3 ms·

Integrations: Simple Marketing for Developers

27 points by WadeF 14y ago

fredsters_s 14y ago
Great idea. We're going to try this.
orangethirty 14y ago
>Most developers I talk to feel like SEO is scammy, social media is snake oil, and generating targetted traffic that will actually convert and pay to use a web app is down right impossible. They feel and reason that because of companies who write "blog posts" in order to generate traffic and prospects. Nothing wrong with marketing, but the majority of developers, programmers, and engineers are sold on facts and not on copy. I'm not saying you are doing this, just stating my understanding of the subject. >An interesting thing we discovered early on when building Zapier is that lots of companies have products that do one thing great, but could use some help in other areas. If your product can help that company do other things great and in turn help their customers be more awesome, then said company has a vested interest in promoting you. This is called collaborative marketing. It doesn't work for competing products. Note that competing products does not refer to a product in the same industry as other. Might even be something completely different, yet competes for the same money. It is very hard to use collaborative marketing without dilluting your brand. >Usually that means blog posts, announcements on email newsletters, mentions on twitter, and generally all that marketing voodoo that developers aren't nearly as good at when compared to writing code and making useful products. Marketing is not voodoo. People who call marketing voodoo make other people think that it is hard. Marketing is pretty simple when you get down to the facts. It is about connecting prospective buyers with sellers. No voodoo with that. You mention utilizing written marketing tools, such as sales letter disguised as blog posts, newsletter and "tweets", but you don't mention what voodoo powers them. It is not voodoo, and its not even a secret. What powers those written marketing tools is one thing: Market knowledge. If you know who you are selling to, then selling becomes so much simpler. This also has to do with your line about "...making useful products." If you don't understand an industry well enough to sell something to it, then you won't build useful products. If a developers can build an useful product, then he/she can definitely market it as well. >So the easy thing to do is pick out a company that likes to promote other services and aligns closely with the product you are building and make something that would be both useful to your customers and their customers. Not so easy. Companies are not standing by waiting to promote their brand alongside yours. Companies do not like to promote other services, they like and well, only function to make money. If your product will make them money, guess what? You are leaving money on the table for them. These are predators. Not saying that it may not be useful for somebody out there, but experience has taught me that more is lost in these types of "deals". >Keep in mind this isn't a magic strategy either. Sometimes getting a marketing or biz dev persons attention can be pretty tricky. Promoting 3rd party apps doesn't always get a lot of attention and tips@company_name.com isn't the most frequently checked email address. It is tricky because they are focused on making money. >Instead try getting a developers attention. Ask them a question about their API. Propose a new endpoint. Get a conversation going. Basically find people who are naive and think marketing is voodoo. >Then by the time your integration is good and ready you can simply ask the developer if they'd be willing to put you in touch with someone in charge of promoting 3rd party apps and usually they give you a nice warm juicy intro. In my country this is called making the