title: Developer-led Sales for Startups
slug: developer-led-sales-startups
meta: Talk slides, notes and more resources for a technical talk on developer-led sales and marketing for tech startups, by Matt Makai.
category: talk
date: 2019-06-26
modified: 2019-07-11
newsletter: False
headerimage: /img/190626-dev-led-sales/01-title.jpg
headeralt: Comment bubble with code representing a technical talk-based blog post.


This blog post contains the slides along with a loose transcript
from my talk on the promises and perils of developer-led sales as an
early-stage company method to acquire customers. 

I gave this talk remotely to [Ubiquity.VC](http://www.ubiquity.vc/) 
portfolio company startup founders and the Extended Team on June 26, 2019.

----

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/01-title.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Title slide for this talk on Developer-Led Sales for Startups.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
</p></div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/02-author-info.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Information about the author, Matt Makai.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Hey folks, my name is <a href="/about-author.html">Matt Makai</a>. I serve the
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF129ioe8kc">Developer Network</a> at
<a href="https://www.twilio.com/">Twilio</a>. I'm also part of the Extended
Team at <a href="https://www.ubiquity.vc/">Ubiquity Ventures</a>.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/03-dream.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Section title slide for the dream of developer-led sales.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
I often meet startup founders who ask me "how can my company do what
Twilio does with developers?"</p>
<p>
I respond by asking, "what do see Twilio doing and want to replicate 
for developers who interact with your business?"
</p>
<p>
That's when they usually tell me about their "the dev-led sales dream".
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/04-dev-events.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Developers at a hackathon working on code.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Their dream is that software developers go to tech events, like 
hackathons, conferences and meetups. While at an event, developers 
see a new <a href="/application-programming-interfaces.html">API</a> 
or technical product that looks interesting.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/05-code.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Code in a text editor.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Immediately those developers implement the API in their own projects.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/06-joint-success.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Your revenue grows with their usage.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Boom, success!
</p><p>
You make more money as the company that the developer works
for uses increasing amounts of your product. Take that money,
reinvest in the business to grow and improve your product.
</p><p>
Rinse and repeat until the IPO and beyond.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/07-early-stage.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Early stage example dev-led sales companies.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
There are examples of this developer-led marketing and sales success 
story across many early-stage and mid-stage companies.

For example, <a href="https://rollbar.com/">Rollbar</a> and 
<a href="https://www.datadoghq.com/">Datadog</a> are doing well by 
focusing on developer adoption with great technical content for their 
monitoring and analytics tools.
</p><p>
<a href="https://www.getpostman.com/">Postman</a> recently raised 
<a href="https://pitchbook.com/newsletter/postman-picks-up-50m-series-b">$50 million</a>
in a Series B round of venture capital to expand their API testing
developer tools. Postman was founded in large part because the original
tool was virally adopted by developers building APIs and 
<a href="/microservices.html">microservices</a>.
</p><p>
<a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/">DigitalOcean</a>'s extensive
<a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials">community-written tutorials</a>
have endeared them to developers and has allowed them to compete 
in a world where providing cloud infrastructure pits you against AWS,
Google and Microsoft.
</p><p>
Citus Data's developer-focused <a href="/databases.html">database</a> 
content and <a href="/postgresql.html">PostgreSQL</a> offerings led them to 
<a href="https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2019/01/24/microsoft-acquires-citus-data-re-affirming-its-commitment-to-open-source-and-accelerating-azure-postgresql-performance-and-scale/">a successful exit via Microsofta acquisition</a>.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/08-public-companies.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Public and large private successful dev-led sales companies.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Then you have the massive success stories of developer-focused companies,
such as publicly-traded <a href="https://www.okta.com/">Okta</a>
<a href="https://www.pluralsight.com/">Pluralsight</a>, 
<a href="https://slack.com/">Slack</a>
and 
<a href="https://www.twilio.com/">Twilio</a>. Still-private 
<a href="https://stripe.com/">Stripe</a> recently raised more 
venture capital money at a $22 billion valuation which is more than 
those four public companies.
</p><p>
<a href="https://aws.amazon.com/">Amazon Web Services (AWS)</a>, 
while not independent of its 
<a href="https://investinganswers.com/dictionary/m/mega-cap">mega cap</a>
parent company, arguably is by far the leader in cloud computing 
infrastructure due to its initial and continuing focus on grassroots
developer product adoption.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/09-reality.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Subsection reality.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
But how does that startup dream match the reality of the work and skills
required to execute on the vision?
