Nicely done Reddit post that went viral on r/MachineLearning.
Reddit dev communities are notoriously hard to market in.
You need to have something really valuable to say to that dev crowd.
But even if you do, it is so easy to screw it up and get trolled or downvoted for "obvious promo".
I know that from experience. So painful to watch.
This is a really nice example of how to do it right:
Try something like that next time you post and see what happens.
Obviously, it is nearly impossible to do when:
But then why would you even post something?
What to put in the header when your dev tool does a lot?
I like how Appsmith approaches it.
In their case, they have multiple use cases they want to showcase.
But you could use the same idea for many features or products.
Show multiple clickable tabs:
A bonus idea is the "Try cloud" | "Self-hosted" CTA.
It communicates right away that you can deploy that dev tool anywhere.
If the self-hosted deployment is important to your customers let them know.
You don't want them to look for it and drop from the page trying to find the FAQ.
This is how you write dev tool JTBD blog posts.
Masterclass of writing this type of content from @WorkOS imho.
Deep 2000 word guide that explains how to add webhooks the your application.
Goes into examples, best practices, everything.
One thing it doesn't do?
It doesn't push the product left right and center.
In fact, the only CTA is hidden in the very last sentence of the very last section.
Why?
Because most likely, the reader's intent is around understanding the problem at this point.
They want to understand what adding webhooks to their app really means from the practitioner's standpoint.
And they did that beautifully.
Could you have pushed the product a bit more? Sure.
But by answering the actual questions devs came here for they managed to build trust.
And I am sure got their fair share of click-throughs and signups anyway.
Most dev tools have two deployment options:
And then companies present it on their pricing page with some flavor of two tabs.
And you need to name them somehow.ย
And how you describe those things sometimes adds confusion for your buyers:
I like how nice and simple solution Retool used on their pricing page:
Explicit, obvious and to the point.
Love it.
Interactive product tours are all the rage.
But how do you make them work for the dev audience?
How do you deal with:
That is hard.
But Vercel somehow made it.
This is by far the best product tour I have seen so far.
What I love:
This product tour is what dev tool startups will aspire to for years (or months ;) ) to come.
Mark my words.
How to do a dev-focused brand video and get 10M+ views?
Making a memorable brand video is hard.
Doing that for a boring tech product is harder.
Doing that to the developer audience is next level.
Postman managed to create not one but three of those brand videos that got from 4M to 10M youtube views.
The videos I am talking about are:
So what did they do right?
Honestly, I am not exactly sure what special sauce they added but those are just great videos that you watch.
And I definitely remember them and the company which is exactly what you want to achieve with brand ads.
How to do a dev-focused brand video and get 10M+ views?
Making a memorable brand video is hard.
Doing that for a boring tech product is harder.
Doing that to the developer audience is next level.
Postman managed to create not one but three of those brand videos that got from 4M to 10M youtube views.
The videos I am talking about are:
So what did they do right?
Honestly, I am not exactly sure what special sauce they added but those are just great videos that you watch.
And I definitely remember them and the company which is exactly what you want to achieve with brand ads.
One of the top-performing conversion flows in dev-focused articles.
"Aside CTA" in the "How to do {jobs to be done}" article.
You know the drill:
And Export SDK executes it (almost) perfectly:
One thing that could be tested and changed is putting this "Aside CTA" mid-article and not at the end (tip from Martin Gontovnikas).
A good thing to try if you are running the "How to do {jbtd}" article strategy.
๐๐๐๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐๐ถ๐๐ฒ ๐ฎ๐ฑ ๐ฐ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ ๐ฎ๐ป ๐ถ๐ป๐ณ๐ฟ๐ฎ ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฑ๐๐ฐ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐ฟ๐๐ป๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐ฎ ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐บ๐ถ๐ป๐ฎ๐น?
Hard, but Run.ai did that.
Infra products are not "obviously cool".
There is no shiny UI, no happy people wearing your sneakers,
So what do you show on your ads?
First off, the rules still apply:
โข Catch your audience's attention
โข Say what you do in their language
โข Better yet, show how it actually does it
And Run.ai ai and MLOps infra tool managed to create a beautiful Linkedin ad IMHO:
โข They catch attention with the code visual
โข They say what they do quickly with "Dynamic Fractional GPU using One Command"
โข They extend on that in the post copy with an action-driven "Open Terminal -> Run Command -> Boom"
โข The code shows what it feels like to use the tool
โข And it shows you the result -> fractional GPUs
Job well done!
