How to market to developers in a recession

Derric Gilling: Quick intro myself. I'm the CEO of Mosif, which is a leading user-centric, API analytics platform, and my focus is really around API platform strategy, KPI's growth, and I guess once the bars are open, I do love IPAs. You can usually find me bars like Zeitgeist and a few others here in San Francisco. But the whole premise of creating this talk is most of all our platforms and API platforms have some inherent ways for you to leverage growth during a recession. However, we do need to think about it from a holistic standpoint and what are the methodologies and processes they can put in place to really leverage growth, even though most folks are doing layoffs and marketing and sales and other areas where you may have less stuff that you're able to leverage. So with that said, why is it that getting developers are hard to adopt?

Many of us already have seen this over and over from a DevRel standpoint to a developer marketing standpoint. There's really no developer persona, right?

And on top of that, developers are sceptical. They don't enjoy doing integration work. They want to work on the next shiny object. They don't want to be plugging in this with that. Also, they just don't listen to sales emails, and I'm going to jump through each one of these little areas a little more before we talk about how do you reorganise your marketing plan to address these. So why is it that there's no developer persona? If I was a pizza shop selling to late night college students, it's relatively easy for me to set up a few Facebook ads. I can target 18 to 25 year olds.

They live in San Francisco or maybe they don't like late night pizza, but at least they like bars and a few other things.

When it comes to developers, there's not really one single set of criteria you can leverage. For example, if you type in software engineer, well, some software engineers are focused on web APIs, maybe JAMstack or something else, but you can also come across a lot engineers that are focused on embedded programming. They're familiar with XA six assembly or c plus plus. Similarly, you don't really see a single title that can actually distinguish whether someone's an engineer or not at a global company. Everyone takes their own path. Some folks have a software engineering or software science background. There's a lot of other folks that just came into software just from past experiences or they just really love it.

Lastly, and this is probably the most critical, is there are different roles that most engineering products and dev tools target. For example, you're creating a billing API. Well, you just don't want to target every single developer at every single company in a certain size. What you're really looking for is a billing guru who is in charge of everything around billing or subscription management, and those are not necessarily clear in the title of the developer, nor in even the company itself.

The other piece about selling to developers or marketing to developers is there are a lot of different stakeholders. In some ways, B2B or a business to developer is a combination of B2C where you can actually just have an ad and you click on it and buy a pair or choose, but there's also the complexity of enterprise sales. You have decision makers, you have legal review, security review. How do you make sure that you can target all these different areas to make sure they buy into your platform or product?

Any one of these folks can actually put a stop to a deal happening and moving forward. Recessions magnify this though, right? You already talked about legal and security reviews, but now you have the finance department having to say, saying, Hey, look, no new software can be adopted unless it's mission critical. What if your software is a little bit more of a hand wavy analytics tool where there is some value created, but do they actually look at it as mission critical?

The other big piece is a lot of new initiatives are focused on reducing costs, so this now means a new project might be placed on the back burner. Even though you get a single developer championing your product, you just can't really go to the next step with the management chain. Similarly, most employees are now thinking about taking less risk, right? They don't want to take on a new project when they're more concerned about layoffs and what does the existing state of the company look like higher approves that are needed and a few other things that are really amplifying objections and blockers when it comes to adopting a developer tool, and this is where I love self-service adoption.

This does not necessarily mean you give up on traditional sales activities lead generation that most API platforms, developer platforms are doing today, but it's putting additional emphasis on self-service adoption where you have to deal with a lot less number of stakeholders.

You have very little approval that's needed. A lot of times it's just a single person that you're chatting with. It's very transactional, very low risk to an employee because they don't have to approve your product to upper level management. They can just actually test it out maybe on a free tier or a very low level self-service plan. The last thing, which is something that most people don't think about is you're accumulating logos. You're still growing the number of accounts they're able to work with, even though each account might have a lower a CV, and this allows the companies that were able to accumulate this logo growth to actually explode once that budget freeze gets unlocked, you already built relationships with a huge variety of different companies in a huge variety of different industries. Rather than just focusing on that select five or 10 key accounts that you might've been focusing on before, but how do you make self-service adoption work?

