In 2024, most people are easily swayed by the content influencers share across their platforms. While the B2C influencer market is hyper-saturated, content creators in the B2B space have adopted a similar playbook that is becoming a clear growth lever — to the extent that some founders are jumping on the bandwagon to take on the  influencer persona themselves.

Particularly in the Developer Tools sector — where community has been the name of the game for years –– “marketing” has their sights set on creating awareness and building trust within the developer community. The tech industry moves quickly and developers are constantly evaluating which languages, frameworks, and tools will help increase their velocity to ship polished user experiences. 

“YouTube has become a trusted platform where developers can go to be informed of the best new tools and strategies with confidence and ease. The platform offers developers on-demand access to a wide spectrum of content to grow their skill set and become more marketable, no matter their role or level of experience.” - Alex Rapp, Clerk

Despite the significant influence creators have on B2B brand building (and the bottom line), most companies are dropping the ball. They drown in cumbersome analytics and operations, and force guidelines and briefs onto creators, undermining the very authenticity that makes these collaborations valuable.

In this post, we'll show how Clerk — with the help of Gonto and the HyperGrowth Partners team — tackled this challenge, sharing roadblocks and learnings that allowed them to transform YouTube into a top performing full-funnel pipeline.

Learnings from pilot partnerships

When kicking off Clerk’s YouTube partnership program, Gonto and Nick Parsons, Director of Marketing at Clerk, zeroed in on YouTubers as the initial core personas. But why? 

The YouTube algorithm is one of the best recommendation engines on the internet, giving marketers confidence they’re reaching an engaged and high-intent audience. YouTube also favors long-form content, such as how-to’s and tutorials, that can have a long shelf life due to viewers continually consuming the content despite the publication date.

Last summer, Nick started by reaching out to creators that were a fit for Clerk's solution and simply asked if they'd be interested in trying Clerk. By giving the creator a test drive, Clerk quickly realized that it became easier to find authentic partnerships.

The emphasis was on maintaining an organic and personal vibe in communications to foster genuine relationships. 

“We wanted to avoid cringey sales pitches and instead give developers the chance to experience Clerk’s 'aha' moment on their own, showing them both the developer and user experience rather than selling them in a 30-second mid-roll ad.” - Nick

The pilot experiment included three long-form videos solely featuring Clerk, which did not move the dial on the metrics they were hoping to influence. However, these learnings began to shape Clerk’s future YouTube partnerships. 

The initial integrations did drive awareness, but accompanied by some negative sentiment. In connecting with some viewers of these early integrations, the Clerk team learned they built the impression of: "These guys are paying people to talk good about them," which is not how Clerk wanted to be perceived. Moreover, these videos didn't impact important metrics like account sign ups and activations.

Faced with additional issues of poor attribution and tracking effectiveness, these learnings showed that Clerk needed to experiment with a new approach more in-line with their core values and one that spoke to developers, rather than selling.

“We wanted the viewing experience to be authentic, so we decided to change direction.” - Nick

From then onwards, Nick and Gonto committed to giving creators full creative freedom to showcase Clerk’s features they were most passionate about and even call out product bugs in their content.

“At the end of the day, we learned that developers don’t want to just learn new frameworks and services in a vacuum, but in the context of learning how to create entire apps, like an Uber or ChatGPT clone. That’s why we prompted creators to use Clerk as one of the tools in the toolbox for creating those apps. And that performed drastically better.” - Gonto

Clerk advocated creators recommend their own content topics but suggested ideas that were popular in the developer community, such as "how to build a ChatGPT clone" or "how to build a project management app," to attract relevant audiences. By positioning themselves as just another part of the tech stack, not the focus of the video, Clerk hoped to achieve the organic integration they sought to test.

After running a few more integrations as part of the pilot, the team validated the above hypothesis by observing that the base of sign ups started to increase. Armed with this new direction and positive results, the team was ready to scale the channel to a proper growth program.

From pilot to partnership program

After the initial pilot, Clerk hired Alex Rapp, who grew YouTube into a full-fledged creator program, rapidly achieving step growth for the channel.

Solving attribution

To enhance tracking effectiveness, Alex introduced branded attribution links in video descriptions to give a more organic appearance and built a reporting suite that eased the process of measuring effectiveness at macro & micro levels.

Despite these efforts, the team noticed a significant proportion of sign ups were still coming from a “halo effect” rather than directly from the attribution links. On days where partner videos went live, Alex observed an uptick in sign ups attributed to direct traffic and organic search. It’s well documented that developers are keen to avoid being tracked, so this was no surprise. The team quickly learned that these ‘hard to measure’ channels followed a similar trend to their YouTube-attributed sign ups. This allowed them to directionally attribute sign ups to specific videos, even when the traffic hadn’t come directly from one of their attribution links.

