Great Developer Marketing: Four Indie Hacker Examples

Marketing to developers is one of the hardest things you can do. Here are four indie businesses that have great developer marketing.

Flatlogic

Flatlogic has $10k MRR and was created by software developers for software developers. The team know exactly what matters to web developers. This leads to consistent messaging about solving problems important to developers.

Provide specific use cases

I love that they show their use cases really clearly to developers.

This approach has resulted in over 25,000 developers worldwide using Flatlogic to help create and support their web apps. Flatlogic allows you to create full-stack React, Vue, Angular apps faster and they breakit down to 3 simple steps.

Provide value

They are consistently iterating, improving and educating. (Follow them on Twitter)[https://twitter.com/flatlogic] for some great content and blog posts.

Tuple

Tuple have created a great remote pair programming app with developers in mind.

Unabashedly focus on solving developer problems

As soon as you arrive on the site, it's clear that Tuple lives and breathes development.

“Developers deserve purpose-built tools. A fast, lightweight tool built for nitpicky developers like ourselves. One that sweats the details programmers care about like efficient CPU usage, no UI chrome, and a 5K-quality video stream. A tool that fades into the background and lets you focus on being a great pair”.
Ben Orenstain, Founder of Tuple

Make it personal - share your story

Tuple have a very unique story. Across several years Ben Orenstein, founder of Tuple built out a large email list and Twitter following. His audience were mainly made up of software engineers, this was even before Tuple had been created. Once Tuple was created and they had the perfect audience directory for it, he tested prices and features with the audience and asked for their money - all without a product demo!
People loved the product and were happy to pay.

One of Ben’s customers said:

I will pay you several hundred dollars just to support what you’re doing because I’ve gotten so much value from your over the years. I don’t even need what you’re selling. I just want to support what you’re doing here.
Ayush Chaturvedi

Developer-specific social proof

Any developer reading a testimonial from DHH is going to sit up and take notice.

Tuple's testimonials section isn't just a box that they ticked, they have made it awesome.

railsdevs

railsdevs is a hiring platform for rails developers. The twists are that it's completely focused on making an awesome experience for developers and it's open source!

Go niche and be relevant

railsdevs is operating within a niche so if you're a rails developer, everything on railsdevs will be super relevant.

railsdevs has two marketing strategies:

1. Open source
   Making railsdevs open source gets rails developers excited to contribute. It's rare that a product, especially a profitable SaaS, is open source. Usually OSS is for libraries and frameworks and such. railsdevs gets a lot of "free" marketing through pull requests, GitHub contributions, and stars. At one point, railsdevs was trending on GitHub for a week and saw a ton of developers sign up during that time.

2. Improving the developer experience
   Joe Masilotti, the founder of railsdevs, understands that in his hiring platform, developers are the most valuable side of the marketplace.
   With the exception of the pricing page all of the marketing is for getting hired as a rails developer.
   This leads to all decisions being focused on a better experience for the developer. Even though the paying customers are the businesses! By making a better product for the developers the businesses will get access to better talent and therefore I'll see more sign ups.

Share your values

railsdevs also do a great job communicating their values on their about page.

Robot.alp

Robot.alp is a monitoring platform which will check all your services, keep you updated and will automatically notify when something goes wrong. Robot.alp is growing fast - their reported revenue on Indie Hacker's is now $5k/pm. They offer 8 monitors in total for different functions, so you'll never miss a dip in service.

Educate your audience

Robot.alp provide some great help guides that cover Set up, monitors, notifications and more. As well as providing other free online tools. It's clear that this is one of the foundations to Robot.alp's strategy.

Provide specific use cases

One thing Robot.alps do really well is get past generalities and share specific ways they can help developers.

Did I miss any?

Check out the Bitreach Developer Marketing blog for more content about growing DevTools.