Episode 5
· 15:51
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 Natwar Maheshwari. Natwar is a developer marketing lead at Algolia and has a ton of experience in developer marketing, including with Mailchimp working on their APIs, and before that as an automation engineer. So clearly has a lot of experience on both sides.
Jack Bridger:Natwar, it's an absolute pleasure to have you today.
Natwar Maheshwari:Thanks a lot for having me, Jack. Super happy to be here.
Jack Bridger:How do you think we should think about developer marketing when we're just getting started?
Natwar Maheshwari:That's a good question. We have talked about this in the past. But I think at at very beginning, you just have to look at what you think is cool and put it out there. I think that's the first thing. A lot of developers build, like, some amazing things, and they don't think it's like like, oh, it's okay.
Natwar Maheshwari:You know, it's not that great. No. You might think it's not that great, but for someone in this world, it's, like, freaking cool. Right? I think put things out there.
Natwar Maheshwari:The things that you're working on, don't think this is not done. Don't think that, you know, others might not like it. That's not the goal. The goal is to be you, at least in the beginning. I mean, the goal should always be to be you.
Natwar Maheshwari:But in the beginning, when you have any limited audience, when you are trying to find your first few customers, just be you. And be be very careful about what you read from traditional marketing places. I'm not saying that wrong. I'm saying that might not work for you. There's a lot of skill that comes into picture when someone took took the block from 0 to 1,500,000 in 18 months.
Natwar Maheshwari:There's a lot of skill there that's not mentioned in that blog that you read. So be a little bit careful about that, but at the same time, do experiments. I think I think in the beginning, experiments are the only thing that work. Work meaning that will tell you what will work for you, but a lot of experiments will fail. Coming from the developer side of the world, if you are yourself a developer, you're used to doing something and seeing it work or not work, and then you troubleshoot it.
Natwar Maheshwari:It's not that fast in marketing. What happens is you do something, and then you wait. And then you have to just wait. And that's why experimentation is important that you're running multiple experiments at the same time and figuring out what's working for you. So, like, something that worked for a midsized company or a really big company might or might not work for you, but it's a good place to start thinking in terms of experimentation.
Natwar Maheshwari:One more thing that I'll say here, your whole team, if they're doing cool stuff, put it out there. Don't care that, oh, today's not the platform or LinkedIn is not the platform or whatever. It doesn't matter. If you're doing cool stuff, put it out there. If you think it helps your place, go ahead.
Natwar Maheshwari:Do that. That's fine. If you think you're doing something that can be used in an open source project and you should use contributor, do that. Right? Think about your customer base, which is other developers.
Natwar Maheshwari:Right? That's why you're building a dev utility in that tool. Would they think this is cool? Right? I think that's a lot.
Natwar Maheshwari:And document your process. I'm I'm very bad at this. I'm sure, Jack, you have struggled with this in your life. We tell people how we reach to a place even if they have issues with our steps. It's still very, very helpful, and that's something that that I've seen a lot of people do very well.
Natwar Maheshwari:Again, I don't do this very well, but companies like Amazon. Right? I know we have all have some experience about that, but still certain things there. They just do very well in terms of documentation of, like, certain things.
Jack Bridger:Just digging in there. Is is there the things that we can do to kind of create that experimentational culture?
Natwar Maheshwari:That's absolutely fair question, Jack. And it's hard. Right? Again, coming from the development side of the world, we'll do certain things certain way. And and if we are testing certain things, we see results.
Natwar Maheshwari:So, like, even if you're trying to use a different kind of API for something that that you've used different product for in the past, you see the result right away. This is not gonna work for this reason. Or, hey, this is having some issues with other utilities within my code base. Whatever that is. Right?
Natwar Maheshwari:In marketing, it's different. So the mindset has to change. The culture has to be different. I'm gonna try this, and it's gonna take time, and that's okay. Telling yourself that, telling your team that that it's okay that this thing will take time.
Natwar Maheshwari:Marketing takes time. Building a brand, building trust in the ecosystem, these things take time. So so in terms of experimentation, have a very good path around what looks good and what looks bad. We can get lost into analysis paralysis. We have all the tools in the world to capture data, to capture clicks, to capture scrolls, to we can we capture everything on our products these days.
Natwar Maheshwari:So don't get lost into analysis paralysis because it's a lot of fun too if you have implemented that in things like mix panel or segment or GA for that matter. It's a lot of fun to just spend ton of time there and drive insights from it. But I would say, like, in the beginning, 80, 20 rule works really, really well. 20% of your work will give you 80% of the insights. Your goal should be to get those 80% of the insights and move on, either the same experiment or the one.
Natwar Maheshwari:So for an experiment, you have to be clear on what you're trying to do. What does good look like and what does bad look like? You need to define when will you stop doing this. But me saying that statement, right, I've assumed a lot of things. For example, if you're running an SEO experiment, right, if you're saying that, you know what?
