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 do "Start building "
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.
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.
How to bring attention and trust to a feature section?
Add a testimonial.
Ideally, it should talk about that feature to make your message even stronger.
I like how Appsmith made it animated and it just makes you look.
And you read the testimonial and look at the feature above it.
Good stuff.
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.
I really like this Reddit ad from Sentry.
Powerful simplicity.
They don't do:
• long value-based copy
• fancy, in-your-face CTAs
• creative that feels "professional
They go for:
• focus on the pain
• creative that speaks to that pain
• low-key CTA ", get Sentry" rather than "Get Sentry Free!"
• building rapport with the dev with copy "If seeing this in React makes you 🤮"
And through simplicity and focus they deliver a message:
• Stack traces in React are not much fun
• They seem to understand that
• Sentry helps you solve that
Good format.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
"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!
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes you have an article, report, or event you want to drive people to.
And it is important that they read it.
What Plaid did here is an interesting way of putting it right in the hero section without making it overwhelming or distracting.
I like it.
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:
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.
I like how they use the black dot to show the mouse movements in the UI.
Simple but powerful and clear.
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.
Your dev tool is faster/more scalable/more X -> show it with benchmarks.
For some tools the entire unique selling point is that they are faster.
You build your messaging around that, put a flavor of "fastest Y for X" in the header and call it a day.
But devs who come to your website cannot just take your word for it. They need to see it, test it.
For some tools it is possible to just see it for themselves, get started.
But you cannot expect devs to really take a database or an observability platform for a spin.
As to test the speed or scalability on realistic use case you need to...
... set up a realistic use case. Which takes a lot of time.
But you can set that use case and test it for them. With benchmarks.
I really like how Astro approached it:
If your usp is that you are faster/more scalable/ more whatever. Back it up. This is the nr 1 thing devs on your website need to trust you with to move forward.
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.
There are a few developer experience gems here:
Also, their design is super clean, non-invasive, and simple which makes for easy content consumption and more developer love.
If you want to get your post to do well on HackerNews you may want to break some "marketing rules" you'd expect to work elsewhere when it comes to titles.
And the titles are really important on HN.
People will start a discussion and fight viciously on both sides of the argument without even reading the article.
I even tested it one time by putting an article "Why people on Hacker News comment without reading" on HN. It went to the first spot in 5min and got a few people talking before it got flagged ;) The article obviously had nothing in it. Just an ask for people who clicked out not to comment saying it was empty.
The point stands though. Titles are crucial imho. They set the tone. Good titles give you a better chance.
And no, in this case, Karma didn't play a role here:
What I think mattered was the titles. Very similar theme but a vastly different vibe.
Imho this is what happened here. The Hacker News crowd lives on good hacker life stories, on feeding curiosity. On titles that don't feel like a marketer would post.
So when in doubt go understated.
btw I have a good story of helping an infra startup get to the top of HN Show if you are interested. Added a bunch of links to resources/learnings in there too: https://www.markepear.dev/case-studies/glassflow
This body cross-section is just awesome.
It makes it obvious that I can connect it to my workflow.
This is a must for dev-focused pages imho.
What I like:
- there are many integrations listed
- I can see the code and that it is easy to use
- The CTA is to integration docs, awesome!
Fantastic all-text Reddit ad from Latitude.
Dev ads are hard. Promotion on Reddit is harder. Running a dev ad on Reddit that gets 50 comments and 90 likes is expert-level hard.
But folks from Latitude managed 🔥
They used one of my favorite Reddit ad formats: all text.
Here is what I liked:
Great execution. Chapeau bas Latitude.
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.
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
I like how it has a proper "hero section" feel to it but it adds a developer-focused twist:
The rest of the Readme is great as well but the hero section is gold imho.
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.
💚 The team at Storyblok ran a Tetris competition:
Afaik it was a big hit and I can definitely see why.
📒 A few more notes:
btw, I read about it on DX Tips. You want to check out that article on dev conferences from DX Tips
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 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.
𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁. 𝗢𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆.
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 ;)
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.
This is one of the most interesting content pieces I have seen in dev tools recently 👇
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.
"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.
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!
Nice way to show code and results straight from the React docs that people love.
And this pattern can be used outside of the docs for sure.
Anyway, a classic situation:
And folks behind React docs solved it nicely by:
Not groundbreaking maybe but a beautiful implementation that is just a delight to use.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Classic widget PLG loop.
Algolia really crashed it with these. Here is how they made it so successful.
Some time ago I did some research on Algolia marketing looking for gems. Found quite a few as they are truly amazing at this.
One angle that is bringing a lot of traffic to their site is that classic PLG widget.
So what they did is:
And the sites that brought the most traffic were:
I love this tactic as it aligns:
Win Win Win
When you find those "Win Win Win" tactics/strategies you are golden.
"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.
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.
There are three CTAs actually.
Common knowledge suggests doing one, maybe two, they do 3:
Devs want relevant and practical.
Also, devs love docs and examples and check them before signing up.
Action-focused copy is great as well.
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.
Great above the fold
The subheader explains the value proposition.
Header handles major objections:
Then we have 3 CTAs but they are super focused on devs:
Then it goes on to explain how it works with a simple, static graphic.