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/10-devrel-skills.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Developer relations skillset.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
You, as the founder, should serve as the chief evangelist for your 
product during the early stages of your company. That role
never stops regardless of how large and successful you become. 
<p>
But your time is split in a hundred different ways so eventually you 
need to hire someone with a nuanced understanding of how to 
<strong>appropriately</strong> market your company to developers.
Hiring the wrong person for the job is going to be the equivalent of
adding a 
<a href="http://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer">net negative producing programmer</a> 
to your development team at a critical stage of growth. A poor result
could sink your entire company.
</p>
<p>
The right person for the job likely has a combination of significant
heads-down software development experience, humility, patience,
strong writing and solid speaking abilities.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/11-devrel-expense.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Developer relations is expensive.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
That combination of skills is exceedingly rare, which according to 
supply and demand dictates a large compensation premium over a 
programmy-only skill set. If you've done any recruiting for top notch 
developer relations folks, you may have already discovered this issue
which is prohibitive for startup companies trying to compete with 
better-capitalized firms.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/12-what-is-dev-led.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Subsection for what is dev-led sales.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
We've done a bunch of talking already about the developer-led sales
dream for startups, but what exactly <em>is</em> developer-led sales?
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/13-dev-buyers.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Developers are your first buyers.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Developer-led sales mean that developers are your primary customers. The
goal is to have developers see the value in your product, sign up, start
using it and spend some amount of money that is relevant to your business.
This approach typically works best with a usage-based model where
development is cheap or free then costs scale with the consumption of your
product.
</p><p>
For example, 
<a href="https://www.twilio.com/docs/sms/api">Twilio's SMS API</a> 
is free to get started with during development. Then for testing and 
production text messages can be sent and received for .00075 US dollars 
each. A developer can sign up with their credit card to test that your 
product actually does what you say it can do, then scale up as their
application goes to production.
</p>
<p>
Developer-led sales stands in contrast to the typical business
model where a business development representative (often shortened to
"BDR") prospects for potential customers, outbound emails and calls 
those prospects, then hands off to a more senior sales representative
to work on closing a deal that is large enough to justify the time
invested in the sales cycle.
</p>
<p>In this traditional model, your startup sells directly to 
stakeholders who control a relatively large budget and are authorized 
to spend that money. Developers usually do not have significant 
budget to spend but can often spend a small amount on a credit card 
and expense it without an issue. That's why dev-led sales is possible
as an alternative sales model.
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/14-dev-led-not.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Dev-led sales is not sales engineering or dev-only sales.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
We should also confirm what developer-led sales is not. It's not sales 
engineering, where your technical folks support a traditional top-down
large sales deal.
<p>
Developer-led sales is also not developer-only sales. Other stakeholders
remain important. When your product is successfully implemented then you
still have to ensure non-developer stakeholders are part of your sales 
process.
</p>
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/15-global.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Empty map no developers using your product before launch.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Here's another way to think about a developer-led approach to product
adoption and sales.
</p><p>
Before your product exists, no developers anywhere are using and
paying for what you are offering, as represented by this dark world map.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/16-global-dev-adoption.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Initial developer adoption upon launch.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
A few risk-taking developers who have a problem you are solving 
"raise their hands" with code by using your product or service
once you launch.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/17-global-more-devs.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Over time many more developers use your product.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
When you are successful, more and more developers use your products and 
serve as indicators that your product is solving a real problem. Those
developers can be your first hook into larger deals with organizations 
where those developers work.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/18-worthwhile.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="When is dev-led sales worthwhile?">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
When should you consider a developer-led sales strategy instead of a
tried-and-true traditional sales motion?
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/19-solving-problem.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Solving a worthwhile developer problem.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
First, you need to be solving an actual problem that developers recognize
is an issue for them that they themselves would not want to solve. Solving
a meaty technical problem with an easy-to-use solution is
a high bar that non-technical founders often take for granted when 
pitching their product. 
</p><p>
Is the problem your product solves... actually a problem worth solving
for developers? It must be if you want to be successful with a developer-led
sales model.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/20-explain-devs.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="How to explain your product to developers.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Second, you need to be able to properly
<a href="/blog/explain-products-developers.html">articulate the problem that you solve</a>
to developers. That is an unexpectedly large challenge if no one on
the founding team of your tech startup is a developer themselves.
</p><p>
That link contains the slides and a loose transcript to another talk
that provides some guidance around telling your product's story
to developers.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/21-cac-ltv.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="At an early stage you may not know your CAC and LTV but you should have a hypothesis for what they could be.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Third, even at an early stage you should have some understanding of 
your own business model. The business model should include a working 
hypothesis for both the cost of customer acquisition (CAC) and lifetime 
value of a customer (LTV). Also, does the revenue derived from your
customers match a standard distribution or a power law distribution?