7k likes on an event promo post to the dev audience.
I don't think I've ever seen 7k likes on a developer company post on Linkedin.
Ok, this is Github, but still.
This is a 26sec video where they go:
This is a job well done:
And they could have done:
This is how to promote an event. LOVED IT!
Newsjacking is a great marketing tactic.
Especially when you can connect it nicely to your product.
โ
And GitGuardian, a tool for secrets management does it beautifully here.
They ran a story on how Toyota suffered from a data breach.
Because they didn't manage their GitHub secrets properly.
โ
Brilliant.
I love this dev tool header copy from Neon.
โ They could have gone with "We make your data fly" or "10x your database developer efficiency" or other stuff like that.
๐ Instead, they spoke in a clear dev-to-dev language:
Simple, clear, and to the point. No fluffs given. Love that.
"But we are selling to the boss of a boss of that developer user persona"
Then let that dev champion understand what you are doing and bring it to their boss.
"But we are going pure top-down"
Then does that boss of a boss of a boss actually evaluate your infra tool themselves or send their architect?
Maybe 90% of your site traffic is the buyer-persona CTO. But my bet is, it isn't even 1%. ย
Hacker News developer audience doesn't love promotion to put it mildly.
But some dev tool companies manage to make this audience their biggest ally.
Fly.io is one of those companies.
And they had a super successful product launch a few years back. ย
So how did they do it?
Let's go through these in detail.
Who are you? Why should I listen?
What is the problem really?
What does your product do and how does it work?
Speak "dev to dev"
By doing it this way you have a chance of gaining love from the prolific HN crowd.
Fly.io definitely did, and is still reaping rewards with constant HN exposure.
OK, the best way of getting GitHub stars is by creating a project that solves real developer problems well.
I assume you have done that already and the metric that people love to hate โญ is growing organically.
What do you do now?
I mean you got to ask people in one way or another.
Many companies put it in their navbars or hello bars.
Posthog adds a sticky banner at the bottom of the page that follows you as you scroll.
It also shows a start count which at their size (11k + stars) acts as social proof.
You can close it and the next time you visit the page it will be off not to push too much.
I like the concept makes sense to test it out this way imho.
How to do a dev-focused brand video and get 10M+ views?
Making a memorable brand video is hard.
Doing that for a boring tech product is harder.
Doing that to the developer audience is next level.
Postman managed to create not one but three of those brand videos that got from 4M to 10M youtube views.
The videos I am talking about are:
So what did they do right?
Honestly, I am not exactly sure what special sauce they added but those are just great videos that you watch.
And I definitely remember them and the company which is exactly what you want to achieve with brand ads.
Showing code and UI in an explainer video is always a dance and rarely ends well.
You want to show the code to make it devy.
But you don't want to show everything not to overwhelm.
The same goes for UI which should look like your UI.
But show only what is necessary.
It's a struggle but CircleCI does it really nicely in this explainer:
They do the same for the UI later in the video.Just a really clean way of explaining things. Nice!
Devs have a love/hate relationship with "Book a demo" call to action.
Mostly hate though.
Especially if what they want is:
Let's just say that sitting through an hour demo call with a salesperson just to get the pricing is not what most devs love to do with their time.
But there are moments in the buyer journey when devs do want to have that live session:
Then, having a live session/demo is the fastest way to move forward.
@PostHog handles this dev journey reality nicely with:
This approach solves both scenarios really nicely. ย
Pre-roll ads are obviously invasive and annoying, especially to devs. But they are also prime real estate in the ad ecosystem.
You can choose not to do them at all (fair option). Or try and make them more fun and less annoying ;)
I like how Sentry handled it in this 16-second video:
Basically they managed to "buy" 11 seconds of attention with 5 seconds of a pattern-breaking hook. ย In the world of pre-roll YouTube dev-focused ads, I'd say this is a win.
Also, I don't know the results of the "Sentry can't fix that " campaign, but I like how this builds curiosity. Even with that slogan alone.
Why not highlight your free plan?
Most companies highlight their middle paid plan saying it is "most popular".
First thing, yeah, sure it is your most popular plan.
But more importantly, most visitors will not convert to your paid plans right away.
So why not try and capture as many devs as possible on the free plan?
If they like your dev tool there are many things you can do to convert some of them to paid plans.
But if they leave that pricing page and go with some other free tool, you are not converting anyone.