All of that being said, the attribution links did contribute to their ability to directionally measure impact and opened doors to more avenues of growth and experimentation.  For example:

• Building retargeting audiences from partner channels

• Running in-feed YouTube ads of partner content they’d sponsored to extend reach

• Re-distributing sponsored content to other channels (e.g. newsletters, dev.to, etc.)

Automating creator scouting

With attribution basics out of the way, scaling partnerships became the next priority. The strategy here was two-prong:

1. The team began by manually searching YouTube for mentions of ‘Clerk’ in video titles, descriptions, and transcripts to identify creators who were already using Clerk in their tutorials. This approach indicated positive brand awareness and creator affinity for Clerk.

2. The team expanded their search to identify creators working within frameworks and libraries supported by Clerk, such as Next.js, React, and React Native.

They automated both steps by creating a YouTube scraper integrated into their Hex reporting environment, drastically reducing the manual burden. Developed internally by one of their data engineers in just one day, the script crawled public YouTube data daily for specific keywords like ‘Clerk’ or ‘Clerk Authentication’.

Scouting creators

When evaluating potential partners, Clerk leveraged YouTube’s native metrics and Social Blade, among other tactics, to assess key performance potential signals:

• Monthly channel growth trends, using 10,000 subscribers as a soft minimum threshold

• Views-to-subscriber ratio to gauge audience engagement

• Community interaction through likes, comments, and Q&A participation

• A consistent production schedule to ensure ongoing engagement with their audience

  

Overall, Clerk prioritized growth potential over audience size. The partnerships were split:

• 40% established creators with established audiences, whose growth curve wasn’t as sharp — these creators leaned into production quality and brand equity value, which comes with all the related positive associations.

• 60% up-and-coming creators for cost-effectiveness and future potential — these were not just value-for-money bets, but faster-growing ones they could invest in and “grow together with”.

Granting full creator autonomy 

What set Clerk’s creator program apart was their outreach and collaboration process. It was entirely rooted in granting total creative freedom to foster genuine partnerships with creators.

Keeping outreach casual

Alex built on the personal outreach Nick had created and shared additional partnership benefits, including creative authority, no deadlines, and performance insights to name a few.

This email was followed by a face-to-face meeting to get to know one another and iron out what an ideal partnership looks like for both parties, strengthening the human relationship and ensuring the creator & Clerk were on the same page.

Creative collaboration > Pitch

When discussing partnerships, Alex encouraged creators to speak authentically about the product, even if it involved flagging product bugs. 

Rather than dictating the messaging, the team leveraged their Clerk expertise to help creators identify features that would best resonate with their audiences and the content topic. To foster creative brainstorming, Clerk would occasionally share content topics based on the latest trends in the developer community — for example, how to build an app that uses the latest version of Claude 3.5 Sonet. However, Clerk ultimately left final content decisions up to the creator, in the spirit of giving them full autonomy.

“This approach empowered creators to showcase the product authentically, resonating more deeply with their audiences, because they were able to build applications they were genuinely excited about. In the end, the creator knows their audience best, and we didn’t want to add friction to what they’ve worked so hard to create.” - Alex

Flexible production schedule

To accommodate the creators' workflows, Clerk also gave them full flexibility by not enforcing deadlines for when content would be published. This allowed creators to focus on producing high-quality work they could be proud of, without the pressure of adjusting complex production schedules to meet artificial deadlines.

“We aimed for quality over quantity, fostering a frictionless environment for creators to build.” - Alex

Creator dedicated communication lines

To simplify collaboration, Alex established dedicated Discord or Slack channels for each partner that included technical experts from the Clerk team. Both parties used these communication channels to ideate, troubleshoot, and take care of logistics in a speedy manner.

“Collaborating through email was far too cumbersome for us and our partners. Setting up comms in Discord was a no-brainer since that’s what developers use already. Creating dedicated channels, rather than pointing them to our support channel, gave them a fast lane to our team.” - Alex

Partner compensation and management

When it comes to partner compensation, Clerk offered monetary incentives on a per-video basis.

Clerk allows creators to propose their preferred compensation per video, trusting their insight into what it takes to produce the quality content their subscribers expect. Initially, Alex used scouting signals to negotiate fair compensation. In the present, he’s built a normative database, inclusive of efficiency benchmarks, that more precisely guide negotiations — especially during their ‘experimental phase’. 

Partnership experimental phase

To kick off the partnership, they suggest an initial scope of 3 to 5 video integrations to understand how Clerk resonated among the creators' audiences. 

“The experimental phase gave me enough confidence in the performance we were seeing to either extend the partnership or pause efforts. In some cases, we’d make recommendations to improve engagement and sometimes it’s just not a good fit, but that’s alright. If Clerk wasn’t resonating with a creator’s audience, we didn’t want to force the issue.” - Alex

Sharing insights

Alex and team shared transparent feedback on video performance. By highlighting winning themes alongside key metrics, Clerk provided creators with directional reporting to improve their content, giving them indications on how they performed compared to their benchmarks. In some cases, they also shared learnings from more established creators to help grow their channels. The emphasis was on a mutual partnership, not just driving Clerk’s metrics or funding a creator’s channel.

