Dev Growth Tactics Aggregated
By Alex Mackenzie at
"It's not even wrong"
Should you wish to stay updated on future posts, subscribe to receive carrier pidgeons at my substack.
As I've mentioned previously, venture is a business of aggregation. I've decided to "open source" some of the content playbooks I've come across (in the public domain!) used by developer tools to build, developer love.
Pull requests are encouraged if you have a learning to share! & I'm at alex[at]tapestry[dot]vc if you want to say hello.
Manifestos
Manifestos are the perfect medium to be opinionated/drop "hot takes". It's important to be thought of/loved for something; even if some cohort of developers will vehemently object.
- >> Deno
- >> Evervault
- >> Planetscale
- >> LatchBio
Best Docs
- >> Fly - I specifically like the idea of "speed-running".
You vs. Your Competitor
It's important that you own the you vs. your competitor narrative (vs. your competitors!). Conceding on certain areas/features creates legitimacy.
- >> Feathery
- >> Roboflow
- >> Contentful
- >> AssemblyAI
Company / Product Launches
- >> Neon
Build vs. Buy
Developers often could theoretically build your product. It's important that you provide a list of factors that they should take into account when considering doing so. Bonus points if you can ~impartially point out why doing so would be a poor use of time/company resources.
- >> LaunchDarkly
- >> Retool
Buyer's Guide
It's, naturually, important to own the criteria that potential buyers should take into account when evaluating a solution. I haven't yet found a developer tool do a good job of buyers' guides, likely because dev tools often follow a bottoms-up gtm. EqualTo does a great job.
- >> EqualTo
Porting from Competitor
- >> Northflank's Heroku alternatives & how to migrate.
- >> PlanetScale's porting from your Django DB.
Dev Community Pages
Spotlighting what your community builds with your product incentivises your users to continue to build with your product & often results in free marketing.
- >> Rasa's community showcase.
- >> Scale's community exchange.
- >> Hugging Face's community spaces.
Content Partnerships
- >> Sysdig's appraisal via Skyscanner.
- >> Hex has an "elsewhere" section within their blog page.
- >> Great Expectations x ZenML.
- >> Materialize has a cross-post with Fivetran on "why Kafka isn't a database".
How We Built X
How to Do X
- >> Northflank's how to deploy X on Northflank.
The State Of X
Creating a report on the "state of" your domain, 1) positions you as a leader in the domain & 2) is great for backlinking if (you provide unique data)
- >> Okta's "Business at Work".
- >> Retool's "State of Internal Tools".
- >> Vercel's "State of the Web".
Educational Content
My general rule of thumb here is to remember your audience/your content objectives. You'll accumulate plenty of vanity impressions for writing a blog post on something generic (a la "what is Python") but if your audience are developers, are they really searching for something this high-level?
- >> Sym's evolution of access control via Python.
- >> Roboflow's "ML in a minute".
- >> Mozart Data's what is data reliability.
- >> Shopify's what is Nix.
Developer Competitions
Internal Developer Products
Social Media
- >> Supabase
Honourable Misc Mentions
- >> Grafbase's connector voting.
- >> PlanetScale's "building PlanetScale with PlanetScale".
- >> Evervault Papers
- >> Fly has carved out sections of its blog for framework-specific posts. E.g., "The Ruby Dispatch".
- >> Cloudsmith's DevOps Horror Stories.
- >> Linear's ReadMe.
- >> Cillium's Co-Founder runs a weekly "Install Fest".
- >> Bytebase built the "Star History" tool; great marketing real estate.
- >> Stripe's homepage easter egg.
- >> Tine's developer credit roll.
- >> Infisical's "open source friends".
- >> Discord previews what your profile could look like if you paid for Nitro.
- >> Arc Browser gives you the option to drive Arc as your default browser for one week (less of a commitment).