Marketing to developers?
Hey everyone, I'm Martin, founder of acreom. After 1 year of development we're getting close to coming out of the beta which leads me to explore / validate some growth experiments.
acreom is a knowledge base with task management running on local .md files for devs. We're building a single workflow tool that you'll love using for your personal agenda but also in the team. We believe the "issue tracking" tools can offer much more, from being well connected to your team knowledge base to being better integrated with your IDE / Github, so you spend more time coding.
We have few ideas we'd like to explore:
- content marketing (i.e. engineering blogs)
- being active in dev communities (i.e. discord, reddit, hn etc. )
- community building - discord & twitter
- our main channel for growth so far has been word of mouth (curious how can we make more of this?)
If you've marketed to developers:
- how did you get your first 1000 users?
- how do you get new users?
- what channels do you use to market to devs?
- what worked well so far?
If you're a developer:
- how do you find out about new tools? what makes you interested to try them out?
- do you read engineering blogs? which ones?
- which communities are you most active in?
- does the value prop on our landing page make sense to you? http://acreom.com
any feedback to this would be much appreciated!
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I would strongly recommend the book "Developer Marketing Does Not Exist" it will answer all of your questions and then some. I would also look at Developer Relations growth/awareness tactics as well.
+1 on this - the author Adam DuVander is brilliant!
@inferense If you want a quick intro to Adam's ideas, I just interviewed him and asked questions from the early stage perspective https://podcast.bitreach.io/episodes/developer-marketing-does-not-exist-with-adam-duvander
Ohhh thank you for sharing this. I'm definitely going to check this out too.
will check it out, thanks!
Some Marketing Tips for Software Engineers
Run your marketing strategy, hooks, and positioning through your own developers to see what they think. ...
Don't force a demo signup - free, usable trials are king. ...
Avoid hype-up ads and landing page copy.
Love this
Here's a shared repo of developer marketing resources https://github.com/ronakganatra/awesome-developer-marketing
how did you get your first 1000 users?
I think this really depends a lot on your product and goals. I'm working with an early stage DevTool and so far it's mostly been connections and cold/semi cold outreach via email/linkedin from the founder
We're focusing a lot on content but there's quite a slow payoff period on this and we need feedback
what channels do you use to market to devs?
what worked well so far?
-LinkedIn worked really well with the founders network and cold outreach
-We do really believe in Twitter and content so we're doubling down on this -too
-ProductHunt kinda works but mostly it brings people to your site who don't stick around (for us)
I wrote this in a hurry. If helpful I, can add some more thoughts.
I also wrote this piece a while back on how I see developer marketing as someone who was a developer and moved into the space https://blog.bitreach.io/how-to-do-dev-marketing/
thank you! this is helpful.
As someone who is also building a very much developer-only product (https://programmer.network) and being a hard core geek myself, I can say that majority of the marketing for us is being involved in the community and providing some value, e.g. knowledge sharing, YouTube videos, etc.
That being said, the way I will go around my programmer network will be mostly that. Once I release, I'll be the first user to use it, write articles, videos, etc on it.
As of Acreom, you website looks amazing, hands down. One thing that would lift your product by a million miles would be e.g. a VSCode integration (plugin). I feel that not needing to switch context from the tools we are already using is a massive help to us, devs, as we are already lazy enough. It takes a while to learn the VSCode API but honestly, it's just javascript wrapped inside of Chromium, so you could with relative ease, put your product inside that.
Anyway, gave you a follow, awesome looking product.
Edit PS - I assume that you are using Electronjs to wrap I guess again, your React / Vue app. The executable you have on your CDN is 152.2 mb. That feels really huge. If I recall well when I worked as an Electron developer, our "binaries" were around 30-35 mb, so something feels a bit off. Are you packaging more then you should? Let's imagine that you app bundle(s) are top 5 mb, and that chromium runtime (yes, no dynamic libs, so it has to package the whole runtime) is around 30 mb. You binary should be within 30mb range.
thanks for the insights and feedback! can I contact you somewhere to about the VSCode plugin? would love to learn more and bounce some ideas of you. (feel free to join our discord community and dm me there! https://discord.gg/YJdzZqkC) much appreciated.
Gladly, I'll join over the weekend and we can catch up. :-)
Design looks awesome. What's even better is that it saves time and money. I think you have good chance to sell it to companies, cause you save hours to their coders. The fastest way to do it will be via direct sales and increasing referal rate. Can help you with these, just drop me a DM on Twitter.
Hey,
I am a developer. I am new here, still trying to get used to IH so that I can discover more products. I usually visit Producthunt to search for new tools to try. I read the description and if it's something that can reduce manual work (I am a lazy guy ) or help me become more productive, then I give it a try. Other than this, I find other new tools from HN (Show HN, Launch HN, etc.), and if it's open-source, then probably from https://github.com/trending.
I read engineering blogs but most of those are specific company blogs like Netflix engineering, Uber engineering blogs, etc. Other than this I read articles from newsletters. I have subscribed to a few newsletters from https://cooperpress.com among others.
Yes, the value prop made sense and I realized that I have been missing such a tool. Usually I dump my thoughts and To-Dos on a new page in the IDE or use the scratchpad in JetBrains IDE. But this way it will be cleaner, organized and Markdown supported. I installed Acreom 0.7 and gave it a try and will wait for the beta launch.
very interesting, didn't know about cooper press for instance!
thank you for your answers! I'm happy to hear your initial thoughts, let me know how it goes once you get to use it more.
I have a blog dedicated to software architecture with approx. 30K page views per month. We can work something out if you are interested.
interested, can you share more details on [email protected] please?
What is acreom assistant? AI?
yes, it's like the intelligent code completion but in the context of workflow.
This looks great, congrats! The design is spot on.
I have a product aimed at devs as well, and lately niched newsletters have been something I've been looking into. Not sure if it would work, but allows you to reach 000's of devs through a trusted source.
And some kind of referral scheme on top of that.
And maybe some paid ads on programming reddits for discovery.
And plan a ProductHunt launch if you didn't do that yet.
Find a hunter who's a dev and get them passionate about your product, then go for it.
sounds good thanks! mind sharing the niche newsletters that you looked into?
Here's a good list I stumbled upon: https://github.com/zudochkin/awesome-newsletters
Also worth getting in touch with https://cooperpress.com/ if your budget is singnificant
Hi,
I'm a growth marketer, I've been working in Growth for 5+ years, I’ve worked on many areas of growth and have deep experience in Emails/Notifications, SEO, Paid Acquisition, Activation, Invites/Referrals, Analytics, Pre-product market fit. My latest article (https://panashe.hashnode.dev/what-happened-to-clubhouse-and-what-could-it-try-from-a-growth-perspective).
I could help you out (together) for a very "small" fee, and try some growth strategies together.