Saturday SaaS - Why is Developer Marketing so hard?

Hello from Mexico City, where I am waiting for friends to wake from their slumber before enjoying a cafe and guava pastries from Panderia Rosetta – iykyk. I haven’t been on this newsletter in a few years because I was scared and nervous about being a poser newsletter author. So I decided to just quietly part. But a few weeks ago I remembered the few Saturdays I woke up and sent out this newsletter and I decided to get back on the horse.

The intention of this newsletter is for me to have a conversation about things I am thinking about with many people at once. I’m looking forward to continuing that with you all! Thanks for your patience with me as I got the courage to come back.

I’ve had LOTS of conversations over the past few weeks with company-builders, VCs, and my own colleagues about the challenge of hiring GTM talent at Dev First companies. 

The real rise of Developer First companies is a fairly recent phenomenon. Before businesses selected their software in a top-down motion, software was not as specialized and developers had to build a lot of their own services and functions in-house. Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics were among the first companies to build tools for developers as the end user, which gave rise to the current developer marketing playbook: community management, support portals, content marketing, events and user groups.

Since then, we’ve had a proliferation of developer tools companies and the rise of DevOps, which has accelerated the trend of scalable technical GTM rather than the top-down enterprise sales motions of the past. And yet, while we have talented engineers who are building these tools, talented CEOs as leaders, VCs and Analysts who understand the market dynamics, we are really struggling to grow the Developer Relations and Developer Marketing talent pool.

Why is this so hard?

Wesley’s thread above articulates a core problem in two parts

1) Imposter syndrome: Folks who are not in DevRel roles have a false concept of what is required to do the job well. The same goes for Marketers who are interested in marketing to the Developer audience. If you’ve never done it before, you might imagine it’s impossible because, as many folks say “Developers hate marketing.”

2) Skills match: Hiring managers prioritize the incorrect skills (in Wesley’s tweet, he is referring to Twitter followers exclusively) as proof that the talent will thrive in a DevRel context. For Developer Marketers, past experience is typically an indicator of future performance.

I believe both can change as this field matures.

Now let’s split up the roles and discuss. First DevRel. Developers likely understand their kind and understand their “tribe” or sub-communities (often language communities) very well. But how do they translate that into a DevRel role? Thankfully it is not all about being “good” at Twitter. DevRel as a practice in company-building is a combination of many different functions that are all designed to endear the developer to your brand and become the voice of the audience within your company. They’re the front line of what your future users are thinking, feeling, wanting. The different functions within that fall into categories like content creation, events attendance or organization, educational evangelism and more.

If you want to get into DevRel, why not start writing about the things you are passionate about – and they don’t need to be feelings of fire even though we all know that sparks conversation. It also doesn’t need to be the most popular post on Hacker News, you just need to start someplace. If writing isn’t your thing, but you love attending user groups, try volunteering for a role in sourcing speakers or identifying sponsors. All to say, getting into DevRel is not exclusively reliant on your Twitter following.

How can hiring managers help usher more folks into DevRel? I do think the first thing is acknowledging the issue of DevRel burnout (read a bit on that here) and ensuring you have safeguards in place to support your team here. We can also do a better job recruiting talent early within our own communities. But one thing I’ve been thinking about: why don’t hiring managers get together to build an entryway to these DevRel roles? Either through training or open sourced resources available self-service? Is it because we’re all competing for the same talent?

Developer Marketing, the biggest oxymoron! I believe deep understanding of the end-user can greatly impact your ability to succeed in a Developer Marketing role. I spoke about this on MadKudu’s podcast last week. Developers and technical professionals only hate marketing because marketing is often promising fun pithy statements that prove to be meaningless. A deeper understanding of your end users could greatly change your fate and help you understand the pressure and responsibility put on developers, security and DevOps professionals to deliver reliable and secure software to their customers. If you make a promise you cannot keep, the consequences could mean at least an all nighter for the developer who put their faith in you, or at the worst a data breach 😱 .

Doing Developer Marketing right means deeply understanding your end-users pain. The pain they experience from not using your product. If you want to get into Developer Marketing, I suggest talking to a developer you know and asking them about their favorite tools – you will probably see them get SO excited. Ask them why they like it. Another exercise I love to do, ask them to walk you through one of these company’s website – what do they like about it, what do they hate, what don’t they understand? Note down the common theme, articulate the principles.

Then next time you’re applying for a job at a DevFirst company, send an email to the CMO saying you are applying for the job and you did a teardown of their website, using the principles you learned from your dev friends. As one of these hiring managers, I can attest that you will stand out as a candidate.

That’s all folks! Hope everyone has a wonderful thanksgiving. I’ll be sending next week’s newsletter from Vermont, prior to my first run of the season. Hope everyone has good turkey and some good first turns ⛷️