@CircleCI highlights free and they are in the mature, competitive market of CI CD tools.
Idk, it really does make a lot of sense to me.
If people need more advanced features they will choose higher plans anyway.
But if they want to get things started with the basic plans they will choose free or go elsewhere.
I'd rather have them choose free than none. ย
Came across this classic What is Segment brand video while watching an interview with one of the folks behind it, Maya Spivak (she is awesome btw).
What I like about it is that:
โข it is fun, not formal, builds rapport
โข it introduces the core problem the tool solves
โข it shows the tech and explains it in a way that is simple but not simplistic
And it follows a flavor of the classic AIDA format:
Putting all that in 90 seconds is hard.
And even though this video is 4 years old it could easily still work today IMHO.
Really solid baseline to sฬถtฬถeฬถaฬถlฬถ get inspired by ;)
Devs are builders.โ
Make your home page for builders.
Go directly into the "how" instead of the way.
Many devs when they land on your home page, already know the "why".
I love that it:
Scrolling through many feature/capability sections of a dev tool website mostly sucks. But dropping things to make it shorter can suck even more.
This is a cool design pattern that deals with that problem. ย
Single section that switches subsections on scroll. And folks over at @Graphite did a great job with that on their homepage.
It works like this:
Also, I saw variants of this that also looked great:
What this design helps you achieve is:โ
I really like this pattern and I have already recommended it to some folks working on their sites recently.
Which feature/product to show in the header?
How about all?
Many dev tool products are feature-rich. And you want to show those awesome features.
But it is easy to overwhelm the reader when showing so much info.
That is why I really like the header tabs pattern that @PostHog uses:
This pattern is especially powerful when you want to communicate completeness.
Posthog definitely wants to do that. If you are on that train I'd strongly suggest considering/testing it.
Marketing through free tools is powerful. And Auth0 implemented it beautifully.
In an old article from Gonto I read about some free tools that Auth0 created years ago.
And those tools are still generating traffic and leads today.
And they are helpful to developers and make the Auht0 brand even more appreciated by the community.
One of those tools is JSON Web Token Debugger.
So how this works for them is this:
Now, Gonto suggested that is important to do it on a separate domain to make it less promotional.
I am not sold on that especially when I know there are companies like @VEED.IO that build "SEO tool clusters" in the /tools/ subfolder of their page and crush it in search.
But either way, if you can solve a real problem your target devs have, no matter how small, you should be able to get some developer love (and $) from the value you created.
Not sure how to find developers for audience research interviews?
Sometimes all you need is ask.
I really liked what the founders of this startup did:
Sometimes you don't need to overthink it and can just ask.
Mux does a few things beautifully in this header.
Value proposition:
Animated visual that is really good for dev tools:
Say what we are all thinking. โ
This tweet is great as it states something that most of us feel.
It is something that you may have had a discussion about with someone recently.
You might have fought about one tool or another.
But at the end of the day tools don't matter.
You can share it with someone as:
โ
Gonto shared an interesting play that they tried at Auth0 when he was running growth there.
So the story goes like this:
Iย think that doing just the sponsorship for the retargeting pixel could work.
But when you add that branding consistency between the sponsored site and the product the CTR is better.
Interesting one for sure.
How to show integrations on your dev tool homepage?
Every dev tool needs to integrate with other libraries in the space.
And you want to show how well integrated with the ecosystem you are.
But you ctually want to do a bit more than that.
You want devs to see how easy / flexible / clean it would be for them to use it.
That is why instead of showing just logos from your ecosystem it is good to show the code too.
Meilisearch does that beautifully:
I am sure this is getting more clicks than just a list of logos.
How to run developer-focused Reddit ads that get upvoted?
Reddit is well known for anti-promotional sentiments.
Just post something along the lines "you can solve that with our dev tool" and see.
So running ads on Reddit feels even more like a no-no.
Especially if you add problems with bot clicks and attribution as most devs will have some sort of blocks.
But you know your audience is on Reddit.
And for some of us, it may very well be the only social platform they are on.
So what do you do?
This is how @Featureform approached it to get almost 100 upvotes on an ad:
If you are going for brand awareness rather than a direct conversion those types of ads can work very well.
I liked it for sure.
Funny and memorable competitive billboard ad from @Statsig ๐
You have a big incumbent, everyone knows them. Use it to anchor your brand.
And tell the story of how you do things differently.
