developer marketing newslepear

See more dev tool video examples ->

2. Great onboarding email drafts

On a special episode of Code to Market Podcast, Hank shared another piece of gold (that podcast is awesome btw, listened to every episode so far) → onboarding email drafts that you can copy paste and use right away.

See the episode

Sequence of 3 emails with things to fill out. A fantastic starting point that is surprisingly hard to beat.

Anyhow, Hank shared those drafts here, so do check them out yourself (and listen to the pod!!!) → see email drafts.

2. Neon YouTube shorts ad from Primeagen and Teej

Finally my YouTube shorts scrolling paid off as I found a dev tool ad with 10k upvotes and this as the first comment:

See comments on YouTube

No hardcore production just creativity, understanding of your audience and pure old school fun and joy. I start to internalize that “being funny on the internet” is probably one of the moats.

Anyhow Primeagen and Teej created this beauty full of DB puns, and a borderline cringy plot twist. Finished it with a solid and super clear CTA. Watch this:

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"You helped us land messaging that clearly states the problem and solution in the words our champions actually use. The homepage is super crisp now."
Chinar Movsisyan, Founder, Feedback Intelligence

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2500+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

🍐#141: How to get your engineers to blog, executive dinners, and a benchmarking ad campaign from ClickHouse

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 15:16:10 +0000

Hey,

Bittersweet pearenting 🍐 lesson. Spent as much time as you can with your kids. They will leave you for the first snowboarding instructor they meet.

This week on the agenda:

How to get your engineers to blog (new podcast episode)
Ideas for running “executive dinners” from Recall.ai
Benchmarking ad campaign from ClickHouse
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 8min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

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Developer marketing insights

1. How to get your engineers to blog (new podcast episode)

This time I had an awesome chat with Ivan Brezak Brkan (IBB) about building programs that get engineers to write at scale. He build that with shiftmag.dev at Infobip.

Takeaways/themes:

“Begging” + bonuses don’t get engineers to write: Most engineers won’t write for money. They write when you give them time + permission + support (peer feedback + real editorial help).
Run writing like a sprint, not a side quest: Timebox it. 2-day workshops produce ~80% drafts; 3-day in-person workshops got 30 people to finish ~90% of a handbook. Since this is not their “main job” if you make it optional, “finish when you finish” type of a thing it won’t happen.
The sync workshop loop is the product: Individual ideation → peer feedback → editorial feedback → outline → draft. The key is fast feedback and an editor who’s ruthless about structure (usually: last paragraph becomes the first).
Use a “Venn diagram” filter for topics: Great content sits at the overlap of what the engineer cares about, what the audience cares about, and what the company cares about.
Create spiky content, not safe content: Not necessarily “controversial for clicks,” but content that makes it possible for devs to disagree, extend, comment. Example: “It’s OK if your code is just good enough” → internal pushback → they published a rebuttal. Comes out more authentic and better that way. Plus there is a reason for external readers to engage (as you semi-tested it internally).

As always way more juicy bits in the podcast.

Listen/watch to this or previous episode on:

2. Ideas for running “executive dinners” from Recall.ai

I like how Amanda shares great actionable stuff from their journey. Highly recommended follow. This time she shared their learnings on running executive dinners.

Three comments:

Give them reason to come: 100x right. And that reason depends on the competing events too. Sometimes the venue/experience may be enough. Sometimes you may need speakers, or other attendees from top AI labs. Whatever it is → give people a clear reason to attend.
Conversation design: this has been the biggest mistake we’ve made a couple times and a biggest learning. Design experiences so it is easy to talk to. Make sure that people sit in tuples of prospect/customer/your company person. If you don’t do that people will batch in ways you don’t want.
Follow up: love this, never tried it but love this so much. Intro customer/prospect with you as an obvious intermediary/help. Brilliant. You add even more value as a vendor too. It is always awkward to reach out after, especially when you didn’t talk to someone you wanted to (but were seated far away or smth). So good.

3. Benchmarking ad from ClickHouse

Another great ad campaign from ClickHouse I saw on X. Btw I love this move towards content promotion vs pure ads that I see there. Makes so much sense and ClickHouse does it in a way I wish more people did.

See on X

What I like about the creative:

Clear info as to what it is that you are selling (a piece of content comparing warehouses).
Clear info that you win → no point hiding imho. Better to come out clear right away
Diagram/matrix visualization that communicates parts of the analysis and supports the result.

And then what is super crucial the blog post that it links to delivers on the promise. It really does.

First viewport after landing is soo good imho. And this is perhaps the most important moment, you need to get me to commit time to go through. Explain why it is worth it.

See original

They start with this TLDR which could have just been an intro but showcasing it as TLDR makes it more relatable, more devy.
They give you that TOC shows what you’ll get
They open a curiosity gap in a very straightforward way in that “How to compare…” block and state clearly what is the main question they will answer.
They let you interact with this page easily in AI engines with “copy page”

Then they show you various interactive comparisons like this one that show you exactly what they checked, let you play with it in a way you’d want to anyway.

Then they drive the cost and speed story with more visuals:

They close by explaining the benchmark methodology. It is a key part when talking to engineers. But you can still start with conclusions and then show supportive evidence (BLUF framework). I like it way more than starting with the premise but then give you the behind the scenes and DIY (GitHub Repo). Way to go.

Way to go ClickHouse team. Bravo.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"Jakub immediately got to the heart of our concerns.
Especially the unique challenges of crafting a marketing and content strategy for a developer audience."
David Burton, Head of Content, Apify

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2500+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

See more dev tool billboard examples ->

🍐#140 What Hacker News says about LinkedIn, and a nerdy riddle billboard idea

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 15:16:12 +0000

Hey,

Question. Why did nobody tell me that two kids are way harder than one? I really need to up my diapear game 🍐.

This week on the agenda:

What Hacker News crowd says about LinkedIn
Nerdy riddle billboard idea from Listen Labs
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

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Developer marketing insights

1. Nerdy riddle billboard idea from Listen Labs

Check this out.

See on LinkedIn

So they ran this billboard creative with no logo, no value prop, no explanation. And they supposedly got 10k submissions.

Devs love riddles. Curiosity, proving that you can solve something, proving that someone is wrong is hard to resist. Especially for devs.

They will figure out what it is and go to the website that you put out there. And they will be delighted to see that it was another riddle/task.

Listen Labs played into those beautifully with this campaign.

Another billboard of similar style that plays into curiosity + “let me prove you wrong” vibe is this one.

See on LinkedIn

The nerdy idea here is that “exa” (the search api startup) is a prefix for 10¹⁸ and they compete with Google, and gogol is a prefix for 100¹⁰⁰ . And they are saying they are better. Cool ;)

Some people get it, most people don’t. But they definitely got people fired up and engaged with this which is half the battle in marketing.

2. What Hacker News crowd says about LinkedIn

Had to go over this thread when I saw it:

See on HackerNews

Takeaways are:

Can be great depending on a niche (but can also be horrible).
Curate your feed and it will respect your preferences.
Many devs hate it and/but mostly think about it from the recruitment perspective.

A few of my favorite comments.

I think it's more just a bizarre platform for us to gawk at. I'm not really certain why LinkedIn even has social features available
munk-a

I agree with a lot of the sentiment here about the actual app itself but I'm surprised that people aren't seeing LinkedIn for what it is, a tool.
If you're a founder, LinkedIn is a great place to find talent & drive inbound sales, at minimum. If you're not using it, I bet your competition is.
Sure, the feed is terrible but look at it purely as a talent & sales pipeline. There isn't anything else like it out there.sieep

I've benefited a lot from my specialist area (energy industry) in which consultants and analysts will post genuinely informative and thought-provoking articles.
…
But to achieve any usefulness from the platform I have to aggressively prune, by blocking every contact who ever posts something I don't find interesting.
…
So long as you don't mind doing the work, I find LinkedIn's algorithm to be the best of the main platforms at respecting my choices of who I want to hear from
iamthemonster

Reminds me of a blog post I once read from a manager writing about all the qualities of being a good manager. I read it nodding along that they all seemed like good traits.
Then in the comment section there was a post from someone saying something like "You were my manager at one point and honestly you were one of the worst managers I've had in my career. I didn't see many of these behaviours from you".
The author responded with something like "I don't disagree. There's sometimes a gap between knowing and doing"
mattm

>I really feel bad for folks still in early career, nowadays. I am grateful to be retired.
I wonder if there’s an opportunity for a cohort of “retired” people to actually deliver things and eschew the performative bullshit. There’s presumably a lot of experience and skill that can be leveraged. I’d happily partake despite having nowhere near the right age for that, my feeling is the same and I’m not even 30 (hell, I’d learn a lot in such an environment).
Nextgrid

In my niche, bioinformatics, linkedin has become somewhat of a force ever since many people left Twitter/X during the 'rebranding'? It's quite weird.
They're mostly posts announcing new packages etc. but there seems to be more bioinformatics-y activity than, say, mastodon or bluesky. The posts definitely have a different tone than what OP decries.
a_bonobo

LinkedIn is mostly people trying to impress folks that aren’t spending their time on LinkedIn. As such it just becomes an echo chamber of self-promotion and grifters while 99% of folks that are legit top tier in their field aren’t wasting any time there.
cmiles8

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"You helped us land messaging that clearly states the problem and solution in the words our champions actually use. The homepage is super crisp now."
Chinar Movsisyan, Founder, Feedback Intelligence

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2500+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

🍐#139: A life learning and my favorite dev marketing insights from 2025

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 15:16:09 +0000

Hey,

Special week, special post.

