How to advertise to developers: deep dive into paid developer marketing | Hacker News Reader

How to advertise to developers: deep dive into paid developer marketing

developermarkepear.com

331 pointsmooreds174 comments

> Pushy pop-ups, "do it now", flashy colors, and all that stuff. Things that work like a charm in e-commerce or fashion will most likely not work on devs.

Not just 'not work', but 'actively repel'. A popup chat bot or a survey form request (during or after using a website or software product) or anything not germane to the task that has a shadow or notification highlight has slowly but surely become a form of wart that elicits a deep, instinctual disgust from me. I'd even say an unhealthy and unreasonable level of disgust.

It's enough to get me to instantly despise a product almost nomatter how well it does its original job.

But 100 folks who actually click ads or interact with these distraction baubles (mistakenly or otherwise) are worth thousands of people like me, so I understand why it won't ever change for the better out of a company's own volition.

---

When it comes to advertising, say, developer tooling, I think a large part of the problem is that there's just not going to be a lot of relevant tools out there, for my job or hobbies, that I either don't already know about (and aren't using because I have already evaluated its prospects) or... I am already using it. Conversely, seeing ads for something I am already using has potential for negative effects (see above). Tasteful advertising is thus useful for the rare case of something I don't know about, but I don't think it's worth it when 999/1000 of these ads are detrimental and irrelevant.

> Not just 'not work', but 'actively repel'. A popup chat bot or a survey form request (during or after using a website or software product) or anything not germane to the task that has a shadow or notification highlight has slowly but surely become a form of wart that elicits a deep, instinctual disgust from me. I'd even say an unhealthy and unreasonable level of disgust.

Same here. I've even setup a bunch of Firefox extensions just to keep the annoying ad-like stuff away from me.

Sometimes, when I open up a browser on a computer I don't own, I get surprised by how filled internet is with annoyances. It feels like I've put on the glasses from They Live and can suddenly see all the bullsh-t.

There's no form of marketing that I "like" or actively reward, at most there's marketing that I fell for.

Anything that comes from the primary source is an automatic nope, I'll only take positive accounts from third-party sources. Unfortunately, not even that is enough, so I've become wary of HN comments praising any particular product.

What's even more unfortunate is that you have to apply the same skepticism to open source "products" these days as it has become common even for open source projects to exaggerate the project's capabilities and be dishonest about its limitations.

When I was younger, I sold turquoise jewelry at the Grand Canyon and I feel about the same towards sales and marketing, I mean they are the same with different levels of scale. I found an exception though, the way we sold in the shop I worked at would only teach people interesting things if they showed interest, explain the history, the nuances, give some background on the artist who made it, things like that. Even if there wasn't a sale the ones who took the time to listen still learned something interesting, and those who did buy now had something cool to tell to people who would ask them about it later.

So I guess I'm saying that tutorial style marketing is ok, but that's such a small amount of what passes for marketing nowadays, and marketing tends to always take anything and everything too far to the point of ruining it and whatever platform supports it.

>There's no form of marketing that I "like" or actively reward, at most there's marketing that I fell for.

For very high value software licensing agreements there's huge financial rewards for performing the marketing dance with the vendor. Paying list for enterprise software doesn't happen. Customers who even know what Oracle RAS is , or SQL SERVER Parallel, are numbered in the hundreds. The expenditure on manpower to design and commission a new major database installation is two to three orders of magnitude greater than the license costs. That's per database not enterprise wide. You embark upon a courtship from the outset.

This isn't what the article nor what most everyone's discussing, but I thought it worthwhile to offer a real illustration of a very viable means of sales and marketing that can be made to work if you have a high value application or service and can identify a small finite number of customers.

Edit: I probably should have said the number of customers who know what they're doing with the most sophisticated databases is very likely in the hundreds. Arguably the market is rather larger but if the behaviour F500 generally is any indication, there's a lot of nameplate and marquee buying driven by C suite egos. If you're selling a unique and expensive application this is where your margins are. And where tales of sales excess and bad reputation / hubris attaching to your product originate.

I used to be a bar manager 16 years ago and would often see the Anheuser-Busch marketing rep for our region out and about, and she would never fail to use her corporate credit card to buy me some free drinks. I liked that form of marketing.

I liked it when they took me to Nashville every year. I went exclusive.

I could have flown myself to Nashville every weekend. But they made me feel special with a plane ticket and a few bar bills.

I guess it's the difference between 'marketing' and 'sales'.

TIL open-source beer… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Beer

> There's no form of marketing that I "like" or actively reward, at most there's marketing that I fell for.

You don't like Paul Graham's essays? Because they are marketing. One of the best I've ever seen I may add.

I would personally say that while marketing elements exist within the essays, they are more like an attempt to influence the industry he operates in (tech focused venture capital) to as much an extent as he is capable with words alone.

His essays strike me as appeals promoting a certain manner of thinking that he wishes to impart, while also naturally acting as marketing simply due to his own default mode of thought being deeply entrenched in entrepreneurship.

So I am assuming you are putting Hacker News in the "fell for" category?

> or... I am already using it.

For something I am already using and actively repel (because I have to use it but hate it) I do the following: I click on every ad I can find, because they advertise a lot, to make them pay 1.30 usd per click for nothing. I'm only seeing this ad now, everywhere.

Why are you seeing ads?

It'd be very interesting to see the results of some A/B tests where they looked at the effectiveness of a marketing funnel with some of these distracting features on and off.

I mean, I think we all know what the results would be, but I think that a lot of bean-counter types will only listen to beans counted...

I think everyone would be surprised at the results. Humans are so good at thinking they are representative of other people.

The marketers would be surprised because they believe people need the shit they advertise.

Some devs would be surprised because this stuff is effective at getting a larger N - total sales funnel volume, not efficiency, is most of their goal.

Most devs would be surprised that it’s even something people talk about.

And the regular citizen like my mom would be surprised that such a thing even exists.

> Some devs would be surprised because this stuff is effective at getting a larger N - total sales funnel volume, not efficiency, is most of their goal.