This whole thing makes me feel peaceful.
Say what you do and how you do it.
What:
How:
CTA (bonus):
Great flow of the explainer.
Starts with the outcome "Build search UX".
Goes straight to code and 1-2-3-results format.
Explains every snippet of code as it is added.
Ends with a nicely presented result: a working search on a website.
No voiceover just code and screenshots.
And it's only 45 sec !!!
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.
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.
Sometimes your product just wins on price.
I like how New Relic owns it on this page:
After reading this I'd trust them to give me a solid price estimate and that it will likely be cheaper than Datadog.
Obviously price is not the only reason why we choose tools, but if that was a problem I had with Datadog, they have my attention.
What to say when you have many products?
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. 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.
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 :)
A freaking developer TV.
They took this "be a media company" to the next level.
They created entire TV around their company, audience, and products.
I respect people really going all in.
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:
• it is fun, not formal, builds rapport
• it introduces the core problem the tool solves
• 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 s̶t̶e̶a̶l̶ get inspired by ;)
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.
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.
The homepage header is about landing your core product message.
For Modal it is basically LLM infrastructure with great developer experience.
And they do a great job delivering it:
Top job on that header folks!
VS competitor ads are hard to pull off with devs. Not impossible though. 👇
So the problem is that:
@Convex does it really nicely here:
And even though this is by a "aggressive" competitor marketing hundreds of devs liked/bookmarked this tweet.
Good job!
Digital Ocean went for an ad for the Hactoberfest in a tricky place.
To keep it in the medium that fits YouTube shorts they:
I think doing YouTube shorts is an interesting opportunity in a yet unsaturated market (as of 2022).
And doing ads that fit that medium so nicely is an art.
Good job DO!
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.
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.
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%.
Testimonial ads are a format that helps you move people from "I know what you are doing" to "I trust you enough to do business with you".
Video testimonials are even better.
You see the person who has a similar role that you do saying things about the product you are considering.
CircleCI did a solid job here.
And so if you are running remarketing to people who went to pricing but didn't sign up, or signed up to a free trial but haven't converted yet this is a good format candidate.
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:
Is it better to do one big prize or many small prizes?
This is a decision you have to make when thinking about running a swag campaign.
Turns out that a small number of huge prizes can get you way better ROI on the same budget.
And NannyML has done it brilliantly here.
They are a monitoring tool and they give away monitoring setup.
This is something that actually can go viral. And it did.
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.
Using memes in the product release.
If you understand your ICP (in this case open-source backend devs) it may be a great idea.
An additional benefit is that people may share a meme... that actually has a link to your announcement.
Is this brand campaign 💩 or ❤️?
I like it a lot actually.
It gets attention, it is memorable, it gets reactions.
And It does speak to a product message: that you have better developer experience than other tools.
It definitely beats flavors of "5x developer productivity".
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.
Thinking about your next conference giveaway idea?
How about a coconut? Datafold did just that!
Coconut + logo burned on it + a person who can open them up
=
A memorable, shareable, fresh (literally), and wholesome conference experience.
And I bet it didn't cost an arm and a leg too.
It goes to show how creativity matters when planning those things.
Thinking about doing a similar thing in Poland... with potatoes of course ;)
Usage-based pricing is loved by devs. But has its own problems.
Ok, so first what are those problems?
Value metric:
Predictability and procurement:
But devs love usage-based pricing:
It is great for a dev tool company:
But pulling it off is not as easy as you may think.
Choosing that value metric, packaging it, and presenting it is a struggle.
@Appsmith solved it in the following way:
Very interesting approach.
With infrastructure tools, it is notoriously difficult to show people the value quickly.
To really see it they would need to set up everything at their company infra, create dashboards for their use case, and so on.
A lot of work.
That is why creating a sandbox experience is a good way of giving people a taste.
I like the way Axiom calls it a playground and says "Play with Axiom" and "Launch playground".
This copy is good because:
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"
🚧 That helps you tackle obstacles your dev reader has:
💚 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 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.
This is a simple but great header imho:
Love it.
"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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
People want to be valued by their tribe.
One of the ways to do that is by being helpful.
So they want to share things that have a "smell" of insight.
Tool stack/workflow/pipeline chart makes them feel that way.
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.
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.
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.
This is a very nteresting approach from PubNub.
They could have published an article on their blog and posted a link to Reddit.
Instead, they just posted an entire article, 3851 words . That post got 360 upvotes and made it to the top of r/rust. Wow.
Never seen anyone do that before but I like this. It could be great:
Some things I also liked:
Super interesting approach that I want to test out myself.
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?
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.
How to get more ROI from your dev conference booth? -> Add obvious CTAs.
Yes, giveaway stuff.
Yes, make it nice and branded.
Yes, make it funny, shareable, and cool.
But give people an easy and obvious option to give back and support you and your goals.
I really liked how Union.ai approached it at the recent MLOps World conference:
Just a nice little tactic but I bet it squeezed a bit more of that ROI juice that we all need in 2023 ;)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I like the design of this crosshead.
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 love that it is static and it blurs everything I don't need to get the concept.
For the dev audience, static graphics, when done well, are better than
Tell me what you do in 1 sec, not 60