This is a simple but great header imho:
Love it.
How to promote your important company event? How about right there in the header.
A typical approach to promoting events on your site is to have them in the Hello bar (right above the navbar). This is a solid option of course.
But what if this is a super duper important event that you really want to push?
Put it in the header.
The header is the most viewed part of the most visited page on your site.
Doesn't get much better than that.
But you don't want to distract people from your value propositions and main CTAs too much.
How do you do that?
This is how Vercel did with last year's NEXT.js conf.
Nice execution on that pattern.
I like the simplicity of this announcement.
What: "Vercel Edge Middleware"
Why: "Start delivering dynamic, personalized content without sacrificing end-user performance."
Visual supports this but is super minimal.
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.
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 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.
Funny ad, that makes fun of ads.
But it actually communicates that you don't care about the ads but more about something else, like:
Simple and powerful messaging.
They say what they do. Zero fluff.
They make it easy for devs by explaining how they are different than (obvious) competitors.
They add a little developer-focused social proof.
I like those sidebar CTAs from Auth0.
They go with a sticky Table of Contents which gives a better reading experience.
They put two CTAs below that TOC:
Solid job.
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 present many features at once?
Sometimes your dev tool has many features/products that you want to show.
❌ Showing all of them as separate sections doesn't work with more than 3. It just gets too long very quickly.
✅ You can go with the tabs pattern where each tab has copy+visual for a feature.
💡 But there is another option that makes a ton of sense when you have many features to show.
Interactive tiles of different sizes.
💚 I like the implementation of that pattern coming from Clerk:
That pattern can work really well on blogs or learning centers too but I think we're going to see more of it on dev tool websites.
Articulate a deeper thought.
Sometimes you want to tell the world something but you don't know how.
When somebody articulates what you were thinking you just want to share that with them.
This is what this tweet is about.
A deeper thought with some parallel examples to back it up.
Subtle but effective dev blog CTA -> info box.
Basically a plain article in-text CTA but there is something special about it.
It looks like a docs info box.
It is not a "buy now" style call to action but rather a subtle "you may want to know about X" push.
But for it to really feel like an info box it needs to connect to the section of the section of the article around it.
Otherwise, it will just feel like an intrusive ad anyway.
PlanetScale does a great job here.
They link the part of the article about the sharding library Vitess with their product that was built on top of it.
It feels natural and I am sure it gets clicks and if not then product awareness.
I like how they use the black dot to show the mouse movements in the UI.
Simple but powerful and clear.
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.
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.
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.
Nice and clean code example.
Clear copy, what it does etc.
Calls to action with links to Github and website.
Really long code example which looks great when clicked on.
Ideating how to do dev tool billboards?
I like these from Snowflake.
Especially the customer showcase ones as the format can almost be copy-pasted ;)
One more interesting thing about those billboards though:
By doing that they seem to have billboards everywhere, fight ad fatigue, and stay top of mind.
Love it.
Vs pages are a classic SaaS marketing.
But I like how Ably adjusts them to the developer audience:
I love this dev tool header copy from Neon.
❌ They could have gone with "We make your data fly" or "10x your database developer efficiency" or other stuff like that.
💚 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%.
So your differentiator is being self-hosted and you want devs to see it. This is a cool trick I saw that feeds into the way devs navigate your site.
One navbar tab devs will click on or at least hover over the docs tab.
So putting your self-hosted deployment guide in there will land.
And likely this guide sits in the docs anyway, you just extract that important piece of information and frontload it. This is exactly what @n8n did on their site and I love this.
People see it first and I am sure (many) will remember that n8n is self-hosted which is one of their differentiators. Simple and strong.
In that vein, you can frontload other important pieces like quickstart/getting started or integrations. Especially when your docs is a toggle tab and not just a clickable link.
I'd argue that having that quickstart frontloaded in the docs tab would be a smart move from n8n too. But anyhow, this is job well done.
Was scrolling LinkedIn the other day, minding my business and what do I see but a new dev marketing newsletter. DevPMM newsletter by Marek Nalikowski (dev PMM at Oxla).
