Benefit Layers: How to avoid sales fluff in devtools

https://dx.tips/benefit-layers

by swyx • 3 years ago

68 45 3 years ago

dx.tips

jawns• 3 years ago

Or A/B test it all against what actually leads to sales, and then use that.

It might be the case that we think we want no fluff, but we're actually swayed more by fluff.

ilrwbwrkhv• 3 years ago

You might not get statistic significance if your numbers are low when first starting out.

swyx3• 3 years ago

the problem is 1) sample sizes are very low for early startups 2) feedback loops (esp for higher ACV) are long, sometimes >1 year.

you still need principles to drive at the end of the day

alphager• 3 years ago

I don't think that A/B tests work for things that enterprises buy. The normal workflow is

1. Dev visits the site, gets convinced that he wants the tool.

2. Dev convinced management to allow the expense.

3. Dev visits the site and buys the tool.

You want to test step 1 but only get data for step 3, where the content of the site is completely irrelevant.

swyx3• 3 years ago

i've been doing devtools advising for a little bit, and over 2 years ago I reflected (https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1679258125067767808)

One thing I've consistently had to relearn in developer marketing:

"Talk benefits, not features" doesn't work!

Developers are sick of vague promises and wary of black boxes.

Instead:

- Demo - reach Wow! in <10 mins

- Explain how it works

- Show how real companies use in prod

and that really resonated with folks (heard some really good feedback from senior github people). excited to return to this topic with a better framework (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F03sDA6agAEBf_M?format=png&name=...) for when to communicate with benefits vs features

hsn9153• 3 years ago

Talking about supposed benefits instead of features is the worst marketing advice I've ever heard that's often repeated by everyone.

It obviously doesn't work.

Can you imagine a restaurant flyer that just says "Enjoy delicious meals! Have fun time!"

It's absurd.

You show pictures of the food. Tell people how you source your ingredients. How your chefs have perfected their craftsmanship. Etc etc.

wmf• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure it does work for complex enterprise tech being sold to people who don't understand it.

paulddraper• 3 years ago

You say that, but have you seen drink commercials?

lelanthran4• 3 years ago

I dunno if restaurants are a good example.

People go to restaurants for the dining experience.

If they simply wanted good food they'd eat at home that night. If they simply don't want to cook they'd get fast food.

Declining both those options means that they want something more than food which is provided by the restaurant.

esafak• 3 years ago

Do both, and make sure the benefits are distinctive and easily-related to the features.

efitz• 3 years ago

I’ve never sold dev tools, but this resonates with me as a buyer.

The other thing that I want to know, where I’ve had remorse in the past, is how much effort it’s going to be to integrate the tool with my current processes and workflows. I don’t want to change my processes, and I don’t want to find that I cannot get that wow because I’m using this homebuilt process over here or this specific third party tool over there or because we’re migrating to cloud in 3 months.

iFreilicht2• 3 years ago

Thank you so much for this! This structure is so simple, but super effective in helping me lay out my own thoughts. I'll try this during my next internal presentation. While not a sales pitch, I am trying to get people hooked on a tool I use a lot and really like, but it's so complex that I really struggled to structure my thoughts about why you'd actually want to use it.

wspeirs• 3 years ago

"Talk benefits, not features" doesn't work!

I don't think this is true... It's more nuanced than this. Developers are much more skeptical of a "benefits" pitch, and care more about a "features" (and limitations as mentioned above) pitch. However, if you're just pitching a developer, you're probably only pitching the user, not the buyer. The buyer VERY much cares about the benefits, otherwise they're not buying. The buyer won't using a single feature, so that type of marketing is lost on them.

This is the challenge: the right message (features or benefits) to the right person (user or buyer) AND at the right time!

krackers• 3 years ago

I had to re-skim the article a few times before realizing they're talking about "dev tools" not DevTools (i.e. page inspector). I've seen webpages advertise (usually job openings) on DevTools before, now I wonder how effective _that_ strategy is.

mcny2• 3 years ago

I had to re-skim the article a few times before realizing they're talking about "dev tools" not DevTools (i.e. page inspector). I've seen webpages advertise (usually job openings) on DevTools before, now I wonder how effective _that_ strategy is.

Got me a first round at Google. Unfortunately for them, I super suck and therefore failed in the first round. Ain't nobody got time for leet code when they already have a job.

intelVISA• 3 years ago

Candidate disclosed that runtime complexity was 'irrelevant as he had 3YOE in a random web shop' and that we should 'use real technology like NuxtJs'

laserbeam2• 3 years ago

If you're selling a devtool, and all I'm seeing is features OR benefits in your pitch, and I can't get limitations, tradeoffs, restrictions, drawbacks or any sort of information about the downsides of using that tool... Then it's still a marketing pitch. If it only lists positives and it's not honest about negatives, it's just marketing.

