
The Developer Marketing Guide - craigkerstiens
https://www.devmarketingguide.com/
======
siddharthdeswal
Here's how in-depth this link is, presented in (hopefully) easier to
understand context for most people here:

"The Web App Development Guide for Marketers"

1) Get a database because they are the where all your data will be saved. "You
should have a db if you have nothing else."

\- MySQL book link

\- Relational databases video

\- more intro-to-databases links

2) "Fancy having a frontend?" A frontend is needed because your users will
want to use your awesome app

\- HTML link

\- CSS link

3) Do's and Don'ts

\- Have forms and buttons

\- Don't make the forms too long. Here's some research to show long forms lead
to lesser people submitting them.

... and so on and so forth.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
I don't think anyone (including the authors) would disagree that this is a
very basic introduction to marketing for developers.

A point that's very separate from whether or not it has value.

There are still way too many developers who are making awesome products and
then failing to get traction because they neglect the marketing basics.
Something like this article that plainly lays out the basics is very helpful
for setting a baseline.

~~~
TekMol
> There are still way too many developers who are > making awesome products
> and then failing to get traction

Can you give some examples? My experience is that the "Build it and they will
come" approach works surprisingly well.

~~~
ams6110
It works if you can hit upon the sequence of events to get some viral
attention. Hitting HN at the right time of day, or getting some other
attention among your target users. That can be a matter of chance but usually
requires at least some effort on your part.

Just creating a product and a website with no marketing whatsoever is unlikely
to get the attention of anyone.

~~~
richard___
How do you find out / when is the right time of day to post to HN?

~~~
grzm
Google indeed can be your friend here.

One analysis I like is from 'minimaxir: [http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-
hacker-news/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/)

There's also a Quora answer: [https://www.quora.com/When-is-the-best-time-to-
post-on-Hacke...](https://www.quora.com/When-is-the-best-time-to-post-on-
Hacker-News-to-get-and-stay-long-on-the-front-page)

And wouldn't you know it, a submission on Hacker News itself for a post
entitled "Best Time to Post? It’s Irrelevant":
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9426040](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9426040)

I'm sure there are others as well.

------
stevoski
> Email might not be the most attractive means of communication, but
> newsletters are direct and exclusive to customers, a good starting point.
> “You should have an email newsletter if you have nothing else... This is the
> one opportunity you have to make something just for them that no one else
> consumes.”

I'd love to see some broad evidence that email newsletters are effective. I've
experienced no strong correlation myself between the frequency of sending
newsletters and sales.

The strongest argument I've heard for email newsletters is, "it can't hurt, so
you should do it just in case it helps." But that ignores opportunity cost.

Can anyone (preferably who doesn't work for a email campaign company) give any
strong evidence in favour of regularly sending out email newsletters?

~~~
blowski
Email marketing is ridiculously cheap in terms of retention compared to most
other forms of marketing. You 'own' the list, unlike with Facebook and
Twitter. You can push to the list, unlike Google.

I can't talk for startups, but I have worked with very big enterprises on
email marketing and all their analysis said email was the most cost-effective
over the customer lifecycle.

~~~
ams6110
Makes sense -- when people subscribe to your email list, they have directly
indicated at least some level of interest in your product. That's more than
any bio/demo based ad campaign can guarantee.

~~~
blowski
Potentially, someone might have expressed interest by following or liking you.
The problem is that the only way of reaching those people is by paying
Facebook. The cost increases as your list grows.

When you send an email newsletter, even if your customers don't read it or
respond, you're getting your brand name and offer in front of them. The costs
barely change as your list grows from 100 to 10 million. That's the real
advantage of email compared to just about every other form of marketing.

Compare the costs and sales of pushing an ad to 10 million people who liked
you versus 10 million people who bought from you or subscribed to your
newsletter. The latter will nearly always give much better value for money.

~~~
unclebucknasty
May I ask which service you use where the cost barely grows from 100 to 10
million subscribers?

We use Mailchimp and it's definitely not the case. Might be time for a change!

~~~
unclebucknasty
Specifically, with Mailchimp, 100 subscribers would be free.

10 million would be $40,700/month.

[https://mailchimp.com/pricing/high-
volume/](https://mailchimp.com/pricing/high-volume/)

~~~
blowski
If you're using Mailchimp to handle a list of 10 million users you're
definitely doing it wrong. You need a tool that charges by number of emails
sent instead of size of list.

