C-3PO speaks more than six million languages, and I’m certain one of them is “developer.” After spending more than two decades working in marketing and speaking what I’d say is fairly traditional enterprise marketing–speak, I now turn my focus to an audience I have much less familiarity with — developers.
I didn’t think I was a total noob. About 10 years ago, when I worked for Sophos, we came up with what I thought were some fairly awesomely nerdy booth themes for Australia like Dr. Who inflatable Daleks (one that unfortunately didn’t inflate all the way and had a limp protruding telescopic manipulation arm), the Get Smart cone of silence, and several others featuring references to Angry Birds, Star Trek, Battlezone and more.
I also have an older brother who is a software engineer/landscape architect/environmental scientist/cat lover, who has developed his own programming language for what I must say is some pretty clever GIS mapping technology. I grew up walking past his room and inhaling fumes from his soldering iron and seeing strewn chip boards, microchips and Commodore64 parts on his desk. Back in the day, he designed his own games and let me play Zork with him on the odd occasion.
I even watched Star Wars more than a few times and just watched the seventh season of Clone Wars again (the animation is SO good in this final series). I thought I fully understood the “techy” persona. But I’m now advised through Sonatype’s DevSecOps 2020 survey, that not all developers are actually into Star Wars (50%) or Star Trek (a pathetic 23%). When it came to pizza however, just over a third said pepperoni pizza was their favorite topping. So, maybe I don’t know that much about this audience after all.
That said, I’ve done an awful lot of Googling and have found some excellent bits of advice on developer marketing and developer relations, including the book coincidentally named, “Developer Marketing and Relations: The Essential Guide, 2nd Edition” published by /Data. It’s an incredibly insightful and useful book for first-timers and a must-read for start-ups and businesses looking to expand their audience to include developers.
In my research, I found a common thread that developers despise marketers and all the insincere fluff we produce. Offended? Not really. I get it.
At Ubiq, we’re learning, we’re listening, we’re talking to as many people as we can who have experience in developer marketing and developer relations so we can start off on the right foot. This is a relatively new area, and there aren’t hundreds, let alone dozens, of books or subject matter experts on “How to Developer Market the Heck out of your Excellent Product” or “How to Build an Awesome Developer Community in 6 Easy Steps!”.
What I’m already gleaning is that it will be different for every organization and you need to start with asking why you’re doing it. It’s not a quick-fire strategy to fill the sales pipeline or a cunning ploy to lull developers into a false sense of love for your product only to be mercilessly sold to. It’s about wanting developers to genuinely see value in your product, to feel excited about it, to be part of the process of making your product even better, and to show how your product can help them do their jobs better, more efficiently and more effectively. We’d also like to get some high-fives or “live long and prospers” along the way.
