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Ideas for marketing a dev centric product

I have a friend who has a company that produces a developer tool that provides a one stop shop for application authentication. It’s a good one and they’ve found some traction.

They are trying to follow the redhat/mongodb playbook–create a tool so good at solving developer problems that developers adopt it. Eventually some portion of enterprises will wake up one morning and realize that their developers are using this. The CIO will freak out and be happy to pay money to my friend’s company for support.

The question is, how do you get developers to find out about the solution and how it will make their lives better?

I am not a marketing guru, but I am a developer and have been involved in selling of software in the past, so I had some suggestions.

  • Read The New Kingmakers, by Stephen O’Grady, in particular “Courting the Developer Population” and “What to Do?”. You can get a PDF here. O’Grady has thought a lot about this problem and his blog is worth reading as well.
  • Find or create a community, and contribute to it. Depending on your audinence, this may be a reddit subforum, an old school php bbedit forum, a facebook group or even an IETF working group. An existing group is more likely to give you results, where a new group will give you more control. Aim for results.
  • Present case studies or testimonials of success using the software. How did a real person solve a real problem with your software?
  • If you can find analysts and/or bloggers focused in your problem space, contact them and offer to walk them through the solution. (To me, this seems more of a long shot, but could be a big hit if you find the right person.) Developer focused podcasts could be an option too, as long as you are talking about technology and the problem space, not your product.
  • Writing interesting content on your blog. Share it widely. Again, this doesn’t have to be about your product, in fact it shouldn’t. Instead, take topics you’ve learned by building your product, or in the communities of which you are part, or the problems developers have solved with your product, and highlight those topics.
  • Write talks for conferences. For developers, I’d look at conferences like gluecon and oscon. Meetups are good too–easier to get into but much less scalable. You attend virtual meetups as well as physical ones.
  • Set up a google alert for competitors’ names and keywords and see if you can add value to any discussions happening there.

Above all, don’t be salesy. Focus on making the developer’s life easy.

Business Security Useful Tools | moore |

Ever felt like your codebase was out of control?

I certainly have. A couple of times in my career the combination of technical debt, business model shift and lack of time for a proper fix have left me feeling out of control.

But reading this post on Hacker News made me realize that it all could have been so so much worse. A couple of “best ofs”:

To give you some examples, I originally came on as a contractor because they had some refactoring they wanted done. The entire system was home built (including the programming language) and there was a file size limit of 32,767 lines. They had many functions that were approaching this limit and they didn’t know what to do, so they hired me.

and:

Once upon a time, there was a search product and one of the data sources that it could search was a Solr/Lucene database. This should be no problem, since search is what Solr does. It should be as simple as passing the user’s query through to Solr and then reading the response. The problem was, it was important to know exactly which parts of any matched records were relevant to the search.

 

The Guy Before Me™ decided that the best way to implement this would be to split the user’s search into individual words, perform a separate search query through Solr’s HTTP API for each individual word, and then do a bunch of very clever and complex post-processing on the result sets to combine them into a single set of results.

and (last one, I promise):

At my first gig I teamed up with a guy responsible for a gigantic monolith written in Lua. Originally, the project started as a little script running in Nginx. Over the course of several years, it organically grew to epic proportions, by consuming and replacing every piece of software that it interfaced with – including Nginx.

 

There were two ingredients in the recipe for disaster. The first is that Lua comes “batteries excluded”: the standard library is minimalist and the community and set of available packages out there is small. That’s typically not an issue, as long as one uses Lua in the intended way: small scripts that extend existing programs with custom user logic (e.g. Nginx, Vim, World of Warcraft). The second is that Lua is a dynamic language: it’s dynamically typed, and practically everything can be overridden, monkey patched and hacked, down to the fundamental iterators that allow you to traverse data structures.

shivers. There, but for the grace of God.

Programming Tips | moore | | Leave a comment