Went through all the newsletters from 2025 and picked out my favorite 31 insights/resources I shared.

Also, I promised a life learning, right? Here it comes:

Don't take life too seriously, nobody ever makes it out alive anyway.

And a marketing learning connected to that:

The biggest marketing campaign risk is not a flop but indifference. Proceed accordingly.

It felt very very true in 2025 and I expect it to be even more of a case next year.

Oh and before I forget, thank you so much for staying with me in 2025 and best of luck marketing to devs in 2026!

Total pearusing time: 5min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

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31 Developer marketing insights from 2025

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"Jakub immediately got to the heart of our concerns.
Especially the unique challenges of crafting a marketing and content strategy for a developer audience."
David Burton, Head of Content, Apify

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2500+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

https://modal.com/pricing

🍐#138: Learnings on growth from Modal's CEO and Kilo Code Reddit ads

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 15:16:11 +0000

Hey,

People talk a ton about this 9-9-6 culture in SF and now as a pearent 🍐 of two kiddos it feels like I have my own 9-9-6 -> 9 cups of coffee before lunch, 9 minutes of uninterrupted sleep a night, and 6 diaper changes a day. The worst part is I don’t hate it one bit (yet 😉).

This week on the agenda:

Kilo Code Reddit ads and Scientific Advertising
Learnings on growth from Modal Labs CEO
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 8min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

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But they read TLDR. 6 million tech professionals subscribe to these daily newsletters because they actually want them. You can sponsor any of their 12 newsletters (AI, DevOps, Product, Marketing) and reach devs who are actually reading.

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Developer marketing insights

1. Learnings on growth from Modal Labs CEO

There are some people I read/listen to where I just find myself nodding my head (almost) all the time. Erik Bernhardsson from Modal is one of them.

Here is what I took from this interview:

Onboarding (at least) to the aha moment shoule be a core product experience, not “growth” or “marketing”.

Modal treats “Hello, Cloud” as the aha moment: pip install, no config, run a Python function in the cloud in seconds really. They optimized the heck out of that with everything from the website to docs to playgrounds to make this feel magical.

That gives devs that feeling of “local, but cloud” that is incredible powerful and important to people -> safety, control but power and scalability that feels delightful. And this is their key value prop as far as I understand.

This has to come from the top, company wide. A key product experience not and cannot be bolted on by growth/marketing to feel this good. You need to care about it a ton. And they do.

How to create and audit your core developer journey

Jul 21, 2024 - Actionable tips and templates for creating a core developer journey. Focused on early-stage dev tool startups.

www.markepear.dev/blog/developer-journey

See fullscreen with comments on dmp

Docs are example first, action first.

This one is an extension of the last point → they want people to get to the aha moment of running something in the cloud. They want people to take action.

And they care about them being able to easily do so with a ton of examples, main CTA being a playground on the docs homepage etc. Also, they think beyond that aha moment to the actual activation moment where somebody actually runs their code on Modal, not just hello world.

Put love into error messages

They use errors to nudge you into the right swimlane. Instead of doing classic “vomit” stack traces you get something that helps explaining what to do next etc.

I remember when we did that at Neptune a few years back and made those error messages colored, with links to docs, and explanations written for users (not our devs) this pushed the activation rates by a ton.

Let bottoms-up do the heavy lifting (first).

They delayed sales/marketing until the product was great, had solid traction behind it etc. Then added content, community, solutions engineers, and (only now) an AE.

I liked how Adam Gross put it with the 1-2-3 framework and the idea that if you start with great PLG product you can (and should) put sales on top of it. But if you start top-down sales-led it is very hard to build a delightful product.

This resource:

Building Self-Serve Go-to-Market with Adam Gross | Heavybit

Adam Gross shares his framework for self-serve go-to-market strategy, and how developer and enterprise startups can gain early adoption, land, and expand.

www.heavybit.com/library/video/self-serve-go-to-market

And his 1-2-3 framework I also explore in my “How to sell to developers” article:

Benchmark what devs actually feel.

Modal markets concrete latency outcomes (sub-second cold starts for small containers; ~8–10s for 5GB models like SD, aiming for “a couple seconds”). They don’t just say “fast.” They back it up with benchmarks/numbers and drive that message. I like that.

Sell serverless economics.

For me price is part of the core experience too. Or actually the pricing model. And the usage-based is a great fit for many dev tools or infra.

But they really take that “lets delight devs” farther and really focus on driving that message of you pay for what you use not wasting $ on idle resources. Erik talks about them saying: “100% utilization billing,” “scale-to-zero,” and “instant spikes to 100+ GPUs” vs just “efficient” or some useless word like that.

Position between commodity infra and model APIs.

This one is very interesting for me as a positioning geek. Their narrative is something like raw GPUs are cheap but painful, model APIs are easy but you are locked-in with limited control. Modal runs arbitrary code with great developer experience and serverless economics.

I love something about this differentiation. Subtle but powerful at the dev level imho.

Overall this pod was great, highly recommended. Also this interview reminded me of the first time I heard about Erik and Modal -> Scaling DevTools:

Erik Bernhardsson from Modal Labs

Scaling DevTools · Episode

open.spotify.com/episode/2wnUoh4kdL461wHHydGqNV?si=18d38f9726c04ad5

2. Kilo Code Reddit ads and Scientific Advertising

As I scroll Reddit way more than I should (ok but I need r/parenting and r/whatcouldgowrong right?) I see lots of ads. Most of them feel invisible, completely off or corporate.

But some are not. Meme ads are one way of doing it as I shared here an here. However, it is always better if you can deliver your message while putting something that memorable, unique only to your brand.

Kilo Code Reddit ads do that.

See on Reddit

They run those creatives that are super text heavy, white background, low on design. But this makes them so different than any other ads that are running right now. It makes them look like docs. And judging from the amount of upvotes people don’t hate them.

But more importantly this creative has a benefit of letting you communicate more to people who are interested. Yes, for most people this will not be interesting but so is any ad really. But for those who want to solve the problem of “AI memory loss” you get a few paragraphs of room for ad copy. A huge win.

Funny enough as I’ve been reading Scientific Advertising a book written in 1923 and many of the things described there seem to still work today. A few ideas from that book that map nicely to this ad:

Most people will not care about your ad whatever you do. The role of the headline is to filter those who do.
If I want to solve the problem that you solve there is almost no ad that will be too long. Copy heavy ads consistently outperformed copy-light ads every time (unless you are selling clothes)
Tell the whole story in one ad. You may not get a chance to catch people’s attention for the second time.

And there is more similarities, just these three came to mind. For a book that is over 100 years old it holds water surprisingly well. Or maybe because of that and survivorship bias? Anyway, a solid read.

Anyhow, kudos to Kilo Code for awesome ads (check out their Reddit profile for more of this style).

See more dev tool Reddit marketing examples ->

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"You helped us land messaging that clearly states the problem and solution in the words our champions actually use. The homepage is super crisp now."
Chinar Movsisyan, Founder, Feedback Intelligence

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2400+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Book a call to see if we can help.

🍐#137: Learnings from Clerk’s experiment, stickers inspiration library, and an interview tip for founders

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 15:16:11 +0000

Hey,

Some may say this was a pretty big week:

my second kiddo was born, on the very same day when…
we announced that Neptune is getting acquired by OpenAI (“subject to closing conditions”),
and I officially finished decluttering our kitchen.

Poetic. Almost as if it was written somewhere that some journeys end when others begin (I will miss you 12 weird knifes I never used).

As pear 🍐 what comes next for me -> for now, I’ll focus on making sure that all those closing conditions are subjected properly ;) … and try to get some sleep whenever I can.

This week on the agenda:

Clerk’s experiment with turning off newsletter partnerships
Developer stickers inspiration library
User research tip for founders
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 8min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

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Developer marketing insights

1. Clerk’s experiment with turning off newsletter partnerships

So this is a fantastic story and a reminder that some activities may have significant incremental impact even if they are not attributable.

Not much to add to this so just read Alex’s post.

See on LinkedIn

I had a similar experience one time when I looked at our Twitter ads a couple years back. I saw that they didn’t drive much activated signups. Being data driven as I was, I pushed to turn off those ads. To my surprise signups, direct traffic, and google search dropped by a solid %.

So, being data driven as I was ;), figured lets run a geo lift test and we ran Twitter ads for some geo’s and didn’t for others. The results clearly showed a lift for geo’s where we ran ads.

The moral of the story is that you want incrementality not attribution. And that there is truth in the famous marketing saying “50% of marketing budget is wasted, you just never know which half”.

After all you'd much rather “waste” 50% while driving ROI from the other 50% (albeit unknown one) than not waste anything but drive poor results.

Itamar Ben Yair summarized it perfectly in our podcast interview:

“CMO’s are never fired because they couldn’t attribute spent. They get fired because they don’t drive pipeline results”

Here is that interview if you are interested (lots of gems on attribution/incrementality):

Also, my two articles on the subject:

How to prove ROI of developer marketing?

A quick explanation of how I like to think about it and what to answer when asked by your CEO.

www.markepear.dev/blog/how-to-prove-roi-of-developer-marketing

Developer marketing metrics and attribution (practitioners guide)

As I am running marketing for a dev tool startup, thinking/reporting/using metrics is crucial to making it work. This is my practitioner's guide to developer marketing metrics and KPIs.

www.markepear.dev/blog/developer-marketing-metrics

2. Developer stickers inspiration library

You probably remember that last week I shared a conference sponsorship guide where the author said that there are only two types of swag he does: stickers and educational materials.

