Developers, what marketing strategies work on you?

Marketing works on me when trusted and intelligent individuals passionately suggest tooling and confidently answer my questions.

Sales people that use words incorrectly and don’t have a deep understanding of the product or the problem being solved cause me to distrust the product and brand indefinitely. I’m looking at you Databricks, Datadog, and Snowflake.

One thing I like is having a one line pitch, in clear terms, that explains what your product does on the front page. Second is easy accessibility to documentation so I can validate whether the product will meet our needs.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to evaluate some new software which required me to wade through pages of marketing speak and buzzwords before I could even find a explanation of what the product does.

No marketing strategies kind of does work on me. The standard psychological manipulation tactics have been so badly worn by now there's a lot to be said for just offering a meaningful product and not acting like manipulative scum. May seem too simple, but sadly it's an easy way to stand out positively from most of the competition.

Be as up-front and bullshit-free as it's possible to be, and then more. Make your website simple, fast, and accessible.

1. Prominence of documentation. I will infer from the absence of a prominent documentation link that the product is not meant to appeal to the kind of people who read documentation, and is thus awful (but probably comes with nice kickbacks for shotcallers).

2. Prominence of pricing. If the product does not have public, easily findable pricing, I will assume that the company is going to try to fleece me. Either now, or when I'm invested enough that I can't afford to switch. Hard pass.

3. I want the marketing to tell me what the product actually does, not what they think it will do for my company. I.e. tell me the stupid thing does object storage with an S3-compatible API, don't give me this "It accelerates your synergies and decelerates your incompatibilities" drivel. I'm perfectly capable of deciding whether an S3-compatible object store is going to be useful or not. Don't make me try to guess what it does, because I won't.

4. Do not ask for my phone number. Seriously, don't do it. I would rather give you a credit card number and pay for my trial than give you the means to cold call me for the next 3 months.

5. Do not cold call me. I will ask what product you're selling, hang up, add the product to my "do not buy" list, then spamlist your entire domain and block your number. If I'm interested, I'll reach out to you.

6. I like to see at least some open source code in a well-maintained repo, to give me some confidence that the closed source portions are well-maintained as well. It doesn't have to be something fancy or secret; just putting the HTTP calls that anyone could reverse engineer into a client library on Github that has unit tests and coverage and releases and what not is fine by me. I prefer entirely open source projects, but I know that's not realistic for many businesses.

7. If your business is a SaaS, I want a real status page. Not this red/yellow/green current status non-sense, but a graph of the SLI's over at least the past year with the SLA marked as a line on the graph, and annotations for the outages. That tells me that providing reliable service to customers is important to you. The red/yellow/green one tells me "reliability" is important to you, where "reliability" means "not having to pay out SLA penalties".