We need to start marketing… Now what?
“We’ve built a really cool product - our early adopters love it - now we want to scale our efforts. How do we get more people to discover what we’ve built?”
Introduction
Over the past 7 years or so, I’ve talked to a lot of incredible developer tool companies answering an almost identical question:
“We’ve built a really cool product - our early adopters love it - now we want to scale our efforts. How do we get more people to discover what we’ve built?”
Usually this question is asked by a very small founding team mostly made up of engineers. As these conversations often end up going in a similar direction, I decided to write up a summary of the tips I’ve shared with them. Potentially they may be useful to others.
In the interest of keeping this article tightly scoped, I want to focus this piece exclusively on potential awareness building activities and the respective channels that they fall into. In other words, to cover some of the approaches that get more eyeballs on a product.
While there are so, so many aspects to marketing, especially when a team is starting out, for now, I’ll be sidestepping the conversation on tooling, measurement, community engagement, etc., but may speak to those more in a future piece.
Key Channels for Building Awareness
Here are some potential channels and approaches I recommend focusing on (listed in no particular order):
YouTube
Events
Written Content
LinkedIn
Discord
Email
For some of these channels, you can imagine dividing them into two subtypes:
Channels you own and that build your company’s network
Existing channels owned by others that are relevant to your audience
Let’s dive in!
YouTube
YouTube is one of the most impactful possible channels today.
Especially when it comes to developer tooling, YouTube videos can give people a first-hand look at the syntax, UI, and general experience of a product very quickly. When engineers are researching a new technology, they will type it into YouTube search as a goto method of getting a handle on it.
Therefore, I’d advise all growing startups to invest in some YouTube presence.
There are several benefits to prioritizing YouTube early on:
It creates an impetus for the team to create new educational or marketing material. Having just a couple pieces of completed videos can have so many uses: it can be sent in an email, promoted on social media, shared with folks interested in the product, chopped into shorter clips for LinkedIn, displayed on the website, or highlighted at an event booth.
It establishes your presence on YouTube overall and gives you a feeling for the platform. You can then start to link people to your YouTube from the site footer.
Although it’s not a very reliable method, having some YouTube content means there’s a chance that it can be promoted to a new audience through YouTube’s (often fickle) recommendation engine. When publishing new videos on YouTube, it’s always a best practice to space them out in order a) not flood subscribers’ feeds b) highlight to the algorithm that the channel produces new videos regularly (which it rewards).
Nevertheless, one challenge of YouTube is that though you may publish videos, the view counts will stay very (very) low because your audience is so small. With a significant investment necessary to make a video, it can be discouraging to see the number of subscribers barely inch up. Overall, YouTube is a long game; the more you post, the more you may find a topic that resonates with folks and brings them to your channel, and eventually your site and product.
Another approach with YouTube is to be featured or demoed by existing YouTube creators. There are a lot of extremely effective content creators whose work ranges from long form video tutorials to short snazzy video overviews (think Fireship). While sometimes the only way to get your product mentioned is through a sponsorship, if you have something that fits well into the kind of content they highlight, even a small mention from a large channel in the context of a greater educational piece can provide massive product exposure.
One way to find those relevant YouTubers with an existing audience? Ask your friends and team what tech YouTubers they watch, or see if there already is someone in your existing network that can assist with a plug.
Events and Meetups
Events can also be an incredibly effective way to spread the word. However, what constitutes events can vary widely depending on the company and audience. Here are a couple types of event activities:
Starting your own meetup: Starting your own meetup is a massive time investment. However, it has the benefit of giving you a consistent platform to highlight your product and other related tech in your community. I would generally recommend this option only once a team hires its first marketer, as this is a great task for someone focused on promotion - even one without technical experience as long as they are eager to learn.
NB: The other cardinal rule that I have for meetups is that they should always be recorded. This is an exceptional way to build up YouTube content and really ensures that the effort from the meetup lives on after it’s completed. This adds to the cost of the meetup, but can pay dividends in other ways.
Speaking at existing meetups: Reaching out to existing local meetups is an effective way to gain additional awareness. Depending on the size of the meetup, they often very actively search for speakers and really appreciate proactive outreach. In fact, for many meetups, their number one challenge is consistently finding interesting speakers. Bigger meetups often have a more stringent application process, but nevertheless they can be an effective way to connect to a new audience.
NB: If your product is paid not all meetups appreciate what they feel could be construed as a plug or an ad. An alternative approach for a potential talk topic could instead be to describe the challenges in the niche related to your product or an interesting takeaway you had while building your tool. For example, if your product is built with Rust, you may be able to speak to your experience using Rust at a meetup without necessarily focusing completely on your product and features.
