Developer Marketing Does Not Exist with Adam DuVander

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, we're talking about developer content with Adam Duvander. Thanks for joining us, Adam.

Yeah. Good to be here.

So when I started to dig into developer marketing recently, Adam, your name kept on popping up. You're the founder of every developer, the author of developer marketing does not exist, which ironically seems to be pretty much the gospel on developer marketing. You started out your career as a developer, and then you moved into tech journalism at Programmable Web and Wired. And then you started helping the likes of Zapier and SendGrid become massively popular with developers. So it is an absolute honor that you are the first guest on this podcast.

Thank you very much.

Yeah. I'm excited to be here and thrilled to to see what you're working on here.

Amazing. So since this is the first episode, I wanted to briefly introduce what we're trying to uncover. We are super interested in start ups that are selling to developers, building tools used by, bought by, loved by, hopefully, developers. And we're especially interested in startups which have maybe 2 or 3 devs, have got a few customers, and maybe one person, if they're lucky, maybe half a person who's thinking about growth. So all of our questions are gonna be around this very resource constrained group of people.

So, Adam, how should these type of startups be thinking about prioritization of content versus other things that they could be doing?

Yeah. I haven't been quite at the 2 to 3 person stage, but I have been in an early dev focused company and in a DevRel role. And there are a lot of things even just in that role that you can do. And I went into it with a, obviously, content first approach, but there are a lot of things of being able to connect with new people who sign up, be able to find people who are talking about the things that might mean that your product is an interesting solution for them. I think you can take what you learn in some of those other activities and turn that into content concepts that can then live beyond that moment where if you are going to a developer meetup, you have a conversation with 10 people, or you maybe get to give a presentation to 50 people.

How can you take that and scale that beyond? And I think content can help you amplify your other activities that you're doing. So like everything in a start up, it's not a this or that. It's a how do you do it all, and how do you make that as low a barrier for yourself as you can to be able to to produce the content? Because one thing about content is that it does take a while to start to see the really big effects of when you can get organic growth from it.

That makes a lot of sense. Whenever you're creating content or whatever you're doing, there's always that interaction.

Yeah. And being able to take those real problems that you notice when talking to real people and turn that into content. And that's the best type of content really at any stage, but definitely for that early stage is to really you've started your company for a reason and what problems you solve really well and being able to 0 in and explain those problems in a way that will really resonate with a developer, whether you are in person with them or or whether they are finding it via a search result or hacker news or however you're amplifying it.

That makes sense. You touched on that already, but in a sense, where do they start?

We often ask clients of all stages, what is something that your company believes that competitors do not? So how can you zero in on the differentiator? Why did you even start this? Probably not because you wanna be the 6th version of whatever this dev tool is. Right?

You did because there's something that's wrong with those other 5. And you can start with those ideas and make sure you start with it at that problem level. One of the mistakes that some companies might make is putting that content company first or product first, and that's, you know, why why we are building this company, right, which is fine. But if you can think about that a little bit more broadly, why this problem is so important or why the way this problem is solved now is done poorly, you can you can turn that into something that's more likely to find someone who hasn't already heard about you. Great that you can put out why we're building dev tool x and share that with the people who already know you.

But even better is getting at what that problem is that DevTool X solves and say why we are solving this problem. Early on, if you wanna stand out, which is what it takes when you're a small start up, you need to share what those opinions are, and they probably need to be different than what everyone else is doing. Saying, you should be 5% better at this developer best practice is not going to get the attention. Right? You maybe do need to be a little bit provocative, but the most important would be to be real to what that point of view that you founded the company on is.

It reminds me of a fly dot io if you've come across them. I think one of the founders was the founder of also Phoenix, the framework, and I read a piece from them which was talking about how they started Phoenix because they felt that Ruby on Rails was not good for messaging and real time communications.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So that would be real time communication apps in Ruby or something like that. Right?

What's missing from the modern web in Rails or something that really digs in at that problem? The missing piece, why Phoenix was created in the first place.

So as a start up, one of the first things they should be focusing on is really solidifying what their opinion

is. Yeah. And I think it's articulating it because the opinion already exists by the time they if started up, at least the first hypothesis on what that opinion is. Right?