This is where inbound marketing is probably one of the most critical things for anything that is developer focused or driven from a bottoms up a growth strategy. I mean, developers hate the buy now sign up try for free. I mean, it just doesn't work that they are sceptics when it comes to adopting new software and what you wanted to provide is a way for them to discover your platform naturally, right? Give them that magical, Hey, I discovered this from going through my LinkedIn or my Facebook post. Yes, it is marketing. You may be pushing it through true ad dollars, but they don't see it that way because what they saw instead was a valuable piece of content. They download it, understand the challenges that you're trying to face, and it may not necessarily even be selling about your product, but just from a high level introducing this new challenge that new companies are facing, but how do you actually make this work?

Well, the first piece is having a really strong cornerstone strategy around content, right?

Content drives everything, whether it's from paint campaigns to SEO to a lot of different other areas, and I'll talk about how to leverage this content. We can start with content from blogs to podcasts to webinars, a few other areas. Each one of these pieces should be SEO friendly, right? Even though you create a podcast, you create a webinar, make sure you transcribe that so that Google can search for it. Not everyone is able to attend your podcast at the right time and they want to do this more from a asynchronous standpoint, so I'm a firm believer in what we call asynchronous content and moving to online dev activities is really pushing this to the front.

However, this is where most content strategies and developer marketing strategies break down. They're not able to target specific areas of the developer funnel. You have folks who are just exposed to your brand that they're visiting your landing pages, maybe they're exploring your documentation areas.

What does it take to get integrated? Then you have folks that already signed up, right? They haven't integrated yet, but at least they're poking around further into maybe a self-service demo or taking a look at what does that integration look like. Finally, you have folks that got to the first Hello world. These are folks who tested your API through postman or other tools out there, but they still technically are not driving growth or revenue or something else through your platform, and that's really the key thing that you want to drive because it's great to test API through Postman, but if you're not driving true revenue to the business, after all, most developers are not buying things just for themselves. They're buying things for a company, and in order for that to be adopted at the company, there has to be some value created there, and I'll talk about how do you actually leverage content strategy, your paid marketing and other channels to align across these different stage funnels or funnel stages.

How do you do that? Well, at the first part, align your content at the pre-sign up stage, people are mostly just curious about top 10 guides to solve a certain problem.

What are the best practises for X? What are the top 10 things you should be thinking about for Y? Right? These are not salesy piece of content. You don't really need to focus that case studies or OI analysis at this point. You're really just trying to drive brand exposure, shown that you are a thought leader in this space. Once you get to the next stage, which is pre-integration at this point, maybe they signed up already, they dropped their email into a downloaded ebook, but they're still just trying to understand is this solution even make sense? Not necessarily your solution, but just getting a solution like yours, whether it's building it, picking your solution and so on, and that's where you just start honing in that content.

It's still non salesy getting started. Guys, for example, is a really great area to focus on this piece of the funnel. As developers continue to go to the next step in your funnel, you have folks that are in the test and sandbox stage. These are folks who maybe they experiment with a postman to make a few API calls, didn't build a full app yet, didn't really see the full value, but at least they're able to see this works. This is a technical product. This is not just a marketing landing page and that's all there is here. In this case, what you're trying to do is demonstrate additional use cases and features. How do you actually leverage this platform?

Why should they move to production and by moving to production, they're able to then leverage that data for these additional use cases. Finally, you have the last stage, which is production for a lot of developer platforms or a PF first products.

There's some type of free tier or maybe a free trial or something like that, and what you want to keep doing is demonstrating why choose you over something that could be homegrown or something that is open source in this case, case studies, comparison guides, ROI analysis can do great wonders to showing why go through for your platform, how do you drive awareness through distributing really, really great authentic content? The typical channels that people think about is social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn. The second piece is through SEO, serp AdWords, that type of stuff. A third piece that people forget about is usually focusing on some of your key partners that you have already been working with. Maybe be able an integration with can be a huge strategy for driving awareness and getting people to sign up for your product. For example, having a one click button to deploy to Heroku, having a integration in the GitHub marketplace.

