a day.
Taplio for LinkedIn - The all-in-one tool to grow your personal brand on LinkedIn
Create better LinkedIn content, schedule your posts at the right time, build new relationships and monitor all your results.”
Review:
14. EthicalAds
Developer ads network.
Pitch:
“Advertising for Developers.
That Just Works.
Connecting hand-picked advertisers with engaged developers without invasive tracking.”
I go deep into developer-focused advertising in this article.
15. Carbon Ads
Developer ad network.
Pitch:
“Reach developers and creators effortlessly.
Carbon is the best way to reach creators and developers at scale.”
16. Stack Overflow Ads
Developer ads program.
Pitch:
“Reach 100 million+ people in tech
Get the word out to the world’s largest audience of developers and technologists. Advertise with Stack Overflow.”
Developer marketing agencies, productized services and advisors
17. Draft.dev
An agency that creates technical developer-focused blog articles as a service.
Pitch:
“TECHNICAL MARKETING CONTENT FOR SOFTWARE STARTUPS
We create blog posts and tutorials designed to reach software engineers.”
18. Catchy Agency
Developer Marketing Agency
Pitch:
“The Leading Developer Marketing Agency
Our team helps the world’s largest technology companies build, grow, and manage developer marketing programs.
With a foundational understanding of technical concepts, Catchy creates and executes on strategies that drive value.”
19. EveryDeveloper
Technical content strategy for developer-focused companies
Pitch:
“Attract More of the Right Developers
A technical audience will sniff out anything that seems like traditional marketing.
We use our D.E.V. Content Framework to find your unique viewpoint that will resonate with developers, engineers, and architects.”
20. Ironhorse
Pitch:
"Mobilize your most powerful advocates."
21. Sarg.io
An agency that creates Twitter Content for Developer Tool companies.
Pitch:
“Twitter Content for Developer Tools
Developers spend up to 2 hours per day on twitter.
We help startups reach developers using twitter content.”
By the way, Supabase does a great job marketing their dev tool on Twitter or other social media. Check it out for inspiration.
22. Yard
A tool that connects dev tools with developer influencers.
Pitch:
“You can’t persuade developers to buy. Instead, educate them with influencers.
Yard's network of influencers and communities puts your product in the hands of 3m developers.
Create authentic product walkthroughs with developers your target market respects.”
23. Zach Goldie
Landing page copywriting and positioning consultant.
Pitch:
“Landing pages for dev tools
Copywriting and positioning consultant, optimizing key marketing pages aimed at selling to software engineers”
24. Adam Frankl
Dev tool startup advisor.
Pitch:
“I help startup founders create developer categories and grow developer adoption.
First Marketing VP at 3 dev-facing unicorns: JFrog, Neo4j, & Sourcegraph”
25. Nick Moore
Content writer and editor specializing in creating opinionated content that appeals to software developers and technical executives.
"Great content combines the appeal of a strong opinion with technical acumen to prove that your company isn’t here to push its product but to offer real value."
What is next?
I don’t know, maybe go test some of these out :)
When you do share your thoughts with me.
Also if you tried a developer-focused marketing tool or agency that I didn’t mention let me know.
I’ll keep updating this article with the feedback I get from you.
You can share it here for example. Or anywhere else that works for you.
