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The Developer Marketing Guide

• Mister_Y 10y ago
  I love this! I always believed that the best developer is the one that has a taste for business and this thing is in the line of it :D
• mariusmg 10y ago
  Isn't this a bit ..."basic" ? I mean sending emails and having a blog is not exactly the pinnacle of marketing (especially for developers).
  • kristianc 10y ago
    Agreed - and feeds a little into the 'Launch and the world will be beating a path to your door' mindset. Just as important as having a blog is being able to mine trending topics and having a proper process in place around content production.
    • AznHisoka 10y ago
      are there really trending topics around most b2b topics? most b2b content dont exactly go viral.
      • pryelluw 10y ago
        You can leverage online ads to make then go viral inside an organization and make decision makers pay attention.
      • kristianc 10y ago
        From experience there's a huge amount of 'watching what others are doing' going on in B2B. No one wants to get caught out as having missed the next big thing. Vendors also try to make sure that they have a 'story' around major trends, and analysts like to see this too. Although you're dealing with volumes orders of magnitude lower than its usually possible to identify 5/6 topics that are top of mind for CIOs at a given time.
      • rfrank 10y ago
        Yes in the sense of there being industry trends you should keep up with and talk about. One thing with b2b sites is that you don't really need viral content, because you likely have a very specific idea of who your customers are. Depending on the field, lots of b2b topics aren't super competitive SEO wise, which makes it possible to really dominate a particular topic in search results. Long tail keywords [1] are particularly helpful from my experience. 1. https://moz.com/blog/long-tail-seo-target-low-volume-keywords-whiteboard-friday https://moz.com/blog/long-tail-seo-target-low-volume-keyword...
• mcjiggerlog 10y ago
  This is perfect timing for me - I've just finished building my side project (http://www.artpip.com/ http://www.artpip.com/) and feel like I've made something people would want to use, but was unsure about how best to get the word out. Thank you!
  • pryelluw 10y ago
    Here is the best feedback I can give you: I experienced a really slow loading time on mobile 4GLTE. The top image loaded and 6 seconds later the text loaded. People dont wait. They dont care enough for your site to load. You should reduce loading time and make sure text loads before pictures. When you do this send me an email and Ill give you more feedback if you want.
  • jayroh 10y ago
    Love your idea! Going to give it a shot later on when I get home
  • ausjke 10y ago
    Failed to install on Windows, wish you have a Linux version. 2017-01-01 13:27:22> Program: Starting Squirrel Updater: --install . 2017-01-01 13:27:23> Program: Starting install, writing to C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\SquirrelTemp 2017-01-01 13:27:26> Program: About to install to: C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\artpip 2017-01-01 13:27:28> CheckForUpdateImpl: Couldn't write out staging user ID, this user probably shouldn't get beta anything: System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException: `
    • mcjiggerlog 10y ago
      Thanks for the report - I'll investigate. What windows version are you on? Linux version is in the pipeline!
      • ausjke 10y ago
        windows 7 that is, 64bit
  • 10y ago
• stevoski 10y ago
  > Email might not be the most attractive means of communication, but newsletters are direct and exclusive to customers, a good starting point. “You should have an email newsletter if you have nothing else... This is the one opportunity you have to make something just for them that no one else consumes.” I'd love to see some broad evidence that email newsletters are effective. I've experienced no strong correlation myself between the frequency of sending newsletters and sales. The strongest argument I've heard for email newsletters is, "it can't hurt, so you should do it just in case it helps." But that ignores opportunity cost. Can anyone (preferably who doesn't work for a email campaign company) give any strong evidence in favour of regularly sending out email newsletters?
