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Developers hate marketing! Agree?

Davor Kolenc
17 replies
I've found a lot of texts about it in the previous months. Developers simply despise all of those traditional means of getting them to buy a thing. If you have a developer tool you'll need to work out a different strategy to get your product in front of them. Usually, what works best is getting some developers to work with you that have a following. The people that developers trust the most are OTHER DEVELOPERS! :)

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Huh) Nice approach - influencer marketing for developers. Also, you are referring to 'lots of texts' - what texts are you talking about?
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Davor Kolenc
@oksana_ch This one is probably the best one I've read https://www.developermarkepear.c... You can read the comments on this text from actual developers here. Great insights! https://news.ycombinator.com/ite...
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flo merian
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@oksana_ch @davor_kolenc Thanks for sharing, Davor! I recently stumbled upon developermarkepear.com and I do really enjoy the insights and best practices from the blog. Kudos @kuba_czakon 👏👏
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Cyril Dubson
I am a developer and I made a tool for developers. Yes, it's a real headache to demonstrate it to them. https://www.producthunt.com/upco...
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Davor Kolenc
@cyril_dubson @julia_zakharova2 Devrel is a person (position) you want that can help the most with this. Either that or somekind of software ambasador or developer advocate.
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Željko Prša
Everyone "hates" marketing until it's done right. Latest example was with Nothing company. They made such a great story about their brand and headphones that many of my developer teammates agreed it spoke to them.
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Sandra Idjoski
I think most people hate spammy promotion, rather than marketing. 😄 Modern marketing is based on the concept of 4P - price, placement, product, and promotion (studied it at university, sorry for the nerdy definition). Even if you're not actively paying for ads or doing other standard promotional activities, you can still be amazing at marketing to a developer community. See where they get their information from and try to appear there organically, reach out to thought leaders and influencers, create content that's actually useful to the community and build trust - because as you said, developers trust other developers. Moving beyond communication, you can also determine the right pricing strategy, put the user at the center of product development, and choose the right marketplaces where your audience is comfortable making purchases.
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flo merian
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hey Davor! when I started my new role as (dev) marketer at Specify, I wanted to learn as much as possible about developer marketing. above all, this blog post from @helen_min is my reference. key takeaways
  • put down your marketing playbook
  • show, don't tell
  • features, not benefits
  • be helpful
  • be direct
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Davor Kolenc
@helen_min @fmerian very interesting its features not benefits. I feel like I saw a lot of people saying the opposite 😅
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Helen Min
@fmerian @davor_kolenc For almost every other sector, it is benefits not features. I worked in automotive brand advertising before working in tech and even when car companies list the features and specs, it's always the benefits and just "the way driving the car makes you feel" that drives purchase decisions. But when marketing to developers, it's features not benefits. Your job is to give them access to the product right away so can assess the benefits for themselves.
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Davor Kolenc
@fmerian @helen_min This is really helpful guys. I already knew some of this and we actually are doing most of the things Helen writes about. Great content!
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