Targeting developers in advertising - what's worked?
Looking for a playbook on how to market to and target developers and entrepreneurs. What's worked for you?
Looking for a playbook on how to market to and target developers and entrepreneurs. What's worked for you?
Create an open source project around the problem you’re solving in your product. Then use that as a lead funnel to your actual product. Developers find you organically through places like Github and word of mouth.
We considered open sourcing part of Rhizata - the question is, which part? Good suggestions and thanks!
Not talking from experience, but stackoverflow and other popular documentation websites such as bootstrap seem like a good target for paid ads?
It seems many docs that have ads use this service: https://carbonads.net/
I've spoken to the guys at carbonads but their base-level campaigns starts around $4,000. I wish I could run something for a sub $1,000 to test but that doesn't seem to be an option.
+1 on stackoverflow
Oh wow I didn't realize. That's a lot for validating an idea.
Consider publishing articles (or ads if they offer that) on platforms such as hackernoon.com and dev.to
Also in my opinion, if you're not too spammy (i.e. send a templated message to everyone), you could try to reach out to developers directly in github.com, via their emails.
You could collect them from git commits. Make sure you stay relevant to their area of interest / expertise and reach out clarifying you're doing research, instead of coming out with a marketing message.
Hope this helps.
Hey @datalab
Create small "resources" and give it away for free with your company branding. For example, a checklist for a developer before starting a project or best top 10 developer blogs ranked by traffic etc.
I'm also building a developer focused product. Marketing to developers is a totally different ball game than marketing a normal product.
Couple of things I've tried and/or want to try:
Blogging
Side project marketing
Creating tools/features that can appear in a GitHub repository
Open source plans
GitHub Marketplace
Finding a way to post on HackerNews regularly without being spam (e.g. iirc in the early days IndieHackers achieved this by posting their interviews)
Quora ads (I've heard people have good results with Quora ads because they can be very well targetted)
Also I'd recommend checking out Heavybit (https://www.heavybit.com/library/topic/marketing/). They have a lot of content that's developer product related. Unfortunately most of their content is more relevant to funded startups than indiehackers but still plenty of useful info.
We should organise a group for IndieHackers building developer-focused products. Feel free to reach out: ben at codemason dot io
Super helpful, Ben. Thanks. Github marketplace is an avenue I hadn't considered.
I'll check out Heavybit.
I've tried Facebook ads with no success (only first iteration though). Next thing I'm trying out is content marketing: Writing blog posts that teach new tech stuff.
I've had a couple of fairly successful tech blogs in the past, and you can get pretty good SEO traffic from targeting specific specific things that developers search for. Best ones being:
A good thing about blogging a response from StackOverflow is that you can answer the original StackOverflow question with a short version and then link your blog post more in-depth view of the subject.
Not sure about how to convert a blog reader to paying customer, but my mailing list form (that's the main CTA of one blog) has currently 1.9% conversion rate from organic traffic.
1.9% is pretty impressive. Thanks for the tips.
I haven't had much success on facebook ads either. Google ads generate alot of traffic and a few signups, but not active paying users.
Stackoverflow feels like a good idea paired with a blog. Thanks for the recommendation.
Do you need help with content writing?
I could put you in touch with some good fellows. Email is in my profile.
That'd be great, Omar. Email inbound.