In the first issue he talks about “Developer product positioning and messaging examples that slap”.
His devy explanation of positioning/messaging is just so cool. Will steal it and us it with eng founder for sure. Here it goes.
One idea that Marek goes into that I don’t see used enough is anchoring. You anchor on something your audience knows. Now classic example of “open-source Firebase alternative” from Supabase is one.
But there are other flavors of anchoring.
Funny enough just last week I talked to a marketer from one of the startups I advise about my personal framing for what they do just to see if I get it. Something along the lines of “If X and Y had a baby, that focused on Z, and had a developer experience of R”. So yeah I did anchoring positioning for myself.
Ok, I digressed. The example that made me want to share this with you is this beauty from Tinybird.
I am talking about this quote that anchors on three popular tools: ClickHouse, Supabase, and Postgres. This one sentence carries so much meaning to people who know them. Good luck landing that message in less words.
This is the tricky part though. You need to know your audience enough to know what concepts are commonly (enough) known by them to use it. So the non-dev audience will likely not get it at all. But this is ok. You should land messaging for the champion.
And Marek argues that this is how devs naturally think and talk about products.
Cannot agree more. I often ask dev founders “so what does the product do” (having read the website)? How do you explain it to dev friends? How do you explain it to other devs on a meetup or conference? Anchoring is surprisingly common in the way they explain it and very rare in their messaging.
Modal with updates.
Adding a modal with "what happened lately" for users who come back to the app.
Good idea for re-activating users by showing new features or examples.
+ a link to a deeper resource.
One of the best types of developer content is a debugging story.
"What is X" or "How to solve Y" work in some situations, especially when you focus on SEO distribution. But a good debugging story is something that even senior devs want to read.
This is an old article from the GitLab and is such a good example of thos format:
The downside of using this format is the same as with most good developer content. You need a real situation, explained by an actual dev in a technical language.
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.
This is a nice little touch in the last step of the signup process.
Linear asks you to do two things:
The beauty of it is while this is an ask it is done so gracefully:
Nice and simple and I am sure it gets some folks to subscribe/follow.
A classic dev tool blog call to action that is somewhat underused these days.
Was going through Martin Gontovnikas blog and found a post from a couple of years back.
He called this "Aside CTA" and the idea is this:
Why this can work well with devs is:
Definitely a classic that is worth trying.
How do you make your dev tool pricing simple?
I really like this one.
Saw someone share a pricing page from Userfront some time ago and really liked it. They changed it now but I really like the thinking behind the older version.
It is just remarkably simple while hitting all the boxes:
Just a very good baseline.
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.
How did this super basic ad get so much engagement on Reddit?
First of all, the value prop is succinct, to the point, and says what it is.
No "streamlining", "boosting", or "democratizing" is involved.
No clever tagline or pains, benefits, or values just says what it is.
But what it is, is "free and open-source" which is what many devs, especially on Reddit want to hear.
And Heroku is a known brand so if you know what Heroku does, you know what Kubero does.
I liked that they linked out to the GitHub project too.
Not 100% sure if that would perform better than a landing page or home. But I see how it feels more in sync with the channel you are running your ads on.
The screenshot? I don't like it but perhaps it doesn't matter as much here?
What do you think?
Oh, and if you read the comments, you'll see that people actually talked about the project, said that they liked the ad etc.
Good stuff.
Many dev tools have complex pricing and packaging.
Say your dev tool/platform has many product offerings.
And you offer usage-based pricing but also enterprise plans but also per-product options, and additional customizations.
But you want to present it in a way that is manageable for the developer reading your pricing page.
Mux solves it this way:
Extended headers on pricing pages are not common as they add friction.
But sometimes adding friction is exactly what you need to do.
Mux managed to make this page (and their offering) easy to navigate by adding a little bit of friction at the beginning.
Maybe you don't browse plans right away but at least you don't waste energy (and attention) on the parts of the page that doesn't matter to you.
Good stuff.
Interesting dev blog CTA idea from V7.