This is a short-term/long-term tradeoff. If you have the choice between:

- N people into the funnel, 10% decide to join, the rest go away without a negative opinion, some of them even with a "not right now but maybe later" opinion

- 10*N people into the funnel, 2% decide to join, the rest go away with varying degrees of negative opinion

Short-term, the second choice will give you 2x the users joining. Long-term, the second choice will give your company a bad reputation.

Fortunately(?), most companies aren't expecting to survive long enough to see a bad reputation come back to bite them.

When it does, they can just buy good reputation for pittance. (Looking at you, Microsoft..)

A/B testing creative is pretty typical. I'm certain "flashy" ads that get your attention perform better. Of course, they change the style of your page, and if you don't like they way they make your site look, don't use them.

> Not just 'not work', but 'actively repel'.

Exactly. If I see something like that I'll often add a custom ad-block rule so it never shows again.

> Not just 'not work', but 'actively repel'.

Anything connected to ads or marketing triggers a visceral response of disgust in me.

Not just towards products or companies that try to show me an ad, but for the advertising/marketing industry itself, the very concept of ads, and all the professions staffed with people who make it their life's work to promulgate it all. It reeks to me of hot air and lies.

Any I don't trust any company (looking at you, Google and Facebook) whose revenue comes primarily from ads - such income poisons everything it touches.

In my experience, high-quality educational content works much better than paid ads when targeting developers.

One of the best examples I've seen is digital ocean. When ever I google a sys admin type question, there is a digital ocean article as the top result.

I absolutely agree, and DigitalOcean does it brilliantly.

I ran into a similar situation the other day trying to put together some apt packages in a way that was clearly off the beaten path. Found a company blog post that walked through pretty much exactly what I was trying to do.

The marketing portion of it? At the very very end of the article was "And here's the single command you'd need to run to do this with our tool." I didn't end up buying the tool because it didn't quite fit some other requirements I had, but it did very effectively get me looking at their product and evaluating whether or not it'd be good for me.

I never thought about it that way, but for sysadmin questions if I see a DigitalOcean article I always pick it. They are always high quality and they version them by major OS version (Ubuntu 18/20/22).

Maybe that's why I have droplets, they got me by providing a good well priced service. /s

You really don't need the /s on the end. It's not a given anymore that this is how commerce works.

Yup that's technically marketing but if it's an article I find useful then I win too.

The “Interrupt” blog by Memfault is another example. They are adored by embedded developers.

A similar example is Neptune.ai, with one of their comparison posts ranking top for almost every query about any MLOps tool. It is very effective for visibility; even if the posts’ quality is poor and marketing is a little aggressive.

Linode seemed really good about that, what changed?

I work on EthicalAds, one of the ad networks mentioned in the post. We focus on targeting relevant developer-focused ads to content rather than to individuals.

The post is great. My only nitpick is that the author mentions that they think retargeting will go away. The scope of retargeting might be reduced especially as third-party cookies stop working but I don't think retargeting will completely go away. Big ad companies with whom visitors have a direct relationship with (Google, FB) will always be able to do it. They know the pages on their sites and those linked from their site that visitors visit and they will use it to target ads. They don't need third-party cookies since they have first-party cookies.

Networks that just do ads and don't have relationships with visitors except for advertising will find it harder and harder. At EthicalAds, we don't do retargeting at all because of our privacy focus, but many ad networks will find retargeting more challenging (less precise, they can always fingerprint users) to do. Doing away with it is a good thing from a privacy perspective but it probably will further entrench the big players.

This is some sneaky good advertising right here.

Ads don't need to track folks to be targeted and effective =).

I don't know if it's a danger or just the illusion of one, but one of the things that targeted ads supposedly avoid is that of influence. In theory if the floor wax I'm advertising in my hypothetical home improvement content decides that they have a personal issue with some of the ethics I have espoused, then there is pressure for me to change or lose the endorsement.

This could be either direction as well. We could disagree on anything from me showcasing work by a feminist or LGBTQ+ carpenter, to me making a statement about fair trade goods and one of their suppliers is in a country known for rampant human rights violations.

The problem I think is that life is full of compromises, and I don't know that the bargain we've made and are now experiencing the consequences of is a particularly good one.

But ads that do will be more effective.

I was the organizer of Austrias biggest developer meetup for a few years. Took it from 5 people in a cellar to a monthly mini conference with 100+ attendees each month. When it became to expensive to pay for Pizza and beer out of my own pocket, I got sponsors.

the sponsor got logo and link to their job boards in the newsletters, and they HAD TO give a talk: 5 (to 10 min max), then 4 min Q&A, then 3 for their pitch (mostly looking for devs). hard time limit, hard format. only if they agreed to this they were allowed to sponsor our pizza and beer.

oh, and the talk HAD TO include some real world code. Q&A was non negotiable.

the HR department (the sponsor initiators) was surprised.

the audience loved it. as the HR did send lead devs / CTO to give the talk. some of the best talks of the meetup we got that way.

after some time I had waiting lists for sponsorships as the format worked so well.

the secret to advertise to developers? show some real world code!

meetup was called ViennaJS

How I've marketed to devs successfully (former YC head of growth, currently work in paid media):

1. Paid search.

If someone is searching, give them a good product and good reason to sign up. Be relevant, be clear, and offer a no-risk way for someone to get started with your product.

2. Reddit

If there is a subreddit _already_ talking about the problem your products solves, you've got a goldmine. Keep your ad simple. Keep comments on. Respond to comments.

3. Organic Search

Have the best content on a specific topic related to your product. Add in CTA's in your content while being respectful.

4. Follow trends

Monitor keywords on Hacker News/Reddit and see what's going on. I hit the top of HN twice in a row doing this.

General notes:

1. Understand your customer's problems. Lead with benefits then explain with features. Read books like "Breakthrough Advertising" by Eugene Schwartz or "Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves.

