#6: Devs Talk Marketing, Podcasts, Before-After-Design, Dark Matter Devs.
Hey, how was your month?
Mine looked like this:
- my daughter started teething, yep, happy days.
- created a Developer Markepear Linkedin page, posting once a day.
- someone put my article about paid ads on Hacker News. Got to the first place and stayed nr 1 for like 8 hours. Sick.
Here are my insights this month.
10 developer marketing insights
1. How devs see marketing
That Hacker News post I told you about got 170+ comments.
A lot of those are from devs. It's a real piece of dev audience research.
A gold mine for dev marketers imho.
Learned a ton from those comments.
I am writing an article about it.
Read comments
2. Excalidraw - diagrams for dev audience
This format just feels super devy.
Hand-draw and has this special feel ;)
If you are looking for a tool for diagraming for your devrels this could be the one.

Links:
- Here is that Twitter thread.
- And here is the tool.
- Learned about this tool in our marketingto.dev slack -> Thanks Natan!
3. Dark matter devs
Interesting thoughts from @swyx about a segment of dev audience.
Devs who are not on Twitter, don't go to conferences, don't rant on Reddit.
But they are downloading, using, and buying software.
He calls them "dark matter devs".
And this could be 70%+ of all the devs you want to reach.
How do you market to them?
Very much an open question and I am thinking about this one a lot.
Read article
4. Two podcast with marketing folks from dbt labs
VP marketing talking about community building (they build 25k+ slack)
VP product marketing on transitioning from non-dev to dev-focused company.
5. DevRel Con deep dives
Two I really liked.
Developer marketing in practice:
- talking down on marketing made me angry
- devrel is not marketing -> and then explains a lot of things that devrel does that are just good marketing
- finish up with devs don't hate marketing -> they hate bad marketing. YES, thank you!
Can product led growth and good developer experience co-exist?:
- Sam Richard just gets dev marketing imho (and obviously product-led gtm)
- "community is product" concept
- "community-led" vs has community distinction
6. Ahoy connect before/after design
I really like this with/without visualization for tools that are supposed to organize your workflow.
See their homepage

7. Decibel has some crazy good developer marketing content
Decibel is a VC fund that invests in open-source and dev-focused startups.
They have some solid dev marketing content.
Two articles I liked:
- The Developer Content Playbook that Fuels Twilio's PLG at Scale
- Developer Marketing and Community: An Early-Stage Playbook from a Devtools and Open-Source Marketer
8. Podcast with Auth0 VP marketing
This is the episode where I learned about the "Make login our problem. Not yours" campaign.
Listen on Spotify
9. GitHub Skyline
This one won the best developer marketing campaign on DevRel 2022 awards by Orbit.See the project

10. Best dev marketing campaigns
Speaking of best devmar campaigns.Last week I put together a list of my favorite campaigns from 2022. Check out the list
1 Pear Fact 🍐
The most classic pear recipe is probably the is probably the Poires Belle Helene.
A dessert from poached pears and a chocolate sauce. Yum.
