Marketing for developer tools

Developers ignore ads, distrust marketing language and decide by reading your docs. We market developer tools the way developers evaluate them: through technical content, documentation, examples and community.

At a glance

  • Technical content written by engineers
  • Docs and API reference SEO
  • Community, Reddit, Hacker News and GitHub
  • Visibility in AI coding assistants
  • Bottom-up adoption to team purchase

Show the code

Developers search for solutions to specific technical problems, often with an error message, a framework or a language in the query. The content that wins is a working tutorial, a clear comparison or documentation that answers the question faster than anyone else.

Increasingly, developers also ask AI coding assistants which library or service to use, and those assistants draw heavily on documentation, examples and community discussion. Clear, well-structured docs are now a marketing channel in their own right.

Our developer marketing work is led by people who have written software. We produce tutorials, integration guides and benchmark content with real code, improve the discoverability of your docs, and help you show up in the communities where developers actually spend time.

What we do for dev tools

  • Technical tutorials

    Step-by-step guides with working code for the problems your tool solves.

  • Docs SEO

    Making your documentation rank and get cited by AI coding assistants.

  • Comparison content

    Honest technical comparisons with benchmarks and trade-offs.

  • Community presence

    Reddit, Hacker News, Discord, Stack Overflow and GitHub, handled authentically.

  • Developer paid media

    Reddit, developer newsletters, podcasts and carefully targeted search.

  • Bottom-up to top-down

    Turning individual adoption into team and enterprise deals.

What developers respond to

  • Working codeCopy-paste examples that run, in the languages they use.
  • Honest trade-offsWhen your tool is the wrong choice, and what to use instead.
  • Clear pricing and limitsFree tier details, rate limits and what happens at scale.
  • Fast time to "hello world"Getting started in minutes, not after a sales call.
  • Engineers, not marketersContent and community presence from people who build.
  • Open roadmaps and changelogsEvidence the product is actively maintained.

An example docs finding

Documentation is often the highest-traffic part of a developer tool's site, and the least optimised.

Example finding (illustrative)
Docs pages answer common errors, but search engines cannot index most of themHigh priority
What we found
The docs site renders content with client-side JavaScript and has no sitemap; only a fraction of pages are indexed.
Fix
Pre-render or server-render docs, add a sitemap and canonical URLs, and add short, descriptive titles to each reference page.
Measure
Indexed docs pages, search impressions for error and integration queries, and signups from docs.

How we start with a developer tool

  1. Developer journey

    From first search or recommendation to first API call, team adoption and paid plan.

    Weeks 1–2
  2. Docs and site audit

    Indexing, structure and content gaps across marketing site, docs and blog.

    Weeks 1–3
  3. Content plan

    Tutorials, integration guides and comparisons for the problems your tool solves.

    Week 3
  4. Community and distribution

    Where developers in your space talk, and how your team can contribute genuinely.

    Ongoing

Common questions

Do your writers know how to code?

Our developer content is written by people with engineering backgrounds and reviewed by your engineers for accuracy.

How do you approach Hacker News and Reddit?

Carefully. We help your team share genuinely useful work and participate honestly. Astroturfing or vote manipulation damages trust and breaks community rules.

Should our docs live on our main domain?

Usually yes, in a subfolder such as /docs/, so docs and marketing pages share authority. Subdomains can work if they are well linked and indexable.

Can you help with developer relations?

We support DevRel teams with content, SEO and distribution. Community management and events are usually best owned by your own team.

Find out where your next 100 customers come from

Start with a growth audit. We review your tracking, search, paid accounts and funnel, and hand you a 90-day plan ranked by expected pipeline. Use it with us or without us.