Five creative examples of DevTool marketing

Below are five of my favourite examples of developer-focused companies creatively marketing to developers.

Atom 1.0 from GitHub

This video from GitHub might just be the Dollar Shave Club of the developer world and kicked off the Atom code editor in a big way.

It's a hilarious video promoting Atom but in the style of a science fiction 50s ad for the home of tomorrow, today.

Supabase Launch Weeks

Supabase founders Ant & Paul loved YC for forcing them to work hard for a launch.

So they decided to take this approach outside of YC with their regular launch weeks and in-between they focus on building.

During a Supabase launch week, they seem to occupy my whole Twitter feed with announcements each day, a hackathon and even end on a Steve Jobs-esque One More Thing.

DocSearch from Algolia

Algolia DocSearch is a 100% free way to add search to your documentation.

It's a great way for Algolia to build love with developers and demonstrate the power of Algolia's search.

Plus if a project happens to mention a search tool you might integrate, they're more likely to give Algolia a shout out.

The take-up has been huge. DocSearch claim to have integrated into 4,000+ projects - you might recognise some of the below:

GitLab handbook

This might be a surprising addition because it's not necessarily marketing. But it completely changed my perception of GitLab (in a positive way).

GitLab open sourced the operational handbook of their whole company.

Sharing publicly almost every process in your company is not an easy thing to do. But it makes for interesting reading and demonstrates that GitLab - a company built on its associations with Open Source - truly believe in openness.

Stripe verified

A lot of developers dream of making it as an Indie Hacker (and I include myself in that).

Stripe introduced a way to verify your revenue progress in public and integrated with sites like Indie Hackers (which Stripe eventually acquired) and MicroAcquire.

First of all I love that it associates Stripe with indie developer revenue.

Secondly, it aligns Stripe with the Build in Public movement.

Finally, we might subliminally as the question: if you can't show off your Stripe-verified revenue, is it even revenue?!

If you liked this, you might also enjoy my podcast Scaling DevTools where I interview experts on the business side of developer tools startups.