๐ But first, make people see you. And remember you in the next conversation when the big known brand or a category comes up.
And being funny is one of the best ways of getting attention and being remembered.
๐ I love how folks from Statsig did it here. Such a playful pun on the feature flag category incumbent Launch Darkly. Job well done.
Btw, this was shared by Oleksii Klochai in the Developer Marketing Community (you joined yet?).
Fantastic all-text Reddit ad from Latitude.
Dev ads are hard. Promotion on Reddit is harder. ย Running a dev ad on Reddit that gets 50 comments and 90 likes is expert-level hard.
But folks from Latitude managed ๐ฅ
They used one of my favorite Reddit ad formats: all text.
Here is what I liked:
Great execution. Chapeau bas Latitude.
Mixpanel primary CTA is to take an interactive tour.
They take you to a 30min video + a guided UI tour.
Not a signup.
That is because with products that have long time to value (like analytics, observability etc) dev will not see value in the first session.
I mean to really see value you need to see real data, real use cases. And if you were to actually test it would take weeks.
That is why many companies do demos. But demos have their own problems (and most are bad).
Interactive tools make it possible for me to explore the value without talking to anyone.
I love this option.
Awesome sponsorship ad from Trieve in the Cassidy Williams newsletter.
Not sure who wrote it but it must have been a dev ;) It is just so refreshingly to the point.
๐ What I like:
This ad does it so gracefully and quickly it is just hard not to love. ย
This is a sandbox experience folks over at Sentry.io created.
I like the navbar CTAs with a big "Documentation" button in there.
Reminds me that I can go and see it when Iย need it.
But Iย also get those conversion focused "Request a demo"ย and "Start a trial"ย for when Iย am ready.
On top of that Iย get tours and help in the sidebar for when Iย get stuck.
.... and the whole thing is gated behind a work email which Iย don't love.
But having that work email let's you nurture (and Sentry is known for awesome emails).
Plus it does help sales. If anything it is an additional signal for your account scoring models.
But if you are going to gate a sandbox, make sure to show all that value behind the modal like Sentry did.
With that Iย can feel compelled to type in that email.
When you promote your feature/product launch on Reddit, it can easily end up being "not well received" to put it mildly.
I am talking downvotes, negative comments that get upvoted ย and break the discussion. Or good old crickets.
But Reddit can also be a fantastic source of audience feedback, peer validation for your product, and some of the most vocal advocates you'll ever find.
I really liked how Tom Redman from Convex directed the discussion in the Reddit thread under their laucn post:
The launch post itself was great too:
"Open sourcing 200k lines of Convex, a "reactive" database built from scratch in Rust" that linked to the GitHub repo.
Doesn't get much more to the point and devy than that.
Beautiful mockery of classic conversion tactics from PostHog website.
So what do we have here:
I have to admit I chuckled ;)
And I bet many devs who don't think of marketing very highly chucked too.
That builds rapport. (hopefully) makes you one of the tribe rather than another faceless corpo.
BTW, they used it as a bottom of the homepage call to action.
I like it.
Most of the people who scrolled there are not going to buy anyway.
But they may share the website with someone who will.
The problem with presenting API is that it is hidden. It gets the job done in the background.
So it is not "attractive" in the way some other dev tools can be.
But you can:
That is how Mux, video API, solves it.
Found this awesome crossover on their homepage.
They give you:
Love it!
How to write a "What is {MY CORE KEYWORD}" article that gets to the top of HackerNews? ๐
First of all, almost no one succeeds at that as you write those articles for SEO distribution, not HN distribution.
To get an SEO-first article on HN your content quality bar needs to be super high.
But you can do it.
PlanetScale managed to get their "What is database sharding and how does it work?" on the orange page (kudos to Justin Gage!).
Here is what was interesting about that article:
๐ฆ๐๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐๐ผ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฝ๐ผ๐ถ๐ป๐ ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ฟ๐ผ.
โข โ No "In today's fast-paced data-driven world enterprises work with data" stuff.
โข โ
Justย ย "Learn what database sharding is, how sharding works, and some common sharding frameworks and tools."
๐๐ถ๐๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ธ๐ฒ๐๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฑ๐ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐น๐ฒ ๐ฏ๐๐ถ๐น๐ฑ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ฝ๐ฝ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ ๐๐ถ๐๐ต ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฟ.