Figured it would be cool to share this sticker inspiration library:

https://stickertop.art/main/

I came across this one on Hacker News.

See on HackerNews

Got to say that thread had a few interesting discussions too. Here are three useful comments that are sort of obvious but when people design stickers (or decide not to) they forget about them:

I used to put stickers on my desktop PC and laptop when I was in my early 20s. Then I realised my laptop was kinda free advertising for whatever companies product I had stuck on the back.
SparkBomb

The stickers reflect things I like or find amusing; maybe they'll get a smirk or a chuckle from someone else.
tlavoie

Anthropologists of the future will be able to trace my beliefs, humor, and tech stack from my laptop lid alone.
imwillofficial

"“Hi I’m Kimberly, can I tell you about my startup” lands way worse than “Hi I’m Kimberly, would you like a dinosaur sticker""
gcr

See more dev tool swag examples ->

3. User research tip for founders

This needs an intro so pls bear with me. But there is a great learning for dev tool founders here, I promise ;)

Listened to a podcast recently where a scientist spoke with a conspiracy theorist (sort of). And while it was obvious (as I know the host) what he thought about the matter it was fascinating to see him talk to the guest for 2 hours, learning a ton about their position.

The main (and fascinating) learning was that the host, instead of explaining why the guest was wrong, listened, asked follow-ups, presented thought experiments to get even more insights. Through that he understood/learned a ton about the guests worldview and beliefs. A ton.

I know how hard it is to do as you hear someone and you just know they are wrong and this is how I prove it. But then you don’t learn anything new. People get defensive, aggressive, dismissive, talk over each other etc.

And what I realized while listening to this was that user research conversations, especially as a founder are very similar. You talk to a dev who explains their workflow, situation and “you just know” how wrong what they are doing is. You want to jump into convincing them that “this is the way”.

The problem is that when you do that, you don’t learn much about their worldview and situation.

So the next time you run a user research interview (or speak to a conspiracy theorist) try and learn more about their position, ask follow-ups. Learn, not convince is the goal of those things.

Besides when you know where people are coming from with specific details convincing them is 10x easier anyway.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"Jakub immediately got to the heart of our concerns.
Especially the unique challenges of crafting a marketing and content strategy for a developer audience."
David Burton, Head of Content, Apify

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2400+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Example: Clickhouse header design

🍐#136: Learnings from 10 years of sponsoring developer events, chat hack from Stripe and an X ad from ClickHouse

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 15:16:08 +0000

Hey,

Remember, remember, its almost December and you’re still reading the pear🍐. Thank you! To all the Thanksgiving readers and everyone else who is opening this just to see how dry my jokes can get ;). Thanks for reading!

This week on the agenda:

Learnings from 10 years of sponsoring developer events
Case study X/Twitter ad from ClickHouse
Website chat “hack” from Stripe
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 8min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

New: The Dev Influencer Playbook by Plug.Dev

This guide breaks down how Dev Influencers and YouTubers drive full-funnel growth, from awareness through to adoption.

Learn:

Which content formats work at each stage of the funnel
How to structure campaigns vs. annual programs
Repeatable influencer motions used by leading DevTool teams

Read the full playbook, here.

Developer marketing insights

1. Case study X/Twitter ad from ClickHouse

You know that I am a big fan of ClickHouse product marketing. Their older header is one of my fav things since sliced bread:

And their comparison pages/campaigns are great too imho -> talked about them in How to create a good dev tool comparison page.

And this is their ad I saw on Twitter recently:

See on X

I liked:

the Netflix (customer) visual but in ClickHouse colors → nice touch but a simple attention grabber
hook on Netflix scale with numbers that give a hint that this will be at least somewhat juicy
promise of walking you through their (Netflix, the customer) optimizations. Again hinting at some technical areas that will be discussed
Not a mention of your product. The entire ad is about their customer, and learning how they do great engineering at scale. Interesting.

Then the case study they link to looks like this:

Read on ClickHouse blog

So they start with a TLDR that actually frontloads a ton of good info (a concept from “Writing without bullshit”, one of my favorite books).

Right after that in the intro they go into details of the scale plugging gently but proudly that Netflix uses ClickHouse. They also hint at this being written or co-written with Netflix engineers and keep it mostly about Netlfix and their scale of problems.

And the first H2 is again curiosity grabbing “Inside Netflix’s” logging architecture which makes you want to keep going.

I really like this campaign idea and would be curious to know how it actually performed but looking at the engagement + quality / focus of the content I think it might have.

See more dev tool website examples ->

2. Website chat “hack” from Stripe

Saw this post, btw I like Casey Hill’s content as it is always actionable, big or small things but action-first. Not really dev-marketing though but hey, you can’t have everything, or at least not at the same time.

See on LinkedIn

So basically the problem is that you have that anonymous chat that you don’t expect would ever help. You don’t click (as often) because you thing you’ll just get some flavor of a form or get asked 5 bad questions that end in “Do you want me to search the docs” kind of thing. Followed by “was this helpful?” ;)

The tweak is to humanize it:

show how many human reps (sales/support) are available
show people in there to make it obvious that these are human

As far as I understand Casey asked their team and they said it significantly pushed the % of people starting a convo.

Something to try.

3. Learnings from 10 years of sponsoring developer events

This is a great post and it was super nice to see that it was inspired by my question in the marketingto.dev community “What are your do’s and don’t, success stories, and learnings for sponsoring/promoting at developer conferences?”.

Reminder that I should ask questions in there way more often as the caliber of people in there is just insane.

Anyhow, the real story is this amazing 4k + guide from Christophe Dujarric:

A Guide: Frugality in Offline Events

My takeaways from this:

You won’t actually sell anything → you’ll meet devs. You may meet champions / prospects, sometimes maybe a buyer persona. But mostly end-user devs. Proceed accordingly with your copy, activations, and expectations.
If you don’t like any sponsorship option, talk to organizers. Most often then not they will try and figure something out together with you. And they want to get feedback from potential sponsors anyway to build better packages in the future.
The actual logistics is really hard. And heavy as you need to carry the stuff yourself, assemble yourself, think on your feet and maybe even drive to IKEA to make last-minute fixes/tweaks. Don’t underestimate how hard it is for those things to look easy.
Minimal, reusable booth setup: two rollups, a back wall, tablecloth, desktop banners, an a screen. Branded, with messaging and QR codes. Simple.
For swag only do stickers (because stickers!!!) and edu content like books/reports/cheatsheets especially when your teammate is the author.
Pitch instead of demo ?!? → this one I am definitely not sold on but it is an interesting take. I am however 100% sold on having a great discovery-style pitch.

I’d add a trick I used at recent conference that worked great for me after those discovery conversations:

After each conversation with devs/leads/prospects/customers I’d record a message dumping as many details and context as I remembered.
But more importantly I’d recorded that straight into a chatGPT project (through transcribe feature).
The project would have a system instruction prompt to organize it by role, pains, competitor mentions, jobs to be done, etc.

So much saved time. And so much detail ready to be used.

See more dev tool conference examples ->

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"You helped us land messaging that clearly states the problem and solution in the words our champions actually use. The homepage is super crisp now."
Chinar Movsisyan, Founder, Feedback Intelligence

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2400+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

See more dev tool billboard examples ->

🍐#135: Kilo Code billboard campaign, and a new developer-led newsletter

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 15:16:11 +0000

Hey,

I am writing this sitting in pijamas. My first pijamas since I was small enough to believe in Santa. And your favorite pear 🍐 is almost forty now. Don’t know what it says about me, but I can tell you how it makes me feel -> Warm and cozy 😉.

This week on the agenda:

Kilo Code billboard campaign
(New) Developer-led newsletter
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

Reaching developers and tech people through ads is tough. They ignore LinkedIn, skip past Google ads, and tune out most marketing.

TLDR works because 6 million tech professionals actually WANT to read it (including me) - they subscribed on purpose. You can sponsor their specialized newsletters (Tech, Dev, AI, DevOps, InfoSec, etc.) to get in front of exactly who you need.

They handle the copywriting, only allow 3 sponsors per newsletter, and companies like Delve have made $1M in pipeline from it.

Learn more ->

Developer marketing insights

1. Developer-led newsletter

Figured I had to share this new newsletter by a fellow Pole Konrad Sopala (ex dev community manager at Auth0 by Okta, GitHub, Oxla, AngelHack) on dev marketing and building dev communities.

Developer Led | Konrad Sopala | Substack

All things devrel, communities, developer marketing and GTM. Click to read Developer Led, by Konrad Sopala, a Substack publication. Launched 2 months ago.

developerled.substack.com

A bunch of posts out there already but today I want to share two.

The first article is this hit on building dev communities.

Community SDK: How Auth0 built and scaled its developer ecosystem

Developer communities don’t grow by accident, they grow through systems.

developerled.substack.com/p/community-sdk-how-auth0-build-and

Lots of great real-life examples from Auth0 (I mean lots). And I like how this article is a bunch of thoughts/learnings/bits that come together but you can learn from each.

Konrad talks about:

When things are working, it is a system working together not one thing. “When you start thinking that one thing must be enough, that’s often a clue something is off.”
Information architecture and navigation -> you may remember me sharing Auth0 navbar as a great example that plays into it.
Developer-facing social media comms (loved this part)
Living in the OSS ecosystem (as a paid SaaS product)
Activating community and building champions: lots of tips/examples here
Product feedback loops: when you skip that overtime your product becomes detached from reality on the ground built by smart people 10 floors above. This is underappreciated and very dangerous btw (happens a lot).
+ tips on content creation and keeping it fresh, product launches, dev support and more.

