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HOWTO Go About Marketing to Developers?
byrnereese asks: "My company has finally realized that one of the keys to our success will be to create a strong developer program (IBM's Developer Works, and Palm's PalmSource come to mind as examples). It just so happens that I have been appointed to lead this program. Now I have a lot of my own ideas, but I wanted to ask a large developer community directly the one question I know I am going to have to articulate a coherent answer to at some point: 'What is the most effective way to market a toolset, or development platform, to a developer in order to encourage them to build products using your product, without turning them off at the same time?'"
The subject says it all. Don't push your thing onto developers. Just publish it. If it's any good, people will use it. Sourceforge.net is one place to do it. Design your tool in an OO and component-oriented way, so people can mix-and-match your tool with others they are used to. The biggest mistake you can make is to develop a monolithic "infrastructure" that can't be used interchangably with other pieces and is required for all further development. Noone is going to use that. Publish small components, each of which do a single job really, really well, and then integrate them in a component-oriented fashion. Good Luck!
Lenny Primak PP-ASEL-IA,Heli
A) Make sure the toolset is really, really good. Developers I know only respect quality - it doesn't matter if a tool is free, if it's flawed in any way people won't like using it, even if mandated by management. This will cost you a lot future sales :)
B) Charge a reasonable price, and make licenses as flexible as possible (i.e., floating licenses).
C) Back to being good - quality support is a must!
I was recently told by a support person "your code is wrong" and got a man-page quote as a reply for something that was clearly a bug in the tool. Needless to say, I will never recommend that product to anyone again - especially because it has a very high price!
Here's a message a friend of mine wrote a few years back, which I saved. Enjoy.
-Rick
From anonymous Wed Apr 26 00:27:55 1995
Subject: MKS
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 1995 00:36:08 -0500 (CDT)
Postmaster@mks.com,
I do not know the names of the people in your company to whom this note should be addressed, but I can describe them.
* There are 1 or 2 first class, original UNIX programmers who created all the products you actually make money on.
* They no longer are in the mainstream of the company. Perhaps they left. Perhaps they are now consultants. Certainly they can be described as UNIX bigots.
* They are completely pissed off, arrogant, and upset about the current move to the "Source Integrity" product. They feel your current customer base will be disappointed by the Windows orientation, the terrible documentation presented in the "test drive", and the overall poor quality of the product.
* They feel that you should have remained compatible with the GNU "cvs" product, offering a simple, fully functional, easy to use command line interface.
Now I will describe the people who realize they are just foolish UNIX programmers who do not understand the movement to fully complaint MicroSoft technology.
* They are slick, fast talking gentlemen, who have never worked for a small prosperous company.
* They have never produced a product that made money, development, startup and market costs included.
* They do not understand your current products, or the customers who buy them They feel you are serving an odd niche, one soon to disappear in the overwhelming rush of total Microsoft dominance in the market.
* They have identified another, larger, more significant market of Microsoft programmers who will want to buy their products. They perceive these programmers care primarily that the look and feel of these products match Visual C++, and suit a more professional data processing image than the renagade programmer of the past.
* They do not understand the real requirements of the product. They are assisted by a few slightly-better-than-mediocre Microsoft programmers who want to bear Bill Gates children.
* They are proud of their shiny new offering. They don't fully understand why anyone would want it, but they think the term "sandbox" is one of its best features.
* They wear nice clothes, they are charming, and they always go home by 6 pm. They work out in the gym. They use Microsoft email.
Here is my message to the good guys (first category)
I really need cvs for my project. I really do. I talked with your blithering salesperson on the phone, and he told me to try out the test drive. I was enthusiastic. I tried it. Within 15 minutes, I was so mad I could spit. It ruined my entire evening.
I really need that product. I was depending on you guys to have it. And now I am screwed.
My cats use the sandbox. I don't. It smells bad.
Your company survives on its image. Your image is being destroyed.
Your RCS product is destroyed.
These fools destoy your entire company if you let them.
They will claim you are in a declining market. They will cut back promoting the stuff that continues to sell, claiming it must finance new products. The new products will be ill conceived. Because they do not understand the customer, and they do not have your support, they will attempt to discredit you. They will bring in Microsoft lovers they claim are experts.
Together, they and their experts, like the blind leading the blind will lead your company to the abyss. When their products fail, they will claim it was insufficient development funds or promotion funds that killed it, even though they spent far more money on this trash than you ever spent on the products that succeeded. They will cut back your products even further to finance the madness.
In the end, when it is clear to them that the company is faltering, they will leave, shiny resumes in hand, claiming success for the products they tried to kill. They will never accept blame for the ill-conceived products they tried to create.
They see only image. They cannot create value for it is not within them. They are made of hype, and hype is all they can create.
And when your company is gone, they will move on to destroy another company. They will never accept responsiblity. They will never accept consequences. They will polish resumes instead. They will have lunch.
I have been there. I have watched these idiots destroy my company, as they are destroying yours. If you still have the power to fire them, fire them. If you can't, its too late to fix the problem. Quit and never look back. Your company was destoryed by terrorists. Be grateful you survived. Tomorrow is another day.
I am always surprised at the good tools/libraries/etc. that must have been used to build actual tools just in order to test them and would actually be really close to what I needed to do but instead I get a huge pile of documentation instead of a couple of WELL thought out non-trivial examples of code that would cover probably a vast majority of the uses for the library.
For example, maybe you have a library that parses some file format or datastream. You could just give me the library and a bunch of documentation or you could give me a makefile and a small app ( nontrivial please but not too complicated. I know that is asking for a lot but you do know the kinds of things that your target customer is really going to want to do don't you? ) that opens up a socket/file reads the data, parses it, does something with it like print out the various parts of it. This is probably all of the documentation that I need as most people only use a small fraction of the functionality of any given tool anyway. I know very few people that go through the documentation, you just don't have time. At most people grep the documentation for the little fragment that they need.
Resist documentation overload.