What is good developer marketing? With Nimrod Kramer from Daily.dev

Jack: Hi everyone. You're listening to Scaling DevTools show that investigates how dev tools go from zero to one. I'm really excited today to have on Nimrod from Daily Dev, which is the place for developer news. Thanks so much for joining us Nimrod.

Nimrod: Hi, Jack. It's a pleasure to be here.

Jack: I really wanted to speak to you because I remember when I first heard about Daily Dev and I remember I installed it straight away, but I have no memory of what happened in between. So it seems like you're doing something where people just bypass their decision making and be like, Yeah, I need this. I'd love to kind of hear why Daily Dev has been such a sensation from your perspective.

Nimrod: Well, first of all, you know, that's, that's one of the greatest compliments that we can get. Obviously we invest a lot of time into getting this thing right. Hearing that makes me smile. So, uh, a great way to start the interview. So I'll tell you what, it's not that we're doing something intentional, to get you into that kind of state.

And there are no like mental tricks or mind reading stuff and so on and so forth. But I think that, at the core of a lot of the things that we're doing at Daily Dev is listening to our users. So we always start from there. We start from the people whom we build the product. Which is the developer community.

And we tend to talk to them a lot. And at the very core of that process is understanding what are their needs and being very good problem oriented thinkers and asking the right questions to really get down to the deep motivations and emotional triggers that drive people to basically stay up to date, and grow professionally.

And then we get back, to how we try and, and message, uh, the product outwards and, kind of like intertwine everything together. If you put it like as a one liner, I think that, you know, the thing that really drives our growth is emotion and love, which is something that we really put at the front.Everything that we're doing and I'm fairly happy, you know, to, to see that we're getting some love in return from the community. Hopefully we can talk about that as well as part of the, podcast.

Jack: I know you also have some kind of strong views on developer marketing and what it, is. And what good developer marketing is. I'd love to hear your, thoughts on that.

Nimrod: Yeah. I mean, definitely. That's something that, is directly tied up to the previous question. So I think that, what makes developer marketing different than just let's say normal marketing, excuse me. All the marketers out there is that developer marketing is everything but marketing.

So, I think again, at the core of, developer marketing is understanding developers. , and when you think about it, developers are probably the best bullshit detectors in the world, right? They're very intelligence people. They are very logical, they, pragmatic and, they want to get things done a lot of the time.

You wanna be explicit, you know, that's the general rule of thumb. And, and when you compare that to, you know, the normal paradigm in, in marketing, which was more or less introduced or strongly advocated by Simon Sinek, you know, everybody were, was talking a couple of years back about, you gotta start with why, so in developer marketing, it's exactly the opposite.

You wanna start with what. You want to tell people exactly what you're doing and then lend them the tools to prove how it works. And if you manage to do it, they're gonna get the why by themselves. So in developer marketing, it works exactly, the other way around. If you ask me like, what's the, the one silver bullet or, or the single most important advice is that you want to pitch. Not how the product would help them, not like, Hey, it's gonna save you time. It's gonna save you cost. Those things are obvious. You wanna say exactly what your product does and then let them have a hopefully self-serve way to just use the product. And get to that aha momentas fast as possible.

And some people even call it like the time to hello world. Like you want that time to hello world to be as fast as possible. And that drove a lot of the product decisions at Daily Dev as well. The fact that you don't need to sign up right away. Like you go into the product first, you see feed, you see a lot of news, you get the value, you get the adrenaline rush of, of finding a very good, interesting piece.

About the developer space. And only then if you want to use the advanced features of data, you can get to sign up and do a lot of, a lot of other stuff, but sign up is optional, that's a big part of it. And yeah, with developer marketing is, is the best,

Jack: I really, really like that approach. And I like the way you put it. One of the people that I follow on Twitter Francesco has been quite a enigma, someone very populous. I see a lot of interaction with him and upon digging in, I realize that he's actually working with Daily Dev. I'd love to hear a little bit about how you work with Francesco and, and how that's been working for.

Nimrod: All right. So I think that the story of how I personally got to know Francesco is that, he interviewed me for his own like online video interviewing series that, he has done couple or years back, which is kind of, you know, similar setting to what we have here.

And what I really appreciated about what he did, and I felt that.

Is pretty much, you know, the, the, the same DNA that we have in daily dev is that he gives back a lot. He invests as an individual, an extraordinary time and, effort into education, into helping other developers succeed, and all sorts of, areas of, his personal interest. And that really, picked my interest.

