Want to sell your developer tool? Here’s what we know.

As early-stage enterprise investors, we invest in companies building for developers and founders selling to CTOs and engineering leaders. In doing so, we often encounter a pressing question: “How do you as a CEO of a technical product stand out when the buyer’s inbox is full of other CEOs, SDRs, and AEs, each peddling their own stuff?”

We keep with speaking with CTOs, Engineering leaders and Developers to understand how they use what they use, why they buy what they buy and what are some of the best ways to be able to grab their attention. This post is a collection of points we gathered on some of our learnings from the conversations.

In March 2024, we also hosted a select group of founders and GTM leaders coming from developer tooling startups across India. In this discussion, we attempted to uncover what it takes to convince a CTO to buy a technical product. The session was led by Sandeep A., Engineering Director at Uber and a Venture Partner with us.

Here are some key points that stood out:

• Cold Emails may not be the best way: Don’t get me wrong, cold emails are a wonderful way to reach out to your target audience! In fact, it can help unlock some amazing conversations, maybe even end up in a sale. But, if that is the only avenue through which a prospective buyer is getting to know you, it may be prudent to start looking at other channels. Moreover, the emails you are sending out must show that you have done your basic groundwork and have put in a thought or two instead of mail merging it to 100+ people. Talk about why your product is a lot better than the process/tool that the team might be using.
• LinkedIn DMs may be a hit or a miss: Engineering leaders are bombarded with DMs from SDRs, AEs, other engineers looking for a job, recruiters, and many more. Don’t just DM. Try and show up in their feed. You may consider posting things like engineering blogs, customer case studies, your product capabilities, what’s it like to run a business, and more. This may go a long way with recall.
• Technical blogs: Get your team to start writing blogs about the problem you are solving, challenges your clients may have encountered while building the product and how you solved it, technical and infrastructure decisions, and more. This should not ideally be a generic post meant to only help your SEO rankings.
• Team members upstreaming the product to their manager: If the buyer is hearing about your tool from their team, it eases the buying process significantly. Getting developers to use the tool, however, is not that easy. Open-sourcing the product, having your engineers and CTOs speaking at technical conferences, your engineers hanging out at discord channels, slack communities, and forums where your target market developers are hanging out are some of the ways your users can get to know about your product.
• Is your product is ready to be evaluated?: I don’t mean this in a way that you should have all the features, capabilities, and integrations ready to go. But ensuring that your website is easy to navigate and explaining the product is a bare minimum. Don’t be afraid to get technical in your language. Ensure that the documentation is easy to read, contains examples, and is ready with sandboxes and playgrounds. Also, it may be wise to allow users to take your product for a spin quickly. Even if it is an enterprise product offering, let the users and the buyers touch and feel the product. This isn’t the same as embedding a 30-sec walkthrough video on your webpage.
• Unapologetically technical: If you as a CEO of a technical product need your CTO or sales engineer to talk about the underlying technical parts of the product, it isn’t the most ideal scenario. Don’t be afraid to dive deep into the skeletons of your product stack and talk about the technical details of how your product solves the buyer’s challenge.
• Talk value: Value doesn’t just include the tangibles, i.e., the $$$ saved or the number of hours saved but also talk about the intangible value that the product unlocks. It is important to lead with value and not just with bells and whistle capabilities of your product.

Do you have any insights to share on selling developer tools? Let us know!

If you are building a technical product and are in the early stages, we would love to speak with you. Please drop a line on my email — harshal@araliventures.in

Arali Ventures is a pre-seed, seed-stage VC from India, investing in entrepreneurs building enterprise-tech solutions for the world. We help shape their journeys through product-market-fit and beyond and scale the offerings to greater heights.

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