2. Talk to people who make it work. The more people you can talk to, the better.

3. Focus on testing messages. Find what resonates and scale that

>devs don’t want it to read like an ad (hate advertising)

This is pretty much why I only use browsers with ublock origin installed, and avoid browsing on devices I can't filter out 99.9% of image/video ads. I don't see ads on youtube or google or most other common sites. The only way I get advertised to is sponsored segments in videos or podcasts, or reading a product review I see on a site like HN.

In the case of the former, the sponsor is hoping my willingness to watch/listen to the content provider talk about stuff I like will transfer some level of tolerance to listening to them shill a product. In reality I either mute it until the segment is over or skip past it (if able). For the latter, I do sometimes look at product pages for gizmos and software posted to HN but I bee-line straight for the specs and ignore the marketing fluff, which is either a wordy summary of the specs, or else completely lacking in substance.

So I think some audiences are simply not targetable by their own choice and you have to accept it. I have certainly tried pretty hard to make myself impossible to advertise to (at least in a consistent and reliable way), and I don't think this mindset is uncommon in the industry.

I skip most of the sponsorship on YouTube. I used to use an extension to do it (i think this one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...), but mostly just press the right arrow key until it looks like it's not the ad anymore. Let's be honest. I'm not going to buy your graphical website builder or VPN. I can get both of those in other ways.

For me, you basically have to have good organic search results, or I won't hear about it. Or write something interesting and put it on HN. Works quite well for Tailscale and Fly.io.

-- been doing developer marketing for 20 years - it's very simple - developers are like cats - just make sure they know you're there - treat them well - & eventually they'll come sit with you - last thing you wanna do is be mauling them --

So it really is like herding cats then.

I jumped through a lot of hoops to earn a free t-shirt that says "Everything will be 200 OK". I had to sign up for a couple cloud services and set up some kind of automation, essentially demo-ing the product to myself to get the shirt. It was smart on their part.

My company sponsored a coding livestream recently that featured a dev integrating with our product and I was astonished at how excited folks were to have a chance to win a t-shirt.

People get unreasonably excited about swag. I try not to take T-shirts any longer unless there's something unique about them. If it's just some random company's name I'll pass. I've given away huge trash bags of lightly worn or unworn T-shirts and I still have massive piles of them.

I enjoy wearing my Twilio t-shirt. It’s still one of the comfiest ones I have.

I wouldn’t want the swag if I were not going to use it, so best to give high quality stuff.

the t-shirts are the best part of working in tech

Haha, hopefully there are other good parts too! But I confess, I'm wearing a "Enjoy Code" t-shirt (like "Enjoy Coke") I picked up at a conference right now.

And, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out anyone who wants a free FusionAuth t-shirt can go to https://fusionauth.io/download , install it, and share a screenshot and we'll ship you one. Further instructions there.

Unfortunately we can only ship to the USA and Canada for this offer.

Talking about marketing to devs, in the immortal words of Jess Fraz, "I really like nothing on my host... I am not going to freakin' install that." (:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cYsVvV1aVss&t=1000

Ah, fair point. There's an entire subreddit for folks who think differently, however: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/

Takes all kinds.

As the purveyor of this shirt, it warms my heart to read this comment. We pretty much copied New Relic's model for this, and it worked really well. For awhile it felt like we were more a t-shirt company than a software company.

I have one of those shirts :)

This has been one of my favorite shirts for years. I also did the same thing :)

I think JetBrains is doing it quite well. They have different subscriptions, but also an affordable All-Products-Pack. And they have discounts for individual developers over companies.

Jetbrains succeeds because of their products, not their advertising. Mostly, I suppose. It was the mayan end of the world sale in 2012 that lowered the price point enough for me to make my first purchase from them.

They're probably the only tool that I pay money for, and I'm generally happy to do so, because I get a ton of value from it.

My only complaint is in a polyglot environment it can be painful to have multiple jetbrains ides running in the same project root.

A number of years ago they shipped all of the different products as plugins to intellij. unfortunately at some point that stopped. I wish they resolve it, because it's slowly driving me to vscode.

> A number of years ago they shipped all of the different products as plugins to intellij. unfortunately at some point that stopped. I wish they resolve it, because it's slowly driving me to vscode.

Did they stop? I still use IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate for most languages (Go, Java, Rust, JavaScript/TypeScript). I had to use Rider for C#, AppCode for Swift, and CLion for C/C++, but those are the only special cases afaik, or are those languages the ones you use & have problems with?

The plugin updates are sometimes a bit behind the dedicated IDEs in terms of feature releases which is annoying but I think you can often download an EAP build to get around that.

I've been under the impression that there are significant capability differences between any of the plugins and the corresponding product

I mainly use goland & clion, and clion definitely doens't have an equivalent plugin. It's been a long time since I've tried to use intellij though, so perhaps my impressions are antiquated.

You're right that you'd have to use clion for C/C++. I'm not sure why they don't have plugins for that.

As far as Go, I've had a great experience with the Go plugin for IntelliJ. You do need the ultimate license for that though, iirc.

The upside of different IDEs is they can change the keymaps and various options to cater for language specific preferences.

My issue is the things they just don't do, Jupyter Notebooks, more than anything else.

This is same for me. It was great value in 2012 and product was good enough to keep using. I subscribed to Resharper before that but now use the other products like datalink. The fact that a personal license can be used at work also helped my adoption of the tools.

> The fact that a personal license can be used at work also helped my adoption of the tools.

Same here, and because of that I sub to the All Products bundle, while if I had to convince my employer it would be for PyCharm only. The Personal All Products license is $50 more per year than a Corporate Single Language license.

Gaining a perpetual license after 1 year of subscription also makes the subscription an easier pill for me to swallow.

> I wish they resolve it, because it's slowly driving me to vscode.

The good news is that their new Fleet product has it all in one again.

The bad news is that it’s not anywhere near production ready (not at a point where it can compete with any of their othet products anyway).

This is a forgotten time, and an important loss.

It would really be lovely if the Jetbrains all-in license gave you each product as its own standalone and as an IntelliJ plug-in.

Aren’t the specific ides just plugins loaded into rebranded IntelliJ?

