Content for developers with Karl Hughes

Hey, everybody. This is Jack from Bitreach, and you're listening to Scaling Dev Tools, the show that investigates how dev tools go from 0 to 1. Today's guest is Carl Hughes. Carl is the founder of Draft.dev, a marketing content agency focused on creating great content for software engineers. Before Draft.dev, Carl was the CTO at a venture backed startup.

So Carl has been on both sides of the table. And also, Carl guest lectures at Kellogg Business School, which makes sense because the first time I spoke to Carl, it felt like a mini MBA in developer marketing. Today, we're going to be talking about content marketing. But there is a lot of news at the moment, which we can't ignore. At the time of recording, in May 2022, the share price of Oracle is 30% down from its 52 week peak.

Atlassian is down 65%, and Twilio is down more than 75% from its peak. The public markets ripple into the VC world, and I'm hearing multiple reports of VCs cutting back their investments, raising the bar for follow on investments, and startups are being told to cut marketing expenses that don't deliver near term results in order to extend their runway. Content is pretty much accepted as one of the most predictable paths to growth for developer tools, but the payback is also sometimes a little slower than other channels. Carl, against this backdrop, how should dev tools start ups be thinking about content?

Thanks, Jack. It's great to be here joining you and having another conversation. I've enjoyed getting to know you a little bit over the last few weeks. It's an honor to be on record this time. But to set the context up, like, at draft.dev, we work with over 80 developer tool companies.

They're almost all funded VC backed companies, mostly doing series a and beyond. And so, of course, we're gonna see some of this scaling back of marketing budgets at some point. In the content sphere, though, I really don't worry about it as much as maybe some other service providers do, partly because almost all of our companies that we work with are sort of banking on the fact that growth should continue. You point out in some cases, content can be slower as a channel than, say, things like paid ads or direct cold outreach. But, honestly, in developer marketing, those are both very hard channels to pull off and scale because of the wide use of ad blockers and kind of ignoring ads in general.

And then on cold email, that's a really tough one in developer marketing. I I'm not gonna say it's impossible because I'm sure there's people who prove me wrong, but the number of people who succeed at that and have good return rates is very low. So if you figure those channels out and they're working for you and content is not something you're strong in, I'm not gonna disagree. Do what works, double down on the things that are are the best fit, especially if you're an early stage startup that has a really tight timeline as far as needing to raise more money. But what I think people miss when they stop investing in content is that they stop building the moat that keeps competitors from catching up with them.

So when I think about having been leading an engineering team where we had we're in a venture back space, we had competitors that were building similar products. We as a engineering team are always looking at our product as a way to build our moat so that we're further ahead of competitors when they raise their next round and we raise our next round. So your product can certainly be a moat because you can build more features faster. You can get more stuff that delivers more value to users out. But what people don't realize about content marketing is it it is a similar mode.

It is very hard for a new entrant to replicate a content marketing engine that's super successful. Take a step back and look at a company like CloudFlare, DigitalOcean, both hurt in their stock prices, certainly. But what's the thing that's gonna keep delivering new customers without throwing more money into it right now? It's content. And that's because they've built this huge moat of content that any new entrant to the field can't replicate overnight.

So you think about paid ads. If I get a new competitor that gets a new round of funding and I'm running a little lean, they're just gonna outspend me on ads, and there's no way I can catch up to that. But in content, if we've already built up a moat and we keep maintaining that moat, that chasm for other people, they can't replicate it overnight, and no amount of money really makes up for time. That's kind of the one word of caution about turning off the the switch and saying we're not gonna do content because it doesn't pay off fast enough is that you're gonna pay a long term price for that. As founders, one of the things that you really have to do that VCs don't have to do is is think about that we wanna exist for 10 years.

That VC is maybe looking at, like, I need to get returns for my fund in in some period, and then I need to raise the next round and decide where I'm gonna deploy those funds. But they've got a 100 or 200 companies they're looking at and working with. You have one company you're running, and you want this thing to be around for 10 years and want it to stay at the top of the heap or at least make its way up there. So content is just one of those ways that you can build that sort of divide from your competitors, separate yourself, get a continual source of traffic and new users without just throwing more and more money at the problem.

I love the idea of building a remote. And having done cold emailing at Stack Overflow, I can attest that it's very hard work.

There's obviously exceptions to every rule. And I think for early stage companies, you know, we're mostly talking about maybe seed round companies right now. There is a good argument to say, focus on the thing that pays you back the quickest at first. But you also have to think, like, some percentage of our resources should always be allocated to long term building. Because if you don't do that, you might get a spike of users from your short term spend.