“This feedback loop empowered creators to refine their work, enhance their content, its impact, and our overall relationship — they wanted to continue partnering with us because we gave them data to be successful. Surprisingly, this was novel to some partners and something they’ve been asking for but weren’t getting from other sponsors.” - Alex

As partnerships grew, Clerk introduced creators to other developer tool teams within its network. This fostered content diversity, expanded reach, and unlocked additional developer tool networks, sometimes reducing Clerk’s partnership costs and enhancing mutual benefits.

Additional incentives tactics

Gonto tested other incentive tactics with HyperGrowth Partners portfolio companies, besides Clerk, including:

• Experimenting with a performance-based CPM model ranging from $20 to $55 for every 1,000 views a video accumulated

• Requesting a ‘make good’ if the first integration didn’t reach a minimum threshold of views

• Capping the viewership amount in the first two months to evaluate performance and payments

Processing learnings and results

Scaling their YouTube program sharpened Alex’s focus on collecting results and insights to assess its effectiveness.

Setting up actionable reporting

Alex unlocked partnership performance by leveraging BI tools like Hex and Notion that were fueled by Clerk’s backend database. This allowed Alex to easily create a normative database, establishing performance benchmarks, efficiency tiers, and easily capture findings to continually optimize performance.

The reporting suite is updated at specific milestones, post-publish, to account for the long-tail effects of partner integration allowing him to understand the different stages of growth, signaling which partners excel at SEO practices. 

Youtube’s full funnel impact

Despite the known challenges of attribution, further data analysis yielded deeper learnings for the Clerk team. They understand that YouTube partnerships aren’t just a direct conversion play, but can also influence every layer of the funnel.

“Once we established our normative database, it became evident that some partners were better at driving sign ups & installations than others. Rather than writing off the lower converting partners, we saw they were able to contribute to our success by filling the top layers of the conversion funnel.” - Alex

• Top Funnel: Increase in brand awareness and engaged site visitors

• Mid-Funnel: An organic increase in the number of creators using Clerk in tutorials; Increased engagement in partner video comment sections

• Bottom Funnel: Step level growth in sign up/installation volume while retaining above industry average conversion rates

“Starting with 3-5 creators, we now boast 20 active partners that have driven a 30% increase in YouTube attributed sign ups as well as the strongest installation rate of any of our channels. This approach fostered genuine engagement and unlocked new avenues for growth.” - Alex

The chart above shows the daily volume of sign ups and installations, which peak when new videos were published. Not every YouTube integration had the same impact on sign ups or installations, something Clerk plans to solve for through more advanced data analysis.

These results underscored the value of the creator program and validated the hypothesis to double down on the investment.

Closing Thoughts

By fostering casual and genuine partnerships with YouTubers, Clerk successfully embedded itself into the developer community. Their approach not only enhanced their reach and adoption, but also unlocked valuable insights into audience interests and content strategies, all while keeping ops lean and casual, ultimately capturing time savings for the Clerk team.

For growth operators in the B2B SaaS space, Clerk's strategy offers a compelling blueprint for engaging creators with genuine, value-driven collaborations, which is ultimately what partnerships are all about.

However, many startups struggle with designing intuitive navigation structures. Common issues include overly complex menus, poorly organized content, and a lack of clear pathways for different user personas. These problems can frustrate users, causing them to abandon the site and, ultimately, the product.

So, how can startups create a navigation structure that is both simple and effective, catering to the diverse needs of their users?

Gonto provides principles for crafting effective website navigation. Drawing on insights from top DevTools websites and practical examples, Martin outlines strategies and tactics that can help startups design navigation systems that enhance user experience and drive engagement.

1. Design the Homepage for All Users

Your homepage hero should cater to a wide audience, including developers, and decision-makers from potential customers. The navigation is critical, as it is the first thing people see and interact with. Therefore, when designing the homepage, it should be structured to ensure that it addresses the needs of everyone who visits. This means providing a comprehensive overview of your company's work while directing users to specific sections tailored to their unique roles.

The idea is that the hero section targets everyone broadly  —  both developers and directors of engineering, or any of your target roles within the organization  —  but each subsequent section should focus on ONE specific persona. 

For example, If you target developers, there must be a section that includes code. The higher up, the more you show you care about them; because they’ll see content that includes code snippets and API calls, demonstrating that their needs are understood and prioritized. Then, the following sections might focus on high-level benefits and more relevant features for decision-makers.

Stripe’s homepage exemplifies this approach beautifully. It is designed to speak to a broad audience by showcasing how the app looks and works, which appeals to a general business audience. It also includes sections highlighting specific functionalities and code examples, catering directly to developers. 

