Guide
- 00 Start here: the mental model upd 2026-09-02
The one rule that changes everything about marketing to developers, the three habits that separate campaigns that compound from ones that get blocked, and how the guide is organised — five parts, in the order the work runs.
- 01 The developer, the buyer and the job upd 2026-09-16
Who you are actually selling to — the developer who evaluates, the buyer who pays, and the job they are hiring you for — why "developers" is not one persona, why the homegrown alternative is your first competitor, and how to research all of it in a week.
3 practices - 02 Positioning, narrative and voice upd 2026-09-02
What you are, in the reader's words, in ten seconds — the three questions a skeptical engineer asks, why clarity beats adjectives, the narrative and voice that make a company recognisable, and the cheap tests to run before you ship a headline.
3 practices - 03 Pricing, packaging and the motion upd 2026-09-21
The one number the positioning has to survive — free tier or open-source core as the top of the funnel, seat versus meter versus the hybrid that won, the outcome unit arriving behind the token, the cap that answers the runaway-bill fear, the moment self-serve should hand off to sales, and why the training-data policy is now a priced term.
6 practices·3 examples
- 04 Docs as the front door upd 2026-09-02
Why documentation is the highest-leverage marketing surface you own, what a great quickstart looks like, and how docs-led growth turns reading into adoption.
1 practice·1 example - 05 Developer experience and activation upd 2026-09-14
Time-to-value as the metric that governs adoption, mapping the developer funnel from first touch to habit, and removing the friction that quietly kills integrations.
2 practices - 06 The website upd 2026-09-02
Where the positioning actually lands — who the page addresses, what the first screenful has to do, how the navbar routes a developer past the marketing, and the two pages most dev tools get wrong.
- 07 The repo as a front door upd 2026-09-01
The README is the highest-traffic page most dev tools never edit — plus how a repository gets found, what a star is and is not worth, and why the issue tracker is a page your buyer reads before they talk to you.
- 08 Content that earns trust upd 2026-09-21
Why technical content is the core of developer marketing, how to make things worth a developer's attention, and the fluff patterns that burn credibility.
3 practices·10 examples - 09 Channels and distribution upd 2026-09-02
Where developers actually pay attention, which channels reach them and which repel them, and why earned beats paid for a technical audience.
2 practices·1 example - 10 Community and developer relations upd 2026-09-14
What developer relations is actually for, the advocacy–education–feedback split, how to build community that compounds, where events fit, and why DevRel dies when it is measured like sales.
2 practices - 11 Launches and the always-on cadence upd 2026-09-02
How to ship an announcement developers share instead of scroll past — substance over spectacle, the assets that matter, orchestrating a launch across the channels that count, and the always-on cadence that makes the next spike land.
1 practice·1 example - 12 Paid, sponsorship and brand campaigns upd 2026-09-02
What to do when you decide to buy attention anyway — why sponsorship outperforms display for this audience, what a developer-credible ad actually looks like, and how to measure any of it without lying to yourself.
- 13 Answer engines and agents as readers upd 2026-09-21
What to do when the first impression is a model's paraphrase — the three layers of machine-mediated discovery, which of them pay today, and how to measure your presence without buying a dashboard.
3 practices - 14 Agent rails: directories, marketplaces and protocols upd 2026-09-21
Where an agent finds your product and how safely it can act through it — the connector directories and platform marketplaces with queues of their own, the protocol that became table stakes, the entry points that replaced the published file, and the transactional flow an agent can be trusted with.
3 practices·4 examples
- 15 Measurement upd 2026-09-21
The metrics that tell you developer marketing is working, how to measure DevRel without pretending it's direct-response, and the funnel numbers worth instrumenting.
3 practices - 16 Team, budget and stage upd 2026-09-16
What to spend on at each stage and who to hire first — the four jobs a developer marketing function does, the first hire that follows the motion, why DevRel dies under sales, what a programme actually costs, and the play that is right at one stage and waste at the next.