How to market to software developers?

Free side projects are the best form of marketing. Small OSS projects that give value and make a name for yourself in the community.

Content works too, especially courses.

I have recently found many articles that help me get started with a language or fix a specific issue within that language have been posted to Medium and then at the bottom has a link to the original post. If the content has been helpful or that person has posted a few posts that I have used and they have worked then I make sure I go to the website to find out more, even if their product isn't something I am looking for (in case that changes in the future).

I thought dev.to went out of its way to make it easy to import and republish your own content. Medium definitely does.

I'm expecting content marketing to be an effective direction (I think I'd do well to write a series of 'How to debug X' articles, for example) but given the above I'm not really sure how to get the resulting content in front of the people who might be interested in it.

Google does exactly this. Rankings aren't instant, but nearly everybody who wants to know how to debug X is going to one or more google searches on how to debug x. The most important thing to succeed with this kind of content marketing is to choose the right X. Anytime you find yourself frustrated trying to figure something out, that's a strong signal that it could be a good topic to write about.

Hey, that looks like a nifty tool!

I think marketing to developers can be harder, but if you want to be in the niche, it's best to stop worrying and start brainstorming. Every niche will have a general personality you have to work with. In addition, marketing to developers is great because, if you target the right ones, you know they make boatloads of money.

Here are my random thoughts:

• Devs may be less prone to salesy pitches. You still need to make your page look good (think you did that ok) and you should probably still highlight benefits over features, but make sure to have links to more in-depth information that will show how it's going to help.
• I think content marketing will be great. For your app, one content strategy would be to brainstorm the various problems your app solves, and explain that problem and how it's solved manually (or where manual steps fall short). That should give some good SEO, show the struggle, and target people who are working with those issues.
• Rather than worry about the self-promotion community aspects, I'd dig around to see how often the issues you solve comes up. Try to answer the questions. And if you answer it, and they respond, you might be able to get away with responding saying something like "I had this problem often enough that I built an app to fix it." - not sure, it might work :)

Quora's been a good source of leads from technical folks for us.

A good chunk of software developers are really averse to spending on software products in general....myself included. I think the way to go is to help them solve hard problems for free, and start charging them once they're coming back for more!

I think this is one of the main reasons that paid support models work for a lot widely used open-source technologies. It goes something like:

1. build awesome open source technology that solves a real problem
2. make it easy enough to use that you can get started but complicated enough that average users have to invest a lot of time to learn/use/maintain it
3. sell support to help them figure it out and make the support awesome!

I don't know if this is extremely applicable to httptoolkit, but maybe you could apply some similar thinking?

Let me ask you. Where do software developers hang out? Go there, build a relationship and trust, then try and pitch a sale.

I put emphasis on the "build a relationship" part because it's important to do that with anyone to make a sale. No one wants someone going to dev.to and saying, "Hey look at me! Buy this thing!"

You got this, Tim!

Hey Tim,

I have two thoughts for you.

1. For content marketing -- guest post on someone else's blog or publication. For example, I've been writing articles for the freeCodeCamp publication on Medium. If you write about topics that are interesting to developers then you can get a lot of traffic that way. If you want some tips on how to do this get in touch with me.

2. The other thing would be to look at your competitors (in your case maybe Charles Proxy) on Twitter. You'll see how they do their marketing and messaging, the channels they use + you'll see a lot of their customers and the situations that get their customers excited. Those are clues you can use to figure out how to reach out.

As a software developer, I don't really like spending money on my tools. Do like building the ones I can't find for free :D

Maybe I could try it out? What do you think?

This comment was deleted 7 years ago