The inclusion of interactive elements and animations engages users, while different sections focus on varying user needs — from detailed product information to high-level overviews suitable for directors and managers. By ensuring that every part of the homepage is tailored to a different user group, Stripe effectively communicates its value to all visitors.

2. Show Programming Language and Framework Fit

Displaying which programming languages and frameworks your tools support is crucial for developers. From my experience, 50% of a developer tool’s Product Market Fit is Programming Language and Framework fit; so you better show it, high on your homepage!

Developers buy products so they don't have to implement them themselves and do it faster. Having a good Programming Language and Framework fit makes them feel a lot more confident that they'll be able to accelerate using this product. Whether featured in the navigation or prominently on the homepage, this detail can significantly enhance your conversions.

Developers primarily care about two things once they understand the cool features of your product: compatibility and ease of implementation. They want to know if your product works well with the specific programming languages and frameworks they use. Examples of companies that do this well include Algolia, Vercel, and Strapi.

For instance, if you visit Vercel's website and scroll through its pages, you'll find templates for technologies like Svelte, Next.js, and others, clearly showcasing the supported frameworks. On their rendering page, Vercel uses logos of the technologies, which developers instantly recognize, to indicate compatibility.

Similarly, Strapi's website prominently displays the technologies it supports as you navigate through the homepage. This visibility ensures developers understand which frameworks and languages are compatible with Strapi from the get-go.

Algolia also excels in this area. Despite having a more enterprise-focused site, Algolia lists the main technologies they support, showing how their product integrates with various frameworks. This approach reassures developers about the ease of implementation with provided SDKs.

Including this information either on the homepage or in the navigation helps clarify your product's focus and compatibility. It's also beneficial to demonstrate how easy it is to implement your product with SDKs. Algolia, for example, effectively shows implementation details, helping developers visualize how they can use the product within their tech stack.

3. Product or Platform Sections Target Developers

When designing your menu navigation, you must always include a section specifically labeled "Product" or "Platform." While the terminology may vary, the focus should remain the same — targeting developers and showcasing your product. This section should never be aimed at decision-makers but should instead cater to the quick-scanning nature of developers. They need to understand at a glance what your product offers.

As we mentioned before, developers often "hover" over website sections, looking for specific technical details rather than reading through extensive text. I’ve learned about this behavior from watching hours of FullStory and Hotjar web recordings. 

It’s also because devs are productivity- and time-obsessed, and they hate to switch between mouse and keyboard. That’s why developer-first tools like Raycast or Linear have built-in keyboard shortcuts

This behavior underscores the importance of designing product sections that are clear, concise, animated; and provide quick links to essential docs and technical specs.

First, developers hover around the whole page to grasp the whole of the product and then dive deeper if they feel it's a fit for them. That’s why having a product or feature name with explanations hidden behind a click is not "hover" friendly, as you’ll force developers to click to learn more.

Strapi’s navigation is an excellent example of this principle in action. Their product section is meticulously organized to address developers' needs efficiently. Each product offering is accompanied by a brief description, allowing developers to quickly grasp what each component entails.

For instance, a glance at Strapi’s site reveals that they offer a community edition that is open source, an enterprise solution, numerous integrations through a marketplace, and a hosted solution. Developers can easily identify key features such as roles and permissions, content translation, and a UI builder.

4. Solutions Pages Target Decision Makers

Solutions sections on your website should be designed primarily for decision makers such as directors of engineering, VPs of engineering, and other similar roles. The key focus here is on relatability rather than discoverability. Instead of crafting content with the sole intent of making it discoverable in Google, or having some specific SEO Keywords, aim to make it highly relatable to the specific needs and challenges faced by these decision-makers.

When a developer sends a link to a director of engineering or a VP, the recipient should immediately see how your product addresses real-world problems relevant to their industry and use case. Again, this is not about having the right keywords for search engines, but about showcasing relatable examples and success stories that resonate with developers. Because developers want to feel that your product is tailored SPECIFICALLY for them.

Vercel provides a great example of this approach. Their solutions pages emphasize different business challenges tailored to their target industries, making it easy for decision-makers to see how the platform can benefit their specific operations. For instance, when you navigate to Vercel's solutions section, you can find examples such as support for Web Apps, platform engineering teams, composable commerce for e-commerce, building AI applications, and providing multi-site insights. This clear categorization helps potential clients quickly identify the value Vercel can bring to their specific context.

By highlighting how your product helps companies similar to theirs, whether through industry-specific solutions or use-case examples, you make it easy for decision-makers to envision your product as a fitting solution to their problems. Additionally, including a variety of specific industries and use cases can further enhance relatability and make your solutions pages even more compelling.

5. The Need for a Developer-Specific Section

When designing your navigation, an important question to consider is whether developers are your main persona. Based on this determination, you can decide whether to include a dedicated developer section in your navigation. 