Speaking at conferences: Speaking at conferences can be an extremely effective tool for promotion. For many smaller organizations, the question is often whether they can afford the time it takes to build out a conference talk as well as the cost of travel if it isn't covered by the event. This is too variable to advise one way or the other, but if the company can swing it, speaking at events (maybe there are virtual events that may work better) is a great way to quickly increase one’s audience. As a cost saving measure, one can start with local conferences to gauge their effectiveness and expand from there.
Sponsoring conferences: When a company is very small and very early in its development, they’ll have to use their best judgment in terms of whether the sponsorship is worth the investment. If it may mean getting a booth somewhere, it could be an interesting experiment, but I would avoid a sponsorship that is just a logo and stickers when just starting out.
Furthermore, speaking to people face to face at a booth makes tracking the results of a sponsorship somewhat easier. At a minimum it provides an opportunity to refine your pitch, get product feedback, and collect some takeaways to bring back to the office. Conversely, smaller sponsorships (logo highlighted on a slide, stickers, etc) may be especially difficult to quantify while still costing you the money that could have been spent elsewhere.
If you’re thinking of sponsoring a conference, I’d recommend trying it out once or twice and seeing how you find the experience and results, keeping in mind that the travel costs related to an event can also add up quickly.
Hosting a conference: While this is not a place to start, if there’s a niche that is both highly relevant to your product and would be interesting to other non-competitive startups and companies in the same sphere AND doesn’t currently have a good event serving them, you may consider hosting your own conference.
This is not a task to take on lightly and requires a massive investment (both of time and finances). However, if executed effectively, this has the opportunity to pay off in terms of brand recognition and an awareness boost as people attend, share about, and later watch the videos from the conference.
Content
In the age of ChatGPT and LLMs, the world of organic technical content marketing is undergoing a massive shift.
It may seem at first glance, that there is little worth in writing content when an AI can spit up hundreds of words on a specific topic. However, that is not true! Organic content can still have a positive impact on traffic and overall brand awareness. The impact of ChatGPT, however, changes some of the ways the content should be created and what it ought to cover. As always, the function of content should be to create value for the reader— we’ve never had as little patience for drivel as we do today.
Here are some considerations when creating content in the age of LLMs:
Create new, original work: While a million pieces on, for example, MySQL vs. PostgreSQL exist online, if your company is taking a new approach to a developer problem, there may be ideas that an LLM has not yet indexed and simply cannot speak to. Look to write those topics first.
Speak to experience: As you work on your product, you may have run into interesting issues needing debugging or taken a specific approach when scaling, or have some sort of architecture that you think fits your needs best. While an LLM can spit out a pretty straightforward reference article, a work that pulls from first hand experience and has something new to say can go far in building the team’s brand and getting eyeballs on the blog or similar.
Liven up your content: When working on technical content, look for ways to distinguish it from content AI generated mush by producing more than just text. This can mean adding illustrations, diagrams, interactive elements (check out this beautiful example), and anything else that puts a more human touch on the piece.
Prioritize the author of the piece: It is also worth thinking about who on your team is writing the content. In the past, simply the publication of content was enough. People would Google a topic and if a result seemed relevant, they’d click and read it, providing the company a unique site visit.
Nowadays however, content that covers a straightforward question is more likely to be found in the output of an LLM. There’s a greater interest in reading something from a knowledgeable source: an engineer who has wrestled with a tough problem, a CEO speaking passionately on current industry challenges, and so on.
Look at who on your team has the expertise to speak authoritatively on a problem and ask them to write something.
Choosing a content topic:
When it comes to publishing content, I’ve often found that companies default to focusing their first pieces specifically on how amazing their product is. This makes sense. If you’ve spent months or years working on your initial version, of course you want to tell the world how groundbreaking it is.
Nevertheless, I recommend finding a balance between product specific content which will be appealing to people already bought into your offering and content that can speak to slightly broader concerns. You can mention your tooling or host the content on your site, but the overall theme of the piece should have a wider appeal in order to give it the maximum audience possible.
Promoting your content:
Without getting into too much detail here, it’s worth remembering that writing content isn’t enough, it needs to be promoted. When planning your content, take some time to reflect on which channels available to you can get eyes on what you’ve written: your own social media, reposts from people in your network and friendly companies, Hacker News, email newsletters, etc.