But if you can't find a replicable channel that gets cheaper to get new users over time, you just are a money pit. And, essentially, it means VCs need to keep throwing more and more money into your operation. Whereas companies that find a flywheel, whether it's content, community, some kind of viral loop, those are the companies that have the cheapest acquisition once they actually get the flywheel going. There's kind of like the short term versus long term thinking in marketing. The short term thinking is throw money at the problem, buy ads, send more cold emails, we will get more customers.

And that's true. But what you want ideally is for that to feed into a flywheel. It's gonna build you a long term, repeatable, cheap acquisition channel, like one of the ones I mentioned, community content, viral loops, those kind of things, because that's really where you start to scale with fewer dollars in, which is super exciting to that next round of investors.

And in terms of eyeballs, that's one thing as well that maybe it's longer term, maybe. But then also I've seen developers buy so many times based on the content that they read. And if you were just doing those kind of cold email channels, paid ads, it must have a big impact on your conversion as well.

The nice thing about content is it augments other channels too. Stack Overflow is a good good example because the whole site is content. But developers know the the name, the brand Stack Overflow because of its content, not because of its cold emails. Now you might be sending some cold emails to help push them over that purchase point or get them to sign up for the job board side of Stack Overflow, but your brand equity, because of the content you had, is really the power that allowed you to do that. Right?

So if you were on day 0 of Stack Overflow trying to build get your first 10 users or 100 users, I don't know that cold email is what I would do because that's a pretty tough channel to try to do from day 0. But if you already had thousands of pieces of really valuable content and people know you in the space, a lot easier to augment and push in things like paid ads and cold emails, etcetera. So to me, content is one of these, like, baseline requirements almost in developer tools. And one of the reasons this is a big part of the reason that as draft.dev, in 2 years, we've gone from 0 to 8085 clients is just because this is a the linchpin of a lot of developer marketing strategies. And I don't think that's gonna change just because, you know, VCs are saying, like, you know, be careful about spending investing in long term acquisition channels.

In a lot of ways, content is part of the product experience too. And so this is where, again, the lines get fuzzy. You and I both worked with developer relations and advocacy teams, and sometimes those are a piece of the marketing pie. But a lot of times, they're lumped under support or maybe product or even engineering. And that's intentional because just kinda put this in a very concrete terms.

If you're a company that's already selling to developers and you have some users, maybe you have lots of free users and you're trying to push them up into paid tiers, one of the best ways to do that is content that shows them the advantages of the paid tiers. Or if you're trying to keep users from churning, one of the best ways to do that is to provide helpful content that allows them to self solve their own problems instead of having to come to your support team, book calls, and do all these things that developers really don't wanna do with their time. There's a lot of ways you can use content, not just as a new customer acquisition channel, but as a retention channel or as a upsell channel within existing customer bases that make it a lot more valuable for just baseline keeping the lights on than just a marketing acquisition channel. So I think that's something to think about. And this is especially true, again, in developer tools because our product is generally something that needs things like tutorials to help users actually use it.

It needs things like integration guides. It needs things like fundamental API concepts or higher level, like, overviews of how the API works and how it's linked together. And all that stuff is content and content marketing. It's just also sort of crosses over into support and documentation and helping users actually get success in the products. Part of what's messy about content is it's not just purely an acquisition channel like cold email.

Cold email doesn't serve support. It doesn't serve developer relations. It it just serves driving growth. And that's fine when that's your goal. But truth is, growth in a developer tools company requires more than just awareness.

It's also about showing you support users, and you actually know what you're doing.

Developer reputation. How does the reputation of your dev tool come into it?

This is exactly the point I was making about Stack Overflow can send cold emails. A company like DigitalOcean that's done thousands of tutorials about how to set up Linux servers, they can get away with a lot of things that a company that's done less for the community can do. Whether those things are being able to have a platform that you can immediately drive more traffic and clicks and trials, or those things are just, like, building up goodwill that allow developers to talk about your product and send over referrals, some other things that tangibly come out of a good content and good reputation. One is it's easier to get people talking about your tools when you have a good reputation in the space, whether that's through meetup talks, going to conferences and speaking. And this isn't just your employees.

Like, you have to think some of the best brands in the world, they have just completely unaffiliated engineers going and speaking about them at conferences. Kubernetes is a good example. And, sure, it's an open source platform that we all use, but, essentially, it's a kind of a spun out of Google thing. Right? There's people who talk about Kubernetes even in the early days that were not involved or affiliated with Google at all.

And that's always been one of its strengths. It's just relying on this community engagement and the community factor for it. I think a lot of us wanna replicate that sort of thing. I used to give talks on Docker when it was a private company. I wouldn't get paid anything for it.

I just thought it was interesting, cool tool, and I wanted to help other developers learn about it. So you think about reputation. It's this multiplicative effect where every marketing channel becomes much more valuable because you have a reputation that helps bolster your credibility and bolster every dollar you're spending on marketing isn't just turning into 1 new user, but it's turning into one new advocate who becomes a 100 new users. And that's extremely valuable. But, again, all this is long term thinking.