If developers are your primary audience, particularly in the early stages of your company, it’s better not to have a dedicated developer section. This approach signals that your entire site is tailored to developers, ensuring they don't feel sidelined by having to navigate to a specific section just for them. Instead, content relevant to developers should be seamlessly integrated throughout your site, making it clear that developers are your main focus.

However, if your company has grown and moved upmarket, targeting enterprise clients alongside developers, including a developer section can be beneficial. This dedicated section provides a clear and convenient place for developers to find all the technical resources they need, such as documentation, APIs, SDKs, and other developer tools. It also indicates to developers that, while your site caters to a broader audience, their needs are still a priority.

Examples illustrate this approach well. 

LaunchDarkly effectively targets developers on its homepage, focusing on feature flags and continuous delivery without isolating developer-specific content into a separate section. 

On the other hand, companies like Storyblok initially did not have a dedicated developer section reflecting their primary focus on developers as their main audience.  Since then, it has evolved to include a developer section as it expanded its target market to include more enterprise clients.

In another case, even when the developer remains your main persona, you might "forget" about them as you grow and target enterprise customers. NewRelic is a good example of how they unconsciously forgot developers are the main persona and their entire website changed based on that.

For companies where the developer is not the main persona or where the focus has shifted, having a developer section helps organize the content. When a separate developer section is absent, it's common to have navigation items like "Docs" or "Resources," which developers can use to access the necessary documentation, APIs, and SDKs.

6. Maintain Transparent Pricing

Transparent pricing is a cornerstone of building trust with potential customers, particularly developers. When developers visit your site, they want to see clear, straightforward pricing information to quickly understand the cost and value of your product. Without transparent pricing, developers may become skeptical about your product's credibility and hesitate to adopt it.

It’s important to note that while you don’t need to display your enterprise pricing, you should at least provide clear details on your self-service or credit card pricing. This transparency reassures developers that your product is accessible and within reach, making them more likely to consider it for their projects. Pricing should be easily accessible from the main navigation, allowing developers to find this crucial information without hassle.

For example, Vercel’s pricing page is an excellent model of transparency. It clearly outlines the costs associated with different tiers of service, from free plans to premium options. This straightforward approach allows users to quickly grasp the value proposition and decide which plan suits their needs.

By placing pricing information prominently in the navigation, you ensure that developers can quickly access and evaluate it. This practice not only builds trust but also facilitates quicker decision-making, as potential customers can immediately understand what they are committing to financially.

7. Design as a Feature

The design of your homepage and website should be a standout feature in itself. A visually appealing, modern design can significantly enhance user engagement and perception, making your product more attractive to potential users. In recent years, the trend has leaned towards cool and futuristic designs, exemplified by websites like Upstash and ScaleAI, which use striking colors and sleek layouts to create a high-tech feel.

However, as this trend becomes ubiquitous, it may no longer differentiate your site as effectively. Instead, consider adopting a unique design approach that sets your site apart. For example, MotherDuck has successfully bucked the trend by opting for a vintage aesthetic. This distinctive design evokes a sense of nostalgia and uniqueness, making the website memorable and engaging for developers. It’s reminiscent of a spaceship or retro sci-fi theme, providing a refreshing contrast to the typical futuristic designs.

Moreover, it's crucial to embrace the principle of "show, don't tell" in both your navigation and homepage design. This means demonstrating how things work through visuals and examples rather than just describing them. For instance, use interactive elements, animations, and real-time demonstrations to show your product's capabilities and features in action. This approach is far more effective in engaging users and helping them understand your product's value.

Snyk’s homepage is a prime example of leveraging sleek, modern design to capture attention and convey a sense of innovation and reliability. By incorporating these design principles, you can create a homepage that not only looks good but also provides a compelling user experience.

Closing Thoughts

In conclusion, Gonto's advice on structuring website navigation for startups focuses on simplicity, product-focused organization, prominent use cases, clear visuals, skimmable content, interactive case studies, strong visual hooks, adaptability to different user needs, and consistency. These strategies help create a user-friendly and effective website navigation structure.

So when reaching out to developers to upgrade their trials, traditional SDR roles often won’t cut it because people in these roles aren’t trained to understand and cater to the unique technical needs of developers. For example, unlike marketers who might sign up for annual 5- or 6-figure contracts like Marketo or Braze without extensive product validation, developers seek clarity and specificity on the SaaS they purchase — and to fulfill that, they often demand specific technical answers to be answered before committing to an initial sales discovery call.

The crux of the issue lies in understanding when and how to engage with developers, structuring an effective enterprise sales organization for technical products, and identifying the right talent for this unique challenge. So how do you do it? 

The short answer? Your first point of contact should be a Product Advocate, a new type of technical SDR. Stick around for more insights on the other questions.

Product Advocates: The Cornerstone of Your Technical Sales Team

Product Advocates (PAs) are entry-level “technical” roles that deeply understand your product and the people who use it. This training enables them to know the product like the palm of their hands, giving them the building blocks to effectively communicate with a technical audience like developers in the language they understand.