These days I'd suggest buying an in-house email tool and use an SMTP server
(SendGrid, Mandrill, SES, Mailgun). Pricing will obviously be more expensive
but it increases much more slowly than with Facebook. To send 10 million
emails on SendGrid would cost around $5K. Depending on the terms, that kind of
budget would cover somewhere between 50 and 50000 users with Facebook or
AdWords.

~~~
unclebucknasty
Ha! Yeah, well we're not quite at the 10 million mark, and not sure who would
pay that amount.

We actually use Sendgrid for transactional emails and should probably revisit
for marketing. They didn't have the list manangement features when last we
looked and there's a little integration dev that'll need to be done, but
you've prompted me to take another look at it. May be worthwhile now. Thanks.

But, even with those guys going from 100 emails to only 4 million (highest
quoted on the site), the price goes up a couple of orders of magnitude from
$9.95 to over $1600. That's hardly "barely growing costs" and for a
bootstrapped startup, the difference may be prohibitive. Hopefully, you've got
some revenue or funding by the time you hit that subscriber base. But, don't
want to gloss over the fact that you will pay significantly more as your list
grows substantially, even if it's less than with other channels.

~~~
blowski
OK I guess I phrased it badly. At a list size of 10 million, email will
probably cost around $10K per month to service. With SEM you'll be lucky if it
costs less than $250K per month.

So for every SEM placement, you can send 25 newsletters. So you need SEM to
convert 25x better than email to get value from it. That might be possible,
depending on the quality of your list, but my experience is that all companies
eventually use email marketing because it's so much cheaper with big lists.

I would question how you even got a list size of 10 million, or what you're
hoping to get from direct marketing, if $10K per month is prohibitive.

~~~
unclebucknasty
Points well-taken. Thanks for sharing.

------
chasenlehara
This post doesn’t go into detail about how to accomplish a lot of these things
effectively, so let’s share some of our favorite resources.

I’ll start: “How We Got 1,000+ Subscribers from a Single Blog Post in 24
Hours”
[https://www.groovehq.com/blog/1000-subscribers](https://www.groovehq.com/blog/1000-subscribers)

~~~
sah2ed
I hadn't seen that post before even though I have heard of Groove. Thanks for
sharing.

------
minimaxir
The problem with marketing as a developer is that there is a fine line between
helpfully increasing awareness of your product/service and _being an asshole
about it_ with modals which interrupt blog post reading and "growth hacking"
of unsolicited email/Tweet blasts/etc.

Silicon Valley has been encouraging the latter because it _works_ , to my
frustration. One of the reasons people ask for upvotes on Product Hunt is that
_everyone else is doing it_ and there are no visible consequences for doing
so. (and I've recently found out that people do the same for HN votes on
occasion because they assume it's a part of the culture)

~~~
user5994461
The line is only moral, at best.

You should perform AB testing and measure what's optimal for revenues.

If spamming the user with popups and emails makes them click and buy more,
adding more of it is making the site more user friendly.

~~~
paulryanrogers
"If spamming the user with popups and emails makes them click and buy more,
adding more of it is making the site more user friendly."

That's a generous interpretation of "user friendly." If a user genuinely
wanted those things, then yes it's truly an improvement. If users didn't want
them but got the impression pop-ups and emails were required then it's more
debatable. Put another way, paying for things is not user friendly, but
without doing so there would be less worthy of buying.

~~~
user5994461
Let's assume we're talking about short and clear email messages. Nothing shady
at all, not using misleading popup to trick the user into clicking adsense
ads.

If people buy more stuff when they receive 10 mails per months, is the user to
blame?

Additional information: Users really open the emails and don't mark them as
spam at all.

------
mariusmg
Isn't this a bit ..."basic" ? I mean sending emails and having a blog is not
exactly the pinnacle of marketing (especially for developers).

~~~
kristianc
Agreed - and feeds a little into the 'Launch and the world will be beating a
path to your door' mindset. Just as important as having a blog is being able
to mine trending topics and having a proper process in place around content
production.

~~~
AznHisoka
are there really trending topics around most b2b topics? most b2b content dont
exactly go viral.

~~~
rfrank
Yes in the sense of there being industry trends you should keep up with and
talk about. One thing with b2b sites is that you don't really need viral
content, because you likely have a very specific idea of who your customers
are.

Depending on the field, lots of b2b topics aren't super competitive SEO wise,
which makes it possible to really dominate a particular topic in search
results. Long tail keywords [1] are particularly helpful from my experience.