To some extent probably, but I guess not completely. That’s why you don’t have everything everywhere.

Only very few companies can build a working business model without a good product.

A d they are giving away licences in meetups, conferences, discounts on podcasts. They offer licences for opensource, for academics... If I didn't have free access as an academic I probably would not be using it with a license today.

This is, I think, most appealing. I do need to know a product exists but the most important thing is when I land on the product page am I going to find a free product that turns into a $10k/yr product? Is there going to be a price range that’s suitable for my use case? Having a good range of offerings and skus makes a huge difference on whether I actually pull the trigger or not.

For me the winner with Jetbrains is that I can see clear prices, the product is defined and I can cancel easily.

With other enterprise products it takes forever to get pricing, scope of what you buy and how to cancel.

A while ago we had to price Windows for 5000 custom devices and it was infuriating to go through a convoluted process with lots of different people, meetings and whatever.

I once tried to buy 2 Windows embedded licenses for a prototype. All the official resellers in my country couldn’t even connect me with a person who could give me a quote, without first getting a certification, finishing courses, signing contracts, etc.

We rewrote our application on Linux then, it was much easier than dealing with MS licensing BS.

I'm always amazed when I see the various embedded contexts I find windows out in the wild. Usually when they are glitching out and displaying a start menu or something.

I guess they are operating at a scale where the licensing hell isn't a major roadblock? I don't get it.

Is it an embedded version though? If you see the start menu, probably not. Because you can easily disable it on windows embedded. And configure a lot of other things, that prevent it from glitching out.

Surprised promotional prizes & swag were not mentioned.

- (1) For example, YC startup had API integration contest with a real battle axe as the prize:

https://www.wufoo.com/blog/win-a-real-battle-axe-in-the-wufo...

- (2) Then there’s the free developer swag promotions:

https://iq.opengenus.org/ways-to-earn-free-cool-developer-sw...

I did the Hacktoberfest one for years getting a T-shirt every time. I liked the T-shirt and might have done it anyway, as I sometimes continued contributing for a while after the event.

After a while the sense I got from Hactoberfest changed. Both from the projects and the promoters in ways that disagreed with the way I think about opensource and contributing to it. So I haven't participated since.

Exactly. I'd love to hear about folks' most beloved swag and sticker acquisitions! This is where people's affinity and affiliation is shown.

In my own career, I remember my first IBM "THINK" button back in the 1980s, as well as my first six-colored "Apple" stickers. Showed them off with pride.

I saw the story above about the "200 OK" t-shirt. I still wear t-shirts for an industry I haven't worked for in over two decades.

This is where brands aren't fighting for your attention. You're happy to champion them. Because you are sold on their tech, and you consider yourself part of their tribe. Or it just has some sort of totally obscure geeky formula or tech reference that only you and others in the tribe will get the in-joke.

No idea why, but just realized Apple’s “Think Different” campaign was likely a direct response to IBM’s “Think” campaign.

Love the battle axe contest. Putting it on my backlog.

> talk values, not features

Be careful. I've seen lots of ads that try to convince me how valuable a certain product is; but the ad itself doesn't answer the "who, what, where, when, why, and how" that I need to know. So:

1: Make sure it's 100% clear what your product does (and doesn't) do.

2: Make sure that it's super-easy for me to find out high-level specifications. (For example, if you're selling a computer, it needs to be super-easy to find out what ports it has.)

Advertising itself isn't a bad communication strategy and I think many developers are fine with it, they simply don't want propoganda. Raise my awareness of something useful I'm not aware of and then be honest about it, don't make absurd claims and don't skip cons (I know, business types only want to ever speak in the positive, especially in marketing).

If you give me a fair assessment of something without BS, I can be happy with the benefits when I understand the shortcomings. The second I see all these omissions, which is everywhere, is the second you're put in the BS until proven otherwise box by default. Developers trust other devs because other devs tend to give you this information and don't paint everything as rosy perfection.

The problem is when the dev is not the one being pitched to. I've been in calls where the dev team are the ones being pitched to and we ask for the cons and get useful answers.

There's real value to going "huh, yeah, this isn't a good fit for you right now", too. Honestly's valuable. I've had potential customers come back later when the thing I was working on was a better fit for their needs because I'd been up-front with them.

The Framework laptop team is doing developer advertising very well IMHO.

I see their ads on multiple sites, and the ads are direct, clear, and advice-oriented i.e. the Framework ad explains a capability and why it's relevant and a differentiator.

Interesting. I’ve never seen their ads.

Most of those things would be blocked by my adblockers. If you want to reach me, that's now how to do it.

People that managed to reach me did so by either:

- helping me solving one problem

- creating something that looked really cool and fun

For me, the deal is often lost on the landing page. "Give us your phone number to get the one piece of technical documentation we have prepared." Nope. I do not want to receive a phone call from you and won't answer it. "Contact sales for pricing." I don't have time. I have more than enough meetings as it is, and I would rather use the time to put together a proof of concept. The next step would be building a consensus internally to get permission to give you the money. Some things I just can't afford, if it's $100k per year, then I'm not interested. If it's $5/month and the product is useful, then I can maybe build a case.

I get why people want to funnel everything through sales; their entire day is meetings and if they have an empty slot, they're wasting money. I could, of course, dramatically misunderstand how to use the product and pass on it if I do an unguided evaluation, and that's a risk they want to avoid. But I think that's the nature of selling to developers; they are the types that want to explore on their own. If the docs don't cut it, your company is dead. They can't just issue a purchase order after a 30 minute phone call. ("Contact sales" also works around the "how much should this even cost" problem. I get that companies want to know if they're losing sales because of the price being too high and can't collect that information from a simple web visit. I say, that's kind of too bad. I want to solve a problem, not be a test subject in your A/B test. Start low, and work your way up after you have existing customers. Or start high, and sell to someone other than me.)

Finally, if I do reach out, spell my name the same way I typed it into the "contact us" form. Nobody calls me "John" and those letters don't appear in my name in that order. I know you think you know better than I do, but you don't.

