karlhughes

I've been wondering if we'll see more dev companies use podcasting for marketing.

Most of the dev podcasts I've run across are by practitioners who just do it for fun or to help boost their consulting practice, so it seems like companies with bigger budgets and more access to big name devs might be really well positioned to come up with a good show.

That said, the medium isn't great for some things that devs want (code samples, seeing results, etc.)

Thanks for sharing @mooreds

There's another person doing an open-source list too: https://github.com/jackbridger/developer-newsletters

So we may join forces. I'd love to have more community contributions if there's interest.

> The most effective founders are not nearly as confident as the least effective founders are...If that’s you, remember it is likely a signal of growth, and not of inevitable failure.

This was good to know. I constantly feel that imposter syndrome, especially as we grow and I am trying to keep my leadership skills at pace with our team size.

Interesting. I would argue that social competence is almost always a baseline requirement for team-based work, but maybe not?

Thanks for your perspective!

Thanks great to hear!

We're actively working to measure and improve the writer experience, so I always welcome feedback.

For us (at Draft.dev), it's this kind of stuff: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials

Typically very education-forward content that might mention the client's tools when appropriate. The goal is typically to contribute to the developer community or raise awareness, especially for smaller developer tools companies.

I run Draft.dev, so happy to answer questions.

We pay $315 to $550 per article depending on the writer's experience and the topic.

Most of our writers are engineers who do this on the side to supplement their income or learn new things. We don't do ghostwriting, so authors also get a byline, which is rare in our space.

Lots of good questions here but I'll focus on two that I have the most experience with:

> Is it better to grow it internally?...Or the best way is to recruit a skilled DevRel person or instead of a marketing person and collaborate in creating great content?

I work with ~70 developer tools companies on devrel/marketing and the biggest killer has got to be founders who think they can just throw marketing over a wall to someone else.

Initially, you as the founder need to become that skilled DevRel person.

If not you, get a co-founder level person to help you. The truth is, in the early days, nobody else will care about the project like you do, so you need to be out there:

- Writing about it

- Demo-ing it

- Talking about it (eg: conferences and meetups)

- Talking to users and contributors

Eventually, you'll need to build a playbook that another DevRel or Marketing person can execute, but you can't outsource this when you're still finding product-market fit.

Narrow down.

Don't look for generalist SEO people, but instead content marketers with experience in your industry.

I've seen so many of our clients get crappy keyword research because the consultant/SEO person they work with doesn't actually know their audience well.

I work with a few security pros who blog. As you suggest, you can't tell people specific problems you're facing at work but you can do some interesting things to get your knowledge out there:

1. Make educated guesses about real incidents you were not involved in. Talk about how you would have solved this problem if it were you. 2. Set up sandbox environments to demonstrate attack vectors and detection methods. Even "dumbed down" versions will help newbies out if you want to keep your more "advanced" versions secret. 3. Talk about tools and services instead of specific incidences. Most of the info about how they work is public, but you can showcase your understanding my summarizing and giving commentary.

I'm a content agency owner that works almost exclusively with SaaS companies, and yes, it works. There is plenty of demand (we went from $0 to $80k/mo in revenue in the first year).

What worked for us was:

1. Going super-niche - we only serve series A and B startups that want to use content to reach software developers. You'd think that going niche would make it harder to find customers, but the opposite is true.

2. Started with my network and referrals. Do good work and people will refer you to others.

3. Build a process that can scale beyond just you.

Good luck!

That's what I usually recommend to clients who are too early too work with us. I usually give them a list of starter ideas so they can at least build up some content.

What a strange choice for a landing page. Almost unusable on mobile

There are a lot of tangential career paths you can take with a background in engineering.

As a case study of one, I transitioned from engineer to being a technical writer last year. I now run a small agency, but I could have stayed employed in the field just as easily.

The money isn't quite as lucrative as in software engineering, but it's very livable, unlike many forms of writing.

You also don't have to limit yourself to dry documentation. Companies hire technical writers to do blog posts, case studies, and even marketing copy for technical products.

I've also had friends transition into fields like product management and network security, which might also be a nice change of pace. I wrote more about this here: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/alternative-career-paths/

I run a service business that gets some clients from blog posts. While we're not in DS/ML, we're similarly technical and priced.