</p><p>
What do CAC, LTV and standard vs. power law distribution have to do with
a developer-led sales motion?
</p><p>
Ideally, your CAC will be significantly lower with a developer-led
sales strategy versus a traditional sales motion. This is one reason
established companies such as Okta 
<a href="https://www.okta.com/press-room/press-releases/okta-welcomes-stormpath-to-accelerate-identity-for-developers/">acquire smaller firms such as Stormpath</a> 
to create a different sales cycle based on usage from developers instead
of trying to convince companies to sign large deals before the software
has proven useful.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/22-cloud-laws.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Bessemer's 10 Laws of Cloud Computing and developer platform laws are fantastic foundational reading.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Note that I am making a lot of assumptions about your understanding of
developer platforms. If what I am saying about CAC, LTV, usage-based
models and related terms are unclear, you definitely need to read 
Bessemer's articles on
<a href="https://www.bvp.com/atlas/10-laws-of-cloud">10 Laws of Cloud Computing</a> 
and 
<a href="https://www.bvp.com/atlas/eight-laws-for-developer-platforms">8 Laws for Developer Platforms</a>.
</p><p>
They are both incredibly helpful foundational resources for understanding 
how to build, market and sell software products for developers.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/23-platform.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Broad developer platform.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Finally, if you have a product that solves a real problem for developers,
can explain it to them and have a working model of your CAC and LTV,
then a massive bonus comes into play when you have a broad platform
useful across many industries. Broad platforms that developers can use
in creative ways can potentially create new use cases for company to
sell.
</p><p>
For example, when Twilio started the SMS API, 2-factor authentication was
rare. The ease of integrating the API to send unique codes to pre-qualified
phone numbers to enhance security beyond a password became a new use
case for the company to sell to customers. Developers came up
with the use case and deserve the credit for figuring out what was
valuable about an SMS API.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/24-tactics.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Subsection for dev-led sales and marketing tactics.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Most startup founders I talk to go straight into questions about the
tactics that Twilio and other companies use for selling to developers.
It's a bit of a "the cart before the horse" situation because you really
need to have figured out what we talked about in the previous section
as it applies to your business before you dig into the specific tactics
you will use to engage developers.
</p><p>
Let's assume you have determined a developer-led sales motion fits well 
with your company strategy. Now we can dig into the myriad tactics you 
can apply to grow your sales funnel. 
</p><p>
Most of these tactics are better described as "developer marketing" 
rather than sales. You are not going to be cold calling developers to
pitch them your service. Please make sure you never do that.
</p><p>
Let's dig into several of the specific tactics that can work well to
jump start developers adopting your product when it solves a problem
that they have.
</p><p>
We'll start with a few online tactics then review in-person "offline"
event-related activities like startup founders' dream hackathons.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/25-docs.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Great developers documentation is your best friend.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
By far your most important marketing asset is having stellar developer
documentation. However, documentation rarely comes up in conversations
as part of marketing and sales efforts. Why is that?
</p><p>
Historically, documentation has been a by-product of an actual product
or service being offered. Docs are considered a necessary evil and cost
center that needs to be minimized as a time suck for engineers to work
on "real" problems. Sometimes writers with minimal or no development
experience are hired to just get it done.
<p></p>
The "necessary evil" attitude makes sense in a world where documentation
lives in a large paper binder that is mailed out after a purchase is
complete. The quality has to be just enough that the customer doesn't
complain about the complexity being so high their developers cannot
eventually (after some long unpaid additional work nights and weekends) 
complete an implementation.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/26-content.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Timely tutorials hit topics that developers care about right now.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Documentation is your evergreen always-to-date content, but there are
additional formats such as blog post walkthroughs, example use cases and 
brand awareness tutorials related to hot topics that developers are
currently interested in learning.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/27-online-social.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Online social strategies.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Alright, I am going to start talking about online social with the 
caveat that I personally think it's difficult if not impossible to
pull off as a decent developer adoption tactic. It's usually done
so poorly that it is better to not do social channels like Twitter,
Facebook and your own Slack instance at all.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/28-async-video.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Asynchronously-consumed video tutorials.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Video tutorials that teach how to use your product which you can post 
on YouTube and other sites are more difficult to create than straight
text and code, but they can be well worth the effort. YouTube is
currently the second largest search engine in the world (amazing how
both number 1 and number 2 are the same company) and the video
search results are also cross-posted in Google standard search. 