Really good guide that opens the door to talk about each more. Which from the looks of it Konrad will in separate, even deeper pieces.

The second article I wanted to share is this gem, where Konrad goes superdeep into the new PostHog website:

I went everywhere on PostHog's new website so you don't have to...but you should

What else should I add in here?!

developerled.substack.com/p/i-went-everywhere-on-posthogs-new

Was thinking of summarizing this but it is just a fun story of what must have been a good few hours spent playing on that site.

2. Kilo Code billboard campaign

I am a big fan of Maya Spivak and her various brand campaigns. You may remember me sharing her classic “What good is bad data?” from Segment.

This time she ran a very cool billboard campaign for Kilo Code.

See on LinkedIn

What I like about it is:

Anchoring on a meme: This always has a good chance of hitting the right cord with devs.
Referencing competitor: every dev knows the landscape, at least sort of. And when you have a hotter than hell startup like Cursor you can be sure that people know about it. Anchoring on it and adding your differentiation is a great approach. Especially when your prospects/customers come to you asking about “how are you different than X”.
One messaging point: hammering on just one key value / differentiation, in this case pricing is the way to go. Billboards don’t have room for many messages. But you also want to drive something for people to rememeber. Always ask yourself if devs remember one thing from this ad/website/article what do you want them to remember. For Kilo Code it is that Cursor pricing model is confusing (and implicitly that theirs is not.

One note is that with memes used in commercial context there is always some legal risk. Those copyrights are fuzzy even when you change the style. Especially when you change it to a recognizable style ;).

But I think this campaign is done really nicely with drawing it by artists (not AI), which makes it completely fine in my book. Perhaps now with the latest release of Nano Banana adjusting memes (conceptual anchors) to new style will actually work. Let’s see.

Also, this is the Reddit thread that Maya mentioned:

See on Reddit

Two thoughts on that discussion:

This billboard caught people’s attention -> always a good sign. The biggest risk of marketing is not being seen at all.
Most people don’t understand what it is about -> assuming that your crowd got it this is also good in my book. You make it specific, hit the cord with one group you usually (almost always) lose the rest of the audience. The alternative is hitting it with everyone and delivering a vague fluff imho.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"You helped us land messaging that clearly states the problem and solution in the words our champions actually use. The homepage is super crisp now."
Chinar Movsisyan, Founder, Feedback Intelligence

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2400+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

🍐#134: Two AI tips/prompts for audience research, and a LinkedIn Outreach Playbook

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 15:16:12 +0000

Hey,

Was thinking about keeping it short and sweet this time. But then I decided it wouldn’t be ok if I speared🍐 you the details.

This week on the agenda:

Two AI tips/prompts for audience research
LinkedIn Outreach Playbook
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 7min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

Reaching developers and tech people through ads is tough. They ignore LinkedIn, skip past Google ads, and tune out most marketing.

They handle the copywriting, only allow 3 sponsors per newsletter, and companies like Delve have made $1M in pipeline from it.

Learn more ->

Developer marketing insights

1. Two AI tips/prompts for audience research

Saw this post and it inspired me to share two thoughts around using AI for dev marketing work.

btw Shlomo has some awesome examples of ads/campaigns on his site https://thecreativemarketer.net/

Anyhow the first tip is exactly what Shlomo shared: extract testimonials/insights with AI search engines.

Use Perplexity / ChatGPT to get exact user quotes from Reddit and review platforms. Sometimes you have additional case studies, testimonials, user inputs to signup forms etc. Perplexity is really good for all those research use cases.

You group it, analyze it, extract the actual wording people use. This informs your positioning/messaging, campaigns, landing pages, ads etc.

Btw while interviewing Aditya about marketing to devs on Reddit I learned about Reddit Answers (feature in beta) that you can use for that too.

Another tip/tool that I use a ton is role playing.

For example, when I create a positioning/messaging doc or a HN launch post with founders I upload the asset (often together with a screenshot of it) and run it through this prompt to get a first line of feedback.

You can go as deep or as shallow with context you want. Also sometimes I just record context and then tell chat to convert to the prompt like this.

SYSTEM
You are conducting a fast, realistic user test. Role-play as the specified persona. Stay in character: use their knowledge level, tone, and constraints. Be candid, specific, and pragmatic.

USER INPUTS
[PERSONA]
- Role/title: {{e.g., Senior Rust backend engineer}}
- Context/industry/company size: {{e.g., fintech scaleup, ~30 engineers, heavy Postgres/Kafka}}
- Goals & pains: {{e.g., hates YAML/infra toil; needs portability & self-host; latency sensitive}}
- Tools & stack familiarity: {{e.g., Rust (Tokio/Axum), Postgres, SQS, Kubernetes basics}}
- Decision criteria: {{e.g., low lock-in, self-hostable, clear perf, simple DX}}
- Skeptic triggers: {{e.g., vague claims, hidden pricing, runtime magic/macros}}

[CHANNEL / ENTRY POINT]
- Where they discovered it: {{e.g., Hacker News post}}
- What they expect from this surface: {{e.g., quick proof it’s real, code sample, deployment story}}

[TARGET ASSET]
- URL or description: {{e.g., product homepage / landing wireframe}}
- Primary CTA(s): {{e.g., Launch playground, See quickstart}}
- Reading task: {{e.g., scan top-to-bottom once; then decide if I’d try it today}}

[EXTRA MATERIALS]
- Comparable transcript/quotes: {{paste any interview notes or forum thread}}
- Product notes or constraints: {{e.g., not open source yet; AWS-first self-host guide}}
- Example copy or wireframes: {{paste or link}}

[REVIEW GOALS]
- What we need from this review: {{e.g., likes/dislikes, confusions, unanswered Qs, what I’d tell a teammate, go/no-go}}

OUTPUT FORMAT
1) First-impressions (≤6 bullets)
2) Running commentary while scrolling (short notes per section)
3) What I liked (specific)
4) Friction / confusions (specific)
5) Unanswered questions (prioritized)
6) What I remember 10 minutes later (top 3 takeaways)
7) How I’d describe it to a colleague (1–2 sentences, persona voice)
8) Would I try it? Why/why not (score /10)
9) Highest-impact fixes (ranked; crisp copy or UX changes)
10) Risks I’d still worry about (and what would de-risk them)

Catches a lot of obvious problems right away.

If the first run comes out overly optimistic, I like to go a bit more rough on my asset I ask for an Eastern European senior dev who is not in a good mood and saw smth on Hacker News. So far it finds the cracks every time.

2. LinkedIn Outreach Playbook (for dev tools)

I shared a lot of tips and resources about selling to devs here and here.

But this guide/webinar from reo.dev on LinkedIn outreach for dev audiences added a ton of color, examples, and tips I haven’t shared.

Winning DevTool Deals: The Ultimate LinkedIn Outreach Playbook

How to book meetings with engineering leaders & CTOs using intent signals

www.reo.dev/resources/linkedin-outreach-playbook

I suggest that you both watch the video and read the guide as the resources while overlapping are complementary. If

Takeaways:

Optimize headline for invite request view (no one reads ‘SDR @ X’). Use problem/benefit first, not your job title. Bar is low; <2% do a reasonably good job here.
Keep two ICP lists: your main ICP list and a live, in-market subset filtered by real intent (docs consumption depth, “build/deploy” signals, competitor repos, hiring signals etc.). Prioritize in-market list and try to react “as asap as possible” ;)
Research cohorts (not accounts). Segment by industry, use case, company size. Write one tight message per cohort. You want relevance. They go deep into this in the guide.
Multi-thread on purpose.
- Top-down: target 3–5 buyers (VP/Dir/CTO) on LinkedIn.
- Bottom-up: nurture active devs with useful content and make them internal champions. Use the most active dev’s network to map buyers. Don’t outreach to devs / ICs though. Just the buyers / decision makers (sometimes senior devs).
Blank connection requests: 300 characters isn’t enough to be useful. They saw higher accepts with no note (same experience for me). Withdraw stale requests after ~30 days to protect your ratio.
Don’t be creepy with signals. Use activity to time outreach, not to creep ppl out with the “just saw you on our pricing” kind of thing.
Metrics that matter. Daily/weekly: request volume, accept rate, positive responses per accept, meetings per positive. Improve the biggest leak first (usually positive responses).
Follow-ups are key. Reo shipped a 5-minute personalized one-pager/microsite (built with Lovable): their logo, their likely use case, quick demo, relevant proof. Share case studies by category and “how it works” explainers. An example of this here.
1st mesage that worked for Reo . Heavy on the value prop, specific, clear.

Automate after you see it work manually. This is something that ppl get very wrong all across marketing/growth/sales. Most of the time, you want to start manual, find something that works, scale it up with automations and process. You scale something that doesn’t work it will just not work at scale. But when you do automate there are lots of tools (and they list out what they use/see people use).

Strong recommendation to read/watch. There are just tons of examples, links to case studies and deeper deep-dives in there. Just a really good piece of content.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"Jakub immediately got to the heart of our concerns.
Especially the unique challenges of crafting a marketing and content strategy for a developer audience."
David Burton, Head of Content, Apify

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2400+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

🍐#133 How to create a good GitHub Readme, and tips for “writing” incredible developer content

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 15:16:10 +0000

Hey,

We went to farm hotel thing with the fam. And my daughter made me a carrot + pear🍐 juice. Yes, she is the best. And ok, her rabbit helped a bit too. Exhibit A:

This week on the agenda:

How to create a good GitHub Readme
Tips for “writing” incredible developer content
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 7min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

Explore Creators through the Plug.Dev Creator Showcase

Looking for your next creator collab?
Our Creator Showcase is live, with YouTubers, influencers and newsletter writers to give you inspo for your next campaign.