And I think that really connected us, together because we're both. strongly believe. And we have a very strong conviction that giving back to the developer community would pay off. And then at some point, uh, we decided that we wanna work together. You know, it just felt like the right time to, uh, for him to join a company as a developer advocate.

And one of the two things that we both spoke about in the very first days, and I hope it's gonna listen to the podcast and hear that, I told him that, Francesco, you are yourself because of what you've done so far. And I think that what a lot of companies tend to get wrong is that they hire developer advocates and they expect them to only advocate their product, to only speak about their product 24/7.

But I told him, you know, if, if you're gonna stop doing your own personal. You're not gonna be Francesco anymore. And if you're not gonna be Francesco anymore. So the entire ground of why we met and why we appreciated each other would just vanish. So I expect you also to do your personal stuff and I expect you to blend Daily Dev inside.

And the second thing that really, really attracted me in, the way he thinks was that when I ask him all right, Francesco, so you're gonna join us developer advocate. What success looks like, like what kind of impact would you want to create? What he said, really surprised me and really changed the way that I thought about developer advocacy.

And he said like a successful developer advocacy program would eventually generate its own developer advocates, not as employees, but from within the community. And for a long time, we were investing a lot of efforts into content creation, into giving back to the community, into bringing the best speakers in the world to speak for free about the most important, most inspiring, most creative topics in the world. And we didn't see any signs of oil at first, you know, developer advocacy in general. It's a field that's very hard to measure. It's very hard to show ROI. I can talk a whole day just about that, but we did have a very strong conviction that what we're doing feels right.

And we hope that at some point it'll stick and luckily like recently we started seeing some, good science to that initial vision of, you know, our developer advocacy program is going to generate its own developer advocate. And one day we're waking up in the morning, we're opening up Twitter and we see that there are a bunch of people who are, power users of daily dev.

Really active in our product, in our community. And so on, so forth that they decided to launch a new challenge. They decided to launch a challenge. They called a hundred days of reading, an article using David do dev. And [00:08:00] in this challenge, basically, you just find an interesting article.

Every day you read it. And then you post your reading history so that you get the support from the, the entire community. And we never had this thought, that was created organically from them. And when you see that, obviously you want to support that. But when you see that that's like a magical moment, that's really.

The time where it's alright, we, we did something right. And we have to, uh, and we have to double down that. And right now we're seeing, you know, every day, every week we see more and more people, joining on this, this online challenge. So you can look up on Twitter hashtag a hundred days of reading an article, and you're gonna see a whole bunch of people sharing their, thoughts and insights about the latest develop.

Jack: I have organically seen that in my own feed. So that is really an amazing initiative that's kicked off and to hear the backstory is quite incredible that it was completely organic.

Nimrod: Like we, we would never imagine, you know, that such a thing can, can even start. And we know that's only the tip of the iceberg. Making the, conviction stronger that, we're doing something right in this direction. and we hope to see more people join. So if you're a developer and you're listening to that, you know, we'll welcome you to join the challenge.

Jack: And actually that brings us on quite nicely to something we've discussed before. Daily Dev is, a news platform that's for developers, right? But that's a very broad term. And actually, what is it that you think is a developer?

Nimrod: All right. So let, let me take, take us back to the mission of Daily Dev. So at Daily Dev, what we're trying to do is to build a place where developers grow together. So eventually we want to create one place where all developers. Exist the home for developers, if you want to call it that way and to use the, the collaborative power to generate more value.

So, you know, when you think about Daily Dev, it's not just a developer and use program, there is an entire mega network effect behind it that helps the entire community. We have more than 150,000 people using Daily Dev almost on a daily basis. This network effect of people that are consuming content through Daily Dev helps us surface.

The best interesting articles from all across the internet. And that's the magic. Like the magic is, the, in the ability to connect developers together. And this is what we've been doing so far. And I think that one of the unique aspects of Daily Dev is that. it's a platform for developers, but it's not really a developer tool, right?

It's not a technical product that would get you, to do something in your code faster, cheaper, or, better configured, better managed, , it's a place for you to grow professionally. , and this is what we're trying to do right, now to grow professionally. A bit, a very big pain for a lot of developers that are getting into, software engineering.

There are so many platforms, there are so many tools, technologies changing in a rapid pace, and we hope that we can unify everything and, and bring in, bring it everything into one place. But then the question is what is a developer? And my personal view of things is that we're living in a very special moment in.

That's actually the first time in, in the history of software development where we experience a generation change. So if you think about it, not so long time ago, software developers were mostly focused at building the very basic building blocks of what software engineering is as of today and the new developers that are now.