Natwar Maheshwari:I'm gonna write this 2,000 word blog post about x, y, or z. Ranking on Google with search engine optimization takes time. So let's say you have to have that knowledge. That's what I assumed. You have to have that knowledge that things certain things take time.
Natwar Maheshwari:Your 3 or 1 redirects? No. They don't take time. But Google looking for something and ranking it, that takes time. Having that basic knowledge of what things take time and what doesn't is very helpful.
Natwar Maheshwari:I would say if you can, like, in in past, even as an entrepreneur, I had a bunch of entrepreneurs or a bunch of founders. We had a group where we'll talk about these random things to each other because I run, like, few experiments around products and mix panel and someone else did something else and we'll learn from each other. If you have other developers that you can talk to about these things, it's very, very helpful because I know especially around, like, our Twitter community. Right? The tons of people who have done this, they've been doing it for some time.
Natwar Maheshwari:They'll at least help you, hey. You know what? If you're doing this, this is gonna take time, and it's okay. But if you are trying to do something, let's say, copy changes on your website, that's technically a marketing experiment. Right?
Natwar Maheshwari:That will be dependent on how much traffic you get, how much net new traffic you get because someone who visited your website day before yesterday is not gonna show up today just because you changed the copy. Right? That's not gonna happen unless you're running retargeting ads, which I'm guessing you're not. So having that basic understanding is helpful in terms of experimentation, but, really, it's be be comfortable cutting your losses and coming back to it in a year. Today, you have domain authority of 20, and the year your domain authority will be 57.
Natwar Maheshwari:Yeah. That same experiment might work later on. Having that cadence of, okay, I'm gonna look at the backlog of my failed experiments and see what else can I kind of pick it up as things have changed? I've kind of gotten all over the place on this, Jack. Does this make sense?
Jack Bridger:It makes sense. I feel like one of the key points you're saying is not being afraid to do things that you don't have a lot of knowledge on and try them out just because they seem like a good idea, but also try to get at least a little bit of expertise thrown in there so that you're not, for instance, doing an SEO experiment over 24 hours and expecting to see some results.
Natwar Maheshwari:Absolutely. You put it in a much better way than I did, man. Yeah. Doing, like, one on ones of basic concepts around marketing is very helpful. So, for example, brand marketing.
Natwar Maheshwari:It's very hard and it's it takes some ton of times. So you can read about it a little bit and you say, I'm not doing this. I'm not ready for this. Right? SEO, you can read about it 4 to 8 hours and say, this is worth doing it because it gives me sustainable traffic or or con consistent traffic over a longer period of time.
Natwar Maheshwari:And you get to pick and choose that. Partnerships, that's another way of marketing if you think about it. Like, kind of, you know, partnering with other people who have bigger audience than yours because you have better tools or better cooler product, whatever. Figuring those pieces out because marketing, you can do 100,000 things, and it's not a joke. You can actually do so many things, but you have to pick your own things, depending upon your skill set, depending upon what you're trying to do.
Jack Bridger:I really like this. There is no specific playbook that's gonna work for you, and your goal at the beginning is to just figure out what things could work for you. And there's not really any expert out there that can tell you what will work for you. You just have to keep trying different things.
Natwar Maheshwari:Yes. 100%. If you can find other developer founders or marketers, if you're finding a decent one, they'll tell you that they don't know a lot, and they'll tell you that I don't know if this will work for you or not because there's so many reasons for something to work and something to not work. It's mind boggling the things that we don't think about right now. I struggle with things like preconceived notions about a brand.
Natwar Maheshwari:Let's say you have used my product in the past or you've seen the logo in the past. I don't know in what context have you seen it. Have you seen it on the open source projects, or have you seen it to the in on a website which you hated? There are so many things. There are so many reasons behind why some things work and why some things don't.
Natwar Maheshwari:All I would say is work with someone who has done things and is comfortable saying I don't know. And because you don't because you also don't know. I think having a peer group is very, very helpful. I'm not talking about, like, hiring consultants or whatever, but having peer groups is is super helpful.
Jack Bridger:One of the things you mentioned in there was about brand. Algolia has a very good brand. I use Algolia. It's it's great. I only hear good things about it.
Jack Bridger:But when you're experimenting with different things, does that play into brand building as well?
Natwar Maheshwari:It definitely does. And it's a very, very important piece of the puzzle, especially if you are trying to build a product for developers. For developers that the trust the brand is that trust. Like, trust of what? Trust of the fact that they're not going away tomorrow.
Natwar Maheshwari:So the fact that the things will work the way that they said it works. Trust behind the fact that I'm not gonna take and sell your data. Right? Trust behind the fact that if I'm giving you an a wrapper or a library, first of all, it'll not break down. If it breaks down, I'm sitting behind it.
Natwar Maheshwari:There is support behind. Trust is not just stuff just one thing. Trust is is a lot of bunch of things. Around, are they going to be around for 5 years? Because, see, some there are certain products that we take and then we put into our system, and to rip them out is gonna be a lot of work.