> But I think that's the nature of selling to developers; they are the types that want to explore on their own. If the docs don't cut it, your company is dead.

Amen, if potential-customers must schmooze with sales to get access to the docs or pair-program with a sales-engineer to get Hello World running, then I get worried (reasonably or otherwise) about things like:

1. The product is a tangled mess so a native guide is required to get anything done, and they've given up on making it independently-navigable.

2. The vendor's business-model is to lock you in and then bleed you dry. (Possibly by paying for said native-guides.)

3. The vendor is focused on selling to management rather than making a product that'll work well for engineers.

> the deal is often lost on the landing page

In most cases the deal isn't being lost there, you're being qualified out. The products that do this are going to be a lot closer to your $100k/year that you can't afford than your $5/month that you have to build a case for.

Qualifying out makes sense, but I don't think the companies are making the right decision. I was recently looking at a web UI that visualizes the output of your team's Bazel runs. No pricing information. That seems like a product that is going to be $X/developer/month, and when that's a lot of money, sure, invite them to a private Slack channel or whatever and charge an extra $30k/year. Otherwise, it's basically free money.

The outcome of the no pricing information is that three options were listed on the Bazel website, so I looked at the other ones instead. They did the hard part of getting me to the website, not to mention typing in code to implement their thing. Now I just want to type in a credit card and use their thing.

Not everything is an Oracle database for a Fortune 500 company. The long tail is long, and contains a lot of money.

I wrote this article.

Thanks for all the comments. Learning so much.

Congrats on landing on the HN front page! Good stuff, although a table of contents could make navigation easier for readers.

EDIT: I originally read your article on mobile but viewing on a desktop, I see a ToC on the left-hand side of the page. So, scratch my earlier remark about a ToC.

I’m working on something similar, but from a different angle: marketing to developers organically. Hoping to have it published soon.

Thanks man!

Let me know when you have it -> always interested to learn more about devmar

Sure. I've joined the dev-mkt Slack channel :)

How to advertise to developers: write a blog post about developers and post it where they hang out.

As someone who makes something solely for developers, I can attest to the fact that it’s not easy.

I’ve tried a lot of things, but for my money, podcast sponsorships have worked the best and it’s not even really close.

I wonder if this is because podcasts don't have any popular adblockers yet, and I'd assume developers have the highest rates of using an adblocker.

Probably one of the top reasons.

I listened to a podcast the other day on Spotify on my phone. Last time I did podcasts was maybe 10 years ago. I was properly confused when an ad block appeared. I had forgotten what ads even were like, and there was no skip button! (For example, for YouTube there’s Sponsorblock)

Certainly could play a role. Another benefit is they have a long tail effect, where people who listen to it a year from the original air date will hear it.

If I may ask, do you reach out to podcasts individually, or use a broker?

I just reach out myself

Large corporations trying to be "cute" really deeply annoys me. I have received enough "Alexa find me a software developer" emails to last me until the end of days.

Recruiters tend to be pretty nice to talk with generally - unless they're single client recruiters... and Amazon seems to be particular unchoosey about who they let wear their name around. I have a moderate amount of difficulty even comprehending why they advertise so aggressively, as someone in the Vancouver market believe me, I know that Amazon is literally always hiring, just like I know that EA would be happy to have me as a tester any day of the week. The issue isn't that we aren't aware that you're hiring, it's that working conditions and compensation are poor and most of us would prefer a job that lets us sleep at night.

> they only really believe other devs when it comes to tech

I have an issue with this one. When it comes to tech, I've found other developers to have opinions as strong as their actual knowledge is weak. It's been a hard thing to learn from some for this reason, given how over-agreeable I am in real life.

IME you don't advertize to developers, you advertize to/court their clueless managers.

That is why Red won the digital camera wars: they marketed to producers. Same idea.

Although Arri still do well by marketing to cinematographers, who would be the devs in this analogy.

https://www.arri.com/news-en/2022-oscar-winners-rely-on-arri...

Didn't Arri win the digital camera wars though?

I wasn't aware the digital camera wars had ended -- somebody better tell Canon -- but "advertising to developers" sure sounds like what Blackmagic does:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/developer/

> Most of those things haven’t worked for me.

Most of the listed ad networks are blocked by uBlock Origin. SponsorBlock is crowdsourced YouTube ad flagging. It is not surprising that those paid channels would not be effective for firms not willing to commit the $$

SponsorBlock is unfortunate, as sponsorships are the “good” form of advertising. No invasive tracking or targeting, contextual targeting only, and generally vetted by content creators (as least far better than ads sold on exchanges).

Sponsorships encourage deception (tricking the user into not skipping) and building up parasocial relationships with the audience to abuse their trust, the worst of the influencer world

I made SponsorBlock, and over the years working on it, I have been able to see how horrible some of the techniques people use are

Two questions for you:

Do you believe that sponsorships are worse that targeted digital advertising?

Do you believe there are any Youtubers who have acted ethically in accepting sponsorships?

> I made SponsorBlock, and over the years working on it, I have been able to see how horrible some of the techniques people use are

It seems somewhat hypocritical to pretend that SponsorBlock is an ethical reaction to bad sponsorships when the clear ethical response would be to simply not watch the content. To be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with SponsorBlock, but let's be honest. It's purpose is convenience, not any higher moral objective.

> Do you believe that sponsorships are worse that targeted digital advertising?

With podcasts, it seems people are now trying to get the worst of both worlds, with dynamic advertisements from a pool based on who you are + the ads are read out by the podcast creator. I can't say that either case is worse than the other, but they are bad for different reasons.

> Do you believe there are any Youtubers who have acted ethically in accepting sponsorships?

There exist some that have clear transitions, declare in the first sentence that it is a sponsor, repeat at the end that it is a sponsor, and say explicitly in the ad-read that it is not their opinion but a script. That is certainly less deceptive. But unfortunately, this is not usually consistent. Some of their videos will do it well, and some do it poorly.

