Playbook
GTM Playbooks
How GitGuardian Leverages Data and GitHub to Fuel Its Growth
Read more
This post by François Dufour is part of our series on Product-Led Growth and Developer Marketing Playbooks.
Your open-source project is getting traction or already quite successful and now it’s time to “market” it. Where do you start? What are the basic building blocks of marketing to developers and pitfalls to avoid?
To learn more about marketing an open-source project and the unique challenges that come with marketing developer tools in general, I sat down with Kasey Byrne. Kasey led marketing at Postman, npm, Rasa, and now Botpress. She shared the playbook she recommends that early-stage companies use to scale their developer community.
Kasey’s playbook includes tips for the four pillars of your strategy:
When founders in the development space say “marketing”, they sometimes conflate it with paid advertising. According to Kasey, it’s extremely important to understand the distinction between the two. Paid advertising is only a small part of marketing. And, for some companies, it’s not even a key pillar of their marketing playbook.
“I’ve met senior people who say they don’t need marketing at all. But what they really mean is they don’t need paid advertising, which is a fair statement for a developer-focused company in the early stages.”
Kasey’s advice is to begin your marketing effort with organic programs, as this is the best way to reach developers. If you’re trying to reach a developer with an open-source project in the early stages, stay away from paid advertising, as developers may be resistant to it.
“You should create a community, focusing on developer tools and content that makes their lives easier. Set up a welcoming forum that is active and practical. Finally, make sure that it’s really easy to download the open-source product on your website.”
Your website functions as a 24/7 salesperson (but unlike talking to Sales, developers like reading), so you want to make sure that it’s clear and persuasive. It also needs to lead to conversions.
According to Kasey, you should skip the high-level emotional benefit statements that marketers love. Instead, focus on explaining the product and its functional benefits (think “jobs-to-be-done” by your software). Then, make it as easy as possible to find docs and tutorials.
Your website needs to feel integrated
Kasey recommends making your website as integrated as possible, which means marrying what is typically seen as the “marketing” side (that targets a buyer) and the technical side of it (that empowers the developer), since buyer and user are often the same initially with developer products, that means integrating the explanatory and functional-benefit-oriented copy with the valuable educational technical information that can lead developers to get immediate value.
“If someone gets to the website, make sure they can find what they need. Not only do they need great docs, but they also need easy-to-use tutorials– either video or written– that help them solve problems, get started, and address advanced use cases.”
Your docs HAVE to be great
Although docs are such an important part of marketing (they help a ton with SEO and brand among other things), Kasey believes that great docs are written by somebody who is embedded on the product or the engineering team. Because so many people will touch these docs, it’s essential that they are managed and cared for as carefully as the product itself.
In short, docs serve an important marketing function, but they’re really an essential part of the product.
“A product is not complete without great docs. I was once on a team that tended to write docs ‘after the fact’ for new product releases– and the result was that the customer success team got slammed with questions at every launch.”
For more insights on docs best practices, read how Twilio approaches docs and DevEd (their docs team is centralized, but are an extension to the Product and Eng teams)
Google Tag Manager is your friend
Kasey also says that Google Tag Manager is your best friend, as it allows you to get a precise idea of how people are behaving on the site. “Google Analytics is great, but you need to set up Google Tag Manager to tag events and activities to understand exactly what people are clicking on and why,” said Kasey.
Community is a central pillar of marketing to developers because it not only provides a scalable way to offer support but also encourages users to rally around your product and company.
Kasey bases her community strategy on the principle of a 90-9-1 community. The idea is that 90% of your community consumes the content without participating, 9% come to you, but only if they’re having an issue, and 1% are contributors who create content and help others.
Serving the consumers
Kasey encourages teams to think about the 90%– these are people who are going to read what you write, watch your presentations, and look through your documentation. Even though this group is not vocal, they are still the largest portion of your community. How can you make sure you’re serving this group?
Supporting and listening to those with questions
The 9%, those who ask questions or ask for help, are important for gaining a better understanding of the audience. “The 9% is the best source to help you understand where people trip up on the product,” said Kasey.
“If you want to do a voice of the customer for an open-source product, go read the community because that’s consistently where people are when they are sharing their problems.”
Engaging your advocates
The 1% of advocates are vocal users who cheer you on and, more importantly will help other community members adopt your product. Kasey recommends finding ways to celebrate this group to make them feel like they’re valued in the community. When she was at Rasa, they would share the bots these advocates created in a community showcase. She also recommends finding ways to scale this group– the 9% can convert into advocates with some strategic love, care, and attention.
