No matter who your buyers are, pay attention to their developers

In the past decade we have seen the birth of a new business segment: B2D -Business to Developers. Companies who sell products to be used by developers. For these companies, developers have become decision makers with considerable budgets, and they compete for the developers’ attention.

Most of these companies employ Developer Advocates. The Developer Advocate’s main job is to create content focused on developers and to build a community around a product. The influence of this community reflects the power of the product, and power eventually translated to revenue and growth.

If you are a senior manager or hold a Developer Relations position in such a B2D company this is no news to you.

But what about software companies who do not sell directly to developers, but developers are still a crucial part of their product integration? What should growth managers and C-levels in such companies do to give developers a positive role in their growth trajectory?

When I joined almost 2 years ago, AppsFlyer’s senior management was facing this exact challenge: How can we make our customers’ application developers happy and contribute positively to the company’s growth process, when the decision makers are in fact the mobile marketers?
The solution was to build a new strategy and infrastructure to answer this challenge, and with positive and promising results so far.

Any senior manager and developer relation manager, who is interested in making their customers’ developers a positive growth factor, will find this blog useful.

Now developers are decision makers

Clients’ developers have become a critical factor in companies growth. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based companies offering cloud hosting services, databases, cyber-security solutions, machine learning — if you can imagine a service for developers, there is probably a SaaS company already providing it.

SaaS allowed companies to develop tools for developers that could be easily consumed. Your customers’ developer should just read the documentation, connect to a remote API with their credentials and off they go — you have another satisfied customer born.

This made developers much more than users — they are now decision makers. They decide if your database will host their data, if your cloud will host their application and if your cyber security portal will protect their traffic. Your company’s growth is now dependent on their choices.

They also decide whether your product is too annoying to use, and they should find another tool.

Here come the Developer Advocates

As soon as companies realised there were new decision makers in town, they invested in making developers happy — starting from making sure APIs are easily explained and consumed, all the way to cool swag and hot pizzas in meetups. Just to persuade you, the developer, our database is not only cooler, but will also make you the `hero` of your company.

And so, the role of the Developer Advocate was born — their job is to make sure the product is built to the liking of developers, easily consumed and simply documented. If done correctly, developers will wallow in your content, come to your summits and recommend your product to all their peers. Now that company has a developer community that will contribute significantly to its growth.

Are you a software company without resident developer communities?

If you develop a software solution for the use of decision makers, who are not developers, but you require customer developers to make it work — this is you in the title.
Take AppsFlyer for example, it is no doubt a highly sophisticated software company, focused on assisting mobile marketers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. The decision makers whether to use AppsFlyer products are most likely the mobile marketers and not the mobile developers. The mobile developers integrating AppsFlyer measuring code into their application, would like to spend close-to-zero time doing that. Therefore mobile developers have close-to-zero interest in becoming a member of the AppsFlyer community for mobile developers.

So, are mobile developers important to AppsFlyer? Absolutely yes!

Developers are a crucial part of making AppsFlyer’s product work for decision makers — in AppsFlyer’s case the mobile marketers.
If you make your customers’ developers happy and satisfied, most likely the decision makers will be happy. And this is when your growth grows.

`Touch-and-go` solution

The most important rule when dealing with developers in companies like AppsFlyer is to realize that you have to think almost the opposite from companies who constantly nourish developer communities.

Developers come to developer communities to revel in their content. They learn as much as they can, write blogs, solve problems online, attend conferences, speak at meetups — for short gain reputation in that community.

Companies without developer communities should understand developers would like to get your code integrated, working correctly, and move on. Quicker and safer — is better.

The key word here is friction-less. Create your content for developers aiming at minimal interaction, a steep learning curve and an easy way to test it.

Less is more

Reducing the time your customers’ developer spends on learning, integrating and testing your code, is key. The product should be designed for minimal friction between the code or API and the developer.

The learning resources (e.g. documentation) should follow the same path. Keep them as short and to the point as possible. Keep them focused on the learned subject. The developers will focus on accomplishing a specific task, and move on. There is no point in giving background information, or trying to lure them into deep dive sessions. It will only confuse the developers, and won’t make them happy — most likely annoyed.

We are not the same

People have different learning habits. Some like to read documentation; some understand better from videos played at double speed; some like to just take a look at a code snippet and understand everything.
Keeping your customers’ developers’ resources diverse will allow you to cater for as many developers as possible. Each will consume the knowledge from their favourite media, optimizing their learning curve. Make sure you make your diverse resources as public as possible, and spread the word. On each of your resources cross-link the other ones, just in case a developer stumbles on one, but actually prefers another.

Adjust your gauges

How can you measure the efficiency of your frictionless resources for developers?

When measuring the efficiency of your resources, remember that the ideal period of time spent is the minimal one. This includes the entire period of time from learning the necessary information to integrating the code or API, writing and coding, and testing safely .

Another important metric that will indicate your customers’ developers are on the right track, is support tickets related to initial integrations, or any subsequent tasks they might follow. Less tickets over time means that the process is indeed friction-less.

Final thoughts and looking forward

Building a solid infrastructure for your customers’ developers is very important to your growth. Even if the developers are not the direct decision makers. These developers do not require you to build a community for them or nurture them through a long process. On the contrary — stay focused and make sure they complete the tasks as fast as possible with minimum friction.

There are new tools that come to your aid doing exactly that — interactive videos that allow developers to skip quickly between chapters; code recipes which allow the developer to step line by line explaining its context without the need to read through any documentation; hosting code examples that serve as stepping stones to faster code deployment.

Finally, you can build a complete independent forum of users who assist occasional developers, and you only need to reward the helpers and manage the forum. This put will actually allow you to have a community of developers, serving developers who do not wish to be part of a community.

Whatever approach you take, as long as you build it with your customers’ developers in mind, they will appreciate it, and spread the word to decision makers that they like your product and will come back again.