> It's purpose is convenience, not any higher moral objective

With "full video" labels (https://blog.ajay.app/full-video-sponsorblock), I've started to delve into the fixing bad declarations world. Full videos don't skip anything, but just inform the viewer what to watch out for. I want to make a wiki-like system for organising more precise biases in the future as well, and allow people to know which where each opinion in a video comes from.

Another fact I'll point out is that we sometimes get complaints that certain sponsor sections are incorrect, even though they totally are correct due to them not knowing it is paid promotion. An example is dbrand, which pays many top tech people to randomly mention their name in reviews, usually without much disclosure.

I don't think you're being honest in your motivations here. SponsorBlock is a convenience tool to avoid having to watch/listen to ads. It's your stated aim on your website:

> SponsorBlock is an open-source crowdsourced browser extension and open API for skipping sponsor segments in YouTube videos.

Again, I don't think there's anything morally wrong with using SponsorBlock, but I think it's absurd to claim it's a morally positive tool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781415

The thing that sparked the idea was a badly disclosed sponsorship. The saving time bits are great, and that's why there's more features now than just ads, you can skip intros too. However, I did start this explicitly due to being frustrated with the state of deception in the sponsorship world, and that remains my main motivation.

That may have been the initial motivation, but SponsorBlock isn't a tool to reveal hidden product placement or sponsorships. It's not described that way on your site or the add-on pages, used that way, or - if we're honest - popular for that reason.

In the end, the motivation is not the tool as implemented.

Thank you for making it. I don't really care much about deceptive advertising, but I love the peace of mind it gives me, because I can dwell into a topic without getting distracted by irrelevant stuff.

So basically your expectation is that your favorite podcast authors create the content for you free of charge and don't earn a dime?

(I assume from your message tone that you are not a fan of paying for the content, either)

I am perfectly happy paying for content

How many podcasts (out of those that you listen to) do you pay for?

But not happy to forgo it if the creators accept sponsorships you dislike?

There is no money you can pay to get the same experience as SponsorBlock. Some channels are offering "sponsor-free" content on exclusive sites such as Nebula, CorridorDigital.com and Floatplane, but I've checked all of these out and they don't cut as smoothly as us, and often leave parts of sponsorships in if they find it humourous. Some of the sponsor cuts on Nebula are done so lazily...

If Nebula existed when I created SponsorBlock, would I have created it? Maybe not, but I think the existence of the tool should prove that people want to avoid this stuff, and more creators should take note and provide ways to at least pay to avoid it.

And, if your ads are still deceptive, allowing a privileged few to pay to avoid them doesn't solve that issue

You didn't answer the question. If the creators are deceptive, isn't the ethical course of action to stop consuming their content.

After all, SponsorBlock doesn't address the deception or the parasocial nature you complained about elsewhere. It just hides the ads that the creators inserted.

Given that SponsorBlock also allows users to skip the segments where users are offered ways to pay (like Patreon), it also seems especially hypocritical to suggest that.

Again, I don't think there's anything morally wrong with using SponsorBlock, but I think you're fooling yourself if you think it serves some public good. It just removes the only privacy-preserving form of advertising available to creators and let's people consume their work without the inconvenience of watching the ads that pay for it.

> isn't the ethical course of action to stop consuming their content.

No, I don't believe so, abd that's the fundamental disagreement

https://giveup.ajay.app/ here's some fun satire of taking that opinion to the extreme. How dare you steal from advertiser by not following through and buying their product :)

That link doesn't address the opinion at all, because you claimed that SponsorBlock is not designed to simply block sponsorship ads. You began our conversation with:

> Sponsorships encourage deception (tricking the user into not skipping) and building up parasocial relationships with the audience to abuse their trust, the worst of the influencer world

SponsorBlock doesn't address either of these points.

If the creator is truly deceiving the user to try to get them to watch an ad or building a parasocial relationship in order to increase the chances of conversion (which is your claim), then I don't see how continuing to watch their content minus the ads is any better for the user. Of course, that doesn't really matter because SponsorBlock has a different true purpose, to remove the inconvenience of watching ads.

Once again, I don't have a problem with SponsorBlock or using SponsorBlock to avoid ads. I think you're trying to rationalise your decision to build SponsorBlock by trying to claim it serves some moral good or higher purpose. Whether that's conscious hypocrisy or internalised self-deception is another matter.

I was simply saying that sponsorships incentivize those bad behaviors

Labeling something on a timeline, or skipping it, does prevent someone from deceptively convincing you to follow through with the action they want. If you have an idea on how to fix people's attachments to parasocial relationships, I'd love to hear it, as I think it's important as well. SponsorBlock does not, and cannot, solve every problem I have with the world.

To be honest, only parasocial dynamic I see here, is his argumentation. But yeah, some people just think they deserve to have content served for free for them...

Problem is a) it is the same stuff that is being sold all across youtube, b) aside from maybe audible none of that is a good offer, c) the claimed benefits are non-existent or bullshit (see all VPN ads) and finally d) the problem is not advertising, it is terrible products. Good products should not need creators to sponsor them, they should get creators so excited they can't stop talking about it.

A) Youtube is a big site. It's more likely that you're seeing the same ads on the channels that you watch. It's very unlikely to be the same set that I see.

b) Apart from the products you like, none of it is a good offer?

c) Are you sure this is true for all sponsors?

d) Is advertising ever justified in your mind?

Overall, I think you just don't like ads, so have decided to arrive at that conclusion. Your arguments don't seem to hold water.

I am talking about ads in sponsored segments. The inventory of youtube ads is much bigger, but I blocked them a long time ago (too annoying).

As for the sponsor ads it is always things like hello fresh, vpn ads, ads for free to pay games, etc. You can argue that hello fresh could be a good deal for a very small selection of people[0], and VPNs might be fine if people didn't lie about what they can do but in general it is shit or actively harmful.

Think of it this way: if you are making the best make up brush, do you want to pay for a sponsorship or just send a few samples to channels that are likely to feature it? On the other hand if what you make is so-so you have to pay to be featured.