Those are areas where you're actually reducing the time to get started with your platform. You're able to actually create more exposure in those marketplaces. I personally love GitHub and Heroku because they do a phenomenal job working with the partners and promoting those partners within their own ecosystem and communities. There are a few others. I can also look at, for example, AWS. The only tricky thing there is it's super, it's ridiculously crowded. Every SaaS tool in the valley, every SaaS tool out there wants to be listened to AWS just like Salesforce app exchange and a few others, so being very conscious on which partners you want to put effort into, that's something you should actually think about ahead of time before you just jump into building an integration with one of these folks.

Once you're able to generate that content, you want to make sure you can capture leads.

In fact, because of the decrease in ad budget, you actually see a lot of LinkedIn ads and Facebook ads far cheaper than they were just a couple months ago. Most consumer brands are actually dropping their ad budgets considerably. It's the easiest thing to drop before turning to layoffs and other things, so you should actually take that to your advantage, right? Instead of just promoting random content pieces without any way to capture leads or value, think about things like gated content and this case someone has to drop in their email or a phone number or something else. I prefer email because most developers don't want to be called up in the middle of the night. Why should you spend 15 minutes talking to me instead? Just drop in their email, make it asynchronous for them and then just continue to feed them additional content why your solution makes sense for them, and this goes to the next piece.

That content needs to be extremely high quality.

Don't just keep pushing out top 10 lists every three days because you may have very high click rate, you may have very high number of page views, but generally those are vanity metrics. What you're really trying to do is drive people to download the content, explore it, then move to the next steps, whether that is making their first API call integrating with your platform and usually the high quality content is able to focus on that the most. Similarly, make sure you have a dedicated landing page. Your ads that you're creating in let's say Facebook or AdWords, you actually just drop them to that landing page that it has a one-on-one correspondence to what they're looking for when they're searching to what you're providing on the landing page itself. The other big piece is instrumenting with analytics, which content pieces are doing the most in terms of driving folks to integrate with your platform and follow up. This is the one piece that people forget just because they download that piece of content, have a drip sequence that is other piece of content that's relevant to what they're looking for.

Alright? Now we talk quite a bit around paid ads and that type of stuff, but what do you do next?

What happens after they sign up? Make sure you're able to nudge them and provide 'em the guidance for what they need, right? You're going to have to split your signups into different segments. Folks who didn't integrate your API at all, never sent an API call to another group which may have sent a few API calls, maybe they've made a few different transactions but not fully got value out their platform. Then you have the last bucket, right? These are the folks who have been sending tonnes of API calls. Maybe they're ready for upsell discussion, maybe they're ready to convert from a free to a paid plan. In this case, that's where case studies and those type of things work.

In this case, you can see here in I'm setting up a advance behavioural email sequence folks who they're creating the last seven days, but they made zero API transactions to my slash purchase endpoint and this is up to you to decide what is truly a value getting out of your platform, right?

What is that time to value? You might have heard terms like time to first how the world time to first API call, but it doesn't necessarily mean any eight call. It should mean something that is specific to what you provide. If you're Twilio, maybe it's sending your first SMS message. If you're Stripe, it may mean sending your first payment transaction and then adjusting that drip sequence after someone signs up based off of what they did and here's a couple examples if they haven't integrated yet, well, why focus on case studies and additional use cases with their platform if they haven't even got to the first step and that's where you want to hone in into your single value prop. That is really the key focus for your platform. Focusing on stuff like integration documentation, are they having struggle maybe offering help?

Get them on the phone to say, is it just because they're missing an integration?

Were they not able to understand your documentation and by getting them on the phone, you're just able to understand where to optimise on that piece. Once they are able to integrate, then they move into what I call the test slash sandbox stage. These are the folks kicking the tyres. Maybe they weren't able to fold to a full production rollout, but that may not be up to them. That might be up to VP engineering or someone hired saying, Hey, we haven't done our full security and performance analysis yet, so why don't we just stay focused on additional use cases? What can we provide not to you, but also to your VP of engineering and other engineering leaders demonstrating that value, arming your what is almost your champion but not quite yet with additional material for them to move to the next step. Finally, after they're able to move to the next step, which is what I call the production stage, they're sending thousands of transactions per day.

