
Ask HN: Best ways to monetize a developer audience? - nepsilon
How to make developers perceive value in a product?
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MalcolmDiggs
As much as it pains me to say this: recruiters are probably willing to pay
highest-dollar for access to that audience. So letting recruiters run ads on
your product, or creating some sort of native-advertising platform for
recruiters will likely mean the highest short-term revenue for you.

...it just might alienate all your users in the process.

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lastofus
This is a great suggestion as long as you don't give recruiters access
directly.

Talk to recruiters, ask them for good jobs that you yourself add to a curated
job board that your dev audience has access to.

You can probably negotiate ~$300-500 per referral to the recruiter that works
out.

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mbrock
Are you aiming at developers as developers, or developers as employees who can
put the company credit card details into your SaaS signup?

For the latter, you just need an honest service that would make their team's
job easier.

A license for Sublime Text costs $70. I don't know how much money they make,
but it's a popular product. The value perceived there is probably something
like "I know it costs money to develop and maintain a highly polished, I'm
willing to pay to support a tool I use every day, and I'm honestly kinda
fatigued with all these ancient open source editors so take my money and give
me a clean nice text editing experience."

~~~
SyneRyder
Sublime Text is interesting, in that you also get unlimited usage without
paying. That was helpful at a time when I didn't have a lot of client work
coming in, and it helped me bootstrap into better work. Once I had solid
client work coming in again, it felt like Sublime had helped me get there, and
Sublime suddenly felt incredibly underpriced, so much less than an hour's
work. There's incentive then to buy it to make sure they keep working on it,
to get rid of the nag screens that occasionally slowed me down, and it looks &
feels far more professional when you're not using unregistered trials as part
of your work!

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katpas
Developers will see value in a product if they use it or see it being used and
realise it could improve their work. Less about 'perception' of value.

More, is this something that will help me enough that it's worth the time of
integrating it into my work flow.

As mentioned in another comment, it also depends who's money it is as to how
that value tradeoff looks. The company they work for or their own.

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petervandijck
You don't charge developers, you charge either their boss (SaaS), or people
trying to hire them (recruiting).

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Cypher
They need a business interest beyond coding. The right person asks, Who buys
the product and why? What is the running cost and where are the expensive
transaction fees. They need to care about money to understand value. Some
developers just enjoy coding and being an employee.

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tmaly
you have to figure out what their worldview is. Once you figure this out, what
is perceived as value becomes apparent.