Educational content that helps developers understand the value of the product is an essential part of marketing. But you don’t want surface-level fluff. Here’s what Kasey recommends:
Develop a storyline and mindset
When you’re creating content for developers, you have to be willing to be an advocate for your own product. It’s OK. According to Kasey, you need to be unabashedly pro-product. “Of course, you recognize the product’s limitations and can speak to them, but you have to believe in your team and be its biggest cheerleader,” she said.
Kasey believes that in developer marketing, the underlying storyline is different than the typical sales process. For example, if you go to buy a car, the car salesperson’s storyline is “buy this car, and I will make money, which is part of why that interaction can be so unsatisfying. But when you’re selling a developer product, the story needs to be “Use our product, and you’ll be able to build something really cool.” Kasey says that it’s this storyline that needs to be front and center in your developer marketing content.
Types of dev content you need to have
Should you write blog articles, make videos, or create a podcast? Kasey recommends all three– or at least creating different types of content that can help a number of different people. “Not everyone is a video person, so you’ll also want content that people can read,” she said. Her recommendation is to have as many formats as possible.
When it comes to getting started, you should create content that makes initial use of the product as seamless as possible. Any type of content that minimizes how long it takes someone to get up and running– such as how-to tutorials– should be prioritized. Kasey also recommends creating content about integrations, as that’s something developers tend to respond well to.
Hire technical marketers
You want to make sure technical people are creating your developer content– they need to have a deep understanding of how the product works, how to use it, and what its benefits are.
If it’s not a developer, the person has to be very close to one.
“I had a developer marketer who was so proficient with the product that the engineering team wanted to hire her – and that’s what you want in developer marketing.”
Add a newsletter
Kasey sees an email newsletter as a foundational aspect of the content strategy. The newsletter’s purpose is to provide a consistent touchpoint with the audience so that the product is kept top of mind. But it’s also a marker of how good your content is.
“The growth of your newsletter should reflect how valuable your content is– people should open it, forward it, and use the information inside,” said Kasey. “Getting your list as large as possible is a really good indication of engagement.”
Accept that technical content gets outdated
Many leaders worry that technical content will soon be outdated. This may be true, but it shouldn’t stop you from creating it.
“You have to embrace the fact that some of your content is going to be outdated within minutes of posting,” said Kasey. “That can create paralysis, but worrying about something becoming outdated will stop you from creating really valuable resources for your audience.”
Developer events are an important pillar because they present an opportunity to create new relationships that can propel growth. Events have become harder to attend and host in a post-COVID world, but there are in-person options returning at some point (Right? 😬 No?🥺 Please? 🙏🏻) as well as a bevy of virtual ones.
Meetups
Kasey recommends hosting meet-ups and being a strong presence at local developer events wherever you live. “Meetups are where you can start longterm community and customer relationships,” said Kasey.
“These relationships take time to build, and meetups can help get them started and provide a way to nurture the connections.”
Third-party conferences
While Meetups are great for developing a local presence, Kasey recommends being at third-party conferences, as well.
At these larger-scale conferences, you should get a technical executive on stage, give out cool swag (at a conference in Portland, Kasey’s team gave out umbrellas and beanies, which was a perfect fit for the rainy and cold weather), and be deliberate about how you staff your conference booth.
When it comes to staffing the booth, Kasey recommends choosing people who will be able to have a technical conversation with any developer who starts a conversation.
“Everyone standing at the booth has to be able to have a five-minute technical conversation with a developer. You don’t want someone staffing the booth who says ‘I’m not sure– I’m an events person’ when a developer asks a question. ”
Your own conference
At some point, you will want to host your own user conference.
With your own conference, you control the agenda and how you treat your community. It’s a great time for your entire team to connect in person with your community, feel proud, and learn a ton. It also makes your company and community more human by showcasing their leaders.
“A user conference is very time-consuming, but a big ROI activity, but I’ve never regretted doing one.”
Everyone attending is there for a reason - to learn about your software. You can inspire and equip your developer community to do more with your product, celebrate and showcase the early adopters and thought leaders, and hopefully launch some new products and features.
To learn more, see some tips from Apollo GraphQL for acing virtual conferences.
According to Kasey, marketing can mean a lot of things, so you need to think through who you want to hire. And for that, you first need to be clear about what marketing playbook you need to deploy and what programs you need to prioritize.
She told a story of a startup founder who had narrowed it down to two finalists to be their Head of Marketing– one was a great Product Marketer and another had a focus on Growth with experience on various digital channels. These two had very different skillsets– both valuable– but it was essential for the founder to decide what was most important for their particular company.
“Get a lot of advice from others and think through what you need, for sure. But also get educated on what marketing is so that you can make a sound decision on who will be right for your startup.”
.png)
