How do you market to developers?

After 2.5 years of development, we're finally launching our product

Congrats! Always nice to see projects with a lot of effort behind them.

What are some other channels, where developers are?

Slack and Discord mainly. Also, communities around specific frameworks like NestJS

How do you usually learn about new tech you use?

Videos and documentation. But it’s different for everyone. My friend always dives into the source code first.

Are there some criteria a product/tools need to meet, before you're ready to give it a try?

Is it webscale? Hahaha

First, is it open-source? Can I contribute back the features I need? Is it under a reasonable license?

Second, is there an extremely generous free tier for developers? As a solo dev, will I ever hit the limit? I need to be able to try technology out before I recommend it to the team. I only suggest what I have proven to work.

Third, is there a large community like React? Even between React and Vue, the substantial difference in community size makes a significant impact. Is there support? Am I going to be fighting the framework as much as my own code?

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The comparison that unsurprisingly comes to mind with your tool is Serverless. I love that framework—they even added support for Announcing AWS Lambda Function URLs within hours of release. Amazing.

I’m sure you’ve put a lot of work into your product. So tell me—why should I choose you over Serverless? I’m curious.

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One other challenge you may run into is many companies refuse to use anything that’s not AWS because it’s the standard. Also, security compliance. Not sure how common that view is.

It's all about putting your time into DevRel, and it's actually simpler than many think.

When thinking about gaining community adoption, approach a single community at a time. If your goal is to approach engineers who currently live and breathe headless microservices architecture, then start making a list of everyone writing and influencing this space.

Focus on reaching out and collaborating, offer to pay them to write about topics associated with your product, all of these 3rd party DevRel companies use this same exact strategy, you can skip the consulting / advising bill and just do it yourself.

When it comes to DevRel you're likely looking to do this in stages and gain influence from prominent ICs at authoritative companies. You could check out companies like Vercel and Netlify and find a list of their 3rd party writers and people they follow to streamline this.

Even though you're touting that it's easier to use and removes ops from the equation, also consider gaining the ops community's perspective on it.

CIO side of the house always focuses on tool purchases over labor, anything they can do to abstract away complexity and reduce risk is a huge benefit, so don't count them out.

The other thing to consider is that all engineers are not alike, depending on if they are in a startup environment, versus a mid-market / enterprise, they have different buying habits and research processes.

When you're thinking about more established markets (midmarket+) consider co-marketing relationships with composable companies, think 3rd party microservices vendors that have a synergetic potential.

These relationships are relatively easy to establish, just reach out to the partner manager and see how you can get involved.

give them free stuff, build free tools, and resources...and put a link on those to your main project.

Your product looks great. We are trying to simplify AWS lambda's with TinyFunction.com .
I know how complex these kind of products are, they are not like general todo apps. After releasing TinyFunction I felt that it is very very important to be in constant touch with developers.

Initially ProductHunt brought us alot of visitors (thousands). I noticied that twitter is very effiecient for product like yours. Have a look at Supabase, fly, Render... they are very active on twitter.

Goodluck

Definitely interested in hearing other people's thoughts on this, since I'm going to be launching a largely developer-focused product soon, too.

What are some other channels, where developers are?

I think you've covered the biggest ones, but Discord is a pretty major hub these days, too.

(if you're a developer) How do you usually learn about new tech you use?

People talking about it on Twitter, Reddit or Discord is usually how I find out about new stuff for the first time. Sometimes podcasts, newsletters, streamers etc.

Are there some criteria a product/tools need to meet, before you're ready to give it a try?

It depends a lot on what it is, but for me, stability and vendor lock-in are big ones. Like if it's a service, how easily can I switch to a different (similar) solution? If it's not easy to switch, is this justified by how useful the service is? What about stability, is it already used by a bunch of people in production, or would I be risking finding out that it's too buggy to rely on?

Developers are a unique bunch. They're used to being left alone to do their work, and often have a lot of pride about the quality of their code. That's why it's critical not to "over-market" to the developer . Their interest in working with you will be sparked by the product you have to offer, not the sales pitch or marketing tactics that you employ. Here are a few ways to market to developers:

Start by talking about developers and how they work. Point out how you're not just another vendor and keep the sales team at bay, so that sales don't distract from the messaging.

Nice product, congrats! You have a configuration example on the homepage and I think the line specifying the value of DB_CONNECTION_STRING env var is not properly indented.

GitHub and StackOverflow!

As a developer I'm inclined to listen to my fellow developer friends. When they don't have an easy answer for my problem, I start poking around GitHub. Social proof is everything. There's a common culture around developers, too, so you can come up with a creative solution. You could for example think of some open source apps you could write that consume your app in some way (API, function as a plug in, etc) and put it out there on GitHub.

If I'm running into a problem, I google it. The top site that usually comes up? StackOverflow. Use a little SEO magic to figure out exactly what a targeted developer is going to Google when you want them to connect to your company and product. Sprinkle some of that into a well researched response that directly answers their question, and slips your product or service into the conversation.

The way you market to developer is you get technical right on the front page. If I don't see code within the first 2.5 seconds, i'm closing the browser tab.

Did you make all of this yourself? It looks amazing. I don't have any answers to your questions but I just say great job and good luck.

Excellent question, I'm struggling with that too at croct.com, and will be nice to follow the answers here :)

Great resources here, love reading about different responses to questions.

Some ideas: Can you work with a hackathon (virtual?) or have a one day/weekend hack that highlights your product/company?

I usually don't recommend producthunt (or similar sites) but for dev tools that might be a great place to get visibility? I think there are more tech/dev focused folks who get notifications for those products.

Hi Matúš,

Dev team lead here. Love the product name by the way. I'll share this with my team tomorrow and gather some feedback for you.

All the best 🤙