Developer marketing for early-stage startups – what we’ve learned | Hacker News Reader

Developer marketing for early-stage startups – what we’ve learned

posthog.com

254 pointsmakaimc72 comments

I'd say another rule of thumb, which may not be specific to developer marketing, is to avoid the "used by" pitfall. I often see tools that were launched, like, a month ago claiming that it's "loved by teams at Uber/Slack/etc". What I imagine in those scenarios is that there's an intern who signed up for a beta using their company email, and the founders were like "hey good enough, technically we're now used by teams at [x] company!" I can see through it, and I'm sure others can as well.

It comes off as disingenuous. A better way is to tell a specific success story. If some unknown brand has a story to tell about how your tool 10x'd their productivity, I'm all ears.

Absolutely something that immediately turns me off to a product as well.

There's a variation of that in the data space, where early-stage data companies show the logos of _other_ data companies.

It's so obviously just that the other company was like checking to see how your product and there's integrates. They weren't actually using it. But now they're in the "Trusted by" panel on the homepage.

While I don't doubt that, especially smaller, companies randomly use logos based on anecdotes or email signups, I can assure you that, at companies of any size, customer references go through a lot of vetting and whole teams devoted to it.

And customer references are a big deal. Companies absolutely want to see other companies in their industry which are using your product and even have conversations with their peers about it.

I tend to assume they’re all connected via founder’s prior employment/school/friends etc and so yeah they tapped their networks and they probably check out their friends new startup product. Maybe they’ve given some pre launch feedback but I also tend to think they’re not likely to indicate having a significant usage/integration at that logo company.

I'm with you. I've never found the "used by $BIG_NAME_COMPANY" to be influential for me at face value. But anecdotally, I think that level of marketing has been effective in getting devs to bring them up in that context. I've heard in meetings throughout my career, devs saying: "It's good enough for $BIG_NAME_COMPANY, it'd be good enough for us". That alone has influenced decision makers to at least consider it.

I admire the use of php vars in your argument as most of these are Wordpress sites used to funnel folks to the actual software.

Now, if the site uses the company logo in their list of $BIG_NAME_COMPANY that links to one of these discussed blog write ups, then I'd accept that as a useful quick glance way of promoting that info.

Otherwise, just a list of logos and/or company names does feel lazy and non-convincing to me.

I have so much fun reaching out and interviewing folks who use our software (both customers and free users) for our blog (making it clear that my goal is to promote both them and their use of our software).

It doesn't have to be a difficult process either. An email interview with 8 initial questions and then another round if I need to dig deeper has worked for me. I turn it into a blog post after a light round of editing.

Depending on the size of the company, there may be additional review on their side, but most of the time I've had folks be happy to be featured.

This is a great way to share success stories, build content, and I was surprised at the various ways people used our software. The stories can also be used by marketing and/or a sales team. (Not typically great for posting on sites like HN unless they dig really deep into a technical topic, though.)

Edit: make it clear that folks know the interview will be published.

Do you choose the product with no references/used by over that?

If you're in an organization with any type of compliance needs (SOC 2), that "used by" signals that the business is organized enough to pass security/audit requirements by that company. While it may be a single team using the product, they're still held to wider organizational standards.

It's not that I'd choose a product specifically because it doesn't have references/used-by, but it's more that I get annoyed at vague allusions to usage by larger companies. If the company in question actually uses your product, great! Tell me about it! But there's no legal guarantee that a "used by" statement is true - it's like saying "9/10 doctors trust this medicine I'm selling you". It just rubs me the wrong way.

In your example, it's actually worse than annoying. If you're basing SOC2 compliant requirements on a "used by" signal, then the misdirection is potentially catastrophic.

> If you're basing SOC2 compliant requirements on a "used by" signal, then the misdirection is potentially catastrophic.

I'm absolutely not basing it only on that, but it is an early signal. There are likely many options for any specific tool. "Used by" can help me differentiate between the side-project and the meaningful company before I go too far down the rabbit hole.

Back in the 90s we had a surprising customer who paid tens of thousands of dollars a year for a subscription. They never reported any bugs but seemed happy -- our salesperson would check in on them ever few months and got an annual renewal without fail.

Eventually she left (to get an MBA) and the guy who took over her territory had trouble reaching the customer on the phone. Eventually he did get a meeting and when he visited discovered that all our packages (software and printed docs) were on a shelf in a cubicle, and that they were uninterested in renewing. It seems someone had the budget to spend and everybody liked having the saleswoman come visit. But they didn't care about a visit from Norm.

A rather extraordinary waste of money, but helped our bootstrapped company!