It wasn't because ridgewallet was so good everybody was showing it, it was because they were paid for it - and even if you want a wallet like that, you are the one who pays for all the marketing.

So to sum up: most products are not revolutionary, the few that are gets their own mention because they are revolutionary and so what is left over is either too expensive or not good enough.

[0]: disposable money and enough time to cook, but not too much time and/or not enough skills to make a dish from scratch.

> I am talking about ads in sponsored segments. The inventory of youtube ads is much bigger, but I blocked them a long time ago (too annoying).

I'm also talking about sponsorships, not Youtube ads (preroll, display, interstitial, etc). However, I don't watch the same channels you do, so I don't see the same sponsorships.

I have seen a Hello Fresh sponsorship, but never Ridgewallet or Raid Shadow Legends that someone else mentioned. I have seen sponsorships from electronics components companies, airlines, medical supplies companies, body armour, agricultural equipment, solar panel installers, a local newspaper, a local dairy, etc.

Edit: Funnily enough, I just heard my first sponsorship for a prescription hair loss medication - ads for prescription medications are illegal here (Ireland) so definitely a bad ad.

Unless you happen to be an Irish search-and-rescue medic who lives part-time on a farm (or have the same interests), you aren't going to see the same sponsorships. Your bubble may contain VPN and F2P games, but mine doesn't. Hence, making generalisations based on your own experience is not helpful.

In the end, I don't think there's anything wrong with using SponsorBlock, but I don't believe that you have an ethical motivation for using it. If so, the best course of action would be to simply avoid the channels/podcasts peddling the products you don't like. You use it for convenience, plain and simple.

They're really not vetted by the creators, usually.

Edit: I mean the products aren't usually vetted, they just make an ad saying how great it is, all the while most likely not having even tried it. How many YouTubers do you think actually played Raid Shadow Legends or used NordVPN?

Well, they are vetted in the literal sense. The creators have to approve the ads. Most exchanges have no human in the loop at all.

NordVPN and the other VPN, Military grade sponsorship ads will strongly disagree with you.

How so?

"Less evil", maybe, but there is no form of advertising which is "good"!

That's a fairly fundamentalist take. Are signs outside shops evil? Window displays? Brochures?

"Fundamentalist" is a fair description; I do feel quite strongly about this.

The function of advertising is to intrude on your awareness, stealing attention from whatever it is you actually care about, in order to create a desire for something you were previously content without, in hopes of enriching the advertiser at your expense. Ads are a tax on your attention which hope to to take a toll on your pocketbook; they benefit advertisers by making everyone else's lives just a little bit worse.

In Seattle, billboards are forbidden (with a few grandfathered-in exceptions), but stores are still permitted to post signs. This seems like a reasonable compromise; labeling the contents of the building provides useful information, which seems beneficial enough to outweigh the advertising function of the sign.

I suppose brochures are fine if you go in and get one because you are curious; but someone walking down the street bothering people by handing them out at random would be an asshole.

Thanks for responding.

Where do you feel the line is online, specifically in Youtube videos/podcasts, where SponsorBlock is effective?

I don't spend a lot of time on Youtube, and rarely have the patience to watch the sort of videos people make in hopes of earning money, so I don't have much of an opinion there. I did install SponsorBlock recently, just in case.

Speaking about marketing to developers. Pushing your product through developer relations/advocates is pretty gross as well. It's frustrating to see all of the marketing content produced by those people. As a developer I'm trying to solve the problems sorrounding my domain. To see people acting as sales people and a dev is not something i want.

Heard a good interview with a developer advocate the other day that said that devrel folks should explicitly not be used as salespeople.

https://www.theengineeringleader.com/1946930/10857263-marcos...

One problem the advertising industry fails to understand is that an advertising agency, or whatever source the ads originate from, is a socioppath.

Developers are logical and practical thinkers and despise sociopathic behavior.

Developers have a very strong resistance to this sort of manipulation.

Advertisers are unable to cope with this reality or understand their true nature in our economy, so they continue to do more "research" on how to engage developers, who in turn, learn how to better detect and evade sociopaths

Im also very surprised that in 2022, there are developers that see ads at all, outside of glancing at some non technical person's youtube tab.There are browsers now that are completely ad free, even without add-ons or extensions. Ads are horribly toxic in nature and an offense to the human psyche and to any person's dignity.

This is good. Very good.

As far as expanding customer use I think having really good and actually helpful docs are critical. The services that I use that have great docs get used a lot more and integrate with apps much deeper than services with okay or shitty docs that feel half assed.

Docs are critical! This article focuses on awareness, but if you create awareness but developers see out of date, missing or incorrect docs, they'll bounce.

I ran a twitter poll on whether devs would prefer missing or out of date docs; was interesting to see the results (N was small though): https://twitter.com/mooreds/status/1517508537945001984

That said, it's a struggle. Sure, there are some pieces of doc you can generate (API docs, for sure) but others are more conversational and can get out of date.

> Reddit - find subreddits where your devs are

yikes. We've been seeing alot of advertisers sneaking into discussion forums and stackoverflow posts lately. I wonder how much more astroturfed engagement is coming from advertisers.

I think they mean actual platform ads, not ads posing as posts from normal users. That said, I do think writing genuinely interesting tech articles on a company blog and posting them on Reddit/hn is a totally legit and effective method. The quality needs to be there though.

Most tech-adjacent subreddits (even sports subs) have tech products advertising for my user. Now a lot of this could be based off my activity as a user, I'm subbed to a few programmer subs that I could get targeted through.

That said all the ads tend to be from large vendors that seem to be targeting very senior engineering leadership. Not sure how great thats going for them.

Advertising effectively to developers is crazy expensive.

At my last place they found most effective to sponsor a couple of popular podcasts - they were paying $15 to 20K per month.

The company for the ads or is that revenue from the ads?

For the ads.

I called this the "Dark Matter Strategy" recently: https://dx.tips/whats-your-dark-matter-strategy

basically if you work in developer marketing, content marketing does tap out at some point because most people just dont have energy/attention for your content. the subtle art of paying for eyeballs is still a thing.