They're ready for discussion on should we use this platform or should we build it ourselves, and this is where you're focusing more at the leadership level, the VP engineering level rather than just the individual developer themselves. Arm down with the right resources around case studies with existing customers of yours, metrics, RI analysis so they can share to their leadership.

Once you're able to have this set up, you can then start mapping your funnel. What happens after that sign up? In this case, I set up three different stages. The first one is, Hey, they sign up for to access my developer portal and generate an API key. If you don't have that, I highly recommend having some type of way to attribute some visiting or landing page to actually signing up and generating an API key. Once that's created, I focus on the next two steps, which is they sent the first API transaction, which is a payment in this case.

Then I move on to the second step, which is they sent over a hundred payment transactions, a hundred payment transactions for this particular product is a threshold where they just didn't send it through postman, but now they have some type of app functioning and we have to talk about why move forward with this app rather than build it ourselves and what should you track in this developer funnel, which is what we call it conversion rate and also time to next step and there's usually two things you're tracking.

The first is time to first how the world which go back to this funnel. Here is a time from first step to second step, but then there's another conversion rate, which is time to value or some folks call it time to working app or time to paid app. That's where the company is actually receiving value because they have external users maybe are able to generate revenue through this app that they are able to release maybe still in data, but they're expected to roll this out to their entire user audience or customer audience. The other piece of course is conversion rate and this allows you to go back to where should you focus more effort on in terms of content, in terms of optimising those drip sequences. Is it because you don't have enough at the high level top of the funnel content like top 10 guides or is it because you're not really showing the reasons why to use your platform versus just build it yourselves and in the developer space, developer platform space, a lot of times we do run into those objections, Hey, I can just build it myself in a couple of days, even though there's maybe additional benefits around maintenance or connectors with other platforms and so on that you need to demonstrate.

This is the other piece which is aligned to what I was talking about earlier with content. Your paid ad strategy should be aligned to each one of these pieces.

Where is a developer in your funnel? If it's a brand new person and you're just doing peer outreach, pushing your product on stuff like Facebook or AdWords and whatnot, this is where you talk about how to guide stuff that is almost clickbait like, but still should be quite authentic. Spend some time on some really, really good articles that can drive crazy amounts of page views rather than just trying to crank out three pieces of content a day that just doesn't work when it comes to developers, and as you move through these pieces in your funnel, that's where you can start thinking about retargeting In these cases, these are folks that you already brought into your CRM or whatever place that you're tracking relationships with your developers in the community and then resurfacing stuff like case studies or how to leverage specific features once they're able to generate their first few a calls. What this means is you have to have really, really good instrumentation to know which stage a developer is in. Are they in the very initial discovery phase or are they championing your product to other folks? And that's where you can arm those developers with very different content pieces.

The last piece I'd like to talk about when it comes to marketing to developers is this is still enterprise sales. Even though there is a lot of this notion that we are more like B2C, you can sign up by yourself, you just can plop down a credit card.

It is really easy to get started, but there still is a lot of other decision makers, right? Once you do have that person that signs up with your product and you got their email or you have the company that they work at, make sure you have other campaigns, and this is really aligned to account-based marketing where you can go after the VP engineering with their challenges that are keeping it up at night. How do business teams, how are they able to get benefits from this platform? Also, it's because they get better insights into their customer experience.

Are they able to accelerate sales because now they have more data points they can look at and optimise who to reach out to? How do we actually target leadership? Their needs may be very different than engineering manager or individual senior engineer, right? Leadership might be more focused on a cost reduction or a ways to reduce risk at the business, especially if it's a more traditional business.

They don't care as much about the shiny developer object. What they care about is reducing risk and having content that can focus towards those roles also is important, which is why during your onboarding flow you should actually ask those roles immediately. What is your main goal for using this developer platform? Is it for debugging? Is it for reducing? Having a better search experience such as Algolia is because I need to roll out payments, for example, using Stripe or something else.

Once you're able to do that, then you can dig really deep into your funnel, which campaigns you're doing the best, which campaigns you're doing the worst, and in this funnel you can see I'm not just tracking page views, right? Page views don't really tell me much because I can go grab million page views who are not even necessarily developers who don't even align with the problem that I'm solving.

