What is good developer marketing? With Nimrod Kramer from Daily.dev
When Daily.dev hired Francesco Ciulla as a developer advocate, Nimrod Kramer's first instruction was to keep doing his own personal content, not just promote the product. His bet paid off in a way he never explicitly asked for: users started a self-organized "100 days of reading" challenge with zero involvement from the company.
Nimrod Kramer is CEO of Daily.dev, a news and community platform for developers with over 150,000 daily active users.
We get into why he thinks developer marketing means inverting Simon Sinek's 'start with why' into 'start with what,' the specific instruction he gave his first developer advocate hire that he thinks most companies get backwards, and the organic community challenge that emerged from users with zero prompting from the company.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
People often install Daily.dev almost on impulse. What do you think is actually driving that?
That's genuinely one of the best compliments we can get, and we do invest a lot of time getting it right — but it's not some intentional psychological trick. At the core of what we do is really listening to our users, starting from the developer community we're building for, talking to them constantly, and being genuinely good at problem-oriented thinking to get down to the deep motivations and emotional triggers behind wanting to stay up to date and grow professionally. If I had to boil it down to one line, what really drives our growth is emotion and love, which we put at the front of everything we do — and we're fortunate to be getting some of that love back from the community.
You've said developer marketing is fundamentally different from regular marketing. What makes it different?
Developer marketing is everything but marketing, in the conventional sense — at its core it's really about understanding developers, who are probably the best bullshit detectors in the world. They're highly logical, pragmatic people who want to get things done, and they generally want you to be explicit rather than clever. The standard marketing paradigm, strongly popularized by Simon Sinek, says start with why. In developer marketing, it's exactly the opposite — you want to start with what, tell people plainly and specifically what your product does, and give them the tools to prove for themselves how it works. If you do that well, they arrive at the why entirely on their own.
What's the single most important piece of advice that comes out of that inversion?
Don't pitch how the product will help someone — don't lead with it'll save you time or money, that's obvious and forgettable. Show exactly what the product does, and give people a self-serve way to reach an 'aha' moment as fast as possible — some people call this time to hello world, and you want that to be as fast as it can possibly be. That thinking directly shaped product decisions at Daily.dev — you don't need to sign up to use it. You land straight in the feed, see real value immediately, get the small adrenaline hit of finding a genuinely interesting piece of developer news, and only sign up later if you want the more advanced features. Signup is entirely optional.
You hired Francesco Ciulla, a well-known independent developer voice, as a developer advocate. What was the actual thinking behind that partnership?
I first got to know Francesco because he interviewed me for his own video series a couple of years back. What struck me was how much he genuinely gives back — an extraordinary amount of personal time and effort invested in education and helping other developers succeed, entirely on his own initiative. That's the same DNA we have at Daily.dev, and it's what connected us. When it felt like the right time for him to join as a developer advocate, one of the very first things I told him was: you are yourself because of everything you've already done. A lot of companies hire a developer advocate and expect them to only ever talk about the company's product, full time. I told him if he stopped doing his own personal work, he wouldn't be Francesco anymore — and if that happened, the entire reason we connected and respected each other in the first place would disappear. I wanted him to keep doing his own thing and weave Daily.dev in naturally, not the other way around.
What did Francesco say success would look like for that role, and how did that change how you think about developer advocacy?
When I asked him what impact he actually wanted to create, he said a genuinely successful developer advocacy program should eventually generate its own developer advocates — not as employees, but organically from within the community itself. For a long time we invested heavily in content, giving back, bringing in great speakers to talk about inspiring, creative topics for free, without any clear signal it was working — developer advocacy is a field that's notoriously hard to measure or show clear ROI for. We just had a strong conviction it felt right and hoped it would eventually stick.
Did that bet actually pay off?
Recently, yes, in a way we never explicitly planned for. We woke up one day to find a group of power users had launched their own challenge on Twitter — '100 days of reading an article using daily.dev' — where people find an interesting article every day, read it, and post their reading history publicly for community support. We had absolutely nothing to do with creating it; it emerged entirely organically. Seeing that was a genuinely magical moment — a real signal we were doing something right, and it pushed us to double down on that direction. More people join it every week, and it's honestly become one of the clearest validations of that original, hard-to-measure conviction.
Daily.dev calls itself a place for developers broadly. How do you actually think about who counts as a 'developer' today?
Our mission at Daily.dev is to build a place where developers grow together — a kind of home for developers, using the collaborative power of a large community to generate shared value. It's not really a developer tool in the traditional sense — it doesn't make your code faster or better configured. It's a place to grow professionally, which is a real, underserved pain point given how many platforms, tools, and rapidly shifting technologies developers now have to navigate. I think we're living through a genuine generational shift in what a developer even is. The newest generation of developers cares as much about their personal brand, their community, and their ongoing learning process as they do about writing code itself.
Do you think that definition will keep expanding?
I do, especially looking five to ten years ahead. Beyond senior engineers and people newly entering traditional software engineering, the entire low-code and no-code movement is producing people building genuinely significant products and websites — through tools like Webflow or Wix — without writing much, if any, hardcore code. Some of those products could become the next billion- or trillion-dollar companies. A lot of these builders already call themselves developers — a 'Webflow developer,' for instance — and I think within the next five to ten years, they'll be fully recognized as part of the broader developer community as we know it today.
With over 150,000 daily active developers, what's the actual opportunity for a dev tool company trying to reach that audience through Daily.dev?
The most straightforward option is submitting your own blog as a content source — it's free, subject to a quick review process, and once approved your content becomes part of the feed and gets exposed to a huge developer audience, functioning almost like SEO specifically for developers. It takes about a minute to submit and can meaningfully move the needle for a business. Beyond that, we offer paid options too — running ads in the feed similarly to any social platform, targeting specific developer segments or geographies, promoting a product, a job posting, or an event.
Can you point to a specific partnership that's worked particularly well?
LinearB, a developer productivity company, has been one of our best partnerships — we're now preparing for the third run of a joint campaign around their engineering-leadership conference, Interact. We help drive signups through the distribution channels we're genuinely good at — that's really our one specialty, distributing to developers at scale — and in return we become an event sponsor, gaining exposure to some of the top engineering leaders in the industry and introducing them directly to what Daily.dev does for their teams. It's been a genuinely successful, repeated partnership.