1\. [https://moz.com/blog/long-tail-seo-target-low-volume-
keyword...](https://moz.com/blog/long-tail-seo-target-low-volume-keywords-
whiteboard-friday)

------
mcjiggerlog
This is perfect timing for me - I've just finished building my side project
([http://www.artpip.com/](http://www.artpip.com/)) and feel like I've made
something people would want to use, but was unsure about how best to get the
word out. Thank you!

~~~
ausjke
Failed to install on Windows, wish you have a Linux version.

    
    
        2017-01-01 13:27:22> Program: Starting Squirrel Updater: --install .
        2017-01-01 13:27:23> Program: Starting install, writing to  C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\SquirrelTemp
        2017-01-01 13:27:26> Program: About to install to: C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\artpip
        2017-01-01 13:27:28> CheckForUpdateImpl: Couldn't write out staging user ID, this user probably shouldn't get beta anything: System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException: 
    `

~~~
mcjiggerlog
Thanks for the report - I'll investigate. What windows version are you on?

Linux version is in the pipeline!

~~~
ausjke
windows 7 that is, 64bit

------
ssharp
re: retargeting

Before you go off shoving fistfuls of money at display ad retargeting
platforms, I'd highly suggest running placebo tests first. The platforms will
tell you how you're converting people into paying customers at a $2 rate, but
with retargeting, you've previously acquired their attention in some form --
that's how you're able to retarget them in the first place. The problem is
that, particularly with display ads and Facebook feed ads, you tend to cookie
bomb your audience and you're not getting a fair assessment of how many people
actually stayed engaged with you because your ads in some part.

In nearly all my experience, the actual value of retargeting is never what the
platforms tell you it is in their ridiculously misleading CPA reporting.

------
yenoham
Has anyone here gathered a bunch of resources similar to this, especially
around early-days bootstrap Marketing for SaaS?

We created our product as a group with engineering backgrounds and now trying
to switch some to full on Marketing mode and trying to grab anything I can get
my hands on.

~~~
marcusgarvey
Here's a terrific list compiled by Patrick Keane:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tAiya71mDQgtwn_F9-mN...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tAiya71mDQgtwn_F9-mNQhuc7GdsQ5e2_BeG69Cb82A/)

------
anacleto
If you're interesting in this topic read everything Patrick McKenzie writes:
[http://www.kalzumeus.com/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/).

This is guide is not "a bit basic", it just barely scratches the surface.

~~~
pryelluw
And do. Doing is much more effective than thinking. ;)

------
nrjdhsbsid
This is a good 1000 foot overview but they leave off some specifics that could
burn you bad.

Blog content: they say writing anything is better than nothing and there's
some truth to this, but compelling content is far more important. One thing
that can happen (seen it) is you hire some content monkeys to make you
"content". The result is bland and reads like stale Cheerios. Google will
knock your site ranking badly if users don't like to read your articles.

When I started writing content for this client my first article got more
organic traffic than their whole site with hundreds of pages of "content".
This continued with each article I wrote until 99+% of organic traffic to the
site came from around 10 articles I wrote.

Biggest thing with content is it needs to be good quality. Long form articles
with pictures work the best. The other extremely important point is to tailor
the subjects to your readers.

If you sell can openers write content about cans and cooking with canned
stuff. Write about ways to open cans when your opener breaks. Write about what
to look for in good can openers. Write about how canned food is made. Become
the one and only website about anything can related. Google questions your
readers are likely to type and get links to your site on the top search
results for those questions. Even if you have to pay some site owners it will
boost your rank tremendously.

Make sure a human visiting your site would think it was well made and google
will to. Use cdn's to make it load fast. The latest and greatest TLS certs.
Fully verified email addresses linked to you domain with all the bells and
whistles. Make your site seem legit enough that users would feel okay using
their credit cards there.

Email: make sure the emails you send are things your customers want to get.
Know the demographic of your customers and tailor your message carefully. It
goes far beyond subject line content, if you annoy your customers your emails
will get binned as "promotions" and nobody will see them.

------
janeboo
An App Launch Guide: [https://github.com/adamwulf/app-launch-
guide](https://github.com/adamwulf/app-launch-guide)

------
kumarski
1\. Get Leads. (get a good trigger signal)

2\. Send Emails

3\. Build Landing Page or other.

4\. 1-3 Repeat and modulate landing page and email template as you get more
customer conversations.

------
ensiferum
Get a botnet to upvote your blogs/product releases on HN/Product
Hunt/Reddit/etc.

------
Mister_Y
I love this! I always believed that the best developer is the one that has a
taste for business and this thing is in the line of it :D

