@@ -3,18 +3,18 @@ slug: developer-led-sales-startups
33meta: Talk slides, notes and more resources for a technical talk on developer-led sales and marketing for tech startups, by Matt Makai.
44category: talk
55date: 2019-06-26
6- modified: 2019-06-26
6+ modified: 2019-07-07
77newsletter: False
8- headerimage: /img/visuals/talk-header .jpg
8+ headerimage: /img/190626-dev-led-sales/01-dev-led-sales .jpg
99headeralt: Comment bubble with code representing a technical talk-based blog post.
1010
1111
1212This blog post contains the slides along with a loose transcript
1313from my talk on the promises and perils of developer-led sales as an
14- early-stage company strategy for acquiring customers.
14+ early-stage company method to acquire customers.
1515
1616I gave this talk remotely to [ Ubiquity.VC] ( http://www.ubiquity.vc/ )
17- portfolio company founders and the Extended Team on June 26, 2019.
17+ portfolio company startup founders and the Extended Team on June 26, 2019.
1818
1919----
2020
@@ -83,8 +83,16 @@ Rinse and repeat until the IPO and beyond.
8383It seems like there are examples of this success story across many
8484early-stage and mid-stage companies.
8585
86- Rollbar and DataDog are doing well by focusing on developers for new
87- monitoring and analytics tools.
86+ <a href =" https://rollbar.com/ " >Rollbar</a > and
87+ <a href =" https://www.datadoghq.com/ " >Datadog</a > are doing well by
88+ focusing on developer adoption for their monitoring and analytics tools.
89+ </p ><p >
90+ <a href =" https://www.getpostman.com/ " >Postman</a > recently raised
91+ <a href =" https://pitchbook.com/newsletter/postman-picks-up-50m-series-b " >$50 million</a >
92+ in a Series B round of venture capital to expand their API testing
93+ developer tools. Postman was founded in large part because the original
94+ tool was virally adopted by developers building APIs and
95+ <a href =" /microservices.html " >microservices</a >.
8896</p >
8997</div ></div >
9098
@@ -424,7 +432,30 @@ tactics.
424432<div class =" row talk " ><div class =" c6 " >
425433<img src =" /img/190626-dev-led-sales/30-conferences.jpg " width =" 100% " class =" shot rnd outl " alt =" Developers at tech conferences. " >
426434</div ><div class =" c6 " ><p >
427- ...
435+ Conferences split into a couple of categories: community-run and
436+ vendor-run. For example,
437+ <a href =" https://developer.apple.com/wwdc19/ " >WWDC</a > is Apple's vendor-run
438+ developer conference. They run the show and control the messaging.
439+ <a href =" https://us.pycon.org/2019/ " >PyCon US</a > is the community-run
440+ Python developer conference. There are a ton of vendors there as sponsors
441+ but no one company controls what happens at the conference.
442+ </p ><p >
443+ Conferences, especially community-run ones, work well for brand awareness.
444+ Vendor-run conferences can work well for brand awareness if your product
445+ augments an existing company's products and solves a problem for the
446+ developers who attend that event.
447+ </p ><p >
448+ Non-developer conferences are great for sales lead generation. Think
449+ of badge scanning and prize raffles in exchange for hearing a product
450+ pitch. However, badge scanning and lead generation activities do not
451+ work very well because most developers are skeptical and just want to
452+ avoid overly pushy situations. Be considerate of your audience and
453+ respectful.
454+ </p ><p >
455+ Generally, I find you can spend a ton of money on conference sponsorships
456+ without getting a ton of value out of them. If you want to be successful
457+ with this tactic you should figure out your secret developer marketing
458+ sauce on smaller, regional conferences then expand from there.
428459</p >
429460</div ></div >
430461
@@ -476,7 +507,17 @@ There is a startup dream of developer-led sales which is an easy path
476507from launching your service to developers, having them find out and
477508start to use it, then becoming large paying customers.
478509</p ><p >
479- The reality is clearly more difficult than the dream.
510+ The reality is clearly more difficult than the dream. You as the
511+ startup founder need to be the "chief developer evangelism officer"
512+ and it will be expensive when you aim to hire a seasoned developer
513+ relations employee.
514+ </p ><p >
515+ We define developer-led sales as a different sales motion than a
516+ traditional sales outreach approach. Instead, you appropriately
517+ market to developers who need a solution to a problem they are
518+ facing, typically with great documentation, timely tutorials or
519+ another respectful tactic rather than cold calling or empty
520+ clickbait content.
480521</p >
481522</div ></div >
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