Getting customers · 4 min read
How to market a developer tool
Developers evaluate tools by trying them, so your documentation is your landing page and your quickstart is your sales pitch. The usual funnel works against you here: gated content, demo bookings and benefit-led copy all read as reasons to distrust you.
Developer tools are the one category where being bad at marketing is almost an advantage, because the audience has spent years developing antibodies to it. Most of the standard playbook does not merely fail here, it actively costs you trust.
The good news, if you are a developer who built a developer tool, is that what replaces it is mostly work you already know how to do.
The inversions
- Docs are the landing page. A serious evaluator hits your quickstart within a minute of arriving. If it is behind a signup, incomplete, or subtly wrong, that is your conversion problem, not your hero headline.
- Show the thing. A code block beats a benefit statement. Ten lines that demonstrate the actual API do more than any paragraph about developer velocity.
- “Book a demo” is a bounce. For a tool under a few hundred a month, requiring a conversation before a trial reads as either enterprise pricing or something to hide.
- Say what it does not do. A limitations section in the README buys more credibility than any amount of enthusiasm. It is also the single most shared kind of paragraph in this category.
- No gated content. Nobody is exchanging an email address for your whitepaper. They will read a good technical post and then check your commit history.
Every developer evaluating your tool is asking one question: will this still work in eighteen months, or will it become my problem?
Almost everything that reads as credible to this audience is an answer to that question. Recent commits, honest changelogs, an issue tracker where maintainers reply, a migration path, clear licensing.
Where the first users actually come from
Being useful in technical discussion
Hacker News, the relevant subreddits, Discord servers for adjacent tools, GitHub issues on projects your tool complements. Not launch posts: answers. Somebody has your problem in an issue thread right now, and a genuinely useful reply that happens to mention what you built converts far better than any post about it.
The rule that keeps this from being spam: your comment has to be worth reading by somebody who never clicks the link.
The complement strategy
Pick the tool your users already have and be excellent at working with it. An integration, an adapter, a plugin, a Terraform provider, a framework binding. You inherit their search traffic, their community and their vocabulary, and “works with X” is a proposition developers understand instantly.
Documentation as the honest version of SEO
This is the exception to our general position that content is a later channel. Developers search error messages, API names and specific tasks, and those queries are extremely high intent and barely contested.
- A page per error message your tool can produce, explaining the cause.
- A page per task, in the words used to search for it.
- Honest comparisons, but only against tools you have genuinely used.
This is documentation you owed your users anyway, which is what makes it different from a content programme.
Open source, with the trade understood
Open sourcing buys distribution and trust, and costs you support load and a harder commercial story. It is a strategy, not a growth hack.
Stars are not customers. A repository can sit at four thousand stars with eleven paying users, and the number is genuinely useful as a signal of interest while being worthless as revenue. Do not let it stand in for a metric that pays your rent.
What to fix before any of it
In rough order of how often it is the actual constraint:
- Time to first working example. Measure it yourself, on a clean machine, from landing page to a thing that ran. If it is over ten minutes, that is your project this week.
- What it is, in one line, without metaphor. “A Postgres connection pooler that survives failover”. Not “infrastructure, reimagined”.
- Who it is for, stated plainly. Solo developers, or platform teams at companies with an on-call rota. These want opposite pages, and trying to serve both produces one that serves neither.
- Pricing on the pricing page. A number. Its absence is read as expensive and evasive, and both readings cost you the evaluation.
The measure that matters
For a developer tool, the honest early metric is not signups or stars. It is how many people got to a working integration and were still using it a fortnight later. That number is small at first and it is the only one worth optimising, because it is the one that predicts everything else.
If you want that judgement applied to your actual repo and docs, the Product Check reads what is publicly there and tells you what it thinks is holding it back. Free, and no account needed.