5 rules to market to developers without being a sleazeball

I’ve spent most of the past decade building and marketing developer-focused products. I’m a developer myself. I’m the target audience. I should nail marketing.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes.

Most of those mistakes occurred when I justified breaking one of the five rules below. Every time, I was wrong. Since I’m sure I’ll come up with an excuse to break the rules again, I decided to write these rules down.

1. Concise writing

Match the writing style of senior devs* by writing short and to the point. Think Hemmingway (there’s an app for that). Look at the Rails repo. Notice the to-the-point style of developer communication in GitHub issues.

2. Be Reasonable

Senior Devs live a life of tradeoffs. They know there is no perfect, forever architectural decision. Products that promise to be a forever solution do not pass the sniff test. It’s OK to specialize and talk about what you don’t do.

3. Forget ads

More than 70% of developers use an adblocker and 40% have NEVER clicked on an advertisement. We’re a suspicious bunch that doesn’t like to be tracked.

4. Say no to email flair

Stop with the non-default fonts, large headers, and long email signatures. Use Markdown if you need some formatting. Scan a developer mailing list — you’ll see very little flair in developer emails.

5. Focus on one topic per-email

Much of a developer’s communication is via tools like GitHub issues. We’re used to focusing our writing on a narrow topic. We don’t like scope creep. We like emails that resemble the same format.

If a developer is interested in your product, I’ve found that they are not afraid to ask an unrelated question. You don’t need to cover all the bases.

* — why do I call out “senior” developers? Senior developers are the primary decision maker for most of the products I’ve worked on. Their words carry more weight.