Launching a Developer Marketing Community
date
Dec 15, 2021
slug
launching-a-developer-marketing-community
status
Published
tags
Developer Marketing
API Marketing
summary
There aren't many communities or resources for marketing to developers. So I tried to co-setup a community for developer marketing (B2D).
type
Post
One thing that's always troubled me was the lack of resources available when I was getting into Developer Marketing after joining Hygraph. I spoke with peers at several other companies in the same ecosystem - Algolia, Shopify, Auth0, Netlify, and Commercetools, to name a few - and they all resonated with the same concern.
Given how "new/rising" marketing to developers was/is, I'd expected it to be a lot noisier in the space.
I had no idea what JavaScript frameworks were. I didn't have a clue why everyone on the team was so particular about spending hours, if not days, creating and improving documentation. Wasn’t that just the digital-product equivalent of a user manual? I'd never really read a user manual. Why would anyone want to read all that? I'd spent my career going from Sales & Marketing to B2C/B2B SaaS and had never spoken to a developer outside of following up on JIRA tickets — this was a whole new world to me.
So I set out to learn more about marketing to developers and found some pretty good resources once I looked - which is what led to releasing my resources publicly on awesome-developer-marketing, something I cover more about in this post.
But while this helped me, that's all it was - a me thing. I didn't really know who to reach out to and chat with every time I was having problems figuring something out, or wanted to share some wins.
Then sometime in mid-September, Seb reached out to me. Having just joined NHost as their new Head of Marketing, he wanted to chat about experiences and growing pains, and throughout the conversation, we kept mentioning how there really weren't any communities around with peers in developer marketing to share these experiences and issues with.
So we said, "f*ck it, let's start one". And we launched one.
marketingto.dev is a small crew of passionate marketing folks working in developer tooling, or actively marketing to developers. We come from companies like Netlify, Algolia, Shopify, Nhost, Lano, Swell, and Octopus Deploy, to name a few.
Jamstack, enterprise SaaS, headless, APIs, whatever your jam, the goal is to have a space for marketers to talk about developer marketing.
We're not necessarily developers, just marketers actively working in companies around developer tooling.