Their goal is to provide answers, resolve issues, unblock developers, and guide them toward your product’s aha moment — naturally building rapport throughout the process. And only after adding value do they bridge the connection to the sales team. This approach differs starkly from traditional sales methods which — instead of “scoring the lead” — focus on delivering valuable knowledge and building trust. 

Not only that, but Product Advocates are also much more cost-effective talents compared to solution engineers, solution architects, and even traditional sales roles. Both PAs and SDRs are entry-level roles, but when looking at the full SDR quota and required training, PAs become much more cost-effective, on top of being a better first touchpoint for your prospects.

To recap, key characteristics of effective Product Advocates include:

• A technical degree in CS or a coding boot camp

• In-depth product training from the outset, with much of it happening in-house

• Ability to confidently communicate in the technical language of the audience, and vet the prospect for BANT parameters

• Providing valuable suggestions and call-to-actions during customer interactions

• Fostering trustworthy relationships rather than immediately scoring leads

• More cost-effective than solution engineers or architects

For the record, Product Advocates was just our preferred name when we created the program at Vercel. At companies before we’ve called the more technical SDRs “Evaluation Support Agents”. What matters is that you intentionally do not brand them as traditional sales roles like SDR or AE, but you actively align them with a language that is more palatable for developers.

Engaging Developers: The Time and Place of Product Advocates

Ok, you’ve hired and trained your PA. Now, when should they reach out to developers?

As mentioned before, the first touch is delicate — developers don’t like to be talking to people unless they need to. So your PAs should plan their first outreach in a way that adds value and is as less invasive as possible.

• Intent signals. PAs should reach out only when clear “help request” from a prospect. This doesn’t have to be explicit but can be based on clear intent signals such as:

  • They clicked on a section on the dashboard, explored other sections of the product, and then came back to the dashboard — signaling they were somehow going in circles.

  • They click on the dashboard, read some technical docs, and then go back to the dashboard without performing a significant product action.

  The signals can also be combined with other properties like being already active on a self-serve plan or having submitted one or more technical queries on topics like pricing, security, or plans. Replies to these intent signals are typically automated, so the PA doesn't have to do anything. However, these signals constitute those conversation starters after which they typically jump in.

• In-product interactions. PA interactions with developers should occur where they spend most of their time: right in your product. This could be through email for 'set-and-forget' products (eg. Segment) or via the dedicated in-app chat for more recurring use cases (eg. Vercel). 

Automating the outreach involves the following steps:

1. Clarify and actively track all potential intent signals.

2. Automate, targeted first-touch communications based on the signals.

3. Notify PAs that developers have initiated the interaction.

4. Offer developers the ability to naturally route their conversation to a PA (specify they’ll be talking to a PA vs. “Talk to Sales”).

5. Provide exhaustive answers and suggest valuable in-product actions that are tailored to the developer’s use case and situation. Avoid cookie-cutter FAQ-type answers that can be found in the technical docs.

Remember to avoid basic BANT qualification questions or collecting company-related information throughout this first interaction. Product Advocates must add value here — see how we did it at Vercel:

Hiring, Training, and Career Progression for Product Advocates

Great, you’re sold on the Product Advocate role and are now keen to hire one for your developer tool SaaS.

Because PAs are not your typical sales role, they can be sourced from a wider array of backgrounds. In our experience, the best Product Advocates are entry-level technical talent that can be found in places like:

• Coding boot camps like Bloomtech, CodeCademy, LeWagon, etc.

• Apple Genius Bar

• Best Buy Tech Support

Once you onboard your PAs, there are several pathways you can progress them on, based on their background and ambitions. At HyperGrowth Partners, we’ve placed PAs in:

• Customer Success. If their core skillset remain helping developers become more successful with your product, it’s a no-brainer to promote your Product Advocates as CSMs, so they can nurture their passion for enabling your customers to build better product and be more successful in their careers.

• Junior Engineering roles. When their technical acumen is beyond just affinity, PAs can easily join the engineering organization and start building the product for the customers they’ve supported to PAte.

• Product Marketing. Because of their deep product and customer knowledge, your PAs are very well positioned to join the product marketing team, helping with product positioning, but also actively bringing customer feedback to the product team and contributing to creating technical docs, content, and events.

Closing Thoughts

The challenge of selling dev tools in a PLG SaaS model requires a complete re-evaluation of traditional sales roles. 

The introduction of Product Advocates — helpful experts who speak the language of developers and focus on adding value before making a sale — is a critical investment to bridge the gap between building rapport with your developer audience, collecting intent signals not and technical requirements, and scaling your enterprise sales conversion rate. 

By understanding the unique needs of developers and tailoring your sales approach accordingly, you can transform the way you sell your technical products and foster sustainable enterprise growth for your developer SaaS.

