I am a former backend engineer, currently figuring out marketing.
Hello everyone. I worked for eight years as a Go developer at a fintech startup and six months ago I left to create something on my own. The product part has gone well. The unexpected challenge for me was communicating what I have done.
The copy for my first landing page looked like a tech specification: comprehensive and correct, but obviously not persuasive. One of my friends read it and said that the way it was written reminded her of some documentation for a product that she would never want to buy. And she was right.
Here I am mainly looking for advice from people who have similar background and faced the same challenge to develop marketing intuition that they haven’t got before. If it’s your case, what helped you make the transition? It may be anything from a book to a particular practice or exercise that rewired the way you write for humans and not for other developers.
Replies
"Fellow dev here, still on the other side of this exact problem. My landing pages used to read like README files — accurate, thorough, and completely unable to make anyone care.
One thing that's helped: I read my copy out loud to a non-tech friend. The moment I hear myself say "seamless integration" or "robust architecture," I stop. If a sentence needs a developer to understand it, it goes.
How are you testing your copy now? Are you doing the friend-read trick, or something else?" @marnie2