diff --git a/content/posts/190626-dev-led-sales-startups.markdown b/content/posts/190626-dev-led-sales-startups.markdown index 30a626671..926097ef8 100644 --- a/content/posts/190626-dev-led-sales-startups.markdown +++ b/content/posts/190626-dev-led-sales-startups.markdown @@ -3,18 +3,18 @@ slug: developer-led-sales-startups meta: Talk slides, notes and more resources for a technical talk on developer-led sales and marketing for tech startups, by Matt Makai. category: talk date: 2019-06-26 -modified: 2019-06-26 +modified: 2019-07-07 newsletter: False -headerimage: /img/visuals/talk-header.jpg +headerimage: /img/190626-dev-led-sales/01-dev-led-sales.jpg headeralt: Comment bubble with code representing a technical talk-based blog post. This blog post contains the slides along with a loose transcript from my talk on the promises and perils of developer-led sales as an -early-stage company strategy for acquiring customers. +early-stage company method to acquire customers. I gave this talk remotely to [Ubiquity.VC](http://www.ubiquity.vc/) -portfolio company founders and the Extended Team on June 26, 2019. +portfolio company startup founders and the Extended Team on June 26, 2019. ---- @@ -83,8 +83,16 @@ Rinse and repeat until the IPO and beyond. It seems like there are examples of this success story across many early-stage and mid-stage companies. -Rollbar and DataDog are doing well by focusing on developers for new -monitoring and analytics tools. +Rollbar and +Datadog are doing well by +focusing on developer adoption for their monitoring and analytics tools. +

+Postman recently raised +$50 million +in a Series B round of venture capital to expand their API testing +developer tools. Postman was founded in large part because the original +tool was virally adopted by developers building APIs and +microservices.

@@ -424,7 +432,30 @@ tactics.
Developers at tech conferences.

-... +Conferences split into a couple of categories: community-run and +vendor-run. For example, +WWDC is Apple's vendor-run +developer conference. They run the show and control the messaging. +PyCon US is the community-run +Python developer conference. There are a ton of vendors there as sponsors +but no one company controls what happens at the conference. +

+Conferences, especially community-run ones, work well for brand awareness. +Vendor-run conferences can work well for brand awareness if your product +augments an existing company's products and solves a problem for the +developers who attend that event. +

+Non-developer conferences are great for sales lead generation. Think +of badge scanning and prize raffles in exchange for hearing a product +pitch. However, badge scanning and lead generation activities do not +work very well because most developers are skeptical and just want to +avoid overly pushy situations. Be considerate of your audience and +respectful. +

+Generally, I find you can spend a ton of money on conference sponsorships +without getting a ton of value out of them. If you want to be successful +with this tactic you should figure out your secret developer marketing +sauce on smaller, regional conferences then expand from there.

@@ -476,7 +507,17 @@ There is a startup dream of developer-led sales which is an easy path from launching your service to developers, having them find out and start to use it, then becoming large paying customers.

-The reality is clearly more difficult than the dream. +The reality is clearly more difficult than the dream. You as the +startup founder need to be the "chief developer evangelism officer" +and it will be expensive when you aim to hire a seasoned developer +relations employee. +

+We define developer-led sales as a different sales motion than a +traditional sales outreach approach. Instead, you appropriately +market to developers who need a solution to a problem they are +facing, typically with great documentation, timely tutorials or +another respectful tactic rather than cold calling or empty +clickbait content.