๐ Speaking peer to peer, not authority-student:
โข "Youโve probably seen this table before, about how scaling out helps you take this users table, all stored on a single server:"
โข "And turn it into this users table, stored across 2 (or 1,000) servers:"
โข "But thatโs only one type of sharding (row level, or horizontal). "
๐จ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ท๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ด๐ผ๐ป ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ป๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ผ๐๐ฟ ๐ฎ๐๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ
Things like:
โข "Partitioning has existed โ especially in OLAP setups"
โข "Sifting through HDFS partitions to find the missing snapshot "
๐๐ฐ๐๐๐ฎ๐น๐น๐ ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฝ๐น๐ฎ๐ถ๐ป๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ฒ๐ฐ๐ต๐ป๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐น๐น๐ ๐ต๐ผ๐ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐ป๐ด๐ ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ธ
๐ฅ Look at the section "How database sharding works under the hood" with subsections:
โข Sharding schemes and algorithms
โข Deciding on what servers to use
โข Routing your sharded queries to the right databases
โข Planning and executing your migration to a sharded solution
๐ ๐๐ผ๐ป๐๐: ๐ฝ๐น๐๐ด ๐ถ๐ป ๐๐ผ๐๐ฟ ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฑ๐๐ฐ๐ ๐ด๐ฒ๐ป๐๐น๐
Section "Sharding frameworks and tools" shares open-source tools (every dev, but HN devs in particular like OS projects).
And there as an info box, you have the info that Planetscale comes with one of those OS projects deployed.
Just a beautifully executed piece of content marketing.
Looking for a good dev-focused case study format?
People tell you to follow a classic Hero > Problem > Solution > Results.
They tell you to show numbers, talk value, etc.
And it is true. Great format.
But packaging this for devs is hard.
For example, putting numbers in there, and framing it in a "save 28min every week" is a recipe for losing trust with that dev reader.
That is if you can even get those numbers from your customers.
I like how @LaunchDarkly solves it.
Hero section:
Case study body:
They keep the content down to earth and devy but still frame it in a value-focused way.
I like that that they speak in the currency that devs care about.
Wasted time.
Before: "Took 2-3 weeks to ship"
After: "Can ship experiments every day"
The cool thing is you could actually use this ย hero section format and then have a more technical user story below. By doing that you could speak to the why and how.
That depends on your target reader for this page of course.
Anyhow, I do like this format and I am planning to take it for a spin.
13% signup form conversion bump with a dev-focused trust/motivation builder.
Dev goes through your page, clicks the signup button, and sees a signup form. Now you want them to actually sign up.
The V1 approach is to go clean, a few social signup buttons like GitHub and call it a day.
The V2 is to add trust/motivation builders on the page:
Now, Stytch went for an interesting V3:
Code snippet -> how about just show it? this is a flavour of that 1-2-3 how-to but extra dev-friendly. They also made the code interactive so that you can tinker with it, make it feel yours already.
And they saw a 13% signup conversion bump.
Definitely an interesting thing to test out.
Check out Stytch CEO talking about it here.
Pushing cold blog readers to try your tool rarely works.
So you need a transitional CTA, something that worms them up.
But it needs to be aligned with the goals of the reader.
And I think pushing folks to a community discord is a solid option.
I like the copy "Discuss this blog on Discord" as it is very reader-focused.
Some folks read the article and have more questions.
They want to discuss it somewhere.
And while you could just do a comments section, a community gives you more options to get people closer to the product.
Navbar is a hugely important conversion lever on the dev-facing website. I saw it move the needle by x times in some cases/conversion events.
So, what does a good one look like?
Auth0 did a great job on their developer portal. But the learnings can be applied to your marketing website too.
What I like:
That makes it easy for devs to explore. Without having to click out to see what each tab/item means. And when devs know what you mean they are more likely to actually click out. And convert.
When selling dev tools you typically have 3 "buyer" levels:
Individual dev:
Team lead:
Org lead:
How does Postman solve it?:
They even go the extra mile. Something I didn't see too often.
They understand their customer's reality and identified one more level between Org and Team.
Basically a department-level unit that probably has multiple teams but is not at the organization/enterprise level.
I really like what they did hear. Solid.
If you have an API product presenting it in an exciting visual way is hard.
But Deepgram managed to do just that.
They go for an autoplay presentation that has four acts:
And the delivery is just slick and elegant. Kudos team!
btw, Mux, the video API has a similar design of their visual. I think it is just a great visual element for API products.