Show me your drawbacks and I might consider you are a serious vendor.

siquick• 3 years ago

Show me your drawbacks and I might consider you are a serious vendor.

Can’t remember any other product from any market openly showing what it can’t do, why are devtools any different?

swyx3• 3 years ago

in my original landing page for temporal i was very proud to add "what do we NOT do": https://temporaldotio-a0ktr49oc-temporal.vercel.app/#headles...

most founders refuse to admit that they're not fit for purpose for some things. yes need to promise the world to VCs but also it makes it harder for the developer to assess how much to trust you if you are in denial about TAM

laserbeam2• 3 years ago

To be fair, my argument has nothing to do with devtools, just that the distinction between features and benefits is pointless or is itself a marketing gimmick.

I'll only get to drawbacks/limitations once I get to documentation. And once I spend a significant amount of time researching a product. And when I don't I feel like I'm buying the marketing.

CJefferson• 3 years ago

SQLite has both when to use it, and when to consider something else: https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html

ben_w• 3 years ago

any other product from any market openly showing what it can’t do

ChatGPT, ironically enough given how many times I see people insisting that them saying “we can be dangerously wrong don’t rely on us” is some kind of marketing scheme.

reillyse6• 3 years ago

This is really resonating with me. As a founder who is currently getting frustrated trying to market a devtool ((https://brisktest.com/) literally a competitor for CircleCI, Github actions etc) it's really hard to talk about the features of the product. It is multiple of times faster than the competitors but nobody believes you when you say that. Developers are so suspicious of something they've never heard about and really reluctant to take a chance even when they are bleeding from the neck. It's a real grind.

lelanthran4• 3 years ago

Regardless of the target market, if the target market sees your offering and doesn't show interest, then they are not bleeding from the neck.

IOW, the pain you think they are feeling is not the pain they are actually feeling.

As someone also trying to bootstrap a product, I feel your pain, but it's not specific to developers.

reillyse6• 3 years ago

I'm not sure. I think specifically with what I'm doing (making tests fast) there is a kind of a Stockholm syndrome. I've talked to people who say things like "It's fine that my tests take 15 minutes to run, I just check my email, or go for a walk". Or they propose that you don't run the tests or only run part of the tests when you merge.

I know personally that waiting 15 minutes for a test suite to finish is super frustrating, but people seem to have normalized it. I've also literally been hired to speed up people's tests, so it's not a problem that doesn't exist. Our current customers are also delighted with the speedups so I know it's a problem. But explaining that problem and why the status quo is bad to developers is especially hard. Btw I don't buy the "developers are immune to advertising" spiel, I actually created some of CircleCIs first ads so I have experience doing this. I just think developers are different and marketing devtools is different again (because of it's not a personal purchase and there are a lot of different stakeholders).

bostik• 3 years ago

Developers are so suspicious of something they've never heard about and really reluctant to take a chance

And that's in big part because they have been burned before. Someone bought a Product[tm] that supposedly Solved[tm] a Problem[tm]. Which then failed miserably to do anything of the sort. Then, to add insult to injury, these same developers are burdened with the need to maintain the expensive and useless thing that they can't get rid of.

If you are trying to sell a devtool, it should have next to zero cognitive burden even in the pathological case. Moreover, you absolutely can not lie, at all, about what your tool does or does not do.

Oh, and once the tool has proven to be useless, ripping it out of the stack should be friction-free. Easy? Hell no. But necessary? Yes.

POiNTx2• 3 years ago

When clicking on "Demos", the top nav bar stops working for me. I'm on the latest chrome.

reillyse6• 3 years ago

strange. Do you have any unusual settings around JS ? And what do you mean by "stops working" does it display ? Links don't work? Is this a desktop browser? Sorry for the 100 questions but it will help me get to the bottom of it, I do appreciate the feedback.

doix• 3 years ago

It is multiple of times faster than the competitors but nobody believes you when you say that

I believe that in certain scenarios it will be much faster. But I would have to go evaluate if it works in my specific case and how much effort it would take to move from our current setup to a new platform.

Combine that with the fact that 15 minutes of tests really isn't that bad. I came from the semiconductor industry, where some simulations would take days/weeks, that was a really frustrating feedback loop.

The 15 minutes is only really frustrating in one case, where you are working on one high priority feature/bug fix that needs to be fixed and deployed ASAP. Those 15 minutes can be killer when you've got some bug crashing your server.

Maybe you could monitor incident post-mortems and attempt to sell to those companies. Chances are, in the incident report the time it took for the tests to run will be highlighted.

zach_g• 3 years ago

Cheers, I'm glad my post resonated, although sorry to hear you're in a tough spot!

The bit in your welcome blog about local tests being unfeasible is interesting. Maybe there's a pain point around pushing untested code? Like wasting reviewers time.

Drop me a line if you want to chat it through, sounds like an interesting challenge.

Benefit Layers: How to avoid sales fluff in devtools

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