> Pushy pop-ups, "do it now", flashy colors, and all that stuff.
Things that work like a charm in e-commerce or fashion will most likely not work on devs.
Not just 'not work', but 'actively repel'. A popup chat bot or a survey form request (during or after using a website or software product) or anything not germane to the task that has a shadow or notification highlight has slowly but surely become a form of wart that elicits a deep, instinctual disgust from me. I'd even say an unhealthy and unreasonable level of disgust.
It's enough to get me to instantly despise a product almost nomatter how well it does its original job.
But 100 folks who actually click ads or interact with these distraction baubles (mistakenly or otherwise) are worth thousands of people like me, so I understand why it won't ever change for the better out of a company's own volition.
---
When it comes to advertising, say, developer tooling, I think a large part of the problem is that there's just not going to be a lot of relevant tools out there, for my job or hobbies, that I either don't already know about (and aren't using because I have already evaluated its prospects) or... I am already using it. Conversely, seeing ads for something I am already using has potential for negative effects (see above). Tasteful advertising is thus useful for the rare case of something I don't know about, but I don't think it's worth it when 999/1000 of these ads are detrimental and irrelevant.
> Not just 'not work', but 'actively repel'. A popup chat bot or a survey form request (during or after using a website or software product) or anything not germane to the task that has a shadow or notification highlight has slowly but surely become a form of wart that elicits a deep, instinctual disgust from me. I'd even say an unhealthy and unreasonable level of disgust.
Same here. I've even setup a bunch of Firefox extensions just to keep the annoying ad-like stuff away from me.
Sometimes, when I open up a browser on a computer I don't own, I get surprised by how filled internet is with annoyances. It feels like I've put on the glasses from They Live and can suddenly see all the bullsh-t.
There's no form of marketing that I "like" or actively reward, at most there's marketing that I fell for.
Anything that comes from the primary source is an automatic nope, I'll only take positive accounts from third-party sources. Unfortunately, not even that is enough, so I've become wary of HN comments praising any particular product.
What's even more unfortunate is that you have to apply the same skepticism to open source "products" these days as it has become common even for open source projects to exaggerate the project's capabilities and be dishonest about its limitations.
When I was younger, I sold turquoise jewelry at the Grand Canyon and I feel about the same towards sales and marketing, I mean they are the same with different levels of scale. I found an exception though, the way we sold in the shop I worked at would only teach people interesting things if they showed interest, explain the history, the nuances, give some background on the artist who made it, things like that. Even if there wasn't a sale the ones who took the time to listen still learned something interesting, and those who did buy now had something cool to tell to people who would ask them about it later.
So I guess I'm saying that tutorial style marketing is ok, but that's such a small amount of what passes for marketing nowadays, and marketing tends to always take anything and everything too far to the point of ruining it and whatever platform supports it.
>There's no form of marketing that I "like" or actively reward, at most there's marketing that I fell for.
For very high value software licensing agreements there's huge financial rewards for performing the marketing dance with the vendor. Paying list for enterprise software doesn't happen. Customers who even know what Oracle RAS is , or SQL SERVER Parallel, are numbered in the hundreds. The expenditure on manpower to design and commission a new major database installation is two to three orders of magnitude greater than the license costs. That's per database not enterprise wide. You embark upon a courtship from the outset.
This isn't what the article nor what most everyone's discussing, but I thought it worthwhile to offer a real illustration of a very viable means of sales and marketing that can be made to work if you have a high value application or service and can identify a small finite number of customers.
Edit: I probably should have said the number of customers who know what they're doing with the most sophisticated databases is very likely in the hundreds. Arguably the market is rather larger but if the behaviour F500 generally is any indication, there's a lot of nameplate and marquee buying driven by C suite egos. If you're selling a unique and expensive application this is where your margins are. And where tales of sales excess and bad reputation / hubris attaching to your product originate.
I used to be a bar manager 16 years ago and would often see the Anheuser-Busch marketing rep for our region out and about, and she would never fail to use her corporate credit card to buy me some free drinks. I liked that form of marketing.
For something I am already using and actively repel (because I have to use it but hate it) I do the following: I click on every ad I can find, because they advertise a lot, to make them pay 1.30 usd per click for nothing. I'm only seeing this ad now, everywhere.
It'd be very interesting to see the results of some A/B tests where they looked at the effectiveness of a marketing funnel with some of these distracting features on and off.
I mean, I think we all know what the results would be, but I think that a lot of bean-counter types will only listen to beans counted...
A/B testing creative is pretty typical. I'm certain "flashy" ads that get your attention perform better. Of course, they change the style of your page, and if you don't like they way they make your site look, don't use them.