Specifically, SaaS targeting developers — also called developer tools — belong to a unique market category simply because software engineers are a unique audience. If you’re in dev tools, you might know that you “don’t sell or market to developers.” But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

That’s also why so many developer marketers get it wrong. Marketing to developers is a whole different ballgame compared to marketers, designers, or salespeople. It’s not just a matter of TOV but a set of nuances spanning product marketing, content, and UX.

Read through as we lay out the developer marketing funnel we used at companies like Vercel, Airbyte, and Humanitec to grow developer adoption and advocacy to the hundreds of thousands!

Traditional vs. Developer Funnels

The traditional customer funnel is made of three stages:

1. Awareness: The lead is either problem-aware or unaware, and the business goal is to use content, ads, outbound, or referrals to re-ignite their problem-awareness and activate their solution-awareness by hinting at your product!

2. Consideration: The lead actively considers multiple alternatives to pick the solution that best solves their problem. The organization’s goal is to package and position its solution as the most fitting.

3. Conversion: The organization now verified that the lead has the potential to be a customer and use the product, and the conversation shifts to how to negotiate pricing and implementation to ensure a balance between time-to-value for the customer and sustainability for the business.

The developer funnel is very different, and that comes down to the nuances of their unique persona.

• Radical practicality. Developers are time-poor, radically practical problem-solvers who always seek the path to the least resistance to understanding, learning, and implementing efficient solutions. This means sugarcoating your marketing copy with too many adjectives, narratives, and so on won’t work with them; it’ll put them off. Instead, optimize for practical messaging, TOV, and efficient UX/UI, especially at the top of the funnel.

• Community-first. When scoping new alternatives, developers are very proactive, scouring the Web and tech communities like Hacker News, Product Hunt, Stack Overflow, or Reddit, always checking for peer reviews to evaluate whether a new solution is worth their precious time. It becomes paramount for marketers to establish a consistent presence on these channels and invest in community.

• Learning by doing. Developers are curious self-starters, always looking for ways to improve their workflows and productivity. They prefer learning new tools and apps by deploying an MVP in a demo environment. This behavior has critical consequences as it prescribes a UX that is entirely self-serve.

• Rational introverts. Software engineers tend to be introverted. They love solving complex problems but might prefer to avoid talking to salespeople. Also, they might not consider themselves the best salespeople or marketers if they need to pitch a new solution to their manager. It’s important to keep contact with your sales team at a minimum and,  when they’ve decided on adopting your product, empower them with the tools to make a successful internal pitch.

Taking the above into account, the developer marketing funnel becomes quite different from the traditional one, more like this:

1. Exploration: The developer is already problem-aware and proactively scouring the web for alternatives to solve their problem and fit into the team tech stack. Your goal is to invest in a consistent community presence and ensure that your marketing site is compelling, straightforward, and BS-free.

2. Demo: The developer is now solution-aware and considering multiple alternatives by implementing an MVP of a few alternatives into their demo environment to test technical viability, solution efficiency, and fit within their stack. Your goal is to design the demo experience as self-serve, radically practical, and effective.

3. Internal sale: The developer now verified that the solution is technically viable and right for the business and now needs to pitch it to their manager to advocate for company-wide adoption. Your goal is to empower the developer with the right content to drive an effective internal pitch of the solution with the right stakeholders in the business and assist the champion every step of the way to close the deal.

Now that we’ve cleared the air about the fundamental steps of the developer funnel let’s dig deeper into how you can align your product marketing and content to drive conversions.

1. Exploration

In the exploration stage, your content goal is to convince developers: a) why your solution is solving their problem effectively, b) better than existing alternatives, and c) doing so while being compatible with their existing tech stack.

This is mostly a product marketing exercise that happens on your marketing site. When marketing to developers, it’s key to design a landing page that optimizes for:

• Compelling differentiation. Your differentiation messaging must be very clear, compelling, and high up on your information architecture. Whether your unique selling point is a specific feature, integration, or price, it has to be crystal clear. Most product marketers enjoy using abstract narratives and fancy terms, but this approach doesn’t work with developers. All they want to know is why your product is different or better than others, in plain English, with no frills. Use the “Grandma test,” and ​​don’t over-explain or over-adjectivize your benefits.

• Hovering navigation. Because developers are time-poor, they don’t click on elements of the marketing site; they hover around. To optimize for that, design interactive drop-down elements with icons and copy one-liners that help them gauge your value prop quickly (see Vercel’s example below). Include these on your main navigation or your product features. You need to answer this question: “What do your champions need to know about your product?”

• Compatibility markers. One of the key questions developers will have about your product is: “Does it fit with my programming languages and frameworks? Is it fast to implement? Do they have SDKs and sample for it?”. Just like company logos, programming languages, and frameworks, logos also work as social proof markers for developers, as they provide peace of mind that a) they’ll be able to use the product, and b) the more logos are there, the more reliable the product is.

