Developer marketing for early-stage startups – what we’ve learned 3 years ago
author here (big fan of your blog btw!)
in terms of budget, I'm not going to pretend we had some grand plan, but this is _roughly_ how things played out at each stage:
- Seed: CEO only writing occasional content, micro paid ads experiments (<$500 per campaign) - Series A: hired a content marketer with SEO expertise and a product marketer (both non-technical), hired paid ads agency ($5k/mo for agency, $Xk/mo ad spend with lots of iterating) - Series B/post-PMF: started experimenting with content sponsorships, hired technical content marketer, tested non-obvious paid ad channels
basically only newsletters work
For us, yes. But this may change at scale - plenty of much larger devtool companies than us _seem_ to do a good job with events.