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Developer marketing for early-stage startups – what we’ve learned
- teej 4y agoThis sets a new low for cookie consent banners.
- flappyeagle 4y agoAt least they commit HARD to the bit
- OkayPhysicist 4y agoReally? The fact that it had a single line, explaining the relevant cookies, and a one-click reject made it perfectly adequate.
- teej 4y agoThe fact it has a cartoon of some politician, taking up 15% of my viewport for no reason?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- albertgoeswoof 4y agoA great tip for content, when you learn something new, write a post about it. If it’s new to you it will be new to many others. Doubly so if you couldn’t find a relevant post in the first place. It’s also a huge benefit for yourself. I have referred to posts I’ve written on topics many times over in the future. E.g I spent hours configuring rspamd (https://blog.mailpace.com/blog/how-to-catch-spam-with-rspamd/ https://blog.mailpace.com/blog/how-to-catch-spam-with-rspamd...) or setting up html modules (https://blog.mailpace.com/blog/using-html-modules/ https://blog.mailpace.com/blog/using-html-modules/). Both are super niche topics that I struggle to recall the details of without my blog posts.
- mooreds 4y agoAnd you never learn something so well as when you try to teach it. I can't count the number of times I've written something, paused, and wondered "well, does it really do that?" and gone off and investigated. When I return, I know more and the piece is better too (win-win!).
- albertgoeswoof 4y agoEven further, you don’t really know something until you can teach it
- dylan604 4y agoBut you can know something but not perform it. The specific case I'm thinking of is coaching. You can know how to "bend it like Becks", but not actually be able to do it. I know that if I strike the ball with the outside of my boot on the outside of the ball, it will bend a certain way. But me doing that as a demonstration to the kids on my team is an entirely different thing. yes, personal experience story.
- guelo 4y agoThis advice is the cause of so many low quality Medium posts that clog up my google searches and make it hard to find authoritative sources.
- n_o_u 4y agoFrankly that seems more like a google search algorithm failure. I think the idea that people shouldn't produce content because you don't want to see it listed is more than a little silly.
- taytus 4y ago>Frankly that seems more like a google search algorithm failure it is, but it is also people writing crap all over the internet.
- danielvaughn 4y agoI'd say another rule of thumb, which may not be specific to developer marketing, is to avoid the "used by" pitfall. I often see tools that were launched, like, a month ago claiming that it's "loved by teams at Uber/Slack/etc". What I imagine in those scenarios is that there's an intern who signed up for a beta using their company email, and the founders were like "hey good enough, technically we're now used by teams at [x] company!" I can see through it, and I'm sure others can as well. It comes off as disingenuous. A better way is to tell a specific success story. If some unknown brand has a story to tell about how your tool 10x'd their productivity, I'm all ears.
- jordanmorgan10 4y agoAbsolutely something that immediately turns me off to a product as well.
- andrenotgiant 4y agoThere's a variation of that in the data space, where early-stage data companies show the logos of _other_ data companies. It's so obviously just that the other company was like checking to see how your product and there's integrates. They weren't actually using it. But now they're in the "Trusted by" panel on the homepage.
- ghaff 4y agoWhile I don't doubt that, especially smaller, companies randomly use logos based on anecdotes or email signups, I can assure you that, at companies of any size, customer references go through a lot of vetting and whole teams devoted to it. And customer references are a big deal. Companies absolutely want to see other companies in their industry which are using your product and even have conversations with their peers about it.
- conductr 4y agoI tend to assume they’re all connected via founder’s prior employment/school/friends etc and so yeah they tapped their networks and they probably check out their friends new startup product. Maybe they’ve given some pre launch feedback but I also tend to think they’re not likely to indicate having a significant usage/integration at that logo company.