  • webmaven 10y ago
    > I've experienced no strong correlation myself between the frequency of sending newsletters and sales. So, it turns out that the effectiveness of email newsletters, just like that of landing pages, is highly variable. I would suggest doing quite a bit of A/B testing on the effect of subject lines, content, format, frequency, day-of-week, time-of-day, etc. (Not to mention the extra variables that customization and personalization[0] can throw into the mix) on email open rates and clickthroughs (as well as on the rest of your funnel) in order to get really good results. [0] The distinction, AIUI, is that Customization would be "for monthly newsletters that go out 60-89 days after the user signs up, add this opening paragraph", whereas Personalization would be "add some recommended product links to the footer based on the individual recipient's product reviews and ratings."
  • nickjj 10y ago
    It's most definitely true but all of those email newsletter services and "marketing gurus" never tell you the real truth. It's not as simple as just "build a list and print money". It's more like, provide top tier content for free for years and years while you test everything that's super specific to your content. Then, you take what you have and transform that into an intelligent autoresponder (drip campaign) that has a purpose of having a user take action (maybe buy one of your products). There's no shortcuts to this.
  • cookiecaper 10y ago
• yenoham 10y ago
  Has anyone here gathered a bunch of resources similar to this, especially around early-days bootstrap Marketing for SaaS? We created our product as a group with engineering backgrounds and now trying to switch some to full on Marketing mode and trying to grab anything I can get my hands on.
  • marcusgarvey 10y ago
    Here's a terrific list compiled by Patrick Keane: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tAiya71mDQgtwn_F9-mNQhuc7GdsQ5e2_BeG69Cb82A/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tAiya71mDQgtwn_F9-mN...
  • michaelbuckbee 10y ago
    You should checkout http://saasemailmarketing.net/ http://saasemailmarketing.net/ - It's nicely hyper focused on SAAS+Email which I found nice as there's so much out there that's consumer focused and frustratingly hard to apply my own projects.
• chasenlehara 10y ago
  This post doesn’t go into detail about how to accomplish a lot of these things effectively, so let’s share some of our favorite resources. I’ll start: “How We Got 1,000+ Subscribers from a Single Blog Post in 24 Hours” https://www.groovehq.com/blog/1000-subscribers https://www.groovehq.com/blog/1000-subscribers
  • sah2ed 10y ago
    I hadn't seen that post before even though I have heard of Groove. Thanks for sharing.
• minimaxir 10y ago
  The problem with marketing as a developer is that there is a fine line between helpfully increasing awareness of your product/service and being an asshole about it with modals which interrupt blog post reading and "growth hacking" of unsolicited email/Tweet blasts/etc. Silicon Valley has been encouraging the latter because it works, to my frustration. One of the reasons people ask for upvotes on Product Hunt is that everyone else is doing it and there are no visible consequences for doing so. (and I've recently found out that people do the same for HN votes on occasion because they assume it's a part of the culture)
  • pryelluw 10y ago
    Agreed! Dont be a fucking asshole! Dont do things because others do it as well. Create your own hypotheses and test them. Then adjust as necessary. But dont be an asshole. You might (might!) make less money but peace of mind and respect are worth so much more than a couple of bucks.
  • user5994461 10y ago
    The line is only moral, at best. You should perform AB testing and measure what's optimal for revenues. If spamming the user with popups and emails makes them click and buy more, adding more of it is making the site more user friendly.
    • paulryanrogers 10y ago
      "If spamming the user with popups and emails makes them click and buy more, adding more of it is making the site more user friendly." That's a generous interpretation of "user friendly." If a user genuinely wanted those things, then yes it's truly an improvement. If users didn't want them but got the impression pop-ups and emails were required then it's more debatable. Put another way, paying for things is not user friendly, but without doing so there would be less worthy of buying.
      • user5994461 10y ago
        Let's assume we're talking about short and clear email messages. Nothing shady at all, not using misleading popup to trick the user into clicking adsense ads. If people buy more stuff when they receive 10 mails per months, is the user to blame? Additional information: Users really open the emails and don't mark them as spam at all.
• anacleto 10y ago
  If you're interesting in this topic read everything Patrick McKenzie writes: http://www.kalzumeus.com/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/. This is guide is not "a bit basic", it just barely scratches the surface.
