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Dev Tools Marketing

The following notes are synthesized from a YouTube video that I found incredibly informative and relevant to Polykey at our current stage.

Everything I've Learned About DevTools Marketing by Draft.dev​

Source: Karl@draft.dev

What is a Dev Tool?​

Software developers use hundreds of tools to get their jobs done every day. For example:

  • IDEs
  • Testing tools
  • Automation software
  • Infrastructure tools
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Polykey would be considered a Cybersecurity Infrastructure Secrets Sharing Dev Tool.

Challenges Marketing a Dev Tool​

One of the biggest challenges in marketing a dev tool is that you have to LEARN what the tool actually does for software developers. This can be especially tough for non-technical marketers.

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  • The very first way to tackle this challenge is to LEARN what the tool does and how to explain it at a high level.
  • Become well-versed in the knowledge base & language that developers use to talk about our area of expertise, which for Polykey is secret sharing & IAM.

What works for Dev Tools Companies​

What works for one company does not work for them all. For example, a small brand trying to replicate what larger, more established brands have done, tends to not work for the following reasons:

  • They have bigger budgets.
  • They have more time.
  • They have huge teams that can execute complex marketing plans.
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If you're a startup trying to get things off the ground with your dev tool, you have to step back and think:

  • What resources do we actually have?
  • What's going to be valuable to users?
  • How can we leverage Polykey's unique selling points and Matrix AI's unique perspective in a way that big companies can't?

For example, as an early-stage startup, we have the luxury of saying whatever we want whereas big companies are constrained by PR, legal, and bureaucracy.

So as a small company, what we want to think about is:

  • how to short-circuit some of that and get really fast feedback cycles
  • and get really fast messaging out there
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  • Getting active on places like Hacker News and Reddit
  • Getting out there in the community and posting things
  • Starting discussions and joining discussions

These are all things that big companies rarely do. So as a small startup, we have that advantage.

Diverse Dev Tools Market with Diverse Set of Users​

Every Dev Tool is different. Even within the secret sharing dev tool space, these tools do different things. The kind of developer that uses one over the other is different, the sales cycle is different.

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  • Is it sold from the top-down?
  • Is it sold from the bottom-up?
  • Is it sold to software devs relatively new to their job?
  • Is it sold to more senior architects, engineers, and managers?

All this will dictate how our marketing should flow.

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The strength of each company & the team that it has should come into play when it comes to your marketing plan.

For example:

  • If you have a team with a bunch of content marketing and writing experience, lean into that and leverage it.
  • If you have a team with a great video development department, use them. Developers watch videos, and one of the strongest ways to get in front of devs is to share content that is interesting, whatever format that is.
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  • With Polykey, we need engaging media content such as YouTube videos that showcase powerful use-case capabilities that our engineering team can record, and that our marketing team can slightly edit for publishing.

Finally, the marketing for Polykey has to actually make sense given the product adoption cycle.

  • This is where concepts such as top-down marketing or bottoms-up marketing come into play because some tools (like Polykey Enterprise) require a whole organization to buy in for them to get value. These are often sold from the top down where a C-level executive such as a CTO or a CEO will sign the papers to get the tool agreed to and then it has to get implemented and pushed out to all the engineers who are actually going to use it on a day-to-day basis.
  • On the other hand, there are bottom-up tools. These are tools like GitHub for example where an individual developer can go in, sign up, and start using it today but there are also Team level accounts that can then be upsold to those developers. This kind of tool is a lot easier usually with lower friction to get people to try it. You often need to get things out there quickly to individuals but the hard part is figuring out how to roll this up into a big sale in order to scale.
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    For Polykey/Polykey Enterprise, we sort of have a hybrid approach where Polykey is a free open-source dev tool that pursues a bottom-up approach but we need to connect this with a top-down approach for Polykey Enterprise which is a SaaS model that would require further implementation and configuration for an organization's cyber-physical infrastructure environment.

Build Trust​

Fundamentally, building trust is the only way to do developer tool marketing. Developers use ad blockers at two or three times the typical rate of a typical person on the internet so what that means is paid ads hardly work, cold emails really hardly work when it comes to software developer marketing and sales outreach.

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So what's left? CONTENT!

Content​

This content can take many different forms and we have to be creative here. Forms of content include:

  • content writing
  • video production
  • events (in-person and online)
  • community content options:
    • curating a community
    • giving content out via an existing community
    • generating content from a community
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Fundamentally, with all these marketing channels, the goal is the same: Build Trust with the audience of software developers, engineers, and technical people and introduce them to your product organically in a way that's friendly and helpful to them

  • The friendliness and helpfulness is a key aspect that many larger companies struggle with which is an opportunity for smaller companies to capitalize on.

Traditional marketing says "here's my product, buy from me, buy from ME ME ME ME" but you've got to focus on the users.

  • What do they want?
  • What do they need?
  • And How can We Answer Their Requests and Their Challenges in a way that's fun, exciting, and helpful. - Hacker News is a GREAT place for this. But we Need to be on it! Meaning, as soon as a relevant thread is identified, a response should be posted on that thread within hours, keeping in mind the lessons above.

Consistency is key​

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Consistency over time beats all the hacks or trends over time.