I do B2B advertising for a living, and that includes a lot to developers. Fun article!

Facebook is going to work better than twitter for direct response just be sheer volume, even though developers are less likely to use FB than the average person.

Generally to target working developers you want to let them know your free trial exists so they can poke around in it. To market to the bosses you use gated content.

Regarding the intro of the article: I agree, it's important not to heed any advice that tells you that you just can't advertise or market to any particular demographic.

Advertising and marketing are essentially universal truths. If you are having trouble reaching someone, it most definitely isn't because "ads just won't work on them."

Also many websites the product is not showing what it does on the front page. Many times they extol how amazing the product is. Best thing ever, customer abc built more whatamdongles with it, etc, etc. But what does your product actually do?! How would I use it? When buying a tool I am many times not buying fashion. I am buying a tool that does something. Be upfront what your tool is. If you are 1 of 5 competitors explain what your tool does that the others dont. Dont make me dig around on your site to find it or sign up for something just to look at your docs. It shows me you are not serious about helping me, other than helping money out of my wallet, and trying to setup a time to talk and waste my time.

We found for skilled workers it is mostly peer referral, as people already know who they prefer to work with on a team. Notably, assigning nontechnical staff to screen talent is going to exclude a lot of interesting folks, and still incurs a 3 month 54% attrition rate at some firms.

I was trying to imagine what advertising works on me...none.

What does work is a family member, friend suggests something or even an article online that is genuine and not written by someone with a flare for social engineering.

I love how the article is one big collage of ads for developers. The irony in discussing this topic as a way of marketing to developers.

How to sell to developers:

1. Go to your local Hackerspace (or makerspace). If you don't have a Hackerspace in your city - create one.

2. Sit there with your target audience. Don't be pushy.

3. Solve their problem with your solution, in real-time.

Also, you should spend like half of my time on Meetup.com and try to attend all possible dev-oriented events where you could pitch my product. Time consuming, but rewarding. Worked with https://aidlab.com/developer

Create a maker space in an increasing all remote working environment as a marketing tool? Slow, expensive, small user base….maybe if you convert a ton but that $$$ might be better used doing the digital ocean strategy mentioned above (ie be useful)

half of your time* pitch your product*

Yeah the one that's been actively marketing me recently is tailscale. Good job of it too...consensual.

Basically, devs are smart enough to call out the _actual lies_ that marketing firms push on other audiences.

Simple, you’re developing like a beast, and your app is ready to go live…

Just don’t. We will find you when we need you.

Dear author, please read each sentence you’ve written before posting your article.

What BS is this?

Thanks for this mooreds! This is definitely a groundbreaking article for me. I never thought about marketing this way before. So I want to share some takeaways around defining your niche & target audience that inspired me after reading this. https://www.developermarkepear.com/blog/paid-advertising-dev...

Rather than looking for new audiences, I am looking for people that already show interest in the type of problem I want to solve, and learning from them. That means that I am currently focusing on understanding who the target audience is, and understanding their problems so that I can do a bit of pre-validation & prioritization of features to build steadily.

Steps:

1. Define who the target audience is? What is their role or job title? - I want to build a product for (job title) saas/ecommerce company founders who already value pleasant & snappy end-user experiences. - I’d prefer to work with saas/product founders partly because they have a shorter sales cycles than large companies, and mostly because they are simply more interesting to talk to than people working for large/established companies.

2. Where does my target audience post/communicate? - Look where the target audience posts so you can talk to them, and eventually sell to them. For example: I am looking for places where saas/ecommerce company founders post such as Product hunt, https://www.producthunt.com/topics/saas because it is community of people who build products. That’s exactly the type of person I want to work with.

- Another idea is to google & discover who wants/already shows interest in the problem you are trying to solve. For me, it is figuring out where do people who care about snappy & performant websites congregate online? Which website, subreddit, or hashtag did this discussion take place in?

3. After finding where, understand the type of content you should post: What’s your goal with posting content? Do you want views/signups or credit card #s? Measure & understand if you are on the right track/making progress. If you link to your product in your profile or in a post, how can you know when you are on the right track. I am going to measure views, bounces, and conversions. Conversions could be things like email addresses, or credit cards. - Look at similar companies to yours, who is their founder? Did they post or comment more as they built up their audience?

4. TBD: After I gather more insights on who is interested in website performance, I want to know why they care about this, so that I can make sure my product solves their problems in the fastest & most intuitive & reliable way.

Would LOVE to hear from saas founders here, and see how they approached this.

Apologies for grammar-police'ing here but ...

> Advertising to developers with feels like asking for trouble.

~with~. "Advertising to developers feels like asking for trouble."

Looking forward to reading the rest of this :)

And this amazing piece of text:

> CircleCi is (or was) remarketing withyoutube pre-roll video ads to people who with case study testimonials to users who visited the page but haven’t signed up

Remarketing ads towards people based on past browsing history is stalking, full stop.

Yeah, not my proudest moment -> fixed

sounds like they had three cups of tea while writing that sentence.

maybe that was part of their marketing the article to you.

Effective! Seriously!

Thanks for finding those.

Not sure how I fk it up when updating/editing.

But I did...

Is this the nitpick thread? Here’s mine: there’s a horizontal overflow on iOS, so it’s difficult to scroll vertically down the y-axis of the page without accidentally scrolling on the x-axis too. This is a pet peeve of mine and so many websites (my own included at times) do this.

But thanks for sharing your site and this analysis. It’s easy to trust your authority on the matter in the title of this post, considering its current ranking on the front page of HN!

Will you post a follow-up with numbers analyzing today’s success of marketing to developers who market to developers? :)

> devs don’t want it to read like an ad

I hate advertising. I especially hate stealth ads that are written to resemble a legitimate article, blog post, etc.

Don't insult what little intelligence I possess.

> devs want the ad to be relevant

I have never, ever seen a relevant ad. Not once in almost fifty years on this godforsaken planet.

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