Developers are really after one thing and one thing only. They need to solve a problem where it's a problem for themselves or problem for the company or the project that they're working on. In this case I'm seeing which campaigns, is it Facebook, Reddit, drip campaigns or something else? Which ones drive the most? Folks who get to the first ape call and how long does it take? In this case, you can see Reddit is actually doing quite well. We found Reddit to do well for ourselves just because we can go out various specific Reddit groups. It's a great and active developer community that allows them to also share their experiences and you can actually follow up with them.

In this case, Reddit is actually driving a convers rate of 42%, which is pretty good for developer platform to go from signup to first API call or first hello world on top of that only takes seven hours. Getting them to see that initial value is most important for any developer platform.

That's all I have. This is actually a relatively short conversation, but I wanted to keep it open for discussion for folks.

Tamao Nakahara: Thank you. Thanks so much and I apologise we wanted to be on time so we could say bye to Kevin. Kevin had to leave a little bit early, but thanks to Salesforce for sponsoring and thanks to Kevin who co MCed for today, so thank you Derek for your talk. We'll go into q and a, so reminder to everybody, I'll be monitoring the Slack channel if you have any questions for Derek, and I have plenty of questions for you, so I'd love to follow up.

So thanks so much for a really clear and clearly outlined talk. I thought it was very helpful to have a lot of good reminders and I'll get right to, I guess one of my key questions is really coming from what I've been doing this for a while, but with every different company and such, I kind of revisit and currently my current revision and grappling is around the gated content, sort of the traditional marketing and you outline that.

So I wanted to kind of dig into a little bit and get your guidance because at the beginning you said it's very not a developer way of engaging when you have that immediate signup or you got to fill in something and yet gated content, if it's not shared at the right time in the funnel that you're sharing can feel like that, and for some people, regardless of whether it may be in the right time of the funnel will still feel like that. And so currently I am personally grappling on that user experience, the developer experience and get that desire for metrics and leads. Is there potentially better ways that you can capture the information to follow up with a developer that isn't this gated content experience? You kind of cover all these different ones and I love how you talk about this impression of an authentic discovery, even though you are doing all these things for them to discover, right, and yet you want to give them the impression that they organically discovered it versus the fact that they probably clicked on something because you made it. So what are ways that we can perhaps get to the next stage of developer relations and outreach where we can reach some of those metrics and yet not bring down the developer experience?

Derric Gilling: Sure, definitely, and I think that's definitely a great question when it comes to thinking about both from a developer marketing standpoint, but what happens after from a DevRel standpoint, I'm not the firm believer that everything needs to be gated.

A lot of times this works well just in terms of ads and you need to have a mix. That mix allows you to drive different objectives. The gated content is there to drive lead generation, and that gated content also may be going after a certain audience, for example, at the VP engineering level, the engineering leader level, because for them they, they're looking for deep case studies or deep thought leadership content on how to move their business forward and meet the goals that they have, and they're always tracked against these goals, whether it's quarterly or weekly or monthly or whatnot, but you still need ungated content too.

Without it, your SEO is going to hurt. Most folks just love just searching for a particular problem, how to do something better and just really be conscious on making it educational. And when it comes to developer marketing and dev route, it's really just about having the educational component to it, whether it's around the overall space. Some other content might be how to use your platform better, highlighting different use cases that a cool customer might've built with your platform, and that also allows you build a better report with your partners, so don't feel like gated content is the only option. The second piece to that is make sure it's authentic.

If you start selling your platform in that gated content or on gated content, it just looks bad. You really want to just say, Hey, I'm running this article. If I'm just a random person that just feels like I am passionate about this space, you write about it, distribute it, but just make sure you can at least capture some leads, especially for those higher value ads on say LinkedIn or something like that.

After that, having a very low touch but still able to reach out to folks who did sign up or download that content is important. And this is where a lot of teams drop the ball, right? They're collecting these leads, they're going into some type of HubSpot or other CRM, but then no one's really acting on them and having either a directly manual personalised content saying, Hey, you download this content, happy to share this other pieces of content that also might be useful from looking at your company, that type of stuff, or setting up more in an automated way, and this is where I love the concept of behavioural emails because with behavioural emails, you can break stuff down based off of who they are, what type of GitHub projects they're following, what are their interesting things they like to follow to also, how did they engage with the product? Is this the first piece of content that they had downloaded? Have they signed up?

