Why "developer advocacy" isn't marketing

Sell to a developer and you've usually lost them by the second sentence. So we don't. Here's what we do instead, and why it tends to work better.

About once a month someone emails asking us to "do some developer marketing." We almost always write back and ask what they actually mean by it, because that phrase quietly smuggles in a pile of assumptions that will sink the whole thing before it starts. Developers can spot a funnel from a mile off. The second they do, you're finished.

What we do is related to marketing the way cooking is related to chemistry. Same raw ingredients, completely different job.

Start by being useful

The only thing that buys you any trust with developers is a problem you helped them solve. Not a feature you announced. Not a webinar they half-watched with the tab muted. An actual problem an actual engineer had at 4pm on a Tuesday, where your post or your reply got them unstuck. That's the currency. There isn't a second one.

So we don't start from "what do we want to say about the product." We start from "what is this audience banging their head against this week," and then we go answer that. Even when the honest answer has nothing to do with the thing we're there to promote. Especially then, actually.

Don't sell. Earn the mention.

This one makes growth teams twitchy, so let me be precise about it. Good advocacy doesn't hide the product — it earns the right to bring it up. If a tutorial genuinely needs your API and your API is good, great, show it off. If it doesn't, leave it out. Nobody was ever annoyed by something that helped them and didn't try to close them at the end.

The strange part is that this converts better. When you've spent months not selling, the one time you say "okay, for this bit you'll want our thing," people believe you. You spent the trust to say it.

What you're actually after

A signup is fine. What you're really chasing is one developer telling another, with nobody asking them to, that your product is worth an afternoon. That sentence — said in some Slack you'll never have access to — is worth more than any ad you could buy. And it only happens after you've been useful enough times, with nothing attached, that you've earned it.

None of this is fast. That's sort of the whole point, and it's also why "marketing" is the wrong word for the work.