CTAs in technical articles is a tricky subject:
I like how V7 approached it here:
What I'd change/test is making this CTA not a generic value prop but something closely connected to the rest of the article.
Super short dev tool case study on a single viewport.
Many case studies follow a Hero -> Problem -> Solution -> Results framework.
Many try and do it on a one-pager.
But what @Resend did is next level and I like it.
Especially with devs, you want to be technical and succinct.
And Resend took all the possible fluff out of it.
I'd like to have some before or after probably or a stronger results (or pain) ) focused headline.
But I think this is great actually.
This is a solid swag copy template that resonates with devs.
"I did X and all I got was this lousy Y"
Why this works imho is:
Very solid start if you run out of ideas.
Funniest dev tool explainer ever? Coming from Wasp.
Let's face it, introducing a problem in an explainer video is often boring. Especially if the problem is
How do you introduce a SaaS boilerplate? Good luck pitching faster time to value or something.
Wasp did something out of the box:
Got me hooked and kept me watching for sure.
+ funny is memorable so you will get a better recall too.
Instead of giving away hundreds of small things that people will forget give away one thing that leaves an impression.
And a huge LEGO set is a great candidate for that one big thing. There is a big overlap between devs and folks who love LEGOs. They are both builders after in their hearts.
Now, some important considerations:
You need to commit to it too.
Don't do 3 different things like that at a conference. Focus on one play like this at a time and try other cool ideas at another conference.
Folks from Sigma Computing ticked all these boxes. Love it!
That CTA.
You go straight for the install/download.
I don't know if you can go more developer-focused than that.
It sets the tone for the entire homepage.
And let's be honest (almost) nobody actually clicks that "Sign up" button in the hero section.
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.
Handing #1 dev obstacle: "We can do it ourselves".
Check it out from second 0:35:
"I bet you're like
We can do it ourselves, it's not that hard.
We know what we're doing.
First, I hear you.
Second, are you sure?"
This is mastery.
Pointing out ignorance without alienating people.
Nice post format.
I like it for dev tools that have both API and UI components.
You show code and what it produces in one view.
You can add additional things to the vis part of it for more context.
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.
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.
Good in-place code pattern.
I can go and see different code snippets without moving to other parts of the website.
At the same time, I can read explanations and value propositions.
I like how "view documentation" is such a strong CTA with so much going on here already.
Newsjacking is a great marketing tactic.
Especially when you can connect it nicely to your product.
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.
Brilliant.
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.
💡You 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:
💚And 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. Just a fantastic work IMHO.
Simple yet powerful CTA in the navbar resources section.
The resources section in the navbar is mostly navigational. Well, the entire navbar is ;)
But you always have that one action that is more impactful than others.
💚 And I think that a Plauground is a great option. You get people to see how your product works. You let people play with it and see for themselves.
Not many next actions can be as impactful as getting people to experience the product.
Especially if you are a heavier infra tool that people cannot really test out in that first session. I mean, you won't really create a realistic example of your core database in 15 minutes to see how that new tool that you just saw works.
🔥 Making this CTA "big and shiny" and showing a glimpse of what will happen after clicking is great too.
🤔 2 changes I'd test out:
But the core idea behind making the playground your core navbar resource section CTA is just great.
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.
I like this idea of showing how your dev tool works.
With developers, you almost have to explain how it works on your homepage.
Many products do some version of Step 1 -> Step 2 -> Step 3 -> Success.
I really like how @SST approached it with a timeline.
I find it more engaging than those disconnected steps.
And when I follow this journey the final and logical step is to try it out. Get started.
Devs are builders.
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:
I like how this starts with a [WHAT IT IS ABOUT] scroll stopper.
That is coupled with a big block of code that has:
(presumably) when you click "See more" you get the rest of the text post.
Just an awesome billboard/ad format for a dev too company coming from Vercel.
What I like about it is:
Simple and beautiful.
Btw, they actually run similar ads on Reddit and it makes a lot of sense IMHO.
Classic Auth0 campaign coming back in 2023.
I love how simple and powerful this message is.
You can outsource a dull but important problem of authentications to them.