Consideration: You'll see often on Twitter people talk about the latest hack that they use to grow their software as a service company or to get 1000 users. Those type of hacks can and do work but the hit rate from Karl Hughes' experience is something like 1/100 whereas more timed and true, consistency over time based-methods, tend to pay off at a higher rate. It's kind of like the difference between people who pick individual stocks vs ppl who invest in the S&P500. You can hit big if you invested in Nvidia or Tesla but can also lose big if you chose wrong, whereas S&P500 over a large enough time horizon is proven to work.

This goes back to what type of channels can we use to build trust with our audience with a developer audience and how do we do this consistently and repeatedly?

Youtube, Twitter, Linkedin, Hacker News, Reddit, etc.

How?

input schedule

Important Pitfalls to Avoid​

Often what people repeatedly do is that they'll overinvest in one channel early and try it at the expense of all other channels. What this leads to is burnout. For example, starting a blog and writing 100 blog posts and getting them all published as quickly as possible but you did not know enough about how to:

  • circulate the content
  • how to syndicate the content
  • how to build back-links to the content
  • how to make sure you're getting feedback from your audience

If this is not done properly, we will miss out on a lot of the opportunities. So it's better to go for approaches that are slow, steady, and build over time rather than shooting your shot all at once.

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this is very tough for venture-funded companies because you are under a tight timeline but this is where unique advantages would need to come into play. For example:

Founders & Engineering​

  • Ability to go out into the market and rally people around them at an event
  • Or go out there and discuss their product and what problem it solves on podcasts or on webinars or on free and open platforms like blogging platforms or on social media.
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    Founders who are willing to get involved in that early stage marketing often make a big difference. Whereas founders who outsource this task to dev rel or dev marketing will always be at a huge disadvantage when it comes to dev tools marketing.

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    This makes me believe that we should set up tasks and opportunities to market Roger as a founder in the AI and cybersecurity space which i believe would lend itself well to our overall goals and marketing strategy. Things such as LinkedIn Posts, Emails Newsletters for potential investors, comments on threads, etc. Additionally, I believe the engineering team at Matrix.AI should also be actively engaging in topics of relevant conversation on Hacker News, posting backlinks to our work.

Other content strategy considerations​

Related to consistency, you also want to think, if you have a long enough time horizon, how can we build up a library of content, that will continue to build in value over time?

  • These could be sample projects
  • They could be open source things that people can contribute to
  • It could be written content
  • video content
  • Great documentation

All these are forms of dev marketing that essentially allow a company to build up this annuity that pays off over time. They can be interlinked together, they can spawn other types of content.

Important Success Case​

  1. Other companies that have done this content strategy successfully will start with a blog post about a topic.
  2. That blog post then becomes a video they post on the internet.
  3. Then that becomes a conference talk that we can then circulate and pitch and pitch variations of at various conferences and meetups.
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Currently, we have actually built up a large knowledgebase of content and topics in Excalidraw related to Polykey and Polykey Enterprise. This is a perfect example of information that we can break apart and

  1. create a blog post on
  2. eventually create a video on
  3. discuss at events

This is a really great way to take a piece of core content and spin it out for lots and lots of value

Universal Tactics​

1. Events​

Live events, dev conferences, etc. We need to be part of events in our space if we're in dev tools marketing.

2. Written content​

The main thing you want to do is provide value while showing them how our product might actually solve some of their problems.

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Ultimately, you've got to build trust.

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One of the things we have to think about and do is create a content plan or a content strategy that revolves around building trust, being authentic, and helpful to developers.

3. Video content​

  • Video tends to skew a younger audience.
  • In other words, people 35,40, and up tend to go to written document first whereas younger audience goes to video content first. Many companies are focusing on both forms of content in order to try to capture all segments of the developer market because those 35 year old's are becoming middle managers now, they're becoming more influential in their organization.

4. Community-driven marketing​

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this one can be really tough and the payoff period can be very long but a lot of people try it and succeed.

Basically, building up an internal community of people who support the product. You see this with some companies because they did such a good job with curating a community that really cares and passionately advocates for their product. Hard to do, but huge payoff in the long run.

5. Social Media​

Social Media with devs is a little tricky.

They're on places like LinkedIn and Twitter but they're pretty averse to advertising so you've got to be very subtle in your approach.

Very few brands do social media for devs well. That said, social media is a great place to learn about how users:

  • like
  • interact
  • and use our product

So as a dev tool product, the number one thing you got to do on Social Media is LISTEN.

If you're just talking about your achievements and products, you won't gain any traction but if you're out there listening and engaging in the interesting conversations, places like Reddit and Hacker News, you'll be part of that whole movement of what people are talking about which will give you a great feel for things to talk on the blog.

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Roger often shares links in the social media channel for relevant Hacker News threads. We don't have an official PK username there, nor should we, but the challenge for me in responding to these threads is that I feel to lack the authority and expertise to be able to authentically engage in these topics of conversations. Whereas someone like Amy or Brian would have way more expertise, and quick and simple things to write about in connection to Polykey. I think this is a big miss and we ought to make sure that we are engaging in these conversations as they are low hanging fruit.