Pricing in your docs? That is how @Fly.io does it.
You click a pricing page link on their homepage and you go to the docs!
No 3 boxes with the "most popular" being the middle paid plan ;)
They just give it to you how it is. Exactly what you'd expect from the docs.
There are tables, explanations, and links to other docs pages.
Very bold decision imho. It definitely makes them feel super developer focused.
Plus if you do want a more standard, enterprise stuff you see:
"If you need more support or compliance options, you can choose one of our paid plans. These come with usage included and additional support options."
And that page looks like a classic pricing page.
But they focus on the developer buying experience here. Super interesting.
A docs header worth a thousand words.
For a dev platform or infrastructure tool it is hard to explain where you fit, what you do quickly, and how you connect to existing components quickly. ย
Hopsworks docs team does a great job here.
So instead of using words, they use a diagram:
All of that in a single diagram.
Now that is a dev-focused header visual.
Make login our problem. Not yours.
This is a beautiful messaging of Auth0 solution.
Login
Simple explanation of what it does/gives you.
Simplified of course
Our problem. Not yours.
You "outsource" this boring but important problem to someone else.
It also has a feel of SaaS in there.
They will take care of it.
โ
The main message you want to land on your homepage community section is:
"We have a big community of devs who love using the product"
๐ง That helps you tackle obstacles your dev reader has:
๐ Modal solves it beautifully by going simple but smart:
It lands the message that this section should land for sure. I really like it.
This is a really clever billboard campaign.
Show don't tell they say.
And Segment did exactly that by putting billboards with the wrong location printed on them (LA in SF etc).
The theme/message was "What good is bad data?" which was exactly what they wanted to convey.
What I like about is the alignment between:
This is hard to do imho so big kudos to them ๐!
Downside?
Reportedly many folks who saw billboards didn't get that it was intentional and Tweeted at them about the error.
Or maybe they were next-level jokers...
Understand who is reading. Add social proof that speaks to them.
Social proof is about showing people/companies who are similar to the reader that they got success with the tool.
Company logos can be good if your reader knows and likes those companies.
But if those are random companies, I am not sure how much value does it bring.
Devs care what other devs who use your product have to say about it.
That's why I like testimonials.
Not the crafted, clean ones with features and values.
But the real stuff. Real devs sharing real stories.
Bonus points for "Okay, I get the point" button copy.
It changes from "Show more" when you click.
Nice!
There are many things that I like about it.
Overall with very little effort, I understand what it is, and what it does.
And I can go and dig deeper for myself or spread the word with my circles.
This has to be one of the better dev-focused headers I've seen in a while.
Headers should deliver your core product message and get people interested. That is true at any stage but early stage especially.
๐กYou want everyone, even those folks who just take a look and leave to remember. You want them to recall it in their next conversation around this topic.
There may be supporting messages for sure but there is always that one core thing. Make sure it lands.
In the case of Clickhouse, that core message is that they are a database that is fast at a huge scale.
Their supporting messages are:
๐And they deliver that beautifully with:
Headline
Clear as day headline speaking to value delivered at a level that builds rapport with their audience.
Not "Give users seamless web experience at scale" but "Query billions of rows in milliseconds". I like that little touch with "rows" which makes who they speak to obvious
Subhead
Subhead supporting it with "fastest and most resource-efficient DB"
+ talking about the use cases "real time apps and analytics" and it being open-source
Calls to action
These CTAs make the audience feel at home. There are docs in there + clear "we are open-source" CTA
Visual
That supporting visual is just amazing.
It shows the value in the most believable way you could deliver it here imho. Query and an Output that shows the size of the database and speed of the query
Social proof
Social proof in the navbar, almost 34k stars and a GitHub icon.
+ a way to get people to that repository, check it out and leave a star.
There is more social proof below the fold with big logos and stuff but the GitHub icon and stars make it immediately clear that this is a project that people care about.
It is remarkable how brilliantly simple it is all presented. ย Just a fantastic work IMHO.
The homepage header is about landing your core product message.
For Modal it is basically LLM infrastructure with great developer experience. ย
And they do a great job delivering it:
Top job on that header folks!
This is one of the most interesting content pieces I have seen in dev tools recently ๐
Comes from @SST and believe it or not is a comedy video created to promote integrations.
That's right.
So SST integrated with Astro and instead of creating "just another how-to use X+Y" video they created this:
It was a fun brand play but got way more views than a tutorial ever could.