And in recent years, getting into developers. Pretty much the same, but also pretty much different than what it used to to be, several years back. So the new type of developer is not only a person who writes code, you know, developers, they care about their personal brand. They care about being part of a community.

They care about their learning process, you know, and they invest a lot of time into their learning and they have all sorts of new tools and new capabilities to learn. And, and we look at, these new generation of developers who say, all right, how can we, how can we support but looking even like five, 10 years down the road from now.

So we don't only have the classic developers, those who are already like super senior staff engineer they've been in software engineering for a long, long time, and it's not only the developers that are now getting into software engineering. We think that the definition of a developers going to expand as well.

So if you look at the entire motion of low code and no code. The people who are using it, they're building websites and apps. They might not necessarily, you know, write the hardcore code and, and build the infrastructure the way we used to, to know up until now. But these people are actually building products, and some of these products might be the next billion or next trillion dollar companies one day.

And one of the most interesting trends is a lot of these people are starting to call themselves, develop. So if you think about a web flow developer, , web flow developers, they don't write any code. Like they might have some JavaScript snippets here and there, but, uh, there are a lot of people who are, building great products and great, great websites, uh, through tools like web flow and others like WICS and so on and so forth.

If you ask me in the next five to 10 years, those people would be also called, and be part of the developer community. As we know.

Jack: I agree. It's like a, a level up on the abstraction, but it's still the same process of problem solving and banging your head against the wall and trying to make things work.

Nimrod: definitely.

Jack: You mentioned that 150,000 developers use Daily Dev every day, which is obviously an enormous opportunity for developer tools that want to reach developers. Have you got any examples of companies that have done really good marketing campaigns with Daily

Nimrod: Yeah. So I think that one of the unique opportunities that Daily Devv offers to any company who wants to get a trusted access to developers worldwide is, is to leverage all sorts of partnership models that we have with Daily Dev. So just going real quick about it. The most obvious partnership model is just to submit your own blog as a content source for Daily Dev it's free.

It's just subject to a review process, but once you are there, all your content is gonna be part of the feed. It's gonna get exposed to. Tons of developers and it can generate enormous amounts of traffic. So that's like the equivalent of, doing SEO, but just, you know, specifically for developers. And it's just, it takes one minute to submit and it can make a huge impact on, on your business.

And then on top of that, we also offer some paid models. , so you can run ads on the feed, , in, in a similar manner that you would do in any other social media platform. So you can pick, , what type of developers watch geographies and so on, so forth. And you can, promote your product.

You can promote a specific job posting. You can promote your event and so on, so forth. And in terms of like one very interesting success story, I think that one of the best partnership we have is with a company called linear. It's a productivity developer productivity company that, um, are trying to increase the output that, the developers produce and in a very interesting way, I'll leave it for everyone.

Who's listening to Google that and, and check it out what they're doing. And together we run some very successful campaigns. Now we're starting to prepare for the third time we're gonna do, uh, a partnership around an event that they run called interact, which is a conference for engineering leaders.

We help them to, uh, get people to sign up to their event through all sorts of distribution channels that we have. This is what we know how to do. We know how to distribute to developers. We're one trick phony. Like that's what we know how to do. And in return, like we, we become sponsor in the event and we get exposed and exposure to like probably the top engineering leaders in the world of tech, right now.

And, to get them also on board Daily Dev and get them to know what we're doing, what kind of impact we can create for their companies. And that was a very successful partnership so far. And I'm very, very happy for it.

Jack: Nimrod, that's all, we've got time for. Thank you so much for joining. We might be able to predict this, but where can people learn more about you and about Daily Dev?

Nimrod: So the easiest thing about daily dev is just type Daily.Dev. The name of the product is the name of the domain. So you could just go there. You can watch a one minute video, get the entire understanding. What we do not what's in it for you, but what we actually do, then you can try it out. You know, it'll take you again one minute to see the video one minute to try the product, and then you make up your mind if it's good enough for you or not.

And about me, I'm, I'm all over social media, mostly active on Twitter. So that's the best place to reach out to me. I also have my DMS open. I love communicating with every. Who is passionate about Daily Dev. Who's passionate about developer news. Who's passionate about building communities, anything around that.

Really strikes my, my curiosity. So feel free to reach out I'm really doing my best to reply to every single one of you. And Jack for you. Like once again, I really appreciate you hosting me here. And, uh, I had a wonderful time. Thank you.

Jack: Thanks so much for joining us and thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you again soon.