That is all the say.
But it is enough to get you interested and understand what they do.
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.
Just wanted to share this classic dev tool branding campaign.
There is even a book about this from Jeff Lawson at Twilio.
But I recently saw someone share on HN that it got changed to "How can I reduce acquisition costs by 65%". Made me a bit sad.
But perhaps after years and years of working it stopped delivering any additional brand awareness/affinity.
Could they have come up with another flavor of "Ask your developer."?
Maybe. But maybe at their levels of mind share you are playing a different game.
The good thing is, you are not at that stage ;)
And f you pull off something that is 1% of the success of that famous Twilio campaign you can make your brand noticed and remembered.
I know we are in the year of doing what brings results right now. And branding campaigns may not make the cut.
But maybe we can (and should) afford to do something that helps us deliver that pipeline next year or a year after that?
𝗔𝘁𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗱 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗿𝗮 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗿𝘂𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹?
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:
• Catch your audience's attention
• Say what you do in their language
• Better yet, show how it actually does it
And Run.ai ai and MLOps infra tool managed to create a beautiful Linkedin ad IMHO:
• They catch attention with the code visual
• They say what they do quickly with "Dynamic Fractional GPU using One Command"
• They extend on that in the post copy with an action-driven "Open Terminal -> Run Command -> Boom"
• The code shows what it feels like to use the tool
• And it shows you the result -> fractional GPUs
Job well done!
Someone shared an old but awesome article with me recently: “I answered 99 Stack Overflow questions and now 2 million developers know about my product“
And while chatGPT/Perplexity/co-pilots may be making the Stack Overflow less effective the rules of engaging in communities very much apply to your Slack/Discord/Reddit.
Also, I often talk about social listening, setting up trackers like Syften, F5Bot, or Gummysearch, and jumping into discussions around your problem space. But I haven’t really shared good examples of how people actually join in the conversation doing that. This is one of them.
So what you do is basically:
Do that enough times, all in relevant discussions, and see how folks refer to your answers and drive more product signups.
The "Resources" tab is the most loved and hated tab for developer marketers.
Ok so the common problem is that you have lots of different resources:
You want to showcase them in the navbar but where do you put them?
Under product? Company? Docs?
How to make sure that people don't go to your blog to read about your product just to find out that you talk about the industry problems there?
Enter the "Resources" tab. The "Miscellaneous" of the navbar world.
And typically it is just crammed with all stuff that doesn't fit anywhere. Just like any respectable misc folder would.
How do you deal with that?
Snyk approached it in a clear and logical way:
I love this (and already stole the idea for our site).
I like that this is both strong and subtle.
It comes right after I've delivered a smell of value with a technical intro.
And I can see that there is more value to come after thanks to the table of contents.
The CTA itself feels like an info box in the docs rather than a typical subscribe CTA.
Good stuff.
Say what you do and how you do it.
What:
How:
CTA (bonus):
I love this video ad format from Hygraph.
They are reading and reacting to bad reviews.
I saw this in B2C but not in the dev tool B2B. Love it!
So basically how they did that campaign is:
Through all that, you get entertained and learn something about their product. This is such a fun format to test out!
Architecture diagrams are awesome.
They have this smell of value that makes you want to share them with others.
This one is particularly good-looking imho.
This is such a fantastic ad creative because it is just so different.
So basically what Kinde it does is:
💚 That timer is such a great way of catching attention and keeping it while landing your product message. It seems raw and "whatever" but I think it is very intentional in its dev-friendly delivery.
So if you have a dev tool that has awesome devex and can get people to that aha moment quickly then give it a go (and tell me how it went ;)).
I like the design of this crosshead.
"How fast do you ship?"
Not many dev tools answer that on their homepage. PostHog does.
In a typical (enterprise) sales process, people often ask:
And you show them the roadmap or get someone from the product on the next call.
But I haven't yet seen dev tools talk about it on their homepage.
But why not?
Devs who want to buy self-serve want to know it almost just as much.
After all, they won't be able to twist your arm to build that custom feature cause "we are your biggest client and we need it".