bed for someone else. By the time you are done with them they are already "asleep". >Some places that are great to do integrations with are MailChimp or Google Marketplace. Mailchimp is good for integrations because its a marketing channel. >If you are interested in testing the integration waters with Zapier we'd be thrilled to have you as an integration partner. Fill out this quick form and we'll make sure to get in touch with you quickly about how to get started with an integration. What is it that you offer that makes collaborative marketing with you an advantage? >Final Note: We haven't had much luck with integration funds. Instead building something the end users want has helped us out the most. If anyone has had better luck with integration funds and found that a viable strategy leave a note in the comments. Basically you talk about collaborative marketing, but then confess to not having much luck with it. Yes, building what people want is the best choice, unless you want to go broke. Simple. I dont get it. You are talking about marketing but are asking for help in the last sentence of the blog post. * I have nothing against the people at zapier, but this blog post just promotes a negative side to marketing that is just not real. When will developers wake up and realize that marketing is not voodoo? When will you acknowledge the fact that if you learn marketing you will be unstopable? Hit the books people, and start learning.
- mikeknoop 14y ago
  Avoiding the 1-for-1 point breakdown, if you saw the amount of traffic a single vendor can push to your app via integration awareness (blog post, integration directories, mailing list, etc.) one would come to the conclusion that it is a viable marketing channel. The spirit of OP is not that you should ignore traditional marketing; it simply points out an alternative most may not be aware of.
  - orangethirty 14y ago
    Good points. I did not get that message from the blog post, and I appreciate you mentioning your understanding of it.
- delinka 14y ago
  "Marketing is pretty simple when you get down to the facts." You're right. Taking a somewhat more literal approach to your statement, I tend to boil my marketing down to facts and only facts. I have a hard time with what I'd call hyperbole. Apple's people say "magical" an awful lot. And from a user's perspective, it may seem that way and such marketing might be a good thing. I have a hard time seeing such things from the POV of a customer and then creating marketing copy to explain the product to them. Don't get me totally wrong on the customer POV thing: I like my software to be "magical" as much as the next guy and I tend to do UI and UX work to make things feel like that. But I know what's happening behind the scenes. I can use your Fancy New UI Widget once and know how you did it. I cannot bring myself to write copy about how magical that is. I'm an engineer, not a marketeer. Can I do the work? Sure. But it takes time away from engineering. I should work with marketing people, not try to be one.
  - orangethirty 14y ago
    You make some very powerful points. As engineers we know how the magic works, so the effect is lost on us. Customers that see computers as black boxes are amazed when their facebook feed is re-freshed automatically, and think "magic". You and me know its AJAX. 404 - Magic not found. And thats the greatest hurdle to get over. How can I disconnect myself from the product enough to see it through the eyes of a customer. Do I find it mind blowing? Is it useful? Does the UI make it seem luxurious? You last paragraph is very important. Should an engineer learn marketing? Depends. Does the engineer want to start a business? Then, yes. If not, then the engineer should focus on developing his engineering skills.
evertonfuller 14y ago
So you just cloned http://ifttt.com/ http://ifttt.com/?