Explore and find the voices your dev audience already trusts.

👉 [Meet creators that code - on Plug.Dev ]

Developer marketing insights

1. How to create a good GitHub Readme

How to create a good GitHub Readme

Oct 30, 2025 - A full guide that goes through principles, good default structure, tons of examples, and extra resources.

www.markepear.dev/blog/github-readme-guide

Recently a few clients asked me to tear down their GitHub Readme's which was the final straw to prepare a doc I could share with good examples and principles.

As always this is a work in progress but should already be helpful. Any feedback, suggestions, insights, examples are very much welcome.

TLDR my default structure suggestion is:

Banner (Logo + Tagline + Visual)
Badges
Links (Website, Docs, Examples, Blog, Discord)
About (What it is)
Visual Demo (GIF, Video, Screenshot, Code Snippet etc)
Installation
Getting Started / Quickstart / Basic usage examples
Features list
How to Contribute
License

You can optionally add, Features, Architecture, Links & Resources, Limitations and FAQ. If it gets very long add a Table of Contents. But Readme is a single doc, navigating through it will never be fun when it is very long so keep it short and send to docs or examples where it makes sense.

Make it visual with GIF, tables, code snippets, bullets. Keep it as short as possible but NOT shorter. It has to be clear and guide people to a first accomplishment. For everything else, send people to the docs.

More context, examples, and resources in the article.

2. Tips for “writing” incredible developer content

Couple weeks back I shared a bouncing balls LinkedIn post inspiration, and to my delight, Jack Bridgert got the author of that post on the Scaling DevTools Podcast to talk about content. Amazing.

Comments/takeaways:

Create something actually valuable: The goal of every touchpoint is “leave people smarter even if they never buy.” Real education that upgrades the your mental model (in this case databases, latency, replication). That compounds into brand trust over time. Funny enough Digital Ocean had that concept of “developer love” in their content strategy (wrote about it here).
High-effort, interactive content beats AI slop: Ship fewer, better pieces. Interactive explainers (d3, live simulations, benchmarks in their case) take weeks or more to create. But they stand out, people share them. They smell like value. They make devs engaging with it on Twitter look smart by association (which is a concept from a book Contagious btw.
Educate into the launch (soft CTA): If there is a product story wrap it in a learning that stands on its own and then connects to a product. Ben’s latency deep-dive taught the problem, then casually pointed to PlanetScale Metal as the fix. Love this comment that someone wrote that sums up what you are aiming for → “So good I forgot it was marketing.” Also, this reminded me of a story/framework that Tailscale seemed to use for Hacker News: Problem → Obvious solution → Why it doesn’t work → Product → How it works exactly → Try yourself (wrote about it here).
Do the hard work: research, benchmark, get feedback: Pick topics from real pain (performance, reliability), show numbers wherever you can (they frame the story + show you’ve actually done smth not hand waved it), and invite brutal edits from dev peers. Leave, return, refine. Ask, “Would a {your buyer: DB/DevOps/frontend} engineer read this?” If not, rewrite. Then come back to it and rewrite again. This takes time but makes for great content.

This reminded me of a short piece I wrote some time ago “How to test if what you created will resonate with developers?”.

The basic idea in there was to:

take a fresh look at what you created (extra tip is to edit/review on a different day than you write/create)
imagine yourself stand in front of a dev you respect and present this
do you feel proud, or ashamed?
do you think this was written to add value to them?
or “it was just a marketing content” which unfortunately almost always means that smth was written for a disrespected but unclear audience that will consume it in an unknown location

Respect your audience, try to actually help/add value. You will be fine.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"You helped us land messaging that clearly states the problem and solution in the words our champions actually use. The homepage is super crisp now."
Chinar Movsisyan, Founder, Feedback Intelligence

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2400+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Fill in the form (~7min, opt-in email)

🍐#132: Google Search ads and dev tool documentaries

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 15:16:38 +0000

Hey,

Ever told you about my favorite psychotherapist? You guessed it, it’s Esther Pearel 🍐.

This week on the agenda:

Deep dive into Google Search Ads with Matt Nguyen
Examples of great Dev tool / infra documentaries
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

Developer Marketing Leader Survey – 2026 Outlook

Draft.dev is putting together an annual developer marketing and relations survey.

Questions around program allocation, channel ROI, budget changes, plans.

Participate and get first access to the survey data and findings.

I already submitted my answers and I am waiting for results ;)

Developer marketing insights

1. Deep dive into Google Search Ads with Matt Nguyen

This time I had a pleasure of speaking to Matt Nguyen. When people ask about “who do you recommend for Google search ads” in our marketingto.dev community Matt’s name is always there with a bunch of +1. So I wanted to learn and go deep into search ads. And deep we went.

Some things we talked about:

Fix your foundations first: Don’t use ads pre PMF. Have clear positioning, some brand recognition, and (ideally) an end-to-end tracking that survives login. Define the next action after signup you actually care about.
Optimize to that next action (activation), not signups: Create staged conversions with values (signup = $1, activation = $20, paid = $100) and feed them back to Google. Add micro-conversions (pricing/docs visits) with tiny values. Smart bidding needs this data.
Intent-matched structure of campaigns: Build 2–3 core use-case campaigns. Use ad groups by subtopic (features, competitors). Map query → ad → landing page 1:1 (vs dumping all to the homepage). It matters for ad quality and conversions.
Scope your spend: Start with focused geos (US if you can afford it; otherwise developer hubs where CPCs are sane). Begin a bit broad, add negatives keywords fast (search terms report is key here), and let data guide you.
Write like a developer, not “an ad”: Drop the fluff (“best,” “by devs for devs,”). Lead with what it does for their stack/use case. CTAs like “Next.js quick start” or even npm install in the headline copy beat “Start your free trial.” Use sitelinks to surface docs, pricing, integrations.

As always way more stuff (almost 2hours) + examples in the pod.

Listen/watch to this or previous episode on:

2. Examples of great Dev tool / infra documentaries

Couple years back I saw this dev documentary on Vue.js from Honeypot (now Cult.Repo) and loved it so much.

Something about the technicalities wrapped in a story with challenges, digressions, and behind the scenes from people you only know by GitHub names just gets me going.

And I know I am not the only dev/ex-dev who loves this stuff. It is such an insider thing, celebration of you and your craft that it gets devs to feel something. And binge.

This type of content is obviously far from your core product marketing stuff. But it can get a ton of awareness from your dev audience/community. Connecting it back to the product is the tricky bit. But if RedBull pulled a flavor of this strategy with a sugar water some dev tool should be able to do that as well.

So recently, there seems to be more of dev documentaries popping up so wanted to share a few good ones.

They also have Lovable, Bolt, and Nuxt. Fun to watch for sure.

Cult.Repo is the OG and some of the classics I couldn’t stop watching are:

And now they have a bunch of new ones I really want to see:

While doing research for this I found a few other good ones from other places:

And of course the classic, especially for an ML person like me.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"Jakub immediately got to the heart of our concerns.
Especially the unique challenges of crafting a marketing and content strategy for a developer audience."
David Burton, Head of Content, Apify

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2400+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

🍐#131 What do people think about the new Posthog website, and a fun announcement stunt from Recall.ai

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 14:16:00 +0000

Hey,

Had a quick chat with legal and they advised me to write that any advice, templates, or examples here or on the markepear blog you read at your own pearill 🍐 ;).

This week on the agenda:

What do people think about the new Posthog website
Fun announcement stunt from Recall.ai
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 6min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

They Drove $1M in Pipeline Through Newsletter Ads

Have you thought about running newsletter ads to drive demand for your dev tool?

Delve, a compliance automation platform, needed to reach tech founders at the right moment when they were actually paying attention.

So instead of pouring money into noisy ad channels, they went straight to where devs and founders choose to spend time: TLDR’s high-signal newsletters.

The result?

The first TLDR-driven deal returned 5× the cost of the placement
In total, the ads generated $1M in pipeline
Overall, they saw a 52× return on investment

This case study shows exactly how they did it and what you can take away if newsletter ads are on your 2025 radar (hint: they should be).

Developer marketing insights

1. New Posthog website

So posthog.com has a new website. They were always fun and different but this is next level. Still not sure if I love it or not. But one thing is certain. They got a ton of attention with this. Way more than any other website redesign I saw. Ok, maybe PlanetScale got a decent amount as well (talked about it in #108).

Here is Posthog designer Cory Watilo sharing that redesign with the world and getting 4778 likes and 652 comments. Without any “Comment WEBSITE to get a link” bs going on in there. Also this is an official blog post on it if you are interested.

See on LinkedIn

Since this was LinkedIn, the vast majority of comments where “amazing congrats” kind of thing.

I love “different is better than better” approach. But with websites I think there is a component of “it shouldn’t look too different”. Which btw is what most design award winning websites are. Beautiful, memorable, but not converting.

So I was curious what HN and Reddit crowds think about it. I went through these three (with my silicon friend):

And here are my takeaways.

