Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Happy inhouse developer does wonders for marketing your developer tool
1 points by DavorDK 828 days ago
At first, some of the developer marketing things aren't so obvious until you unlock them. Especially if you don't have any real prior developer experience. And I don't need to tell you that devs hate marketers now, do I? :)

However, devs ldo like to experiment, and if you give them access to what you are building in places they trust, it can go really good. The obvious lesson from what I'm about to tell you is probably - to use your in-house devs to gain insights and knowledge (provided you have good ones and they have the time).

As a marketer, I know that VS Code exists, but I was unaware of a whole marketplace that exists for VS Code Extensions.

One of our devs uses VS Code a lot, and he suggested building an extension for one of Treblle's products (API Insights). He did it, we researched, figured out the best way to present it on the VS Code marketplace, and we ended up in the marketplace's trending area for 10 days or so - gaining over 600 downloads of the product.

If you have the opportunity to build an extension for your own product, I definitely recommend it - it's great exposure the one of the world's biggest dev communities.

According to the 2022 StackOverflow survey, VS Code is the most popular IDE used by developers. That is one of the reasons we wanted to make API Insights even more accessible to developers who use it to work on APIs.

I know this might seem super obvious to devs here, but for non-devs it's not. It's easy to say "just tap into your devs habits", meaning, how do they find things, what do they use on a daily, weekly or monthly basis? But often, people don't see their normal day-to-day work habits as something that can help marketers out - in reality, it's a goldmine of ideas.

So, making a very friendly working environment where a creative dev can suggest and execute their own ideas (this came directly from a dev that uses VS Code as I said), might be the best thing you do for your tool/platform or whatever it is you are building for developers/engineers.

Next stop - GitHub.