- ericholscher 4y agoI’d be curious to hear more about your experience with carbon. In particular, what a competitor could do better to make it work :-) We’re building something[1] and we like to think we have our targeting figured out a lot more effectively, any general feedback would be interesting. I’d really like to be able to build an ecosystem of paid ads that isn’t tracking people around the internet, not injecting Google tracking images, and effective for start ups. We’re doing this with ML-powered content-based targeting, so in theory we can offer a lot better niche targeting, which is more valuable for startups than large brands who are just doing brand campaigns. 1: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/11/a-new-approach-to-content-based-targeting-for-advertising/ https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/11/a-new-approach-to-con...
- Varqu 4y agoWe would be interested in trying it out. Do you mind sending an intro to hello [at] swissdevjobs.ch ?
- cheeseface 4y agoThe article very well matches my experiences working with marketing in an early-stage startup for 1,5 years.
- dfabulich 4y agoIn the "Pre-product-market fit" section: > You can’t rely on UTM parameters to tell you where a user actually first heard about you. Example: user reads an article about PostHog on Hacker News -> searches 'posthog' -> clicks on a Google Ad. Our analytics will tell us "wow, Google Ads are awesome!" But that’s not the whole picture. Before product-market fit, you should absolutely not pay for Google Ads for your products own name. i.e. if your product is named "Posthog", do not pay for ads for searches for [posthog]. You should only buy ads for your own name (if ever!) when competitors are buying Google Ads for your name, and you want to pay to outcompete them. Pre PMF, that can't possibly be happening to you yet.
- jahewson 4y agoThat’s not really true. You will have a much higher Quality Score for your own name that any competitor and as such your ads will cost very little. Your competitor on the other hand is going to have to pay a small fortune to bid on those same keywords - you’ll never have to “compete” with them.
- dfabulich 4y agoI think you misread my post. When you don't have competitors buying ads against your name, and you already have the #1 spot in organic search results, buying your own name is a waste of money. When you do have competitors buying ads against your name, sure, spend money to defeat them; you'll be able to do it pretty affordably, because of your Quality Score advantage. But until then, buying ads for your name is a waste of money. (And it confounds your analytics, as TFA points out.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- moremetadata 4y ago> We’ve found that hitting the front page results in a giant, ego-boosting traffic boost, with a noticeable but small signup boost. I know people who've paid agents £10k's to get an advert disguised as an article written in some UK Sunday broadsheet newspapers, generated a massive number of leads but ultimately never recouped the outlay. > Paid ads can be a useful tool for learning quickly if you are building a consumer app I know plenty of people who had signed up to online targeted advertising, generated minimal leads but no business. In my experience, advertising has never worked, always costing more money, never recouping the expenditure, but it is a very nuanced way to buy the media's silence if you can afford it. > Events are 10x more work All the events & exhibitions I've been to, never bought or signed up to anything. > SEO articles are not exempt from this rule I've found SEO to be both a waste a time and money and highly manipulative. Just look at the number of youtube video's uploaded by individuals who are lucky to get a handful of views. SEO is no different, in fact Search Engine spider's generated more traffic for the websites I know of.
- adamckay 4y ago> In my experience, advertising has never worked, always costing more money, never recouping the expenditure As the old saying goes:- “Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
- eastbound 4y agoSo according to you, no solution works? None at all. Advertising doesn’t work, marketing doesn’t work, SEO doesn’t work. So how do you get a startup from zero to 10k customers?
- Varqu 4y agoIt's the marketing / sales equivalent of the HN-developer-type who would "build Dropbox / Docker over a weekend"
- moremetadata 4y ago> So how do you get a startup from zero to 10k customers? I dont know! I've used the latest tech as it became available, and I'm left thinking, either no one is seeing things like the fax mailshots, postal campaigns, advertising campaigns which I've done in the past, or its the culture of the UK to be reserved, cautious adopting the if its not broke dont fix it attitude. Little short of the marketing and advertising material not reaching the people, I don't have an explanation, but when considering other events in my life, it would not surprise me to learn no one received any of my marketing and advertising material!
- sandGorgon 4y ago>Hire a cheap agency – $5k/mo is achievable, especially if they're just managing channels and creative, and not throwing in 'value add' services like landing pages and SEO strategy. what does this mean ?
