How to build credibility and trust with your developer community

The Dispatch

June 12, 2024 | Edition # 2

Argon Labs is specialized technical and developer marketing firm that helps startups to scale-up technology companies build out their content strategy and helps them establish domain authority and presence in their industry.

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Welcome to the latest edition of the Dispatch, where we provide you the latest musings on technical marketing and developer experience to help educate and inform you on building the best content strategy for your team and organization.

This month, we’re diving into a topic that maybe useful for organizations out there building developer-focused products — How to Build Credibility with your Developer Community

Developers are an interesting bunch. They’re not like your everyday customer or user. They demand immediate value, trust/credibility from the product, and low barriers to entry to get started. It’s also a plus if there’s a growing and thriving community along to boot.

Let’s take a closer look into how companies can better build out their brand and presence with their developer community.

Time to dive in.

But first, here’s a few things that caught our eye this past month.

What Caught Our Eye

[podcast] How to figure out which developer is the right developer audience for your product — Milica Maksimović is a Product Marketing Manager. This podcast episode reveals exactly how to discover your true developer target market, across both B2C and B2B.

​Developer Experience: What not to do — great post by Shuba Swaminathan where she reveals the top mistakes that repel developers from using your product. Also, she goes into how to keep your developer community engaged and satisfied.

​How Notion Does Marketing: A Deep-Dive Into its Community, Influencers & Growth Playbooks — First Round capital wrote a piece on how Notion initially struggled to find Product-Market-Fit, but eventually discovered their footing when they

How to Build Credibility and Trust with your Developer Community

Why Credibility and Trust Matter

You’re an up and coming company. There’s plenty of competition and product options already in the market. But you’re still young, have little branding, authority and presence.

Getting developers to use your product for the first time ensures that you have something of value to offer but it also means you need to establish some sort of trust with them.

Here’s a few tactics that you can employ to build this trust, quickly.

Deliver High-Quality Technical Content

Developers just wanted to get started, fast! They favor practicality over theory, and they want this product to solve their problem.

If you are starting out, your first batch of technical content can be a variety of tutorials, walkthroughs, guides, comparison articles and API docs.

Tutorials / Guides — these can range from introductory getting started articles to in-depth user guides. Ensure they cater to the skill levels from beginner to advanced. Pro tip: create pieces that are practical that can solve an immediate problem. You can leverage current affairs (latest news) as a way to create virality around the product. If you’re an AI company, perhaps you can use it in a way that extracts data from a viral video or podcast.

Comparison Pieces — these are great when you you’re trying to convince incoming users (developers) why your product should be considered. In many cases, it’s a good way to provide an unbiased perspective between your product and others in the market. It’s a plus if your product is superior in some areas, which may incentivize the community to learn more about you and spark some interest.

API documentation — outside from the content awareness that you’re generating from the tutorials, walkthroughs and guides, it’s also important to have a developer portal where you can showcase your entire API. This is when developers are now convinced that your product has something to offer, and now ready to start using it. API docs, because it helps consolidate everything to become the one-stop shop for developers to easily access, understand and digest your API.

Engage Actively with Your Community

Build a community. We strongly believe this to be a non-negotiable when it comes to ensuring you have a long-lasting product (and community).

Nowadays, it’s super easy to start building a group of fans around your product. You get started by creating communities on Slack, Discord, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram and so many others. Be sure to includes these communities everywhere i.e. website, social, newsletters etc. Make it as easy as possible for people to join and participate.

Doing this allows you to provide a platform where others can join and communicate with each other and the organization. It enables for discussion on new feature development, bug reporting, and general product feedback.

Being able to foster suggestions from the community is a powerful way to create a feedback loop with your most trusted users.

We highly encourage you to read Paul Graham’s essay on Doing Things That Don’t Scale — a provocative title, but a helpful guide on how to focus on your 100 true fans when building community.

Showcase Your Value

This goes without saying, but worth mentioning anyway — show by example.

Your credibility is highly correlated with what value you can offer as well as the track record you have created thus far.

These can come in the form of:

• Case Studies: demonstrate the clients you have worked alongside. You can put together a .pdf of a few pages showing how you are working with and helping them solve some of their most pressing problems.
• User Stories: pick a handful of early fans you’ve worked with and see if you can get a testimonial/story on their positive experience with the product. This helps create inclusiveness around the community.
• Collaborative Projects: similar to case studies, but this focuses more on any joint projects you have with certain partners. A great example is OpenAI partnering with Apple to integrate it’s technology into Apple devices. Being able to collaborate is a strong sign that other reputable partners see value in what you’re building.

Provide Honest and Transparent Communication

It’s one thing telling the world how awesome you are, but it’s another being honest and transparent about your faults and when things go wrong.

People appreciate honesty. Developers know that services can go down, and API can get broken. Announcing these via Twitter and/or your online communities i.e. Discord, Slack etc. is a powerful way to build trust with your community.

Honest and transparency can go a long way.

Leverage Community Feedback and Support

Create channel feedback loops to leverage your community. All this means is to build out processes such that you can quickly receive feedback from your users. Typically this will via those online community groups you have created, or it could be through virtual events you hold on a periodic basis.

Once you get that feedback, it’s also important to have the speed to respond in a timely manner, especially with issues back to the community. Having a good support/ticketing system via Jira or other third-party platforms means you can optimize the feedback look and fix bugs, introduce new features very quickly, thus edging out in front of your competitors.

Helping Build Your Own Developer Portal

Over the past few months, we’ve been working with a few of our partners to build out their own developer portal. We see this is as the next stage when it comes to building and fostering a community of developers for an organization, as well as building great developer experience.

We noticed that with the content awareness we were helping produce i.e. tutorials, comparison articles, persuasion pieces, user guides etc. — this was only one piece of the puzzle.

The other piece was getting developers/users/customers to stay on the platform and continue to use the product with ease. This is where we begun to offer an additional service of helping build out your own developer portal.

This includes an end-to-end service of creating a fully-hosted public facing API reference docs portal, a sandbox to test and quickly verify API calls over a number of languages as well as working with your engineering team to help document and maintain your API.

Reach out to us if you’re interested in something like this.

Connect with Us

If you’re in need of some additional support and help with your technical or developer content marketing strategy, feel free to reach out to us. You can check out our website and book a call with us. Alternatively, you can also say hello to us via email at team@argonlabs.xyz. Subscribe to our LinkedIn channel for the latest content.