Want to Reach Software Developers? Educate and Engage

Over the past year, I had the pleasure to work with the Corbado team as part of a university project in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich. We've been diving into developer marketing and learning more about how to better reach developers and cater to their needs. In particular, we were interested to discover what makes a developer community successful and what other developer-first companies did to build a strong one around their product. Here are some insights we learned along the way.

At the beginning, we looked at different kinds of developer products: open-source software, SaaS startups, legacy software and many in between. Quickly, you learn that each community may have some differences which include:

Community engagement channels: Some communities are mainly focus on Slack, Discord or other channels. Here we looked at the specific mix of channels that were used.

Content type: We wanted to gain an understanding on the wide spectrum of content focuses used to grow and maintain these communities, i.e. deeply technical information that only developers with sufficient background knowledge understand or reliance on humorous content to relate with a specific niche of developers.

However, more importantly, they have two important common traits, which we outline below.

The element of education

Most community members adopt a “giver mindset” without the expectation of receiving something in return (directly). An example is Discord channels for developer-first products, where companies can directly interact and ask questions to developers and founders of the company. Sometimes, these are efforts that do not necessarily scale well. With all successful developer-first products we looked at, we noticed there is at least one channel where marketing efforts are focused on “educating” or benefitting potential users, rather than trying to sell them an offering. For instance, blogs are a great medium to fulfill this particular goal.

The significance of communities

Generally speaking, we found being active in communities to be essential when building a developer-first product. There are many reasons behind this. Firstly, you can directly engage with your customers and gather first-hand insights. Secondly, it is the most direct and transparent avenue to build trust. Therefore, you need to either be engaged in a community where your potential users are, or build one around your own product. Many software products have active communities around their product where users interact, help other devs, and gladly spend their own time contributing to the community. We found that founders and developers themselves spend a considerable amount of time directly solving individual users’ issues. We found that such “marketing activities” build a culture that especially developers recognize and become attracted to.

These two key learnings we gained through researching other successful developer-first software products served as guiding principles in our developer marketing efforts. Whenever we decided on testing a new method to reach software developers, we asked those two questions:

1. Are we adding value to our reader/user through these efforts?
2. Are we contributing to a community which is relevant to our potential users?

If yes, we can evaluate it and proceed accordingly. Here are two approaches we pursued based on our evaluations:

Positioning ourselves as experts regarding passkeys

We started to engage in online communities on social media with a focus on developers and software development in general. As passkeys are frequently in the news at the moment with Big Tech and many software companies pushing for their adoption, we sought to cover the news and use our expertise over the past years to put the developments in context as well as explain their significance and relevance for developers, as you can see here on our blog but also on Hacker News (see below).
To be able to do this, we have three requirements:

1. We need to be one of the first ones to comment on a new development or event
2. We need to have expertise on the specific topic
3. We need to provide additional value to the reader through our commentary

We use this content on several platforms where our expertise is relevant for its members. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37907283 you can find our article on Hacker News, which reached the front page some time ago. One of the key learnings here is that consistency is key. It is very tough to predict which content will be successful, however, over a long enough period of time, our experience says that we get positive results if we consistently add value to readers/users. Additionally, most probably, we were not the only ones providing valuable content on a given topic so highlighting why we are in a position to provide value given our expertise also goes a long way.

Collaborating with influencers

The Tech influencer space is growing on social media and usually certain niches are covered that are attractive for software developers and subsequently result in a specific community following. For that reason, we saw influencers as partners we collaborate with to grow the community and spread more knowledge on passkeys and their importance.

Our processes start by gathering as large an amount of creators as possible by searching for relevant keywords such as “passkeys”, “oauth2”, “authentication”, etc. In this phase, quantity is more important than quantity.

The next step is filtering the influencers and adding some key data for future analysis, i.e. follower count, content type, language, etc.

The third and last step is creating several texts to test which ones work best when approaching different types of creators. One of the key takeaways here is that this is mainly an experimentation process where there is no one right method or one secret ingredient. However, with time, one notices which creators respond well to which kinds of texts, and patterns start to emerge. Of course, collaborations with creators must also be beneficial for them and value-adding to their respective community. For example, at the beginning, we experienced a high response rate with creators in the German-speaking area characterized by follower counts <100k, which was not possible with prior analysis, but actually seeing which creators respond more.

After researching several influencer niches we even had our first collaboration posted some time ago, you can check it out here

Conclusion

As it turns out, reaching software developers via memes is not the (only!) way to go. In general, the process of finding the “perfect” mix of developer marketing for your own product is a never-ending journey of trial-and-error. Our discoveries didn't just come from research but from continuous experimentation. For now, we've found that this approach works but we are ready to adapt to future changes. What's clear is that Corbado plans to maintain a focus on user benefits and community engagement in future developer marketing efforts.