I like it, it builds trust, it shows me you are transparent,
And it shows me that those features I can see on the public roadmap will come true.
How to write a "What is {MY CORE KEYWORD}" article that gets to the top of HackerNews? 👇
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:
𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼.
• ❌ No "In today's fast-paced data-driven world enterprises work with data" stuff.
• ✅ Just "Learn what database sharding is, how sharding works, and some common sharding frameworks and tools."
𝗛𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗸𝗲𝘆𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗱𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝘃 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿.
💚 Speaking peer to peer, not authority-student:
• "You’ve probably seen this table before, about how scaling out helps you take this users table, all stored on a single server:"
• "And turn it into this users table, stored across 2 (or 1,000) servers:"
• "But that’s only one type of sharding (row level, or horizontal). "
𝗨𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗷𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲
Things like:
• "Partitioning has existed – especially in OLAP setups"
• "Sifting through HDFS partitions to find the missing snapshot "
𝗔𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸
🔥 Look at the section "How database sharding works under the hood" with subsections:
• Sharding schemes and algorithms
• Deciding on what servers to use
• Routing your sharded queries to the right databases
• Planning and executing your migration to a sharded solution
🎁 𝗕𝗼𝗻𝘂𝘀: 𝗽𝗹𝘂𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆
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.
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.
Adding CTA in dev-focused articles is hard.
You don't want to be too pushy, but you do want to get conversions.
DigitalOcean strikes a great balance with its in-text article CTA design.
They make this CTA look like an info box that you'd typically see in the documentation.
It is clear that it is a Digital Ocean CTA but it doesn't feel pushy.
It feels like a piece of potentially useful information.
Love it.
Linked GitHub logo in the navbar
Adding CTA to your GitHub repo makes your company look more dev-friendly.
If you have a ton of stars I'd show those as well to play that social proof card.
But even without it, I think it's a good way to get more traffic to your repo and get those stars :)
Code-style ad format on Reddit.
Code can speak louder than words (sometimes).
It makes your value prop real and concrete to the right audience.
How to communicate the flexible part of your plan?
Many dev tools have 3 plans:
Especially the ones doing some flavor of product-led-sales or open-source go-to-market.
Now, the Team plan is often a self-served version.
And for many dev tools, this part is partially or entirely usage-based.
So how do you present it?
You can just have "+ what you use" and explain it in the big table below.
But if you have just one usage dimension then why not do it here?
Resend does it beautifully communicating right away that it starts at 20$ / month and grows with the amount of emails you send.
Very clear. Very nice.
This is a cool story coming from the GOAT of all docs. They added a signup button to their header and the conversions and revenue followed.
All they did was added a "Create Account" button and saw a huge jump in conversions.
Interestingly, Peggy shared that when they added it to Apollo GraphQL docs, signups went up by 20%.
It sounds like a good thing to try out.
There are a lot of boring vendor t-shirts at conferences.
And they get boring results.
I like this bold design from GitGuardian:
Nice.
"There are two types of companies": Just a beautiful piece of copy from Fly.io
Doing us vs them doesn't always play out well.
But folks from Fly made it snarky and playful and fun.
And they basically said that they are:
And this is just such a nice brand play as well.
You just show personality and confidence in this devy snarky way.
I dig it.
Make it about belonging.
Something some people can deeply connect with.
Nostalgia is a very strong emotion.
It feels good to be a part of something as well.
An interesting option to push people to read the next article.
You use a slide-in triggered on a 75% scroll with a "read next" CTA in the bottom left.
On the aggressive side for sure but when the article you propose is clearly technical it could work.
And if your articles are not connected to the product explicitly you do need some ways to keep people reading and see more of your brand.
I love this copy. It answers:
It doesn't talk about the value as it is obvious to devs.
Obviously, it will save time and make things safer.
Don't talk about it.
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.
Well done templates gallery from Vercel.
For developer-focused products, having an examples/templates/code samples gallery can be a powerful growth lever.
✅ It helps people:
Just a great touchpoint in the developer journey.
💚 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.