Have they made any API calls, which SDK are they using? That way that content can be really, really focused on their problem rather than just raw, Hey, I thought you should just know about this content because developers, they see through the bullshit, but the content is relevant for them. Hey, it looks like you're trying to set up this AEG gateway and trying to hook it with some billing system. I thought this might be relevant for you.

Tamao Nakahara: Sorry. Okay, I was looking at some of the questions, so yeah, so follow up would be, I guess a little bit, are there ways beyond email, are there ways to measure engaging through Slack or GitHub or Discord that can keep that authentic quality? And in fact, you may get their contact information or you have an active discussion with them in that way, but it's a different experience from email that perhaps, or have you looked into ways that there could be more success by including those methods as well? If some people nowadays don't even check email too or they put fake emails, right?

Derric Gilling: Yeah, definitely, and we found actually Twitter to do quite well for us both following up on a content piece that we posted to even direct messages when someone has a few further questions on that content piece. Depending on the platforms that you're distributing this content on, whether it's like a D Zone or other area, you can just reply to contents, make sure you have some type of forum, whether it's discourse or discuss or something like that that you can leverage sharing that content and following up with 'em. You don't necessarily have to have getting the email of the person as your primary goal. All you're trying to do is engage with them and keep talking, keep talking about this problem, don't force 'em to keep talking about your solution,

Tamao Nakahara: And then I really appreciate how you really kept coming back to the value. You really want them to have constant sense of value from the content that they receive, but also the value from the product. And that's where think sometimes there can be a disconnect between these names like Dev marketing and Devra and all that, when really the end goal, right, sometimes can get lost. The end goal is that they get value from the product and they understand that they want to pay for it. And so for you, is that in clear stages or do you have some advice on, like you said, it's not just about page views.

Do you have some advice to make sure that the teams are working together, whatever hats the rating, dev, marketing dev route, whatever, what guidance do you have to get to make sure that don't forget the end goal of the value of the product experience?

Derric Gilling: Yeah, definitely, and this were what I call the developer marketing funnel, or I guess developer funnel in general, which encompasses both the high level initiatives that marketing is driving in terms of brand exposure and driving signups, but also going deeper into the product, which in many cases for a developer platform is the API itself and coming up with what do you consider the key value that someone got if someone just made a single transaction to your API that's useful. That's definitely a lot more useful than just signing up, but then maybe they're not able to see the full value in terms of analytics or how, let's pick on Algolia. Issuing a single search query through Algolia API is great. You're able to see how fast it is, but building a full app and product on top of a golias platform, that's truly when you see the most value.

One ways to do that is a segment based off of product usage, so in this chart here, I build up a funnel. The first step is sign up, but then after that I have first payment and they only completed it one time in the last, you can say last week or last whatnot. But then the third one is what I call time to value rather than just time to hella world.

In this case, they made over a hundred searches, maybe they have both index a hundred items and did a hundred searches. That to me implies that they built at least some type of test apparatus or product to see how does Algolia work in a final user experience rather than just using postman. Tracking those conversion steps at each point is really helpful and also allows you to then drill down into where does stuff fall off?

If you're able to get people to sign up and you're able to get people to make their first a call, then maybe your documentation and your content that you have today is fine. People are struggling on, okay, now how do you actually build a full app from this and creating example apps on GitHub example, use cases for your product can go a long ways for this because now they can use some that's a little bit more boilerplate. The other piece is having integrations like Immense with Heroku and other platforms where they don't have to do all this SDK integration of themselves can go a long ways for that last step. And a lot of times what we've seen just in terms of tracking this developer funnel is that last step is not dependent on the developer themselves. They are waiting for the project priorities to change.

They're waiting for security and performance review. They're debating between building it in house versus using your platform and then arming your developer, which is almost a champion at this point. Just like from a sales standpoint, you always have a champion that you want to arm with content on. Why is it cheaper, why is it better to use your platform? This is a similar case study from a similar industry that you are in on how they are able to use their platform and get these particular results. Developers still love looking into the metrics and the results and ROI analysis and it's easy to.