  • pryelluw 10y ago
    And do. Doing is much more effective than thinking. ;)
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• siddharthdeswal 10y ago
  Here's how in-depth this link is, presented in (hopefully) easier to understand context for most people here: "The Web App Development Guide for Marketers" 1) Get a database because they are the where all your data will be saved. "You should have a db if you have nothing else." - MySQL book link - Relational databases video - more intro-to-databases links 2) "Fancy having a frontend?" A frontend is needed because your users will want to use your awesome app - HTML link - CSS link 3) Do's and Don'ts - Have forms and buttons - Don't make the forms too long. Here's some research to show long forms lead to lesser people submitting them. ... and so on and so forth.
  • michaelbuckbee 10y ago
    I don't think anyone (including the authors) would disagree that this is a very basic introduction to marketing for developers. A point that's very separate from whether or not it has value. There are still way too many developers who are making awesome products and then failing to get traction because they neglect the marketing basics. Something like this article that plainly lays out the basics is very helpful for setting a baseline.
    • TekMol 10y ago
      > There are still way too many developers who are > making awesome products and then failing to get traction Can you give some examples? My experience is that the "Build it and they will come" approach works surprisingly well.
      • ams6110 10y ago
        It works if you can hit upon the sequence of events to get some viral attention. Hitting HN at the right time of day, or getting some other attention among your target users. That can be a matter of chance but usually requires at least some effort on your part. Just creating a product and a website with no marketing whatsoever is unlikely to get the attention of anyone.
        • 10y ago
• nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
  This is a good 1000 foot overview but they leave off some specifics that could burn you bad. Blog content: they say writing anything is better than nothing and there's some truth to this, but compelling content is far more important. One thing that can happen (seen it) is you hire some content monkeys to make you "content". The result is bland and reads like stale Cheerios. Google will knock your site ranking badly if users don't like to read your articles. When I started writing content for this client my first article got more organic traffic than their whole site with hundreds of pages of "content". This continued with each article I wrote until 99+% of organic traffic to the site came from around 10 articles I wrote. Biggest thing with content is it needs to be good quality. Long form articles with pictures work the best. The other extremely important point is to tailor the subjects to your readers. If you sell can openers write content about cans and cooking with canned stuff. Write about ways to open cans when your opener breaks. Write about what to look for in good can openers. Write about how canned food is made. Become the one and only website about anything can related. Google questions your readers are likely to type and get links to your site on the top search results for those questions. Even if you have to pay some site owners it will boost your rank tremendously. Make sure a human visiting your site would think it was well made and google will to. Use cdn's to make it load fast. The latest and greatest TLS certs. Fully verified email addresses linked to you domain with all the bells and whistles. Make your site seem legit enough that users would feel okay using their credit cards there. Email: make sure the emails you send are things your customers want to get. Know the demographic of your customers and tailor your message carefully. It goes far beyond subject line content, if you annoy your customers your emails will get binned as "promotions" and nobody will see them.
• kumarski 10y ago
  1. Get Leads. (get a good trigger signal) 2. Send Emails 3. Build Landing Page or other. 4. 1-3 Repeat and modulate landing page and email template as you get more customer conversations.
• ensiferum 10y ago
  Get a botnet to upvote your blogs/product releases on HN/Product Hunt/Reddit/etc.
• ssharp 10y ago
  re: retargeting Before you go off shoving fistfuls of money at display ad retargeting platforms, I'd highly suggest running placebo tests first. The platforms will tell you how you're converting people into paying customers at a $2 rate, but with retargeting, you've previously acquired their attention in some form -- that's how you're able to retarget them in the first place. The problem is that, particularly with display ads and Facebook feed ads, you tend to cookie bomb your audience and you're not getting a fair assessment of how many people actually stayed engaged with you because your ads in some part. In nearly all my experience, the actual value of retargeting is never what the platforms tell you it is in their ridiculously misleading CPA reporting.
• janeboo 10y ago
  An App Launch Guide: https://github.com/adamwulf/app-launch-guide https://github.com/adamwulf/app-launch-guide