Side Note: Don’t let a lack of formal writing experience on the team hold you back — not only can AI act as an effective editor (even without changing your text, it can give valuable suggestions), but in my experience I’ve often seen technical folks deliver incredibly interesting work because they are so keen to get into the meat of the subject.
LinkedIn
Social Media these days is also not necessarily the powerhouse it once was. However, LinkedIn may carry some value depending on the audience you’re looking to reach.
What makes LinkedIn especially interesting is how it encourages different types of content. While the most common is the one-sentence-paragraph texts with tons of whitespace, it could also be a place to promote the videos you’ve uploaded, content you’ve written, and any other materials you’ve created for other channels, as well as photos from your events.
Always look for ways to repurpose existing content. A blog post can turn into a LinkedIn carousel; a full-length video into a short clip; a conference talk can be repromoted with an interesting quote from the full presentation.
Additionally, depending on the composition of your team, there may be a benefit in building up the CEO’s brand or any other highly visible member of the leadership team. Their personal followers on LinkedIn can be just as relevant to the overall product visibility. It’s no coincidence that when a startup begins working with a PR agency, one of the first things on the agenda is ascertaining who from the leadership team could represent an effective public face for the company, and getting them specifically in front of an audience.
When someone from the leadership team, especially the CEO, has their own approach to LinkedIn, they may be able to speak with authority on various topics in a way that a company’s promotional posts may not. While the main company LinkedIn page may benefit from snazzy carousels and highly curated copy, having personal, more casual to some extent, posts from a single person in the team, may feel more relevant to other developers and a friendlier way to build an audience.
Discord
It’s very likely that as a company you have already set up a Discord channel— this is especially common as a support channel for early users of your product.
One can also sparingly use Discord as a way to share company news, if you aren’t currently doing that. Not every user may be signed on to an email list, especially not in the case of products that are wholly open source, and when used only for the most valuable releases, this is a handy vector to get the word out about key developments.
In general, Discord is a good way to potentially develop deeper engagement with your users overall, but as this post is mostly about building top of the funnel awareness, I’ll limit the discussion here.
Email
Aside from the standard use of email to update your users, there are two main ways that email can work for expanding awareness.
At its most basic, email keeps your mailing list in the loop about what the company has delivered. Very likely this is one of the primary vectors for announcements, and if you have the time, a more detailed newsletter linking to updates and any content that’s been created. Nevertheless, setting that aside, there are two factors potential email-related awareness building activities.
Creating a technical newsletter: Occasionally there exists the opportunity to create a general tech newsletter in your niche. This newsletter would cover developments in your area but not necessarily exclusively about your product. An example of this is Stellate’s GraphQL Weekly Newsletter. By consistently curating valuable information for your community, you can highlight your company through a discreet mention on the newsletter sign up page and some small shout out at the bottom of the email itself. I would caution, however, not to be tempted to use this newsletter just for self-promotion. Readers are very savvy and fast to unsubscribe when they don’t find your emails useful.
Hooking into external newsletters: The second opportunity is to find external newsletters where your content might fit in. Like YouTube, one way to begin compiling a relevant newsletter list would be to see what newsletters the team already subscribes to. It’s very likely that those already have well-curated content of interest to your audience.
Some newsletters can have a submission form or for others, you can get in touch with the editor. However, these newsletters are not the place to spam with self-promoting product announcements! Instead, they are instead an outlet for your very best, most interesting content that may be relevant to their readership.
Your Mileage May Vary
While this piece may have offered a variety of suggestions, the proposed channels are by no means close to comprehensive.
Just like any aspect of building a startup, marketing is multifaceted and should be adapted depending on exactly what your audience responds to.
Your approach will always be informed by the size of the target company (vs. individual developer) that you’re looking to attract, where they spend their time, and what requirements your specific product has in order to be implemented in their stack.
Furthemore, in addition to the channels and activities I’ve shared in this post, there are many other potential vectors including:
Ads
PR
Podcasts
Educational Courses
Sponsorships
Swag
Product Hunt/Hacker News
Gated Content
Influencer Marketing
etc.
No matter what you decide to do, a good product is an amazing foundation for long term success. A bit of awareness building is the cherry on top.
Acknowledgements
Thank you so much to:
Andy Hattemer, Head of Marketing at Neon
Lisa Tagliaferri, Senior Director of Developer Enablement at Chainguard
Both provided valuable feedback, insights, and input for this piece.
Get in Touch
Questions? Feedback? Suggestions? Feel free to reach out to me directly: etel [at] hey [dot] com