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Mike Sedzielewski
Mike Sedzielewski

Posted on • Originally published at Medium on

LTV developer

The Onion reports that the interdisciplinary research group dedicated to the investigation of the Anthropocene (AWG) has agreed to name the last decade ‘The Great Mobilification.’ Scientists characterize the era by the overflow of mobile devices used to distract humanity from the pain of being.

Jokes aside, the distraction often takes the form of careless consumerism. Businesses that want a piece of this pie need to learn how to navigate the stream of distraction. They need to find a way to have the consumer pull over next to their offer, over and over again. This is impossible without technology and thus a developer.

Dealing with this scale requires somebody who knows how to engineer data in the business context. This includes building data workflows and taking care of data integrity. But the ultimate goal is to recognize data patterns quickly and use them to drive revenue (or customer lifetime value [LTV]).

I call this person an LTV developer.

There are three traits an LTV developer should have:

  • Data expert
  • Fluent with modern marketing APIs
  • Doesn’t follow the “I did not complete the computer science degree, only to talk to mere marketers” rule.

Because The Onion’s sources claim that developers prefer to abstract data away, favor open-source solutions and building from scratch, and don’t want to be bothered outside IDE, there’s a massive gap of the LTV dev on the market.

Now supposing you want to fill the gap and break the bank, how do you start? While I don’t have an obligatory visual roadmap yet, I find this piece by Andy Carvell useful to picture the key areas.

I’m also a lifelong believer that the best way to learn something is by doing. The following list provides hands-on developer tutorials from projects I’ve stumbled upon while building Voucherify and watching top digital teams that integrated our product.

📚LTV developer reading list

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