Anything connected to ads or marketing triggers a visceral response of disgust in me.
Not just towards products or companies that try to show me an ad, but for the advertising/marketing industry itself, the very concept of ads, and all the professions staffed with people who make it their life's work to promulgate it all. It reeks to me of hot air and lies.
Any I don't trust any company (looking at you, Google and Facebook) whose revenue comes primarily from ads - such income poisons everything it touches.
I absolutely agree, and DigitalOcean does it brilliantly.
I ran into a similar situation the other day trying to put together some apt packages in a way that was clearly off the beaten path. Found a company blog post that walked through pretty much exactly what I was trying to do.
The marketing portion of it? At the very very end of the article was "And here's the single command you'd need to run to do this with our tool." I didn't end up buying the tool because it didn't quite fit some other requirements I had, but it did very effectively get me looking at their product and evaluating whether or not it'd be good for me.
I never thought about it that way, but for sysadmin questions if I see a DigitalOcean article I always pick it. They are always high quality and they version them by major OS version (Ubuntu 18/20/22).
Maybe that's why I have droplets, they got me by providing a good well priced service. /s
A similar example is Neptune.ai, with one of their comparison posts ranking top for almost every query about any MLOps tool. It is very effective for visibility; even if the posts’ quality is poor and marketing is a little aggressive.
I work on EthicalAds, one of the ad networks mentioned in the post. We focus on targeting relevant developer-focused ads to content rather than to individuals.
The post is great. My only nitpick is that the author mentions that they think retargeting will go away. The scope of retargeting might be reduced especially as third-party cookies stop working but I don't think retargeting will completely go away. Big ad companies with whom visitors have a direct relationship with (Google, FB) will always be able to do it. They know the pages on their sites and those linked from their site that visitors visit and they will use it to target ads. They don't need third-party cookies since they have first-party cookies.
Networks that just do ads and don't have relationships with visitors except for advertising will find it harder and harder. At EthicalAds, we don't do retargeting at all because of our privacy focus, but many ad networks will find retargeting more challenging (less precise, they can always fingerprint users) to do. Doing away with it is a good thing from a privacy perspective but it probably will further entrench the big players.
I was the organizer of Austrias biggest developer meetup for a few years. Took it from 5 people in a cellar to a monthly mini conference with 100+ attendees each month. When it became to expensive to pay for Pizza and beer out of my own pocket, I got sponsors.
the sponsor got logo and link to their job boards in the newsletters, and they HAD TO give a talk: 5 (to 10 min max), then 4 min Q&A, then 3 for their pitch (mostly looking for devs).
hard time limit, hard format. only if they agreed to this they were allowed to sponsor our pizza and beer.
oh, and the talk HAD TO include some real world code. Q&A was non negotiable.
the HR department (the sponsor initiators) was surprised.
the audience loved it. as the HR did send lead devs / CTO to give the talk. some of the best talks of the meetup we got that way.
after some time I had waiting lists for sponsorships as the format worked so well.
the secret to advertise to developers? show some real world code!
How I've marketed to devs successfully (former YC head of growth, currently work in paid media):
1. Paid search.
If someone is searching, give them a good product and good reason to sign up. Be relevant, be clear, and offer a no-risk way for someone to get started with your product.
2. Reddit
If there is a subreddit _already_ talking about the problem your products solves, you've got a goldmine. Keep your ad simple. Keep comments on. Respond to comments.
3. Organic Search
Have the best content on a specific topic related to your product. Add in CTA's in your content while being respectful.
4. Follow trends
Monitor keywords on Hacker News/Reddit and see what's going on. I hit the top of HN twice in a row doing this.
--
General notes:
1. Understand your customer's problems. Lead with benefits then explain with features. Read books like "Breakthrough Advertising" by Eugene Schwartz or "Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves.
2. Talk to people who make it work. The more people you can talk to, the better.
3. Focus on testing messages. Find what resonates and scale that
>devs don’t want it to read like an ad (hate advertising)
This is pretty much why I only use browsers with ublock origin installed, and avoid browsing on devices I can't filter out 99.9% of image/video ads. I don't see ads on youtube or google or most other common sites. The only way I get advertised to is sponsored segments in videos or podcasts, or reading a product review I see on a site like HN.
In the case of the former, the sponsor is hoping my willingness to watch/listen to the content provider talk about stuff I like will transfer some level of tolerance to listening to them shill a product. In reality I either mute it until the segment is over or skip past it (if able). For the latter, I do sometimes look at product pages for gizmos and software posted to HN but I bee-line straight for the specs and ignore the marketing fluff, which is either a wordy summary of the specs, or else completely lacking in substance.