What if your next swag was a donation? That's what Cockroach Labs did.
Ok, so the typical way of doing swag at a conference is to give out t-shirts for badge scans.
And then folks either wear them or throw them away (or keep wearing them when they should have thrown them away but that is another story).
After the conference you take leftovers with you, ship them home or, you guessed it, throw them away.
A lot of throwing away for a badge scan if you ask me.
Cockroach Labs decided to do something completely different.
They donate a few $ to a great charity @Women Who Code for every badge scan they get.
I love it.
An extra benefit (and where the idea originated) is that with this, you can do virtual badge scans too.
I love the design of this crossover section on the Tailwind homepage.
I see the code and the result next to each other.
I see how I can get that result with code.
It is interactive and catches my attention.
It makes me feel inspired.
Great job Tailwind team!
Nice Reddit ad from kftray.
This is a simple ad format but lands the message:
An interesting fact is that there is no call to action?!
They say "Kftray is an open-source" which is enough for those interested to google "kftray github" or just go to GitHub and find it. And makes the ad less pushy which is a nice touch on Reddit.
But the most important takeaway is this. If the problem is real to the dev audience you target you don't need to go fancy. Just show how you solve it.
Create a connection with your ideal customer profile.
"Wrong answers only" questions are great for that imho.
Developer-focused Reddit ad. 33 upvotes, 30 comments.
So @Zesty is a company that targets devops folks and helps with cloud cost optimization.
And they decided to run Reddit ads.
So they:
And they got 33 upvotes and 30 comments.
Some of the comments were technical.
One comment that got 67 upvotes was actually
"Okay, this ad is pretty funny"
And I agree, this is a pretty funny ad that I am sure brought them some brand awareness and clicks.
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.
A great example of a dev-focused Linkedin post format from Khuyen Tran 👇
What I like about this:
Just great job!
"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.
A great example of a quote-style ad.
I like it because:
Great stuff.
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.
Devs like diagrams.
When you explain a complex concept in one diagram it is just very shareable.
If you are interested in reading more there is an entire "blog post" when you click see more.
Just a very solid content format.
In dev tools, you really can solve the problem for a narrow market and extend to adjacent markets over time.
Use that -> Snyk did.
Their value proposition stayed pretty much the same for 7 years!
"Find and fix vulnerabilities in open-source software you use."
But the market they served got so much bigger over time:
Again, their core value prop is the same in 2023 as it was in 2016.
But their target market (and revenue share) grew by... a lot ;)
Isn't that just beautiful marketing-wise?
So the takeaway is this:
Start narrow, solve the problem, and extend to other frameworks/languages/tech can still work.
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 ⭐ 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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:
I really like this pattern and I have already recommended it to some folks working on their sites recently.
Very nice design solution on the homepage.
Classic communication of the world before using your tool and the world after.
Really liked how it felt messy before.
And is nice and clean after.
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.
If your dev tool's USP is that it is faster -> Show it in the header
I like how folks from Bun focus on the fact that they are a faster library.
They show the benchmark as the key visual on the homepage header.
I love it.
If you think about it how else do you really want to show that you are faster?
This is believable, especially with a link to the benchmark so that I can dig deeper.
They show competitors, they don't pretend they don't exist.
And they talk about being faster left right and center.
I mean, they drive this "we are faster" home for me.
If that was important to me, I'd check it out.
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!
𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗛𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗿 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲𝘀?
The general tip is simple. Create content that the HN audience finds interesting.
𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝘆𝗽𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀:
But how do you actually do that?
𝗢𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗲𝗱 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀:
That was exactly what folks from CockroachDB did at the beginning. Heard about it on one of the episodes of the Unusual Ventures podcast with Peter Mattis from Cockroach Labs.
𝗘𝘅𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗶𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗼𝗳 𝗛𝗡:
• "CockroachDB Stability Post-Mortem: From 1 Node to 100 Nodes"
• "Serializable, lockless, distributed: Isolation in CockroachDB"
• "How CockroachDB Does Distributed, Atomic Transactions"
Kudos Cockroach Labs team and thanks for sharing!