But, like, some of the problem with short term in next round of investment driven thinking can be you lose track of some of these long term things that have to happen for you to be that next real unicorn. A lot of companies get stuck in a a cycle of just letting the next round of funding motivate them purely or this fear based operations, just letting them run off fear. I think that's super dangerous because you're not able to zoom out and think, like, how do we become a $1,000,000,000 company? Instead, you're worrying about how do we raise the next million. And I know that maybe if you're early early on, all that sounds like a lot of money, but at the same time, what are your VCs pushing you to really do?

It's to be a $1,000,000,000 company, not the $1,000,000,000 one. So you do have to think of this, like, long term stuff as a CEO or founder, and getting stuck in, like, the short term all the time is gonna be really, really harmful for for that long tail.

Carl, you've written an amazing piece on promotion. You wrote the promotion checklist, which I really like. In there, you wrote that a lot of people think that writing the content is 80% of the work, and and then you do 20% on, promotion. Maybe it should be the other way around. And once you've written a great piece of content, you're just getting started, really.

I'd love to hear about how you think about promotion. And especially at the moment, if there's anything that startups can be doing to shorten the payback of some of their content.

To answer the the question about promotion and how much time to spend on it, it obviously depends. What I I would encourage anybody to do if you've typically been just writing a big piece of content, spending 4, 6, 8 hours on it, and then you just put it on 2 places on your Twitter account and your Facebook account, you just walk away and that's it. I would encourage you to actually take a step back and spend another 2 hours and just see what it gets you because it's gonna make a big difference. And the things you can do in that time are things like sharing it with relevant newsletters. It's funny how simple this sounds, but a lot of newsletters are looking for really good content.

So using things like JavaScript weekly, and and there's tons of them just for different niches. They're all looking for good content, and they have to go source it themselves every week. It's like a ton of work for the newsletter maintainers. They actually really like it when brands write really good content and send it to them. It's not all gonna get picked up.

It just gives you the chance to get this huge multiplicative effect from getting your stuff in the feature there. Same with different subreddits. People are afraid of posting stuff on Reddit because they'll get criticism. I always say Reddit is this weird community that you can't listen to 99% of the people there. And and every now and then, something will get popular, and I don't really understand why.

And other times, things will get voted to oblivion, and I don't get why they got downvoted. So it isn't necessarily something to worry about. It doesn't hurt your brand reputation just because something got downvoted once. You don't wanna be breaking rules, but at the same time, people understand you're putting it out there and you see what people say. This is this is really common in marketing, but for some reason, developer marketing is just a little behind on some of this stuff, like slicing up some of the key points into a Twitter thread or into different LinkedIn posts, doing a video version of that, or at least like a video summary of it and posting on some of the short form video formats like Instagram or TikTok.

This is something too that I get really into because I think a lot of companies look at senior engineers as their target audience, and therefore, they ignore the fact that junior engineers are younger and on platforms that senior engineers aren't. A lot of people I talk to are 10 or 15 years younger than us that are just getting started in their dev careers. They're out here going to YouTube first, TikTok for, like, dev content, and I'm blown away. Because to me, it doesn't make sense. Give me the whole written articles all day long.

But, like, you have to realize you're not the only kind of developer to reach, and there's a whole community of people just getting started. There's people in other parts of the world that might want that content in other languages. You can get stuff translated and put it out there. There's just a ton. Slack channels are good.

Different niche communities that, you know, are relevant to your audience. All those are good places to share. And the once you spend just a couple hours publishing stuff, syndicating it out to other places like dev 2, Medium, what you're doing is opening up the number of opportunities that piece of content has to go kind of viral or to get picked up and backlinked to or just to impact someone in a a personal way to make that 1 on 1 connection. Because pa like, content, much like podcasting or doing a video vlog or something, it's like a very 1 on 1 connection. Readers and and listeners can feel very like, they know you through it.

Anyway, I I think it's a really underdone like, promotion is just underdone in the developer marketing space, but it's also really important, especially if you want to consistently get noticed, and you're really trying to build this as a growth channel, a sustainable channel.

Actually, while we're on the topic, TikTok, tell me a little bit if you've had any experiences with developer content on TikTok.

There are a few people doing it. I don't have a ton of experience personally. It's one of these platforms that isn't as comfortable to me or is like like, I'm not as native on it as I think a generation of developers younger than me are. But I hear about it a lot because we work with developers of all experience levels at Draft, and I get to go out there and talk to a lot of our writers who are maybe junior, mid level developers that are getting started in their career. And it's interesting to hear how much that comes up and YouTube comes up.