Did you think about having the saleswoman continue to visit that one customer on contract? Pay a few thousand for the day, land the sale, then back to the MBA.

Good idea -- but I never thought of it!

I could only imagine what this saleswoman was like to convince a company to spend tens of thousands a year just for a visit every few months.

She was quite attractive and fit, it is true (still is, 30 years later). We used to ski together. But more importantly as a salesperson she knew her stuff. She wasn't a developer, but she took the time to learn enough that she didn't waste the customer's or our team's time.

IMO the danger with those sections isn't how disingenuous it might be to some, it's the fact that you have to be very careful what brands you are highlighting here to not send the wrong message.

What are you actually trying to convey here to potential clients? Having a bunch of consumer tech brands when your potential base is actually more about universities, sends the message that you're not a serious company in the field and won't have their best interests at heart. Worse, it can make you seem very generic, as most sites flaunt Google/Microsoft all over the place.

This also applies to success stories. Highlighting irrelevant success stories also sends the wrong message. If a potential client in finance is looking at your tool, ready to drop substantial funds, but all they can find are success stories relevant to gamer brands, they're gone they aren't going to do the work for you to find out if you're good enough.

You have to be selective even if that feels counter intuitive at first. So I don't mind the row(s) of brands related, just make sure it's sending the message you want to send.

Disagreed. Social proof is a HUGE signal, even if it's "fake".

> It comes off as disingenuous.

And if the product is valuable to you AND it has logos, I can guarantee you will still use it. This feels like the typical developer trope here of "ads don't work on me".

The reality is that even if products (like Posthog) have developers as users, there is usually someone paying for it that's not the developer. So while you might not like logos, the person opening the wallet usually does.

> A better way is to tell a specific success story. If some unknown brand has a story to tell about how your tool 10x'd their productivity, I'm all ears.

Totally agreed (albeit this isn't mutually exclusive)

What I love is when competing services claim the same large companies use their product.

What are the legalities regarding using another company's name and logo as social proof without explicit conscent from that company?

I am running my own Saas company (https://www.usecloudpress.com/) and I ask explicit permission from companies that use my product whether I can use their name, logo, and some testimonial text on my website. I would never even consider using it without their permission.

One I saw recently was "With developer signups from the world’s leading brands" and then a wall of logos under it. Felt like a stretch to use a company's logo when all that happened was someone downloaded your open source code.

With our startup, the policy is that we don't put up a logo unless 1) we have permission 2) they use and pay us 3) the product is widely adopted in the company, not just with a single team.

Ironically, I noticed that in the Posthog Website (as is the case with a number of other companies).

I think the best option would be a mix of the two (which AWS does). You have a tileset of companies which "use" your product, but you also back that up with individual testimonials which link back to case studies on your blog.

Which logo?

Not any of your logos per se (rather, I haven't done a deep dive yet :P), but when I usually see a SaaS say that they partnered with so and so BigCorp, I just assume it's one developer trying out the product, as compared to a team using it for an extended duration (granted, everyone's doing that). So I just skip that testimonials section now.

Case studies are a much better validation imo.

Posting the logos of huge companies signals to small companies that they're not your target market.

So if the office manager of the IBM facility in Mobile, Alabama uses your SMS service to coordinate the contract janitorial staff, then boosting the IBM logo without this context sends the wrong message to the long tail of small companies who don't pay "IBM" prices for anything.

i do share the feeling.

you should be specific, especially when marketing to developers. So, I’d rather write the product is "used by X developers or Y companies."

in a past experience at an early-stage company that was starting its sales motion, we highlighted a testimonial from a customer in the headline as a workaround. Another option could be adding a short description of the use case, too.

show, don’t tell.

A great tip for content, when you learn something new, write a post about it. If it’s new to you it will be new to many others.

Doubly so if you couldn’t find a relevant post in the first place.

It’s also a huge benefit for yourself. I have referred to posts I’ve written on topics many times over in the future. E.g I spent hours configuring rspamd (https://blog.mailpace.com/blog/how-to-catch-spam-with-rspamd...) or setting up html modules (https://blog.mailpace.com/blog/using-html-modules/). Both are super niche topics that I struggle to recall the details of without my blog posts.

And you never learn something so well as when you try to teach it. I can't count the number of times I've written something, paused, and wondered "well, does it really do that?" and gone off and investigated. When I return, I know more and the piece is better too (win-win!).

Even further, you don’t really know something until you can teach it

But you can know something but not perform it. The specific case I'm thinking of is coaching. You can know how to "bend it like Becks", but not actually be able to do it. I know that if I strike the ball with the outside of my boot on the outside of the ball, it will bend a certain way. But me doing that as a demonstration to the kids on my team is an entirely different thing.

yes, personal experience story.