The good

“Interesting idea and nice-looking UI.”
“I really like the way their homepage looks… fun to drag all the windows and icons.”
“It is wonderful… should be accessible via a switcher… bold move.”
“I for sure welcome the creativity and love PostHog for this.”
“Less scattered and disorienting than the vast majority of modern websites.” (minority view, but present)

The bad

“Awful idea… recreating windows… getting in the way of native browser features.”
“A browser within a browser… disorienting… back button didn’t do anything.”
“Breaks the most basic of keyboard functions.” (no keyboard scrolling)
“Cool concept but garbage in terms of usability… bet the bounce rate will skyrocket.”
“I’m an engineer evaluating PostHog, and I bounced.”
“Don’t know what I’m supposed to be navigating to.”
“Suited more for PC than mobile.” (mobile jank called out)
Conversion worry: “Fun, but a disaster for conversions once launch hype fades.”

Overall sentiment was negative on Hacker News, Mixed on Reddit but still more on a negative side.

But.

What is key is that definitely people on both sides where emotional enough to have heated arguments with “love” and “hate” thrown around a ton. Getting this much attention with a website rebuild is remarkable. Full stop.

Reading through the comments I think that with stunts like this there is a real concern of launch day vs day-2 usage of it, and that people are accustomed to a classic website experience.

So perhaps this or other crazy websites could actually be done as a stunt (especially with all those vibecoding tools) and then reverted to a more classic one after the hype is done. Maybe even with a “see classic website” button somewhere during the launch.

This is the behind the scenes with Cory Watilo (the designer):

2. Funding announcement idea from Recall.ai

How about this idea of sending postcards:

Take a nice piece of paper
Print your company name on it
Print your one liner on it (bonus points for saying what you do ;))
Create a list of ICPs with office addresses
Send those postcards to them
…
Wait for ppl to reach out

This is what Recall.ai did and I love it. Another example of doing something different rather than just better. Creativity seems to be back in marketing grace ;)

See on LinkedIn

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"Thanks so much for your time and all the thoughtful feedback coming from the workshop.
I feel like we are in a much better place to start our website rebuild. "
Sarah Morgan, Head of Product and Customer Engagement, Scout APM

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2000+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

See more dev tool LinkedIn examples ->

🍐#130 Great LinkedIn post idea from PlanetScale, and How to sell to developers Reddit Thread.

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 14:16:00 +0000

Hey,

Shorter one this week. I guess you’ll have to go through the resources I shared. But you know what they say. You pearuse 🍐 you you never lose!

This week on the agenda:

Great LinkedIn post idea from PlanetScale
How do you sell to developers without turning them off?
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

Does your technical content lead to real sales opportunities?

Draft.dev specializes in building content-first lead gen engines that build trust with developers, DevOps, and data professionals. If you’re currently creating developer-focused content, but you struggle with:

Publishing consistently
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Then book a call to learn more about how Draft.dev can build a content-powered lead generation engine for your developer audience.

Developer marketing insights

1. Great LinkedIn post idea from PlanetScale

See on LinkedIn

This is viral viral post for a person with <5k followers.

Short video of an interactive visualization showing how fast/slow apps are depending on where databases are (or at least this is what I think it is ;)).

Also, it breaks some of the formats/templates that are super text heavy too. Feels more like Twitter really: one idea (problem PlanetScale solves) + one interactive visual that presents it.

So yeah, one idea/problem, one great visual. One great visual that is hard to create, valuable in and of itself.

Ben has a few more of these on his LinkedIn/Twitter. Great stuff for inspiration. And definitely click out and see the interactive part of it.

See on X

2. How do you sell to developers without turning them off?

Saw this Reddit thread (btw are there more of these dev GTM focused threads on HN/Reddit recently?)

Lots of “classic” advice like:

Lead with self-serve: docs, 5-minute quickstart, sandbox, examples.
Explain “how it works” in 5 seconds. Features > vague benefits > connecting it to capabilities
Don’t pitch in community. Show up, answer with code, be helfpul.

A lot of it I touched on either in How to sell to developers or Developer marketing guide.

But a few really good comments with first-hand experience in there that I wanted to share:

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"You helped us land messaging that clearly states the problem and solution in the words our champions actually use. The homepage is super crisp now."
Chinar Movsisyan, Founder, Feedback Intelligence

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2400+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

👉 [Explore the Devtool directory]

🍐#129 How to sell if your user is not the buyer, employee advocacy trick, and a great newsletter on creating LinkedIn content

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 14:16:00 +0000

Hey,

My oh my had a great pear🍐 dessert. Fried cheese, caramelized pear, roasted walnuts, ice cream. It had to work. They got extra points for calling it de-ser (ser== cheese in polish)

This week on the agenda:

How to sell if your user is not the buyer
Fun little employee advocacy play from WIZ
Newsletter on how to create LinkedIn technical content
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

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Developer marketing insights

1. Fun little employee advocacy play

Getting employees to post on LinkedIn is hard. If people don’t want to do it they just… don’t want to do it.

Over time I went from “let me try and convince you that it is worth it” to “if you want to, I can help”. Power of aligned (or misaligned) incentives rules here.

But this week I saw a fun little trick.

See on LinkedIn

I mean why not:

People have work anniversaries
Info about it typically goes on Slack anyway
Why not give people a little nudge in a form of a fun company badge
So that they can look fun/cool on LinkedIn

This can work. Incentives are aligned.

Probably it won’t give you million qualified signups but it can get you some extra awareness. But since it is super “cheap” the ROI of the play is likely there.

2. Newsletter on how to create LinkedIn technical content

Some time ago Paolo’s content popped up in my feed:

See Paolo’s LinkedIn

And he’s been sending his newsletter “Tech Audience Accelerator” ~twice week. Focused on how to create LinkedIn content as an AI/ML startup founder (also, kudos for actually focused positioning ;) ).

Just tons of actionable insights in there. The posts fall into 3 buckets:

prompts and templates → reusable patterns that work today to make writing easier
stories from the trenches → what is working, what is not working
essays/guides → thoughts on strategy and why things work the way they work

Imho this is an absolute must if you are creating on LinkedIn for the tech audience whether you are in AI/ML or not.

Just look at some of these posts:

See Paolo Substack

3. How to sell if your user is not the buyer | Hacker News

There was a really good discussion on it on HN recently:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44825491

Here are some notes/tldr but this is a fun read.

Classic lead gen gating gets the hate (obviously)
Requiring info to download an ebook and chasing devs after they shown little interest turns users into detractors.

“I don't have buying power, but I do have bitching power.”
spauldo

Don’t go around the gatekeeper
Emailing the whole org to bypass an IT owner gets your domain blocked.

“Start email blasting others on my team… Quick way to get your domain blocked.”
thewebguyd

Quote before demo (for dev-ish buyers)
Some buyers (especially senior devs evaluating) want a fast price estimate to move forward with shortlisting for deeper evaluation. Save the pitch for when it helps.

“Don’t make me sit through a demo just to get a quote… just give me the numbers.”
thewebguyd

But many non-dev buyers like demos
At some point many (or most) Enterprise buyers do expect a call to contextualize price and options. Build a bit more trust in the company.

“Nobody makes $10k+ purchases without talking to somebody.”
mnhnthrow34

So you can segment by audience (dev/user, buyer)
Let developers tr. Let non-dev buyers talk.

“Non developer audiences like demos. Developers… like to try things out on their own.”
chairmansteve

Don’t gate your docs please
Gating API docs blocks evaluation and goodwill.

“Requiring people to sign-up… just to view API documentation.”
Terr_

Have an entry plan with visible pricing
Fixed, small-team pricing seeds future enterprise accounts.

You NEED fixed pricing… tie in a customer at the low end.”
benjiro

Be honest about the long tail
Serving many tiny accounts can cost more than it’s worth when compared to a big enterprise deal.

“Long tail… combined they might be worth less than a single big customer.”
arccy

Respect devs inbox
Spray-and-pray sequences damage brand and relationships.

“Emailing me every 5–15 minutes… probably blessed from the top.”
neilv

Remember who enjoys the attention
Some sales motions exist to flatter people spending other people’s money.

“Flatter people… whose job is to spend other people's money.”
fijiaarone

Design for the principal–agent gap
Your user isn’t the buyer; equip the user to sell internally.

“Make the user your champion.”
doesnotexist

A few more resources on dev tool sales:

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"Jakub immediately got to the heart of our concerns.
Especially the unique challenges of crafting a marketing and content strategy for a developer audience."
David Burton, Head of Content, Apify

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2400+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

See more dev tool conference marketing examples ->

🍐#128 Learnings from agency running Reddit ads and how to give a good talk?

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 14:16:00 +0000

Hey,

Just got back from Italy so figured I’d share one of my favorite pizzas: gorgonzola, pear🍐, arugula, honey. Hard to beat. Ok, tomato sauce, nduja, burrata, red onion is probably still a GOAT.

This week on the agenda:

Learnings from agency running Reddit ads
How to give a good talk? HN thread
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

Show up in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity

Developers are using LLMs and generative AI to discover new tools, implement solutions, and plan projects.

So making sure that your brand has a strong presence in all the major large language models means faster adoption and more customers.

Draft.dev can help you maximize LLM visibility by optimizing existing content and creating new content both on and off-site. Learn more and book a call here.

Developer marketing insights

1. Learnings from agency running Reddit ads

See on LInkedIn

Nice real-life learnings on the formats that are working from Ali who is running Reddit ads for their customers:

Memes → yep, also talked about it a bunch of times, for example in the issue #120
“Is this an ad?” text posts → yep, also shared this amazing example from Latitude
Incentive-first copy → have to say, this one I never tried. Basically a “free credits”, “early access” type of thing. Clear offer.

