How do we reach out to the everyday developer? If you have a great idea for a developer focused product, where would you go to find people who are interested? Where do they hangout—is it Reddit, Twitter, Hackernews, different Discord servers, or other dev forums? All these things related to developer marketing, in fact, have come to create a series of complex matters that branches off into its own form of marketing.
But What is Marketing?
At its core, all marketing is simply communication between the business and its customers. It acts as the in-between layer of how someone may view a certain product or service, and how the business wants that product or service to be showcased out into the world.
However, this poses a problem when it comes to developers. In general, they don’t like being marketed to. The layer of fancy wording, colorful advertisements, and exaggeration techniques do not work in the developer community. They are far more apprehensive and analytical, looking past the marketing veil to usually discover a product that is less than advertised. They already know what technologies are out there, what’s good and bad, what fits their workflow and what doesn’t. Most importantly, they have a group of like-minded individuals which share similar struggles in their developer journey, thus having a direct source of information of a general consensus on how the latest innovation can be used.
The Experience
This is where the importance of a great developer experience comes in. Product cannot exist by itself to succeed—in order to grow, there must be three aspects:
- Developer-focused content related to how exactly the product will provide benefit
- An amazing onboarding experience in the product itself
- And finally, a thriving community of developers that all share the same struggles, of which the product is helping them succeed
What content do developers like?
From documentation to helpful Youtube videos on a subject of interest, developers love to absorb information from all over the internet. A blog post like this one is perfect as well—a piece of information that will further help them make a decision on using the product. Other forms of content include newsletter and email campaigns, educational and tutorial content, new version release notes, and more. Check out our own documentation here!
The Onboarding Experience
In order to convince them that a new technology will work well, it begins with the onboarding process. Take a look at Algolia, the leading search engine tool for developers. Their experience is second to none with a fully interactive web tutorial that shows you the code, the UI, and exactly how their product works across several different platforms and use cases.
The Blankly Community
Finally, the developer experience expands outside of the product and into the community built around it. There is a reason why so many crypto and NFT communities exist around different coins and blockchains. The growth of Web 3.0 is attributed to these communities, where millions of people are interested in similar ideas. Our own Blankly community is growing as well—join our Discord here! Connect with other developers using our package, or even talk to our own team of developers if you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions.
Difficult, but Rewarding
The developer space is huge. They hate being marketed to in the first place. The community is fragmented, with no single source to funnel them all. However, the feeling of speaking to even just one or two developers who express a need for using this new technology is very much exciting. It provides validation that your idea has a certain market, somewhere out there—you just have to look for it.