Natwar Maheshwari:So, like, trust around that. Right? Which brand comes into everything. And if I am not consistent if we as a company are not consistent around saying, you know, we stand behind this, then then it's gonna be very, very hard for someone to, say, pick something and and use. If you are a lot of my guess is a lot of your listeners have been into into companies where they were part of, like, b to b sales cycles on either side of the table.
Natwar Maheshwari:They used to be saying they're still saying nobody gets fired for buying an IBM. That it's an old saying, like, an nineties thing. The point being, the IBM had such a strong brand that even if everything that you implemented failed, you're not gonna get fired. So so companies which were competing with them, that's what they're competing against. Right?
Natwar Maheshwari:That's where brand comes into picture. It might not be very relevant to to the developer utilities and developer tools, but it's important because someone who's gonna buy your product, your tool, or bring it into the ecosystem of their own world is putting their own reputation on the line. I don't think anyone is gonna get fired. Point being they're still putting their reputation on the line. That's why trust is very, very important.
Natwar Maheshwari:Being honest being you being you and being honest about what you are and what you're not is is very, very helpful because you don't have to remember a lot of things because you're just you. I I know it's very, very easy to say this than than doing it.
Jack Bridger:I love the way you kind of articulated, especially the point around being painful to rip out if they go broke or you you know, something bad happens. When when we talk about experimentation, is it experimenting within constraints? How would you describe the kind of process? Because it sounds like you're doing that.
Natwar Maheshwari:Experimentation at different stages of our products, of our brands are different. A small curated newsletter site called Engineering Brew. The experiments that I do there are very simple, are very clean because of two reasons. One is I don't have a lot of time because I have a full time job as well. And second is I wanted to keep it simple and clean.
Natwar Maheshwari:Like, when I started, I'm like, I do this a lot. Let me just start curating, and that's it. Like, that's how it started. So that context is that I'm not trying to make money off of it or anything like that. So that's there.
Natwar Maheshwari:But if you are running an experiment on, let's say, goal yeah. We use a proper product for an a b test, for example. Right? Now b tests only work if you have ton of traffic. Otherwise, it's never gonna be statistically significant.
Natwar Maheshwari:That's a constraint. So when I used to in my own startup, I used to run AB test, and and they used to be useless because I had, like, a 125 visitors on the website every day. Even after a month, I will not have a decent kind of data on what copy is working, what's not. Understanding that in terms of criteria when you're thinking about your experimentation, be very clear about what you have and what you don't have. Being brutally honest there is helpful.
Natwar Maheshwari:For engineering brew, if you go there right now, the text box where the email is even supposed to be, it's automatically selected. It's a very small tiny thing. Someone else did it. It's it was not my idea. I looked at it.
Natwar Maheshwari:I went to that website. Yeah. I'm gonna subscribe. And my cursor was just there. Like, it's it's really nothing if you think about it.
Natwar Maheshwari:But that small thing, I saw my own behavior. I'm like, okay. And I I implemented it here. To be brutally honest with you, I don't know how my site would react or this engineering crew would react if it was not there because I'd not run an experiment. I saw something.
Natwar Maheshwari:I'm like, that's cool. I'm gonna use it, and I used it. So so sometimes you just see something like, that's pretty cool. I think earlier when we were talking about, for example, Stripe documentation. If you see something in in the world that is definitely, like, great and, like, someone else is doing it, don't feel bad about copying it, especially around marketing.
Natwar Maheshwari:Stripe documentation. If you're logged in, right, you don't have to copy paste your staging API keys. It's a small thing. Again, they did, I think, 7, 8 years ago, something like that. It's been a while.
Natwar Maheshwari:You see something like this, use it. There's nothing wrong with that. And one might think that that's not a marketing tactic or a marketing thing, but in my opinion, that is. Right? Because even right now, 90% of the the API documentation don't do that.
Natwar Maheshwari:So people will remember you. That's trust. That's brand building. That's that one thing that people were like, that was cool, man. I'm gonna remember that.
Jack Bridger:Not far. We are very unfortunately out of time. That was very, very interesting. If people wanna hear more, where can they find out stuff?
Natwar Maheshwari:You can follow me at on Twitter, natwar86, n a t w a r 86. That's my Twitter handle. I work at Leggolia. We are a search and discovery API company. Anytime that you see a website search, it's powered by something.
Natwar Maheshwari:A lot of times, it's powered by. Super super happy to be here. We do a lot of work with front end, back end, and and we have a lot of utilities, a lot of things that are open source that are not and whatnot. Other than that, I I run a small newsletter called Engineering Blue. You can find it at engineeringblue.com, and it's a curated engineering blogs.
Natwar Maheshwari:I I like to read and and just curating them as I'm reading them. And and I send out newsletter and whatnot around that.
Jack Bridger:Thanks for listening to Scaling Dev Tools. If you enjoyed this, we also have a newsletter on all things Dev Tools at bitreach.io. Please sign up, and we'll see you soon.
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