Because to me, if I wanna know how to do something, I almost always will find a written tutorial. I like to copy

paste the code, and I have to go read

the docs and all that. But a lot of our our developers almost solely rely on YouTube videos as a way of figuring out how to solve problems. So when you think about that, if you're a company that's trying to get your content discovered and you're not utilizing channels where your potential audience is, you're missing out on big portions of that community. It's also a really good opportunity. We're kinda talking about competition in the startup space.

Come into a space that's crowded. You see all your competitors are doing content, but it's all written content. Maybe there's a lot of space for you to do video. Just zig when other people zag and start to, you know, set yourself apart in some way and do something a little unique. Because you have to take those big bets if you really want something to pay off in an exponential way.

So everyone invest in TikTok right now.

Yeah. I mean, who knows? I think it's still pretty early to tell. I mean, like, a few years ago, Snapchat was all the rage. And I'm not saying Snapchat's, like, gone and people clearly use it, but now TikTok's all the rage.

And you wonder, like, how many of these are gonna kinda be fly by night versus they stick around, and they live long enough to become uncool. And who knows whether TikTok will be there or not? But it's important to think about meeting your audience where they're at no matter who your audience is. So developers is a big one. The other thing too I think people miss on that same vein is the number of international developers.

Latin America is getting to be huge in, the developer space. We have tons of writers, tons of developers we work with in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, all of Eastern Africa, and and Western Africa. And so, again, like, when you build your content only for an Americanized or a Western European audience and you ignore the, like, 75% of the world outside of that zone, you're really putting a big limit on what you who the people you reach. That's something else to think about in developer marketing and developer relations is being accessible by the world now is, I think, increasingly important, especially as we're all going remote. We're all gonna be working in, like, distributed teams all over the world.

Don't ignore that trend and think that we're all gonna go back to the same 5 cities to work in offices.

What kind of things can teams do to make content is accessible to an international audience?

I think a big part of it is having people on your team who know those audiences. I found this out because we've hired people all over the world. We have 16 full time employees and a couple 100 writers. And so started working with an engineering manager who is in South Africa. He's now works with us on, like, quality control and and QA team.

And, he just told us about these things that that us in the US and Europe just don't even realize. Like, latency is a huge problem there because every web request they make in South Africa has to go up to Europe, and then it goes out to the broader world. They don't have the same, like, sort of distribution and the same nodes that we have access to here in, you know, the United States and and London. And so just that alone is, like, very different from mine because mine is, like, in the order of milliseconds. His can be seconds sometimes.

And it's like understanding how to developer tools that are in low latency areas. And this is where you see tools like Replit does a really good job of just being they make web development more accessible. I love them as an example of a tool that's just being very forward about accessibility for developers in every part of the world. They don't care that they're not as big of purchasers as we are in the US, but they're still a huge market, and they're only gonna grow over the next 10 or 20 years. Looking out at the space of where is software development happening and how will that shift as the world continues to grow and get more connected.

And if you just pretend like the whole world is in San Francisco and Chicago and New York and London, you're just missing out on, like, 90% of people. It's just wild to me that companies still do that. We a lot of times, again, when we think in marketing, we think in terms of, like, who's your target market or your ideal customer? And if everybody in your industry is building for the ideal customer profile of Carl with a really fast Internet connection with a MacBook Pro in Chicago, Illinois, then that market saturated. But if nobody's building for the the 100,000 developers working in Nigeria off of tablets, smartphones, and old Windows, you know, laptops with slow Internet connections and intermittent power outages, Like, the people who go build tools for them have this huge untapped opportunity because that whole market is getting more educated.

They've got, like, access to the same kind of resources that we have as far as, like, learning how to code, starting to get more access to jobs and good employment of Western companies. And so, like, again, short term thinking is you focus on where the money is today, but long term thinking is where does the world shift as we all get more access, more connectivity, and the development sort of world doesn't just live in 5 or 6, 10 cities or whatever. Change is always exciting because it means there's opportunities. And and to me, that's, like, that's always my takeaway. There's no such thing as a market that is completely saturated and finished because the world is gonna change around it, and that forces all the markets within it to change.

So whether you've got a start up and you're looking for, like, your niche in the way that you're gonna you're gonna, like, set yourself apart, or you're a big company and you're trying to stay competitive or keep growing despite the fact you've hit most of the the normal target users, I think there's just a ton of new avenues opening up as the world opens up.

If you'd like to hear more from Carl, you can find Carl on Twitter at carlhughes. And if you're serious about scaling your developer content, you should probably be speaking with Carl. And, you should probably also check out draft.dev's blog. So, it's draft.dev. Thanks everyone for listening to scaling dev tools.

If you'd like to hear more from us, we just started a newsletter on all things dev tools, which you can find at bitreach.io. And otherwise, we'll see you very soon for a new episode.