So I think some audiences are simply not targetable by their own choice and you have to accept it. I have certainly tried pretty hard to make myself impossible to advertise to (at least in a consistent and reliable way), and I don't think this mindset is uncommon in the industry.
I skip most of the sponsorship on YouTube. I used to use an extension to do it (i think this one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...), but mostly just press the right arrow key until it looks like it's not the ad anymore. Let's be honest. I'm not going to buy your graphical website builder or VPN. I can get both of those in other ways.
For me, you basically have to have good organic search results, or I won't hear about it. Or write something interesting and put it on HN. Works quite well for Tailscale and Fly.io.
-- been doing developer marketing for 20 years - it's very simple - developers are like cats - just make sure they know you're there - treat them well - & eventually they'll come sit with you - last thing you wanna do is be mauling them --
I jumped through a lot of hoops to earn a free t-shirt that says "Everything will be 200 OK". I had to sign up for a couple cloud services and set up some kind of automation, essentially demo-ing the product to myself to get the shirt. It was smart on their part.
My company sponsored a coding livestream recently that featured a dev integrating with our product and I was astonished at how excited folks were to have a chance to win a t-shirt.
People get unreasonably excited about swag. I try not to take T-shirts any longer unless there's something unique about them. If it's just some random company's name I'll pass. I've given away huge trash bags of lightly worn or unworn T-shirts and I still have massive piles of them.
As the purveyor of this shirt, it warms my heart to read this comment. We pretty much copied New Relic's model for this, and it worked really well. For awhile it felt like we were more a t-shirt company than a software company.
Readit News
Not just 'not work', but 'actively repel'. A popup chat bot or a survey form request (during or after using a website or software product) or anything not germane to the task that has a shadow or notification highlight has slowly but surely become a form of wart that elicits a deep, instinctual disgust from me. I'd even say an unhealthy and unreasonable level of disgust.
It's enough to get me to instantly despise a product almost nomatter how well it does its original job.
But 100 folks who actually click ads or interact with these distraction baubles (mistakenly or otherwise) are worth thousands of people like me, so I understand why it won't ever change for the better out of a company's own volition.
---
When it comes to advertising, say, developer tooling, I think a large part of the problem is that there's just not going to be a lot of relevant tools out there, for my job or hobbies, that I either don't already know about (and aren't using because I have already evaluated its prospects) or... I am already using it. Conversely, seeing ads for something I am already using has potential for negative effects (see above). Tasteful advertising is thus useful for the rare case of something I don't know about, but I don't think it's worth it when 999/1000 of these ads are detrimental and irrelevant.
Same here. I've even setup a bunch of Firefox extensions just to keep the annoying ad-like stuff away from me.
Sometimes, when I open up a browser on a computer I don't own, I get surprised by how filled internet is with annoyances. It feels like I've put on the glasses from They Live and can suddenly see all the bullsh-t.
Anything that comes from the primary source is an automatic nope, I'll only take positive accounts from third-party sources. Unfortunately, not even that is enough, so I've become wary of HN comments praising any particular product.
What's even more unfortunate is that you have to apply the same skepticism to open source "products" these days as it has become common even for open source projects to exaggerate the project's capabilities and be dishonest about its limitations.
So I guess I'm saying that tutorial style marketing is ok, but that's such a small amount of what passes for marketing nowadays, and marketing tends to always take anything and everything too far to the point of ruining it and whatever platform supports it.
For very high value software licensing agreements there's huge financial rewards for performing the marketing dance with the vendor. Paying list for enterprise software doesn't happen. Customers who even know what Oracle RAS is , or SQL SERVER Parallel, are numbered in the hundreds. The expenditure on manpower to design and commission a new major database installation is two to three orders of magnitude greater than the license costs. That's per database not enterprise wide. You embark upon a courtship from the outset.
This isn't what the article nor what most everyone's discussing, but I thought it worthwhile to offer a real illustration of a very viable means of sales and marketing that can be made to work if you have a high value application or service and can identify a small finite number of customers.
Edit: I probably should have said the number of customers who know what they're doing with the most sophisticated databases is very likely in the hundreds. Arguably the market is rather larger but if the behaviour F500 generally is any indication, there's a lot of nameplate and marquee buying driven by C suite egos. If you're selling a unique and expensive application this is where your margins are. And where tales of sales excess and bad reputation / hubris attaching to your product originate.
You don't like Paul Graham's essays? Because they are marketing. One of the best I've ever seen I may add.
For something I am already using and actively repel (because I have to use it but hate it) I do the following: I click on every ad I can find, because they advertise a lot, to make them pay 1.30 usd per click for nothing. I'm only seeing this ad now, everywhere.
I mean, I think we all know what the results would be, but I think that a lot of bean-counter types will only listen to beans counted...