This advice is the cause of so many low quality Medium posts that clog up my google searches and make it hard to find authoritative sources.

Frankly that seems more like a google search algorithm failure. I think the idea that people shouldn't produce content because you don't want to see it listed is more than a little silly.

>Frankly that seems more like a google search algorithm failure

it is, but it is also people writing crap all over the internet.

people writing crap all over is the internet

Both situations can happen.

I think that ideally you write about a topic you've grappled with and know it well at that moment. I've done this a number of times and am really happy that people comment it's been useful.

On the other hand I've also come across many low quality articles as well.

I used to do this (for about a week), but I'm in school and am constantly learning new things and ways of doing stuff and quickly got overwhelmed. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff and focus on worthwhile topics?

In the "Pre-product-market fit" section:

> You can’t rely on UTM parameters to tell you where a user actually first heard about you. Example: user reads an article about PostHog on Hacker News -> searches 'posthog' -> clicks on a Google Ad. Our analytics will tell us "wow, Google Ads are awesome!" But that’s not the whole picture.

Before product-market fit, you should absolutely not pay for Google Ads for your products own name. i.e. if your product is named "Posthog", do not pay for ads for searches for [posthog].

You should only buy ads for your own name (if ever!) when competitors are buying Google Ads for your name, and you want to pay to outcompete them. Pre PMF, that can't possibly be happening to you yet.

That’s not really true. You will have a much higher Quality Score for your own name that any competitor and as such your ads will cost very little. Your competitor on the other hand is going to have to pay a small fortune to bid on those same keywords - you’ll never have to “compete” with them.

I think you misread my post.

When you don't have competitors buying ads against your name, and you already have the #1 spot in organic search results, buying your own name is a waste of money.

When you do have competitors buying ads against your name, sure, spend money to defeat them; you'll be able to do it pretty affordably, because of your Quality Score advantage.

But until then, buying ads for your name is a waste of money. (And it confounds your analytics, as TFA points out.)

It always blows my mind how HN calls a small part of marketing function "marketing". Imagine every machine learning article posted on HN were about linear regression.

Why don't we see more articles on critical marketing functions such as determining customer needs? Instead, it's always about "we have build a product now how do we reach customers?" This is called promotion and it works much better if you have nailed down other marketing strategic scopes around product, pricing, and distribution.

Here is an open access textbook on marketing: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/principles-of-m...

I’d be curious to hear more about your experience with carbon. In particular, what a competitor could do better to make it work :-) We’re building something[1] and we like to think we have our targeting figured out a lot more effectively, any general feedback would be interesting.

I’d really like to be able to build an ecosystem of paid ads that isn’t tracking people around the internet, not injecting Google tracking images, and effective for start ups.

We’re doing this with ML-powered content-based targeting, so in theory we can offer a lot better niche targeting, which is more valuable for startups than large brands who are just doing brand campaigns.

1: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/11/a-new-approach-to-con...

We would be interested in trying it out.

Do you mind sending an intro to hello [at] swissdevjobs.ch ?

The article very well matches my experiences working with marketing in an early-stage startup for 1,5 years.

>Hire a cheap agency – $5k/mo is achievable, especially if they're just managing channels and creative, and not throwing in 'value add' services like landing pages and SEO strategy.

what does this mean ?

I felt that this was vague too. Clarification would be nice

I work at PostHog, but didn't write the article. I'm guessing what we meant here is that we use a small, flexible agency that manages our paid ads. We didn't want any "optimized" landing pages or other stuff, we just wanted _any_ spend here to go on generating some relevant traffic (since often we think conversion rate optimization is harmful for brand/word of mouth, especically with a technical audience who in the long run respect companies that give you all the info up front etc, and we can do the other bits like SEO research).

We spend $5k/month with them + give them a monthly spend to do 99% of the work so we don't try to build any paid ads core competency in house. Continuously we've been trying to move spending from here to more organic content, and just leaving spend on the highest conversion paid campaigns (like our own brand name... which sounds stupid but it is broadly accepted as cost effective to boost CTRs for high intent traffic on Google's first page).

So is your "actual" ads spend in addition to the $5K that goes to the agency as their fees? Or does $5K include ad spend (money paid to google etc)

the former - we've gone anywhere from $0 to about $40k/month, averaging somewhere in the middle

Running ads is a sophisticated business. You have to understand the platforms you’re using, the targeting tooling, the audiences you want to target and to do so in a way that won’t just blow your budget instantly in the wrong place. You also need “creative”, i.e designs for ads that will be effective for your chosen medium(s) and audience(s). After that you need on-the-fly analysis to redirect money to the most effective places. All this work is usually done by ad agencies, who do a fixed amount of work for you each month on a retainer.

