How to make developers perceive value in a product?
Ask HN: Best ways to monetize a developer audience?
1–9 of 9 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best ways to monetize a developer audience?
#2They need a business interest beyond coding. The right person asks, Who buys the product and why? What is the running cost and where are the expensive transaction fees. They need to care about money to understand value. Some developers just enjoy coding and being an employee.
Re: Ask HN: Best ways to monetize a developer audience?
#3Are you aiming at developers as developers, or developers as employees who can put the company credit card details into your SaaS signup?
For the latter, you just need an honest service that would make their team's job easier.
A license for Sublime Text costs $70. I don't know how much money they make, but it's a popular product. The value perceived there is probably something like "I know it costs money to develop and maintain a highly polished, I'm willing to pay to support a tool I use every day, and I'm honestly kinda fatigued with all these ancient open source editors so take my money and give me a clean nice text editing experience."
Re: Ask HN: Best ways to monetize a developer audience?
#4Are you aiming at developers as developers, or developers as employees who can put the company credit card details into your SaaS signup? For the latter, you just need an honest service that would make their team's job easier. A license for Sublime Text costs $70. I don't know how much money they make, but it's a popular product. The value perceived there is probably something like "I know it costs money to develop a…
Sublime Text is interesting, in that you also get unlimited usage without paying. That was helpful at a time when I didn't have a lot of client work coming in, and it helped me bootstrap into better work. Once I had solid client work coming in again, it felt like Sublime had helped me get there, and Sublime suddenly felt incredibly underpriced, so much less than an hour's work. There's incentive then to buy it to make sure they keep working on it, to get rid of the nag screens that occasionally slowed me down, and it looks & feels far more professional when you're not using unregistered trials as part of your work!
Re: Ask HN: Best ways to monetize a developer audience?
#5Developers will see value in a product if they use it or see it being used and realise it could improve their work. Less about 'perception' of value.
More, is this something that will help me enough that it's worth the time of integrating it into my work flow.
As mentioned in another comment, it also depends who's money it is as to how that value tradeoff looks. The company they work for or their own.
Re: Ask HN: Best ways to monetize a developer audience?
#6As much as it pains me to say this: recruiters are probably willing to pay highest-dollar for access to that audience. So letting recruiters run ads on your product, or creating some sort of native-advertising platform for recruiters will likely mean the highest short-term revenue for you.
...it just might alienate all your users in the process.
Re: Ask HN: Best ways to monetize a developer audience?
#7You don't charge developers, you charge either their boss (SaaS), or people trying to hire them (recruiting).
Re: Ask HN: Best ways to monetize a developer audience?
#8you have to figure out what their worldview is. Once you figure this out, what is perceived as value becomes apparent.
Re: Ask HN: Best ways to monetize a developer audience?
#9As much as it pains me to say this: recruiters are probably willing to pay highest-dollar for access to that audience. So letting recruiters run ads on your product, or creating some sort of native-advertising platform for recruiters will likely mean the highest short-term revenue for you. ...it just might alienate all your users in the process.
This is a great suggestion as long as you don't give recruiters access directly.
Talk to recruiters, ask them for good jobs that you yourself add to a curated job board that your dev audience has access to.
You can probably negotiate ~$300-500 per referral to the recruiter that works out.