A Community-Driven Approach to Developer Marketing

The goal is to make each user an advocate. The rule of thumb is you give more to the community than you ask.

Product

User experience is at the core of building your product. You want to make the user feel special. You want them to say, "This was built for me."

Optimize for the aha moment.

Content

Focus on media-rich content. Video is great. Developers are unique in consuming a much higher amount of content than other markets.

You need to figure out your balance between educational content and product-focused content. Content that only focused on the product doesn't really work. But if you focus on education, people will come back to you.

Content distribution is more important than content creation.

When you're considering content distribution, where does the primary content live? You can redistribute content in other places.

Only create content that will help your very small subset of customers. Eventually, you focus on partnership content.

Once your content has been written, it can be reworked into other mediums. This helps you get much more bang for your buck.

Another key insight is to localize content into other languages. This makes your product much more accessible. They used an online course as the initial viral marketing kick off.

Once you find the long-lasting resources, you repeat this process.

Engineering as Marketing

Create small free tools that complement the core product and help your users. These should relate to your area (engineering as marketing). They need to be use-case centric.

Think of the core content and tools as part of your product, and then think of everything you would do to market that. All of this creates multiple opportunities to "launch".

Support

Product engineers should be on support. This can be one of your biggest differentiators. Larger companies typically have terrible support.

You need to have frequent product releases and quick response times. Keep track of feature requests and then let people know when you implement them. This makes people feel special and like their voice has been heard.

Users

Acknowledge and appreciate your users. People don't expect that and they feel good when they're acknowledged.

One thing they did was take the people who were most helpful in their community and made "community champion" t-shirts for them. This small act actually made people more responsive.

Support is huge in the early stages.

Strategy

You always want a team that's running a lot of experiments. You want to identify things that will eventually become dedicated teams. When you start, your goal is to write playbooks. Eventually, those can be spun off to individuals and eventually teams.

You have to do experiments long enough. They advocate for at least 3 months. If you don't give it enough time, you can't expect it to work.

Do a mini launch
Figure out the things that you do that are working.
Slice and dice each piece, think about them as separate products, create lots of resources around it.

You don't want to create too much content. Focus on maximum distribution of your content, amazing support and the developer experience.