• Quickstart guides and API docs. As soon as developers understand why your product is differentiated and compatible with their stack, they’ll want to check one last thing to see if it’s worth to demo: quick start guides and API docs. Keep these elements accessible from the main navigation, the final CTA, and the footer, and design them with a radically intuitive UX/UI. Invest in robust docs indexation, outlines and search (⌘K), rich templates, guides, and community features like popular articles, peer reviews, feedback inputs, and user-generated FAQs. 

Overall, these tactics will ensure developers will give your product a spin for a demo. Great examples of the above content include Vercel, Snyk, and Auth0.

2. Demo 

Once your developer has been convinced your product is worth a demo, they’ll sign up to try it and confirm their initial assumptions. At this stage, they’ll usually sign up with a personal email to minimize the risk of being contacted by salespeople. 

This stage is an exercise of technical content marketing and experience design. You want to enable them to get the demo off the ground as quickly and easily as possible.

• Working sample. Before even starting working on the demo, most developers want to see a working sample or template, a simple version of your product application that helps them experience it first-hand and double-check it meets the expectations set in the exploration stage. It’s even better to have a downloadable version of your sample that’s already configured with their account info (API Keys, secrets, etc.), as it streamlines the process.

• Templates library and design. You must create a few demos based on the different use cases, product features, and supported languages. Index your templates library similarly to your API docs to make them accessible. Also, investing in the design of your samples — including structured data, video demos, and quickstart copy — will set you apart from competitors. Even with radically practical users, perception is reality, and a simple, good-looking UI breeds thoughtfulness and reliability. It’s like the first impression on a first date. 

Great examples of the above include Vercel and Stripe.

Once ready to deploy the demo, your developer will dig into the nitty gritty and understand how your product connects to their stack. They’ll typically sign up again with their work email. Merge the two accounts in your data warehouse by tracking the browser cookie and the anonymous user ID. This info will uncover important insights on their end-to-end journey. Then, line up helpful content to help them deploy the demo.

• Step-by-step guides. Given they now need to deploy the demo into their repository — their org’s dev environment — they'll be looking for a full-blown version of the quick starter guide — the step-by-step guide — which includes a detailed explanation of all the steps needed to complete the deployment.

• Architecture scenarios. In these docs, it’s useful to articulate how every app component can connect to each other and existing tech stack components. Dedicated architecture scenarios include visual diagrams and technical explanations targeting senior engineers or software architects and help them understand the deployment process and integrations with other SaaS.

3. Internal sale

Now that the demo has been deployed, performs as expected, and integrates with the stack, it’s time to showcase it to the team. This stage aims to get management approval and unlock the budget that will lead to business-wide adoption. 

To do so, developers need to sell the platform internally. But because they’re not great salespeople, it’s your job to empower them to package the right content to enable the internal sale.

• Use case and solution pages. These product marketing landing pages work wonders as additional social proof markers for engineering managers because, despite the developer not reading them, they make it clear that your product matches the needs of “companies like them.” Make it easy for them to share them with their team as an appendix to the demo. Keep them front and center in your navigation, and include them as part of the ‘convince your boss’ content pack. We love how Strapi executes these.

• Enterprise-ready features. If your product targets enterprise customers, you must list all your enterprise-ready features — audit logs, SLAs, data and logs retention, support tiers, authorization, RVAC, etc. Check your enterprise readiness to see how far you are. As these features target mostly the VP of Engineering or CTO, it’s best to include them in your pricing page or a dedicated section of your developer docs. Again, developers won’t read this — they just want to be aware that these features are included and the full detail can be easily consumed when shared.

• ‘Convince your boss’ content pack. You can take things to the next level by packaging the working demo and the above assets in a so-called ‘convince your boss’ pack, empowering your champion to make a successful internal sale. This pack can include a slide deck or one-pager with:

  • Value proposition, features, and benefits overview

  • Case studies, social proof, and compatibility markers

  • Pricing, cost, and benefits, ROI calculators, or build vs. buy summary

  • Implementation roadmap details

• Email sharing templates. Sometimes, the email or Slack messages with which you share the content pack are even more important than the content pack itself because they help your champion kick off the conversation about the sale. These messages could be tailored to the company use case and/or the company stack, as well as to the relevant stakeholder that the champion is trying to convince — may that be the technical or economic buyer in engineering, product management, or even finance.

Very few companies do this right, but Smashing Conference provides an insightful example of how to do it right.

Closing thoughts

Unlike traditional personas, targeting developers demands a specific strategy and funnel. Developers are introverted people driven by practicality, community, and hands-on learning. This reshapes how we engage with them through marketing.

You must lead with clarity in differentiation and compatibility, a smart UI design, and encompassing quickstart guides and docs. Also, intuitive working samples and a well-designed template library are key. Design impacts perception, making aesthetics a powerful differentiator.

Lastly, don’t forget to empower developers to advocate the sale internally. Tailored email templates, enterprise-ready feature lists, and 'convince your boss' packs provide the tools they need to close the deal on your behalf.