Aug 28, 2024Updated Sep 5, 2024

Developer GTM

I worked at Stripe for nearly a decade, and saw product-led growth (driven by developer experience and reputation) evolve into a full-scale GTM machine. At Stripe, engineers were effectively PMs and worked alongside GTM efforts, so I got to see a lot of the process first-hand. Stripe's culture also heavily encouraged writing, so there was always a lot of internal and external content-making.

Now that I'm a founder, I've had to bootstrap a lot of the GTM process with a small team. I'm by no means an expert, but frameworks are a helpful tool for thought, and knowledge-sharing is always good content ;)

I frame developer GTM as 6 activities:

Outbound sales
Founder-led content
Product-oriented content
SEO-driven content
Performance marketing

These are ranked by priority, and you generally should not pursue 5. or 6. until you've done plenty of 1–4.

1. Outbound sales

This isn’t really unique to developer products, or even sales. Non-sales outbound motion happens all the time, in the form of fundraising, recruiting, sourcing vendors, etc.
The outbound process is (1) sourcing (building lists of who to contact), and (2) contacting (messaging people with variations on a template).
As a founder, focus on sourcing in your direct network and test hypotheses on your customer profile. When contacting, it’s much easier to make the sales approach from a networking context (and networking can lead to introductions even if it doesn’t lead to a sale).
Do a lot of contacting yourself at first to perfect your messaging and discovery conversation. Start by experimenting with lower-value targets outside your network.
I find it easier to focus on either sourcing or contacting in a given prospecting session – you should be optimizing your time for volume, and it’s less efficient to context-switch between the two activities.
I highly recommend hiring a fractional SDR/head of sales to scale outbound or help with the followup process.
I haven't tried sales automation tools or CRMs, but I've heard good things about Clay.

2. Founder-led content

The founder content treadmill is a grind, but remember the ultimate goal: to enrich your sales pipeline.
There’s a vast ocean of content to draw from, but it takes practice to see the opportunities, and craft them into content that hits.
You won’t know what works for you until you try a lot of things. Over time, you’ll find the content and style that’s easy for you to write.
Build a writing habit: create a pipeline of ideas to write about, and flesh them out incrementally. A well of long-form content to draw from can make it easier to post short-form content.
Build a posting habit: start with once a week, and try to make it more frequent. Syndicate it: post variations on the same content to multiple channels at the same time.

3. Product-oriented content

There are many standard categories of content to produce: short examples, longer tutorials, case studies, competitor comparisons, technical blog posts, product updates, co-marketing with ecosystem partners. Events, too: talks, workshops, demos.
If you're building a product for developers, it's important for your team to own a lot of this content – creating repeatable templates for common shapes of content. Once you have some established content, you can enlist agencies like Letterbrace. In parallel, it's worth considering a full-time Dev Rel hire.

4. SEO-driven content

You can find and write this content yourself, using tools like Positional, Semrush, and ahrefs.
Alternatively, you can enlist agencies like Letterbrace to identify and write SEO-optimized content adjacent to your product.

5. Performance marketing

I don’t have much experience here yet. Generally I’ve heard that it’s tough to figure out effective performance marketing on your own, and agencies like UTTR can help.