Wanted to share this because Ali also added a link to his Reddit ads inspiration library (which is awesome, and I didn’t know you can share inspiration libarries on Reddit 😉 ). My favorite ads from his are (also, you may want to check out my Reddit examples gallery):

See on Reddit

2. How to give a good talk? HN thread

Saw this the other day and figured I’d share just in case you were working on a talk for a conference.

See on HackerNews

Paraphrased takeaways from the article and discussions:

1) Lead with the win, fast. Pitch the value prop in the first 60 seconds. Map some flavor of “efficiency, correctness, expressivity” to your product’s speed, reliability, and DX.

Good talks inform, educate, and entertain.
Michael Greenberg, Article Author

2) Title = promise. Your talk title should read like the audience’s desired outcome (“Ship preview envs in 7 minutes”), not a table of contents.

Your talk title should be the agenda.
ehutch79 (HN thread)

3). Bio is important but should be quick. One slide, less than 1 minute. You’re not the keynote (most of the time) your problem/solution/story is.

Keep intros to 1 slide, 1 minute.
ehutch79 (HN thread)

4)Teach one portable thing. Give attendees a snippet/checklist they can use tomorrow (CLI one-liner, GitHub Action, example repo).

Listeners expect party favors; make insights portable.
Michael Greenberg, Article Author

5) Slides aren’t the talk. Don’t go for walls of text unless you want to communicate “overwhelm”. Use one diagram or a few words. Then link to the deep-dive as a blog/whitepaper at the end.

Minimal slides; put details in a complementary blog/whitepaper.
raesene9 (HN thread)

6) Rehearse where it’s cheap. Record yourself, iterate, and practice at meetups/Toastmasters — not on a $1k-ticket stage.

Record yourself; use Toastmasters; don’t practice at conferences.
jasonlotito (HN thread)

7) Entertain, but ship content first. Humor/story beats work; don’t let them replace the takeaway. If you want a north star for “serious fun,” study James Mickens.

Mickens: clear, funny, unforgettable (talk: Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Secuirty Is Possible?)

8)Spice it up with real energy. Rants can work when they serve the story. But only if the audience still leaves with a tactic they can use.

Fork Yeah! (Illumos history), infamous rant around 33:00. (talk: Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos)

A few more resources I have on this:

And of course…

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"Thanks so much for your time and all the thoughtful feedback coming from the workshop.
I feel like we are in a much better place to start our website rebuild. "
Sarah Morgan, Head of Product and Customer Engagement, Scout APM

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2300+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

That’s why dev marketers are turning to TLDR.

🍐#127: Deep dive into marketing on Product Hunt, and how to improve AI search visibility

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 14:16:00 +0000

Hey,

We are starting to get into the “why? but why? but why?” phase with my kiddo. Which inspired me to ask “Why do pears 🍐 have different shape than apples?”.

The best explanation I found is that the growth is stronger around the seeds and those are positioned lower in pears. Not satisfied. Why lower then? Thoughts?

This week on the agenda:

Marketing dev tools on Product Hunt with Flo Merian
AI search discoverability for APIs and SDKs (playbook + a tool)
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

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More clicks for lower cost than LinkedIn (one advertiser saw LinkedIn-level traffic at half the CPC)

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Developer marketing insights

1. Marketing dev tools on Product Hunt with Flo Merian

This time I had a pleasure of speaking to Flo Merian one of the co-founders of our marketingto.dev community about marketing dev tools on Product Hunt. Flo had some really strong points for why and how to do it (yes disarming some of my biases when it comes to PH). A good one for sure.

Some things we talked about:

One launch << continuous re-launching: While it is true that most successful launches don’t bring direct results, you can get significant interest over time as you re-launch every time it makes sense. You basically treat the channel like “another channel” NOT like a place to go launch and get initial signups.
Don’t over-invest: If you do treat is another channel and you re-use your launch assets across your channels the incremental investment in launching will not be too high. This is where my thinking failed as I’ve always treated PH differently and because of that the ROI on preparing assets and gathering community to upvote didn’t make sense. That is why launch weeks love PH.
Youu have to go visual: invest in the visual assets, great images showing features. Video doesn’t hurt but is not a must.
Use discussions (forums): it’s Reddit-like but nicer and you can plug yourself in to gather feedback, tease launches, ask, and occasionally, where it makes sense share your product.

Way more stuff + examples with commentary in the podcast.

Listen/watch to this or previous episode on:

2. AI search discoverability for APIs and SDKs (playbook + a tool)

How to Benchmark (and Boost) Your Brand’s Visibility in AI Recommendations

Learn how to benchmark and boost your brand’s AI visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini & more with a 5-step LLM discovery process. Be on the right side of the next big distribution shift!

www.plg.news/p/how-to-benchmark-and-boost-your-brand-s-visibility-in-ai-recommendations

One of my favorite dev tool GTM voices Ben Williams cooked up something really cool recently.

In this article he goes through the process of improving AI engines visibility for your APIs and SDKs. This is the table of contents:

Why AI recommendations are now as critical as SEO
How to build a prompt suite that mirrors real user intent
Running your benchmark: platforms, process, and tracking
Special focus: developer tools & SDKs (where the rules are different)
Analysing results and closing the gap
The iterative improvement loop
Next steps and resources

On top of that he shares:

a spreadsheet (in the article),
a list of things to consider improving (in the article),
and a tool he has built to operationalize these insights (DevTune).

Go to devtune.ai

This article is gold (and not only because the DevTune rhymes with Neptune ;)).

A few things I noted while reading:

Third-party content matters: engines build answers on a mix of Reddit, GitHub awesome repos, forums, various blogs, your website, and your docs. Social listening that ends up feeding those third-party websites will show up in AI search eventually.
Ask(prompt) like your audience: users ask for long-tail, long questions (average prompt I think is 15 words for AI search vs 3 for SEO), use real words your dev community uses. “Best logging library for Node.js”. Developers go deeper with their specificity vs other personas so expect a long-long tail.
Create a list of prompts: mostly solution aware and problem aware questions: “What is best X for Y”, “How do I X my Y?”, “X vs Y for Z”. Ask for lists, use different product categories (devs call the same things differently), include use cases an integrations. And track the results over time (Ben shares a spreadsheet in the article).
Assure zero temperature in analysis: a lot of dev search for API/SDKs happens through Cursor and similar within IDE. You want to replicate this environment in your analysis.

Two more great articles from Ben exploring these problems and solutions:

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"You helped us land messaging that clearly states the problem and solution in the words our champions actually use. The homepage is super crisp now."
Chinar Movsisyan, Founder, Feedback Intelligence

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2300+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

See more dev tool Hacker News examples ->

🍐#126 "Nightmares" on Hacker News, learnings from ex Vercel VP marketing, and a great launch video ad

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 14:16:00 +0000

Hey,

Your pear🍐 has been enjoying family life recently. A LOT. Can you guess which European city has such a nice beach view?

This week on the agenda:

Getting on top of HN seems may is a “nightmare” (or is it)
Learnings from ex Vercel VP marketing
Cool launch Twitter/X ad from JetBrains
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 6min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

Show up in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity

Developers are using LLMs and generative AI to discover new tools, implement solutions, and plan projects.

So making sure that your brand has a strong presence in all the major large language models means faster adoption and more customers.

Draft.dev can help you maximize LLM visibility by optimizing existing content and creating new content both on and off-site. Learn more and book a call here.

Developer marketing insights

1. Getting on top of HN seems may is a “nightmare” (or is it)

Just saw this story on top of HN:

With the first comment being:

And figured I’d share something that seems to me to be a clear pattern for HN.

Attaching to a feeling of frustration gets you upvotes/comments even if people never read the post (this time I think they skimmed through the post).

While infuriating is probably not the strongest word to use looking at HN search results the are a few strong candidates that hit the feeling.

Other candidates that I really like include: “nighmare”, “horror”, “pain”, “wrong”, “bad”.

Obviously stuffing those words in your blog title to try to get to developer emotions may is not enough for this to work. Ideally you speak to a problem that people actually experienced.

But it can move the needle especially for those people who will only read the title and go to comments (most HN readers? definitely many).

So while Lago could have written “How to build billing correctly” they went with “Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers” and got 777 upvotes and 359 comments. If you want to hear about that story Ahn Tho, Lago’s founder talks about it on Scaling Dev Tools:

Top of Hacker News with Anh-Tho from Lago

Scaling DevTools · Episode

open.spotify.com/episode/2RmPGUQT4wIu0Td7CVEWue?si=6770ab98431d487f

As I shared some time ago when going deep into Tailscale Hacker News strategy creating content where you go deep on the problem sprinkling your product around but not breaking the story with it is the way to go.

And if you can increase the chance of going to the top of HN by charging it emotionally why not. Also “negative charge + problem” just works so much better than “positive charge + solution”. Especially on HN.

Below are some results from Algolia HN search -> try and filter mentally to just look dev tools and problems/concepts. Sometimes results get mixed up.

Nightmare

Horror

Pain

Wrong

2. Learnings from ex Vercel VP marketing

So this post went viral recently:

See on LinkedIn

Things I took away (but do read the entire post). :

1. Don’t slow down product launches. In hypergrowth, launches drop with little notice but that’s the fun! Be flexible, give the team permission to drop other work, and then spend time on “the land.”
Morgane Palomares - ex Vercel VP Marketing

Better to accept this reality and adjust/plan accordingly than get angry and fight it to “have a clean process”. It is great that people ship faster than you can plan.

