Help me brainstorm how to get in front of more developers
I'm currently exploring a possible pain point for developers who are learning to code or are switching dev roles (such as from backend to frontend). I've made a problem-focused landing page, but I'm not positive on the best way to get it out there. Here's what I've done so far:
- Post for feedback on various entrepreneur forums
- Post on twitter
- Put up a small google adwords budget
- Sent around to friends and family
If you were in my shoes, how would you go about getting more people to take a look?
Also, happy to take any idea feedback / validation here as well! https://codingcourseproblem.landen.co/
A very nice landing page. Clean design and the message is clear.
We are actually doing something very similar.
post on producthunt + reddit
Audience building and content marketing.
Think of it in terms of building an audience of qualified leads. You need to offer something in exchange for an audience's attention. If you want to capture "developers" for your audience, you need to offer lots of content for developers. Start a development blog where you write a post about every new feature you build. Don't talk about "why should you buy" in these posts, talk about "How I used React context hooks to manage authentication in our app".
Post these everywhere developers hang out: hackernews, /r/programming, /r/react, whatever. Hang out on stack overflow, and if you've solved a problem someone is facing, answer the question and link back to the relevant article.
Make sure your blog has a newsletter signup and an rss feed. The email newsletter should be between 1x/week and 1x/month, and should have highly valuable content, just like your blog. This newsletter will be your primary mode of communication with your audience. Every 4-6 weeks, promote your product gently.
It'll take a year to build a sizable audience. But these people are targeted (developers), are all essentially qualified leads, and what's more they're opt-in, organic, and you have their attention. They will want to buy a product from you at the end of the funnel.
This is something I've been mulling over. Is there a way to build a SaaS without doing a year of audience building first? Obviously, having an audience is a huge advantage. But plenty of people get an idea out there without the audience. Is a year of pre-effort worth it?
It's the only way to get an owned audience for free. The alternative is to spend a bunch of cash on google ads, but depending on your pricing model and your competition that might not be economically viable. Economics of google ads means that it only makes sense if your product is priced high enough.
Maybe, but I'm moreso unsure that an owned audience is required. For example, I pay monthly for a subscription to FrontendMasters, because they have really good content. But I never watched any free content from them (in fact, I'm not sure they have any). I wasn't part of an "owned" audience of theirs. But I was a member of various slack groups, including some programming groups, which recommended the content.
I see plenty of ways to build an audience without owning an audience. Posting on IH is an example. While I don't own any audience, if I'm helpful people may just click on my profile, and perhaps it will lead to interest in what I'm building.
As a developer yourself you probably have some idea about how/where you find out about new tools, techniques, dev news, etc and also where you go and what you do when you're trying to learn something new - try and work out what those channels are and see if you can gain visibility there.
As a fellow dev my experience leads me to suggest these ideas...
You could try getting it onto developer-focussed communities where devs go to learn, like StackOverflow, dev.to, Lobsters, Hackernoon, GameDev.net, etc. Perhaps achieved by posting your tool as an 'answer' to questions about how to get better at programming language/tool X or Y.
Then there are influencers. Get some Twitter and YouTube dev influencers to mention and link to your offering in such a way that give cause for people to retweet and/or discuss. Realistically you won't bag a top-tier influencer like Dan Abramov or Jon Skeet, but some mid-to-low rank influences will still drive traffic.
There are also lots of YouTube tutorial videos out there that teach people to code whether explicitly ("Learn to Javascript Episode 123") or implicitly ("Make your first minecraft mod"), you could drop comments linking to your product.
If/When you have a working MVP you could even re-create some of those videos yourself, make your own tutorial series, but utilise your product as part of the video - newby programmers using your tuts will use it as well.
Thanks! My main struggle is that I'm just exploring a pain right now - therefore, I don't have a great way to link to the problem on a lot of dev sites. And of course I don't want to be spammy or inappropriate on certain forums :)
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Thanks! I actually had just followed GrowthExamples coincidentally - will be keeping an eye out!