Content like blog posts usually don't close sales on their own. Most successful consultants get the most business early on through referrals, but blog posts can help widen the top of your funnel, showcase your expertise, or move people through to close.

We invested in content early, but didn't start seeing any leads or clients from it for six months, so it's not the channel I'd recommend for getting your first clients. That said, once you have some margin to invest in content, it's great because it's a passive source for inbound leads.

A lot of my ideas for from conversations with other developers and founders.

Listening to podcasts, reading, and thinking also bring me a lot of ideas. The most important thing in my mind is to have a backlog where you can keep ideas. It's not often that free time and inspiration come at the same time for me.

There's kind of two sides to your question: the reading experience and the writing experience.

The reading experience is obviously important if you're blogging for your content to get shared or at least be accessible to people. Personally, I prefer any platform that outputs static HTML because it's fast and highly customizable. Jekyll, Gatsby, Hugo, and other static site generators are good for this.

On the writing side, you want to remove friction. The more mental effort required to get started writing, the less likely you'll stick with it. So, CMSes are nice for this. I have used Netlify CMS, Strapi, and plain markdown files in git for this in the past. If the blog doesn't have guest writers, I prefer the simplest path (writing markdown in git), but if you're opening up to guest posts in the future, you might want to give people a user friendly CMS.

Looks cool. Any intention to add collaboration in the future?

I manage about 50 developer writers and we still haven't found a tool purpose built for our size team.

Yep, and to get more tactical, here are some marketing channels I've seen work for people who don't use social media:

- Search engine marketing/ads - Live events - Direct mail (yes, it's very much still alive) - Sponsored content

Some of these are hard to measure, and some won't work if your target audience isn't online, but this gives you some specific tactics to start with.

To piggy back of what @mooreds said, here's a big list of community writing programs that pay software engineers to write blog posts: https://github.com/malgamves/CommunityWriterPrograms

Depending on your expertise and writing skills, they can pay pretty well.

One of my teammates did a big ranking of company engineering blogs recently: https://draft.dev/learn/technical-blogs/engineering-blogs

Ranked them by writing quality, consistency, depth, and usefulness. It's a little subjective, but there are some good blogs on the list nonetheless.

I always do "back door" interviews for this reason.

I try to find a recently departed employee and ask them what it's really like. Not every founder is trying to pull one over on you, but some are...overly optimistic.

I was just going to mention Appsmith. Great tool!

Side projects were a great warmup for me before I started my company. Like OP, I enjoyed my day job and didn't feel the need to quit, but when Covid hit and our whole company folded, the years of side projects had given me lots of skills to try making it on my own.

Running a business takes a wide variety of skills, some of which you have to just get by doing.

What does that mean exactly? Isn't publishing the same as broadcasting? Maybe a little bit of an example on the home page would help.

I'd like to see Google get broken up and search even get turned into a nonprofit or public utility, personally (https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/a-proposal-for-non-profit-...).

I get that it's not a perfect solution, but barring something major changing, I don't see how another search engine will ever honestly compete.

My main problem with experts is they share the same cognitive biases as the rest of us: https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/experts

It's great to have academic qualifications, but you still have such a limited sphere of experience and knowledge - even more so the higher you go in academia.

Ah, the freelancing feast/famine cycle. This is really easy in theory, but very hard to get off of in practice.

Here's how I've dealt with it:

1. Niche down really tightly. It seems like you've at least narrowed your expertise to the frontend, but do you specialize in certain industries? Sizes of companies? There are so many general purpose freelance frontend architects, so find a way to get more specialized in your messaging.

2. Network, network, network. Service businesses are relationship based, so if you let your network stagnate, you're going to struggle. I set aside half my time each week for sales and marketing, and at least half that time is networking with people or staying in touch.

3. Do things that bring you energy rather than listening to gurus. In other words, if side projects get you jazzed up and you can build them to facilitate your marketing, do that. If writing works, do that. If you like sending cold emails, try that. If you're doing marketing that doesn't even feel like work, it'll be more sustainable.

The other thing working remote forces me to do is to actually think before I assign a task to someone or ask a question.

It's a lot easier to casually interrupt someone with half a thought than to write a poorly thought out email.

That's a fair critique, although I didn't mean to imply that any of these roles take 0 people skills - only that some involve more time creating things solo vs. interacting with a team.

I also think there's a lot of variation in these roles, so my experience with them is probably just limited.