“Developer Marketing Does Not Exist” - Interview with Adam DuVander

API Resilience

In this episode:

When you are reaching out to developers, traditional marketing solutions like leadgen forms or ppc ads won’t work on their own. What is the right approach then? How to convince developers to use your products or services?

In this episode Adam DuVander (principal consultant at Every Developer) and Kristof Van Tomme (CEO at Pronovix) discussed

• how and why “marketing” to developers is different from marketing to other audiences,
  
• how to change your mindset and toolset to transcend and complement the classic funnel-based approach,
  
• how this way of “promotion” might even affect marketing in general in the future,
  
• and Adam also presented his new book, “Developer Marketing Does Not Exist”
  

Host: Kristof Van Tomme

Resources:

• Adam DuVander: Developer Marketing Does Not Exist
  
• The Secret Sauce of Developer Marketing - previous interview with Adam DuVander on the API Resilience podcast

Contents:

1:26 Adam is a returning guest, he is publishing a new book

2:15 storytelling - companies should do it more

2:44 developer marketing: manipulation vs education - is it only for developers?

4:00 developers are more sceptical - developer marketing tactics and approach can work at other audiences too

6:40 developers are typically difficult to reach out to with traditional promotional means

9:05 journalism: you have to find the point, and it is not to promote; developer relations: see personally how the team connects with developers

11:05 content can do a lot of the relation building for you

13:00 balance between marketing and devrel: have something that is not branded and try to connect it - let the halo effect work

14:00 the content can induce the natural next step: CTAs: “Sign up” or “Check the platform”

16:00 2 sales modes: 1. Establish credibility 2. Switch to sales mode when someone shows interest and ready to buy

17:21 make the step natural and don’t chase the developers away by asking too much (don’t ask for phone number, etc.)

19:00 blatant promotion is abusing trust. Attention is too expensive today

21:00 why are developers different? Why are they ahead in the process? they naturally want to understand how things work

24:54 Product vs Services: you only need to buy this product and you can immediately achieve your goal - it is a fake promise

33:40 How to teach your colleagues -- how to bring new people into doing content

35:30 develop the same taste in your team

36:30 The title of Adam’s book: Developer Marketing Does Not Exist. You can lay this philosophy on your funnel approach! Provide authentic content that helps to convert - it provides the audience with authenticity

41:30 Shift in approach - cooperative, without competition