- parentheses 4y agoI felt that this was vague too. Clarification would be nice
- james_impliu 4y agoI work at PostHog, but didn't write the article. I'm guessing what we meant here is that we use a small, flexible agency that manages our paid ads. We didn't want any "optimized" landing pages or other stuff, we just wanted _any_ spend here to go on generating some relevant traffic (since often we think conversion rate optimization is harmful for brand/word of mouth, especically with a technical audience who in the long run respect companies that give you all the info up front etc, and we can do the other bits like SEO research). We spend $5k/month with them + give them a monthly spend to do 99% of the work so we don't try to build any paid ads core competency in house. Continuously we've been trying to move spending from here to more organic content, and just leaving spend on the highest conversion paid campaigns (like our own brand name... which sounds stupid but it is broadly accepted as cost effective to boost CTRs for high intent traffic on Google's first page).
- rishabhkaul1 4y agoSo is your "actual" ads spend in addition to the $5K that goes to the agency as their fees? Or does $5K include ad spend (money paid to google etc)
- james_impliu 4y agothe former - we've gone anywhere from $0 to about $40k/month, averaging somewhere in the middle
- ianzakalwe 4y agoI love posthogs branding and mascot so much! Also great article.
- sjm 4y agoReally? Seems like a terrible name to me. Where I'm from, if you "post hog", you're getting blocked.
- swyx 4y agoas a guy who works in developer marketing - good set of advice in here imo. posthog if youre reading this - how did you think about budget for marketing? time budget and $ budget. "Hire a developer who loves writing onto your marketing team" is a huge expense for a very early stage startup (it looks like you're Series B with $27m raised so you can afford it - when exactly do you pay a developer salary just to write?). also find it funny to see "It’s ok to waste money on sponsorships" with "Sponsoring events is disproportionately expensive". so basically only newsletters work?
- RheingoldRiver 4y agoAs a developer who loves writing, how would I find a job like this (either fulltime or contract)? What job titles do they tend to have? I'm somewhat on medical leave right now but looking for a job soon, and this sounds like something I'd be pretty interested in.
- piemets 4y agoauthor here (big fan of your blog btw!) in terms of budget, I'm not going to pretend we had some grand plan, but this is _roughly_ how things played out at each stage: - Seed: CEO only writing occasional content, micro paid ads experiments (<$500 per campaign) - Series A: hired a content marketer with SEO expertise and a product marketer (both non-technical), hired paid ads agency ($5k/mo for agency, $Xk/mo ad spend with lots of iterating) - Series B/post-PMF: started experimenting with content sponsorships, hired technical content marketer, tested non-obvious paid ad channels > basically only newsletters work For us, yes. But this may change at scale - plenty of much larger devtool companies than us _seem_ to do a good job with events.
- peteforde 4y agoThanks for the excellent article; I really appreciate the style and depth of the writing. It reminds me that every time I need these ideas, the next place I get stuck is trying to find those small agencies and affordable experts. It takes zero seconds to realize that if the online marketing and SEO ecosystem was water, it would be supersaturated with lead and mercury. It's incredibly hard to find good help. I'm pretty much at the point where I wouldn't work with someone who didn't come via referral.
- hapless 4y agoHere's a marketing rule of thumb: don't use "post hog" or "post hole" as your core marketing identity (Unless you are primarily targeting "adult" firms, of course)
- jasfi 4y agoTheir Open Core licensing model is really interesting.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- malshe 4y agoIt always blows my mind how HN calls a small part of marketing function "marketing". Imagine every machine learning article posted on HN were about linear regression. Why don't we see more articles on critical marketing functions such as determining customer needs? Instead, it's always about "we have build a product now how do we reach customers?" This is called promotion and it works much better if you have nailed down other marketing strategic scopes around product, pricing, and distribution. Here is an open access textbook on marketing: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/principles-of-marketing-2022 https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/principles-of-m...