And it connected with their audience in a human way that will be remembered (and shared).
Nice.
In a mature category, it is safe to assume that people know about other tools.
Especially devs.
I love how Axiom owns its unique selling point and how it stands out from the competition.
Takes guts but I love it.
I really love this hand-drawn feel.
It makes it super authentic.
Also, starting from scratch (not a ready diagram) makes following it more fun and less overwhelming.
Great stuff.
BTW the tool used for this is called excalidraw.com
How to design the navbar product tab? This is what @PostHog does ๐
Figuring out what to put in the navbar is tricky:
The "Product" tab is especially tricky.
It can get overloaded with a ton of content.
I like how Posthog approached it:
I like it.
The idea behind this conversion play is to put an "Aside CTA" that is unrelated to the content early in the article.
And get that clicked.
But obviously, if you do that it will be pushy and intrusive.
So?
Nevo David from Novu shared this idea on one of the podcasts:
Btw, Nevo says that cat memes work best.
What to say when you have many products?ย
Dev tool companies over time grow from one product to suite of products to platforms with products built on top of the core one.
The result is that it is harder to communicate without going full-on fluff mode (my fav "built better software faster").
But for most companies, there is this core capability/product where people start. ย The entry product. Why not use that?
I really liked what Stripe did on their docs page here:
Even though this is docs, the same applies to homepages and other dev comms.
If you have many products, figure out what is the most important one, the one where most people enter. Focus on that. "Upsell" to other products later.
This is one of the more devy blog designs I've seen in a while.
It has this docs-like feel.
But is just a bit more fun and loose than most docs would allow.
Here is what I like:
And if your posts are code-heavy, then a docs-like experience is where you want to be anyway.
But you can spice it up with things that wouldn't fit the docs.
Like a Twitter/X embed or a meme.
Really good product navbar tab from Supabase.
The product tab in your navbar is likely the most visited one on your site.
And there are a million ways of organizing information in there.
But ultimately, you want to help people understand what this product is about at a glance.
Even before they click. Even if they never click.
And how do you explain your product to devs?
By answering common questions:
Supabase does it really nicely:
Very solid pattern imho.
What I'd improve:
Make a {X} cry in 5 words or less.
Great Linkedin (or Twitter) post format.
This is one of those fantastic self-selecting mechanisms as well.
People who understand the joke are the people you are looking for.
You may get the exact people you want to follow your profile.
With a nicely targeted joke.
Love it.
This is one of my favorite our dev tool vs competitor blog posts.
With these pages, you want to explain when you are better.
But you don't want to berate your competitor.
And above all, you want to help people make a decision.
Chances are (almost 100% ;)) that you are not better for every use case. And your developer audience knows it.
But there should be use cases, tool stacks, or situations when you are the best option.
Talk about those. Dev to dev.
@Convex did a great job in this post that I think can be a template for how to write these:
After reading that post you are fairly convinced that if your situation matches the one described and if it makes sense to use it.
Love it.
This is one of my favorite header patterns for dev tools lately. Layered video visual from MUX.
So that video design pattern in here is this:
There are a few bonus learnings here as well:
btw I really like that branding. Custom font makes it so memorable. It is, isn't it?
"See docs" is one of my favorite secondary CTA on dev-focused pages.
TailwindCSS takes it to the next level by inserting docs search right into the header CTA.
This takes devs directly to the page they are interested in rather than have them try and find things for themselves.
They could have searched the docs in the docs, of course.
But this is just this slightly more delightful developer experience that TailwindCSS is known for.
Well done templates gallery from Vercel.
For developer-focused products, having an examples/templates/code samples gallery can be a powerful growth lever.
โ It helps people:
Just a great touchpoint in the developer journey.
๐ And Vercel does this one really well IMHO.
They start with an easy-to-find CTA in the navbar resources section. Bonus points for adding one-liner descriptions that make it clear what is on the other side of the click.
On the templates library page, they give you solid use case navigation with tags. And each template tile has a result thumbnail and a one-liner description. The beauty of this is in the simplicity and what they didn't put in here.
Each template page shows the result, gives you a tutorial on how to use this, and clear CTAs to either see this live or deploy yourself. Bonus points for the "Deploy" action copy (instead of "Sign up").
Kudos to the Vercel team. They are one of my favorite inspirations.
Funny dev newsletter CTA. From shiftmag .dev by Infobip.
