For the last couple months I've been doing Adam Frankl's Developer Facing Startup course with my own project: StreamPot.
It's a 12 week course. Adam delivers content and then gives assignments. You also go through past week's assignments.
If you don't know Adam, he was previously VP of Marketing at Neo4J, SourceGraph and JFrog. But honestly, he is like the Yoda of DevTools marketing.
The course is not over yet but it's already been really helpful and there are already some lessons I'll keep with me for a long time.
I'll avoid regurgitating all the content because you could buy his book or watch my interview with him and he'll explain it better than I could.
But here are two of my biggest lessons so far that I was/am doing completely wrong.
Developers will talk to random startup founders
The actual main point is that you need to talk to users/potential users.
But you already knew that.
The surprising part is that developers will talk to startup founders and be very encouraging and supportive.
I need to do way more of this personally but here's an example of a message I sent and response I got.
Adam also shares how to analyse the calls you have with users. It takes a long time to summarise all the lessons you learn but it's worth it.
Social proof
You need lots of social proof. And it should be specific.
For instance, for StreamPot, I currently have
"I just wanted to thank you for StreamPot, it makes my life so much easier thanks for making tools like this."
This is bad because it's very generic and doesn't specifically say how StreamPot made their life better.
As Adam puts it, someone reading it should be thinking "I'll have what they're having". My quote doesn't do that.
Also, I learned you should not worry about overdoing social proof because you are almost certainly under-doing it.
Get lots of good quotes specifically about how your tool changed their life and put them everywhere. Supabase do this really well on their login screen.
Hopefully Adam won't kill me for sharing an exact quote from his course:
In Summary..
- Don't be afraid to reach out to strangers for their help. Do this a lot.
- Ask for lots of testimonials. Make sure someone reading it thinks: "I'll have what they're having".