What is Developer Marketing?

This is a living post. It's largely influenced by my experience at Replit leading DevRel and technical marketing on our run from $5M to $100M+ ARR.

Marketing to developers is no different than marketing to any other audience.

The three things that matter are: what, who, how.

Marketing starts with product. Product requires being hyper-opinionated about two things:

1. What you are building
2. Who you're building it for

This is surprisingly hard to do well.

As a marketer, your number one job is to understand the product and the user.

This is one of the reasons I'll argue that developer marketers need to be technical: if you plan to communicate with devs, it will be much easier if you are a dev.

How can you really understand a product you don't use?

The easiest way to understand the user is to be the user. Marketing adds one more layer of opinion:

3. How you communicate

That's it. Marketing is product + communication.

Now, this is hard for technical products. If you haven't noticed, most engineers communicate through code, not copy.

Moreover, most folks interested in technical concepts want to nerd out.

We start with features. We explain how things work. We write technical explanations.

It's very rare to find someone who seeks to understand and simplify. Why?

If you're confused, you're winning

If you find software confusing, you're already ahead of 90% of developer marketers.

That moment when you're reading docs and thinking "what the hell does this even mean?" — your users are thinking the exact same thing.

Most people who build technical products live so deep in the solution that they've forgotten what the problem feels like.

But you remember. That is your superpower.

When something finally clicks for you, pay attention. That's the exact moment you need to recreate for your users.

The best developer marketers aren't the smartest engineers. They're the ones who stayed curious about why things are hard.

The translation gap

Most technical marketing sucks because it's written by people who think in features, not problems.

They write: "Our platform provides comprehensive AI-assisted development capabilities with enterprise-grade security and scalability."

But developers aren't thinking about "comprehensive AI-assisted development capabilities."

They're thinking: "I'm tired of writing the same damn boilerplate code for the 50th time this month."

The magic happens when you translate from solution-speak back to human-speak:

I didn't dumb anything down. I just stopped talking like a robot.

How to actually do this

This isn't magic. It's a process:

Step 1: Start with the user's perspective Understand their world before selling your solution. What keeps them up at night? Where do they hang out? What do they complain about?

Step 2: Focus on outcomes, not features Lead with what they'll achieve, not how it works. Deploy with confidence, build faster, sleep better at night.

Step 3: Keep it simple 4th-grade reading level. Short sentences. Clear language. No jargon, one idea per sentence.

Step 4: Lead with emotion, back with logic Hook them with feelings, then justify with facts. Feel confident first, then show monitoring. Emotion first, specs second.

Step 5: Be confidently opinionated Have strong opinions about everything you do. We are the best, this is the way, no apologizing.

That's it. Five steps. Nothing revolutionary, but most people skip at least three of them. Start with users, focus on outcomes, keep it simple, lead with emotion, be confident.

Do all five consistently and you're well on your way to being a great developer marketer.

Building the movement

The best developer marketing doesn't create customers, it creates champions.

But what do people actually evangelize? It's not your product. It's their success.

Getting a promotion because they shipped that impossible project on time. Starting a business of their own. Getting to go home early and spending more time with family. Accomplishing something they never thought possible.

People don't tell their friends about your features. They tell their friends about how they won.

Share your failures. Don't just show the polished demo. Show how you struggled with the same problems they face. Your failures make their successes feel achievable.

Ask for help. Your community wants to contribute. When they help improve your product, they become invested in everyone else's success too.

Celebrate their wins. When someone builds something amazing, make them famous. Not your product. Their success story becomes your most powerful marketing.

Show up consistently. Be there when they succeed. Be there when they struggle. Success feels better when someone notices.

The goal isn't to trick people into using your product. It's to become essential to their success stories by making them successful.

What good looks like

Here's what happens when you nail this:

Someone tries your product because you actually understood their problem. Not some made-up persona problem—their real, daily frustration.

They use it. It works. They ship something faster than expected. They look good in the standup. They go home on time for once.

Now they have a story. "Dude, you have to try this thing. I just shipped that feature in like two hours."

Their friend tries it. Same result. More stories.

Before you know it, you're not marketing anymore. Your users are. And they're way more convincing than you ever were.

That's how things actually grow. Through people who genuinely can't shut up about how much better their life got.

The only things that matter

Developer marketing comes down to three things:

1. Build something worth talking about
2. Talk about it like a human being
3. Help others talk about it too

Everything else is just noise.

The foundation is product. The execution is communication.

But the secret is making your users successful.

When they win, you win.

When they achieve something meaningful with your tool, they don't just become customers—they become living proof of what you built.

Most people wouldn't call that marketing, but I do.