It starts with a chuckle-worthy:
"Sarcastic headline, but funny enough for engineers to sign up"
Then they follow up by disarming the "is that spam" and building more rapport with:
They end with an alternative call to action. RSS feed.
Most newsletters don't do RSS.
But for many devs RSS feed is the preferred content subscription.
Great job!
How to present benchmark results masterclass from RavenDB
The biggest problem with the software benchmarks that you run is?
People don't trust you. Especially when the results are good.
๐ฌ๐ผ๐ ๐ท๐๐๐ ๐ป๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐๐ผ ๐ฏ๐๐ถ๐น๐ฑ ๐๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ฟ๐๐๐. ๐ข๐ป๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ฎ๐๐ ๐ถ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ด๐ต ๐๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ป๐๐ฝ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฐ๐.
People from RavenDB do it by:
This looks solid because it feels like I could re-run what they did myself.And so I trust them and I probably won't ;)
Most devs want to explore products themselves.
They want to read the docs, see examples, play with the product, or watch a video.
They don't want to hop on a demo call, especially early on in the evaluation process.
And they definitely don't want to sit through the demo to learn what your pricing is.
But there will be moments when they will want to talk to you. They will raise their hands and let you know then.
Posthog speaks to this reality with this copy beautifully:
This is very developer-focused approach and I love it.
Conference activation idea: Tetris competition at the booth.
It is hard to get devs to your booth if all you offer is a "do you want to see a quick demo" spiel.
You need to get a bit more creative than that.
๐ The team at Storyblok ran a Tetris competition:
Afaik it was a big hit and I can definitely see why.
๐ A few more notes:
btw, Iย read about it on DX Tips. You want to check out that article on dev conferences from DX Tips
What if you not only posted entire articles on Reddit but also promoted them?
This is what WarpStream did and I like it.
A few weeks back I shared an example of a company posting not a link with a snippet but an entire article on Reddit.
WarpStream is taking it to the next level by promoting it as an in-feed Reddit ad.
I love this trend 100%:
By doing that you assume that if your piece of content gets read by the right people it will lead to business outcomes. People don't need to go to your site to be retargeted by ads and attacked by popup banners.
That is a very fair assumption, especially with devs.
But even generally in B2B SaaS and social channels like here on LinkedIn that concept of zero-click content, coined by Amanda Natividad, is gaining traction and I'm glad that it does.
Action-focused copy is usually better than "sign up".
But sometimes it is hard to find a good copy for this.
Some teams like Vercel or Auth0 ย do "Start building " ย
But that doesn't always work.
I really like this "Get API keys" CTA copy.
Now for the Hero section I really like those two CTAs:
Really great job imho.
"32 billion reasons to check out..." - I love this ad from Aikido Security.
What I Iove the most is that it doesn't say much, it just points. I think it comes from Harry Dry or the book Made to Stick.
But the idea is that the best stories are not something you write. It is something you tell. You don't say, just point.
And this is what folks from Aikido did:
So they pointed:
Love it! Sometimes I think I live for this stuff ;)
Thank you Marie Jaksman for sharing this gem!
Copy that lands makes a huge difference in dev tool website conversion.
Earthly proved it with this "tiny" change.
So I am a huge believer in good copy.
Not the clever one but the one that is written with words that your customers use.
That is rooted in product and research.
But I often hear devs or founders say things like "it's just copy".
It is not "just copy" it is your message, it is your positioning.
It is the difference between ย "cool, let's try it" and "now for me, whatever".
So some time ago I came across this article from the Earthly CEO Vlad Ionescu.
He shared that at some point they decided to run this A/B test with just a "tiny" change.
They changed the word "CI" -> "Build" across the homepage.
And their core website conversion doubled.
So next time you work on website copy give it some more thought and you may be surprised that "just copy" made a huge difference.
I love how simple this delivery is. But this is what makes it powerful:
Bonus points for showing those regions with their balloon logo.
Just loved how they focused their message to the very core and used all of those elements to land it right away. Great job.
How easy it is to get started is a big conversion factor for any dev tool.
Devs want to test things out and if it is hard to do they will be gone testing a competitor that made it easy.
And so a good how-to section on your homepage can make a big difference in getting devs to that first experience.
Appsmith does it beautifully with their 1-2-3 How-to section:
It is so engaging and just beautifully designed. And the CTA to additional resources like integrations, widget library, and docs make the message land. I do believe it is easy to set this up.
Great pattern to copy-paste imho.