</p><p>
The wide reach presents a strong acquisition model if you can create
useful technical content.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/29-streaming.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Synchronous broadcasting and consuming video via streaming.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Live coding on Twitch and YouTube are a nascent but promising teaching 
method.
</p><p>
Evergreen documentation, timely technical content, online social, 
asynchronous videos and streaming are the most common <em>online</em> 
developer adoption tactics. Next we'll look at some offline, in-person
tactics.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/30-conferences.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Developers at tech conferences.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Conferences split into a couple of categories: community-run and
vendor-run. For example, 
<a href="https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/">WWDC</a> is Apple's vendor-run
developer conference. They run the show and control the messaging.
<a href="https://us.pycon.org/">PyCon US</a> is the community-run 
Python developer conference. There are a ton of vendors there as sponsors
but no one company controls what happens at the conference.
</p><p>
Conferences, especially community-run ones, work well for brand awareness.
Vendor-run conferences can work well for brand awareness if your product
augments an existing company's products and solves a problem for the
developers who attend that event.
</p><p>
Non-developer conferences are great for sales lead generation. Think
of badge scanning and prize raffles in exchange for hearing a product
pitch. However, badge scanning and lead generation activities do not
work very well because most developers are skeptical and just want to
avoid overly pushy situations. Be considerate of your audience and
respectful.
</p><p>
Generally, I find you can spend a ton of money on conference sponsorships
without getting a ton of value out of them. If you want to be successful
with this tactic you should figure out your secret developer marketing
sauce on smaller, regional conferences then expand from there.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/31-meetups.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Developers at meetups.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Tech meetups are good for brand awareness among primarily less experienced
developers. While there are some niche, senior developer and tech 
lead-focused meetups, most of the content at these events is aimed at
less experienced folks.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/32-hackathons.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Developers at hackathons.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Professional hackathons have undergone a transition over the past several
years. Broadly speaking there is less excitement among developers to spend
a long sleep-deprived weekend working on a project with an unclear payoff.
I could be projecting my own feelings on this one but it appears that the
majority of developers in 2019 would prefer to work on their projects outside
the pressure of an arbitrary forced deadline. Hackathons can be still useful 
for getting a focused product shipped in a weekend but there seems to be less
excitement around them than a few years ago.
</p><p>
College hacakthons, like Hack MIT, MHacks and Hoo Hacks, on the other hand,
are going stronger than ever. There are always new classes of students who
are excited to code their ideas. However, you are playing the long game with
college hackathons and assuming that a few years down the road a student
who learned your APIs will pick it back up to solve a problem at work. For
most early startups, college hackathons won't make a ton of sense unless
you want to get quick immediate feedback from junior programmers about your
product's developer experience.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/33-magic.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Magical new approaches to developer relations.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
That covers the most common online and offline developer marketing and
sales tactics. Is that it?
</p><p>
No, there are many other tactics. However, the ones we just listed
are the most likely to be successful based on the relatively small 
investment you can make as a startup.
<p></p>
There are an additional set of tactics that are essentially "magic" to 
you because they rely on an existing successful foundation to properly 
execute. Building a new foundation of developer awareness is dramatically 
different from expanding developer adoption among those are not early
adoptors as well as doing a better job of serving developers who already 
use your service.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/34-recap.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Subsection title for recap.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
Let's wrap with a quick review of the important concepts presented in
this talk.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/35-recap.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Recap core ideas of talk.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
There is a startup dream of developer-led sales which is an easy path 
from launching your service to developers, having them find out and
start to use it, then becoming large paying customers.
</p><p>
The reality is clearly more difficult than the dream. You as the
startup founder need to be the "chief developer evangelism officer" 
and it will be expensive when you aim to hire a seasoned developer
relations employee.
</p><p>
We define developer-led sales as a different sales motion than a
traditional sales outreach approach. Instead, you appropriately 
market to developers who need a solution to a problem they are
facing, typically with great documentation, timely tutorials or
another respectful tactic rather than cold calling or empty
clickbait content.
</p>
</div></div>

<div class="row talk"><div class="c6">
<img src="/img/190626-dev-led-sales/36-q-a.jpg" width="100%" class="shot rnd outl" alt="Q&A slide.">
</div><div class="c6"><p>
That's all the prepared materials for today. Thank you very much. Again, 
my name is <a href="/about-author.html">Matt Makai</a>, I am a software 
developer at <a href="/twilio.html">Twilio</a> on the Developer Network and 
the creator of 
<a href="https://www.fullstackpython.com/">Full Stack Python</a>
(<a href="https://github.com/mattmakai/fullstackpython.com">source code</a>).
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