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Doing the work

We sell to developers. Why does the normal B2B playbook keep failing on them?

Because the normal B2B playbook is built to reach a buyer, and with developers the person who decides is usually not the person with the credit card. Developers evaluate by using the thing, so your docs, your free tier and your time to first working call are your sales pitch, and a gated demo request form reads as a red flag rather than a step in the funnel. They also live in places your CRM cannot see (GitHub, Discord, Stack Overflow, Hacker News, a colleague's recommendation), so lead scoring on form fills tells you almost nothing. The motion that works is developer first then buyer second: let engineers adopt it for free, watch for the signal that several people at one company are now using it, and only then bring in a human to talk to the CTO about security, compliance and a contract. Marketing to developers means being genuinely useful in public, not being clever in an ad.

Go deeper

3 resources, 1 India-specific, 3 link-checked.

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

This is the piece that explains why your CRM looks empty while your product is spreading: developers evaluate in Discord, GitHub and Stack Overflow, not on your lead form. It is also honest about the user versus buyer split, which is the single thing most teams selling to developers get wrong.

Selling to developers: how to bring devs to the buying table

From Common Room by Eric Wendt 12 min read

  • Stack Overflow 2023: 65 percent of developers say they influence technology purchases.
  • If a developer has to meet your sales team to try the product, it is often an immediate no.
  • Developers gather in Discord, GitHub, Discourse and Stack Overflow, not standard marketing channels.
  • Resolve identity to the account: a team scoping a project is a richer opportunity than a lone developer.
Open commonroom.io →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Built from interviews with the founders of Heroku, LaunchDarkly, Netlify, CircleCI, Fastly and Tailscale, so it is the accumulated experience of people who actually did developer first GTM. Its core argument, create value for developers before you try to capture it, is the discipline that separates dev tools that spread from ones that stall.

How to Launch a Dev-First Startup: First Principles

From Heavybit by Andrew Park 16 min read

  • Stay wedded to the problem, not to the solution, which changes as the market does.
  • A category needs competitors to benefit too; if only you talk about it, it is not a category.
  • Team, dream and steam are the three legs an early dev-first startup has to balance.
  • Create more value than you capture, and use value clarity to shave features back.
Open heavybit.com →

Browse all 796 resources →

The same ground, at another level

How what gtm actually is reads from a different seat.

What does 'go to market' actually mean? People say GTM constantly and I still cannot define it. GTM is the whole answer to one question: how does a stranger who has your problem end up paying you and staying. That covers who you sell to, what ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → When do I stop selling myself and hire the first person, and what kind of person should that be? Hire when you have closed roughly ten to twenty deals yourself, can describe who buys and why in one paragraph, and are spending more than a fifth ... Leading a GTM team 6 resources → What do the very best GTM teams do that everyone else does not? They treat GTM as a system they design rather than a set of tactics they copy. The best teams pick one narrow group of buyers and go absurdly deep,... How the best do it 5 resources →

Terms in this answer

Customer Relationship Management

People also ask

What does 'go to market' actually mean? People say GTM constantly and I still cannot define it. 4 → I am a founder and I have never sold anything in my life. Where do I actually start? 5 → How do I tell whether our GTM is genuinely working or we just got lucky with a few deals? 4 → What is the real difference between product-led, sales-led and everything in between, and which one are we? 4 → When do I stop selling myself and hire the first person, and what kind of person should that be? 6 → How do I turn the thing that worked when I did it into an engine someone else can run? 4 →
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