The marketers would be surprised because they believe people need the shit they advertise.
Some devs would be surprised because this stuff is effective at getting a larger N - total sales funnel volume, not efficiency, is most of their goal.
Most devs would be surprised that it’s even something people talk about.
And the regular citizen like my mom would be surprised that such a thing even exists.
Exactly. If I see something like that I'll often add a custom ad-block rule so it never shows again.
Anything connected to ads or marketing triggers a visceral response of disgust in me.
Not just towards products or companies that try to show me an ad, but for the advertising/marketing industry itself, the very concept of ads, and all the professions staffed with people who make it their life's work to promulgate it all. It reeks to me of hot air and lies.
Any I don't trust any company (looking at you, Google and Facebook) whose revenue comes primarily from ads - such income poisons everything it touches.
Deleted Comment
One of the best examples I've seen is digital ocean. When ever I google a sys admin type question, there is a digital ocean article as the top result.
I ran into a similar situation the other day trying to put together some apt packages in a way that was clearly off the beaten path. Found a company blog post that walked through pretty much exactly what I was trying to do.
The marketing portion of it? At the very very end of the article was "And here's the single command you'd need to run to do this with our tool." I didn't end up buying the tool because it didn't quite fit some other requirements I had, but it did very effectively get me looking at their product and evaluating whether or not it'd be good for me.
Maybe that's why I have droplets, they got me by providing a good well priced service. /s
The post is great. My only nitpick is that the author mentions that they think retargeting will go away. The scope of retargeting might be reduced especially as third-party cookies stop working but I don't think retargeting will completely go away. Big ad companies with whom visitors have a direct relationship with (Google, FB) will always be able to do it. They know the pages on their sites and those linked from their site that visitors visit and they will use it to target ads. They don't need third-party cookies since they have first-party cookies.
Networks that just do ads and don't have relationships with visitors except for advertising will find it harder and harder. At EthicalAds, we don't do retargeting at all because of our privacy focus, but many ad networks will find retargeting more challenging (less precise, they can always fingerprint users) to do. Doing away with it is a good thing from a privacy perspective but it probably will further entrench the big players.
the sponsor got logo and link to their job boards in the newsletters, and they HAD TO give a talk: 5 (to 10 min max), then 4 min Q&A, then 3 for their pitch (mostly looking for devs). hard time limit, hard format. only if they agreed to this they were allowed to sponsor our pizza and beer.
oh, and the talk HAD TO include some real world code. Q&A was non negotiable.
the HR department (the sponsor initiators) was surprised.
the audience loved it. as the HR did send lead devs / CTO to give the talk. some of the best talks of the meetup we got that way.
after some time I had waiting lists for sponsorships as the format worked so well.
the secret to advertise to developers? show some real world code!
meetup was called ViennaJS
1. Paid search.
If someone is searching, give them a good product and good reason to sign up. Be relevant, be clear, and offer a no-risk way for someone to get started with your product.
2. Reddit
If there is a subreddit _already_ talking about the problem your products solves, you've got a goldmine. Keep your ad simple. Keep comments on. Respond to comments.
3. Organic Search
Have the best content on a specific topic related to your product. Add in CTA's in your content while being respectful.
4. Follow trends
Monitor keywords on Hacker News/Reddit and see what's going on. I hit the top of HN twice in a row doing this.
--
General notes:
1. Understand your customer's problems. Lead with benefits then explain with features. Read books like "Breakthrough Advertising" by Eugene Schwartz or "Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves.
2. Talk to people who make it work. The more people you can talk to, the better.
3. Focus on testing messages. Find what resonates and scale that
Dead Comment
This is pretty much why I only use browsers with ublock origin installed, and avoid browsing on devices I can't filter out 99.9% of image/video ads. I don't see ads on youtube or google or most other common sites. The only way I get advertised to is sponsored segments in videos or podcasts, or reading a product review I see on a site like HN.
In the case of the former, the sponsor is hoping my willingness to watch/listen to the content provider talk about stuff I like will transfer some level of tolerance to listening to them shill a product. In reality I either mute it until the segment is over or skip past it (if able). For the latter, I do sometimes look at product pages for gizmos and software posted to HN but I bee-line straight for the specs and ignore the marketing fluff, which is either a wordy summary of the specs, or else completely lacking in substance.
So I think some audiences are simply not targetable by their own choice and you have to accept it. I have certainly tried pretty hard to make myself impossible to advertise to (at least in a consistent and reliable way), and I don't think this mindset is uncommon in the industry.
For me, you basically have to have good organic search results, or I won't hear about it. Or write something interesting and put it on HN. Works quite well for Tailscale and Fly.io.
Deleted Comment