That makes sense. Let's say they've figured out that they need to get their opinion out there. The best people to write this content are probably the same people that building the tool. And as we all know, it's hard to even keep up with all the features from your existing customers. How do you get those developers to also be writing great content?

In your synopsis of the audience for this podcast, you talked about how there is probably someone who is not full time code. Right? You probably can't have everyone full time code in in a start up. Right? The one who is tasked with some of those other, even if it's miscellaneous, is probably the one to write it.

And, I mean, I I would definitely start with those who have the most interest in writing. And, naturally, you can see the the spark happens and then the the fingers go to the keyboard. Attempting to have an engineer write when it's not that motivation already. Sometimes you'll see that companies, oh, let's all write a post a month. There's 4 of us, so we'll get 1 a week out.

Well, one of those people who might be great at the rest of their job and fast in their coding might take a week, an entire week to write that and polish it. The same things that make engineers really good at their job could make them take too long on content. So I would caution against having these everyone's going to throw in here with with full written pieces. Maybe the knowledge that they have can be captured in another way that someone else writes up. But very likely, the initial posts are going to be written by whoever is doing other types of marketing and sales activities, I think, is the is the most likely.

Unless, again, following that passion and natural inclination to take some knowledge and express it in words that and if you have someone on the team that does that, absolutely encourage it. Right? But but likely, it's it's going to be you who are listening to this podcast.

Once they have overcome this challenge of writing content, how should they be thinking about spreading this content?

We've jumped ahead to a particular type of content, which is blog post type of content that's marketers might call top of funnel contents. But in a start up, there are other types of content that you also have to think about prioritizing. So and we jumped past in even saying, don't make it product focused. Well, your documentation should be product focused, and your documentation should obviously live in its own section of your website and should connect to the how this works and also some contextual why you even wanna do this type of content. So those who are who heard don't focus on your product there.

It's okay it's okay to focus on your product for that type of content. I think this other sort of blog content still makes the most sense to publish in your own place. There's a lot of potential places to publish, but because it takes a long time to gather search traffic, it makes sense to start now. And so having a place where you are able to publish because you're planting seeds for for future growth. People are going to find these and link to them.

It will help your entire site and its later SEO strategy, which is a bigger topic, and it goes beyond content in the developer sense that you and I are talking about now. But having it published on your own site, I think, still makes a lot of sense. That doesn't stop you from also publishing elsewhere. There are a bunch of of places now, dev 2 and and hash node, topic specific blogs that you can submit to. All of those places allow you to have the canonical URL point back to your site.

So those of you who are worried about republishing from an SEO standpoint, if you set it up that right way, you don't have to be concerned about that. So it can live in your own home and then be out there and using those communities that have natural ways of being able to share the content and help others discover. So that is one way to be able to distribute it is to is to republish. Then certainly looking at communities to to share it with and looking at your Hacker News and subreddits and all of those typical places. You're a scrappy startup.

There are a lot of Slack channels and Discords that you can go into, and the key there is to share that in a in an authentic way that's not super promotional. But if you're writing the content right, the content is going to already be that way. Even back to that initial post where it's not rah rah, this is why we built company name, it's talking about that problem, and problems are the things that attract developers. Being able to engage their mind, and and you're sharing one way to think about this problem, and they may have other ones. And there are comment sections in all of those places for a reason.

So I think that can be done in an authentic way. You do have to watch out if you're publishing a bunch. If you have a high volume promoting in the same places and it seems promotional, then you're setting yourself up to be banned. But be a good community member. And, definitely, for some of the first ones, reach out to friends and colleagues.

Don't be bashful about asking them to share this thing.

Feeling bashful could partly be the way you're thinking about the content.

You might have some amount of bashfulness no matter what because it's putting yourself and your new company and your work out in front of people, which takes practice, and that's all the more reason to do it and then do it again, right, and get those reps in. But if you're really feeling, oh, someone who I know really well, I don't wanna ask them to look at this or share this. It might be that it's worth then looking back and saying, is this content really being helpful, or is there too much promotion in this?

The next stage so they've got content out there. How do they know if it was a good piece of content?