My interpretation is: pay someone to run your ads for you rather than doing it yourself. Keep the cost low and avoid their attempts to up-sell as the return on those services are low.

Not the author though so can't be completely sure, I agree it's a bit of a weird sentence.

as a guy who works in developer marketing - good set of advice in here imo.

posthog if youre reading this - how did you think about budget for marketing? time budget and $ budget. "Hire a developer who loves writing onto your marketing team" is a huge expense for a very early stage startup (it looks like you're Series B with $27m raised so you can afford it - when exactly do you pay a developer salary just to write?).

also find it funny to see "It’s ok to waste money on sponsorships" with "Sponsoring events is disproportionately expensive". so basically only newsletters work?

As a developer who loves writing, how would I find a job like this (either fulltime or contract)? What job titles do they tend to have? I'm somewhat on medical leave right now but looking for a job soon, and this sounds like something I'd be pretty interested in.

we had 3 engineer + writers on my team. just a function of how much founders are willing to invest

Often "Developer Advocate" or similar is the title.

draft.dev is a company that does this full time (not affiliated).

author here (big fan of your blog btw!)

in terms of budget, I'm not going to pretend we had some grand plan, but this is _roughly_ how things played out at each stage:

- Seed: CEO only writing occasional content, micro paid ads experiments (<$500 per campaign) - Series A: hired a content marketer with SEO expertise and a product marketer (both non-technical), hired paid ads agency ($5k/mo for agency, $Xk/mo ad spend with lots of iterating) - Series B/post-PMF: started experimenting with content sponsorships, hired technical content marketer, tested non-obvious paid ad channels

> basically only newsletters work

For us, yes. But this may change at scale - plenty of much larger devtool companies than us _seem_ to do a good job with events.

thanks for sharing! and reading!

Here's a marketing rule of thumb: don't use "post hog" or "post hole" as your core marketing identity

(Unless you are primarily targeting "adult" firms, of course)

Thanks for the excellent article; I really appreciate the style and depth of the writing.

It reminds me that every time I need these ideas, the next place I get stuck is trying to find those small agencies and affordable experts.

It takes zero seconds to realize that if the online marketing and SEO ecosystem was water, it would be supersaturated with lead and mercury. It's incredibly hard to find good help. I'm pretty much at the point where I wouldn't work with someone who didn't come via referral.

I love posthogs branding and mascot so much! Also great article.

Really? Seems like a terrible name to me. Where I'm from, if you "post hog", you're getting blocked.

Their Open Core licensing model is really interesting.

> We’ve found that hitting the front page results in a giant, ego-boosting traffic boost, with a noticeable but small signup boost.

I know people who've paid agents £10k's to get an advert disguised as an article written in some UK Sunday broadsheet newspapers, generated a massive number of leads but ultimately never recouped the outlay.

> Paid ads can be a useful tool for learning quickly if you are building a consumer app

I know plenty of people who had signed up to online targeted advertising, generated minimal leads but no business.

In my experience, advertising has never worked, always costing more money, never recouping the expenditure, but it is a very nuanced way to buy the media's silence if you can afford it.

> Events are 10x more work

All the events & exhibitions I've been to, never bought or signed up to anything.

> SEO articles are not exempt from this rule

I've found SEO to be both a waste a time and money and highly manipulative. Just look at the number of youtube video's uploaded by individuals who are lucky to get a handful of views. SEO is no different, in fact Search Engine spider's generated more traffic for the websites I know of.

> In my experience, advertising has never worked, always costing more money, never recouping the expenditure

As the old saying goes:- “Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

So according to you, no solution works? None at all. Advertising doesn’t work, marketing doesn’t work, SEO doesn’t work.

So how do you get a startup from zero to 10k customers?

It's the marketing / sales equivalent of the HN-developer-type who would "build Dropbox / Docker over a weekend"

> So how do you get a startup from zero to 10k customers?

I dont know!

I've used the latest tech as it became available, and I'm left thinking, either no one is seeing things like the fax mailshots, postal campaigns, advertising campaigns which I've done in the past, or its the culture of the UK to be reserved, cautious adopting the if its not broke dont fix it attitude.

Little short of the marketing and advertising material not reaching the people, I don't have an explanation, but when considering other events in my life, it would not surprise me to learn no one received any of my marketing and advertising material!

This sets a new low for cookie consent banners.

At least they commit HARD to the bit

Really? The fact that it had a single line, explaining the relevant cookies, and a one-click reject made it perfectly adequate.

The fact it has a cartoon of some politician, taking up 15% of my viewport for no reason?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com