3. Founder-led comms only works if it’s authentic. Feed the CEO angles, narratives, and evidence but don’t ghostwrite everything. Be their sounding board not voice. Oh and CEOs beef in public on X, don’t freak out.
Morgane Palomares - ex Vercel VP Marketing

Your founder (or SME) needs to be the source of insights and how it is said. You can make it 10x more efficient with a better process (I talk about it in LinkedIn CEO/Founder playbook). But 10× 0 value is still 0 value.

5. The biggest growth wins often come from product improvements, not experiments. Faster pages, simpler upgrade flows, better account structures.
Morgane Palomares - ex Vercel VP Marketing

Bigger changes make a bigger, step change possible. And product changes are typically bigger than marketing/channel changes. Caveat being that at early stage with no channels working finding a distribution channel or a way to message your product will have more impact imho (I talk about those early stages here).

3. Cool launch Twitter/X ad from JetBrains

Saw this launch tweet from JetBrains the other day:

See on Twitter/X

I liked the combo of:

clear, simple to the point copy
combination of basic screenshot video with…
… meme b-rolls

It made it engaging in the feed while delivering the core product marketing message.

I’d probably name the product JetBrains AI and not Junie:

this another name for people to remember.
“Junie” doesn’t really convey anything while you can probably guess what “JetBrains AI” does.

But anyhow, the ad itself was great imho. And got eyeballs/engagement for sure.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"Jakub immediately got to the heart of our concerns.
Especially the unique challenges of crafting a marketing and content strategy for a developer audience."
David Burton, Head of Content, Apify

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2300+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

See more dev tool billboard ideas ->

🍐#125: Marketing dev tools on Reddit and great baseline onboarding email from Auth0

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 14:16:00 +0000

Hey,

Took a little break from the newsletter but I am back now. And as promised I come bearing new episodes of Going deepear🍐 into dev marketing. Enjoy!

This week on the agenda:

Marketing dev tools on Reddit with Aditya Ramakrishnan
Great baseline onboarding email from Auth0
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

Creator-Led Growth for Devtools - Playbook by Plug.Dev

The adoption of developer tools has changed a lot. It hasn't been led by ads, or private forums. It’s been led by creators that code, the ones teaching, sharing, and influencing what tools developers choose to adopt and why.

This playbook is a deep dive on Creator-Led Growth for Devtools. What it is, why it matters, and how to put it into practice. Including examples of CLG by Devtools like Clerk, Neon and Snyk.

Here’s our Plug.Dev playbook on CLG for Devtools: https://plug.dev/companyblog

Developer marketing insights

1. Marketing dev tools on Reddit with Aditya Ramakrishnan

It all started with this LinkedIn post:

See full post on LinkedIn

Which got me started following Aditya and learning at ton from his content.

At some point I figured → “why not go deeper on this?” and so I reached out. The result is this almost 2 hour episode focused 100% on organic Reddit marketing for dev tools. Good stuff.

Some things we talked about:

Think of Reddit vibe as a bar during a conference: People talk. Have opinions (sometimes extreme). Join conversations, comment a lot. Post only when you have something new and be there to answer.
Pair a marketer with a technical owner. The marketer finds/frames threads; the engineer/PM answers.
Measure by replies, not upvotes. Links and karma are ok to track obviously. But you get more insight from qualitative feel of the quality of conversations (or at least a count of replies).
When starting build a Reddit muscle before posting/commenting. First weeks just lurk and earn karma in non-work subs. Then start commenting in your target subs.
Run a biweekly “dev conversations” show-and-tell. Share threads, wins/flops, and product insights with PM/Eng/CS. This builds understanding/alignment.
Use Reddit Answers: this is a great new tool for market research basically collating answers/thoughts around tool comparisons, problems within ecosystems etc. You get a summary + links to threads. Great starting point.

Way more stuff + examples with commentary in the podcast.

Listen/watch to this or previous episode on:

2. Great baseline onboarding email from Auth0

I love a great baseline. Something that you can start with and iterate from. Nothing fancy but still something good and hard to beat.

I signed up for Auth0 recently and got this simple onboarding email, which in my book is a great baseline:

I love how simple and not overly optimized it is:

here is the product
here are resources
talk to us if you have questions → engioneer will reply

This is exactly what you want as a dev signing up for a new thing.

One tweak for early stage founders would be to send this from a founder and sign as founder. Maybe make it slightly more dev to dev.

Another one would be to send it a day after I signed up (not right away), so that it can serve as a reminder / get me back into the app in case I hit problems in the first session.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"You helped us land messaging that clearly states the problem and solution in the words our champions actually use. The homepage is super crisp now."
Chinar Movsisyan, Founder, Feedback Intelligence

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2300+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Read the full case study ->

🍐#124: How to make your dev brand memorable, and what is still relevant from my 2022 interview on Scaling DevTools.

Jakub Czakon — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 14:24:25 +0000

Hey,

I know I’ve been slacking off with the Going deepear 🍐 into dev marketing podcast. Apologies. I have 5 more interviews recorded that are waiting to be edited. I promise one of them is coming up next week.

This week on the agenda:

How to make your brand memorable: The Roll from Aikido Security
Learnings from my interview from Scaling DevTools… in July 2022
+ a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 8min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

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Developer marketing insights

1. How to make your brand memorable: The Roll from Aikido Security

I am turning into an Aikido Security fanboy but their campaigns and marketing overall is just soo funny, bold, and gets attention.

Shared a teardown of their LinkedIn Ads, talked about OnlyScans in the issue #106, and now I have another treat. The Roll.

See on LinkedIn

Click out and watch that video.

They took their slogan “No bullshi*t security” and took it to the next level.

So for the Black Hat conference they came in with a campaign around a branded toiler paper ;)

Quite sure this will be one of the most memorable stunts that happened on that conference. And the best thing you can do for you brand is make it memorable.

A few creatives that Madeline shared on LinkedIn:

See more dev tool billboard ideas ->

2. What is still relevent from my interview from Scaling DevTools… in July 2022

Was listening to my favorite pod, Scaling DevTools, and realized that wait a minute, I was a guest ;). It was super early, episode 9, back in July 2022, before everything AI happened.

Was curious what I talked about and how I see those things now in Aug 2025. A whole eternity in AI years later.

The four pillars of developer marketing with Kuba Czakon

Scaling DevTools · Episode

open.spotify.com/episode/6pfsNOVwPCAuPXGgi57EsE?si=6cc8d30e4c4b4f48

Here is what we talked about with Jack.

1. We started with pillars of dev marketing:

Do not persuade → educate, enable, inspire
Who are your developers and where they are
Devs are looking for solutions to problems all day(ish) and/or they need/want to upskill and learning
Let people try and build with your product - or at least give them a smell (docs, demos, playgrounds)

I’d say I am still very much bought into these. Nothing groundbreaking here really but I do believe it helps to organize your thinking and decisions.

The ways to solve for these changed but the core stays clear.

✅ 9/10 relevant

2. SEO strategy

So we were very heavy on SEO, our MLOps blog did 2M+ visitors a year (it ended up being 3M that year if I am not mistaken).

And the way I thought about SEO as a distribution channel was the following:

There are stages of awareness (solution aware, problem/jobs-to-be-done aware, product aware, most aware) and you’ll get readers across the board
Although obviously the more aware people get the higher the conversions would be → “{product} pricing” is going to convert way more than “What is {problem}”
The way to win is to write a better/deeper/more valuable article on a query that you know your potential users are searching.

Ok, so today, imho it doesn’t make much sense to focus on problem-focused articles for SEO distribution. Hold on, it does make sense to do those articles if you have first-hand expertise and you are creating them with a different distribution in mind (say Hacker News).

For the solution aware stage (comparisons) it still makes sense to write it for sure. But do it in a way where you explain how those tools are different. What is your point of view. Why you build a product. Not “my competitor is sh*t” and here is my frogwatch chart.

I wrote a deep dive into this here:

How to create a good dev tool comparison page

For product aware stuff and making sure the information that is indexed (in Google and LLMs) about your product is correct → of course you want to keep doing that.

✅ 7/10 relevant

3. Many CTAs and navigation nature of interactions

I shared a story of a dev saying to me during a user testing session:

“Show me the options and let me choose”

And then talked about having different CTAs (see docs, examples, templates, sign up, watch demo, launch playground, check out discord, GitHub) to let people choose.

I still like the approach of more CTAs, nav tabs and generally sites/assets heavier on information. But I do believe, more than back then, that it is key to have that clear golden path, that clear next step highlighted.

People should be able to follow your suggested path with little cognitive overhead. Even if you have many options on the side.

✅ 6/10 relevant

4. Thinking of marketing as portfolio of bets

The idea is that your channels are like stock or asset classes and you invest across those with different levels of risk/reward.

Agree with this completely. Even wrote an article about it later:

What should marketing do at each stage of the dev tool startup journey?

✅ 10/10 relevant

So overall what I shared is surprisingly still relevant today. I think the reason is probably that I focused on strategy not tactics there (which would have been vastly obsolete). Idk, give it a listen, tell me what you think.

Oh, and if you want to listen to a less ancient ramblings of mine, check out my own podcast Going deepear into dev marketing.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

"You helped us land messaging that clearly states the problem and solution in the words our champions actually use. The homepage is super crisp now."
Chinar Movsisyan, Founder, Feedback Intelligence

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

2. Bonus links to check out

3. Join our Slack community

"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
Charles Cook, VP Marketing & Ops @Posthog

2300+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.