Like everything in a start up, there are various levels of ways that you can gauge that. And so the very first is kind of that that gut check the same way when you talk to developers about your tool. Do you get the glazed eyes look, or do they go, oh, that's interesting. Many years before I joined SendGrid back to when I was a developer, I had to implement SendGrid of some sort without SendGrid existing. We would send emails from our servers, and guess what?

They would go to spam. And there wasn't a transactional email service at that point. I was looking into, oh, there's all these white lists, and there's all there's so much around that problem. Long before then I joined SendGrid, when I first saw it as a Techstars company, like, I immediately got it. I got that, oh, like, this is a real problem that they that they're solving.

Everyone's talking about email newsletters, but what about that one email that goes to one person that everyone in that situation wants them to get? It's the receipt. It's the confirmation email. Right? And so I instantly got it.

When you have those conversations, there's that gut check, like, oh, did you hit a nerve with this? And you get the similar thing with really good content where you just share it out and you get that immediate feedback of, oh, yeah. You're on to something here. And, again, through repetition, you'll get better at sniffing out what that is and be able to find those things even before you publish, right, and be able to prioritize your content based on that. I think you also need to make sure that not only are you writing something compelling, but it's not about your product, but it's connected to your product in some way.

So the classic one is to say page views, like someone's seeing this. And I absolutely still to this day do look at those numbers. That's an important one. But you don't wanna only look at that because this it's a a real example of, like, people going after programmer contents that might be jokes. Like, everyone wants to know a programmer joke, and so they see that people search for that, and you could write content about that.

I can't think of many dev tools that can then connect that to to their tool. Right? So that's going to be maybe you get views if you manage to rank for that or manage to have people share it a bunch. Right? But that isn't very connected to your product.

So in SEO, people talk about search intent, and I think being able to look and talk about developer intent and see within a topic, what's the intent that a developer would do after reading this. That goes back to prioritizing. That's the stuff you wanna make sure that it's focused on problems and that it's really high in developer intent. And then if you have just content that meets those requirements, then page views mean something, and even small numbers of page views mean something. Early on, you might not be talking about thousands of page views across your blog.

You're talking about a 100 maybe. But if you're writing the right type of content, that's a high quality 100, and they're much more likely to take that next step, which is probably to try your product. Maybe it's to say, tell me about the beta when it comes out if you're really early. And so that would be the next place I would look is, can you get someone from that view to taking some next step with you? And and you can go down that line too.

I talk about developer experience. There's that first hello world, but then there's also the first success. And so you can trace that funnel, for lack of a better word, all the way down to saying, are they actually using this dev tool? But that that goes well beyond the content. So the content stage, is there a next step for them even to take?

That would be something that I would encourage at likely the end of your posts is here's the obvious next step. If you've done a good job of being super helpful and problem focused the rest of the page, you'll be forgiven by most devs for saying, hey. By the way, we have a tool that helps with this problem that we've just thoroughly described here. And some won't, but you can't please everyone. There was a long Zapier post I wrote on authentication for APIs that dev tweeted and said this, so much this or something like that of just loving loving the post that I wrote and then said, except for the marketing spiel, this is great.

And I went, oh, man. What? Because, of course, as the writer, I pride myself on not being a marketer, not being sniffed out as a marketer by a developer. And I look, and it's like right at the end. I mentioned that Zapier has a platform that connects to APIs, and APIs need to be authentication.

So you'll always have your haters who love the rest of your post that still can't help but mention that. But I think giving them a next step is more important than avoiding that dev that might not not like you mentioning your product ever.

So, essentially, things like page views, like who's using who's seeing it, but with the constraint of developer intent as you talked about. And then within that, trying to capture that intent somehow.

Yeah. We might be trying not to say conversion, but conversion. Yeah. Some some way to be able to have them take that next step.

That's all the questions I have for you. Where can people learn more about Adam and about all of the amazing insights that you have on developer marketing?

I am adam d on Twitter. Would love to to chat with folks there, and then, of course, every developer.com.

Thank you so much for coming, Adam. It's been brilliant.

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for listening to Scaling Dev Tools. We'll be back very soon.