27 points by WadeF 14y ago

Great idea. We're going to try this.

>Most developers I talk to feel like SEO is scammy, social media is snake oil, and generating targetted traffic that will actually convert and pay to use a web app is down right impossible. They feel and reason that because of companies who write "blog posts" in order to generate traffic and prospects. Nothing wrong with marketing, but the majority of developers, programmers, and engineers are sold on facts and not on copy. I'm not saying you are doing this, just stating my understanding of the subject. >An interesting thing we discovered early on when building Zapier is that lots of companies have products that do one thing great, but could use some help in other areas. If your product can help that company do other things great and in turn help their customers be more awesome, then said company has a vested interest in promoting you. This is called collaborative marketing. It doesn't work for competing products. Note that competing products does not refer to a product in the same industry as other. Might even be something completely different, yet competes for the same money. It is very hard to use collaborative marketing without dilluting your brand. >Usually that means blog posts, announcements on email newsletters, mentions on twitter, and generally all that marketing voodoo that developers aren't nearly as good at when compared to writing code and making useful products. Marketing is not voodoo. People who call marketing voodoo make other people think that it is hard. Marketing is pretty simple when you get down to the facts. It is about connecting prospective buyers with sellers. No voodoo with that. You mention utilizing written marketing tools, such as sales letter disguised as blog posts, newsletter and "tweets", but you don't mention what voodoo powers them. It is not voodoo, and its not even a secret. What powers those written marketing tools is one thing: Market knowledge. If you know who you are selling to, then selling becomes so much simpler. This also has to do with your line about "...making useful products." If you don't understand an industry well enough to sell something to it, then you won't build useful products. If a developers can build an useful product, then he/she can definitely market it as well. >So the easy thing to do is pick out a company that likes to promote other services and aligns closely with the product you are building and make something that would be both useful to your customers and their customers. Not so easy. Companies are not standing by waiting to promote their brand alongside yours. Companies do not like to promote other services, they like and well, only function to make money. If your product will make them money, guess what? You are leaving money on the table for them. These are predators. Not saying that it may not be useful for somebody out there, but experience has taught me that more is lost in these types of "deals". >Keep in mind this isn't a magic strategy either. Sometimes getting a marketing or biz dev persons attention can be pretty tricky. Promoting 3rd party apps doesn't always get a lot of attention and tips@company_name.com isn't the most frequently checked email address. It is tricky because they are focused on making money. >Instead try getting a developers attention. Ask them a question about their API. Propose a new endpoint. Get a conversation going. Basically find people who are naive and think marketing is voodoo. >Then by the time your integration is good and ready you can simply ask the developer if they'd be willing to put you in touch with someone in charge of promoting 3rd party apps and usually they give you a nice warm juicy intro. In my country this is called making the bed for someone else. By the time you are done with them they are already "asleep". >Some places that are great to do integrations with are MailChimp or Google Marketplace. Mailchimp is good for integrations because its a marketing channel. >If you are interested in testing the integration waters with Zapier we'd be thrilled to have you as an integration partner. Fill out this quick form and we'll make sure to get in touch with you quickly about how to get started with an integration. What is it that you offer that makes collaborative marketing with you an advantage? >Final Note: We haven't had much luck with integration funds. Instead building something the end users want has helped us out the most. If anyone has had better luck with integration funds and found that a viable strategy leave a note in the comments. Basically you talk about collaborative marketing, but then confess to not having much luck with it. Yes, building what people want is the best choice, unless you want to go broke. Simple. I dont get it. You are talking about marketing but are asking for help in the last sentence of the blog post. * I have nothing against the people at zapier, but this blog post just promotes a negative side to marketing that is just not real. When will developers wake up and realize that marketing is not voodoo? When will you acknowledge the fact that if you learn marketing you will be unstopable? Hit the books people, and start learning.

mikeknoop 14y ago
Avoiding the 1-for-1 point breakdown, if you saw the amount of traffic a single vendor can push to your app via integration awareness (blog post, integration directories, mailing list, etc.) one would come to the conclusion that it is a viable marketing channel. The spirit of OP is not that you should ignore traditional marketing; it simply points out an alternative most may not be aware of.
- orangethirty 14y ago
  Good points. I did not get that message from the blog post, and I appreciate you mentioning your understanding of it.
delinka 14y ago
"Marketing is pretty simple when you get down to the facts." You're right. Taking a somewhat more literal approach to your statement, I tend to boil my marketing down to facts and only facts. I have a hard time with what I'd call hyperbole. Apple's people say "magical" an awful lot. And from a user's perspective, it may seem that way and such marketing might be a good thing. I have a hard time seeing such things from the POV of a customer and then creating marketing copy to explain the product to them. Don't get me totally wrong on the customer POV thing: I like my software to be "magical" as much as the next guy and I tend to do UI and UX work to make things feel like that. But I know what's happening behind the scenes. I can use your Fancy New UI Widget once and know how you did it. I cannot bring myself to write copy about how magical that is. I'm an engineer, not a marketeer. Can I do the work? Sure. But it takes time away from engineering. I should work with marketing people, not try to be one.
- orangethirty 14y ago
  You make some very powerful points. As engineers we know how the magic works, so the effect is lost on us. Customers that see computers as black boxes are amazed when their facebook feed is re-freshed automatically, and think "magic". You and me know its AJAX. 404 - Magic not found. And thats the greatest hurdle to get over. How can I disconnect myself from the product enough to see it through the eyes of a customer. Do I find it mind blowing? Is it useful? Does the UI make it seem luxurious? You last paragraph is very important. Should an engineer learn marketing? Depends. Does the engineer want to start a business? Then, yes. If not, then the engineer should focus on developing his engineering skills.

evertonfuller 14y ago

So you just cloned http://ifttt.com/ http://ifttt.com/?