Developer Marketing is Dead. Long Live Developer Marketing.

I've spent the last five years building marketing teams for technical products. Identity infrastructure at FusionAuth. Self-hosted help desk at Deskpro. And I keep seeing the same thing everywhere: companies that think they're doing "developer marketing" but are actually just pissing off developers.

Most developer marketing sucks. And if you're doing what everyone else is doing, you're probably sucking too.

You know the playbook. Dark website with green text that looks like a terminal. GitHub repo with some basic examples. Blog posts about how to integrate your API. Maybe a developer relations person giving talks at conferences. Slack community that's mostly your own team talking to each other. Stickers. Don't forget about the Stickers!

Congrats, you're doing "developer marketing." Except developers still aren't using your product. Your GitHub has twelve stars. Your blog posts get forty-seven views. Your Slack is dead.

Here's what's wrong: you're marketing to developers instead of marketing with them.

Real developer marketing isn't about making your website look like a terminal. It's about understanding how developers actually work.

When I was at FusionAuth, we didn't start with personas or buyer journey maps. We started by watching how developers actually solve problems. And here's the thing - they don't follow your neat little funnel.

A developer hits a problem. Usually on a Thursday afternoon when they're trying to ship something. They Google it. Check Stack Overflow. Maybe look at some docs. They try the first thing that looks like it might work. If it works, great. If not, they move on. And if it does work and saves them time, then maybe they tell their team about it.

That's it. No awareness stage. No consideration phase. Just "I have a problem, what fixes it fastest?"

So why are you trying to "educate" them about why they need your solution? They already know they have a problem. They don't want education. They want solutions.

Our best content at FusionAuth wasn't thought leadership about identity management. It was step-by-step guides for implementing specific auth flows. Real code. Copy-paste examples. Stuff that actually worked.

Same thing with communities. Everyone wants a developer community. Most are ghost towns. You know why? Because you're thinking about it wrong. You think your community is a marketing channel. It's not. It's a support system.

Good developer communities exist to help developers solve problems. Bad ones exist to generate leads. If your community strategy is "get developers in Slack so we can market to them," you've already lost.

So what actually works?

Your marketing needs to fit into the developer workflow. That means your docs are actually your most important marketing asset. Not your website. Not your blog. Your docs. Because that's where developers spend their time when they're evaluating your product.

Your docs need to get someone from zero to working code in under thirty minutes. They need examples that actually run. They need to assume the developer knows nothing about your product but isn't stupid.

And your error messages? Those are marketing too. A good error message tells you exactly what went wrong and how to fix it. A bad one just says "error occurred." Guess which one makes developers want to keep using your product?

You need to measure different stuff too. Forget about MQLs. Forget about email open rates. What matters is: how long does it take someone to get your product working? How often do people look at your docs versus file support tickets? Do developers who try your product actually stick around?

But here's the most important thing: you need to build systems, not campaigns. Developers hate inconsistency. They want to know that if they bet on your product today, you'll still be supporting it next year.

That means predictable release cycles. Regular doc updates. Reliable community support. A roadmap they can actually see.

At Deskpro, we matched the effort that went into our traditional marketing campaigns with making it making it easier for developers to actually try the product. You could spin up a full instance in fifteen minutes. Test it with real data. See exactly how it would work in your environment.

That trial experience generated more real pipeline than any campaign we ever ran.

Real developer marketing is product-led growth, but technical. Self-serve trials that don't require talking to sales. Docs that get you to success fast. Example apps that solve real problems. Pricing you can calculate yourself.

It's community-led growth, but useful. Q&A that actually helps people. Examples contributed by users, not just your team. Developers helping other developers. Recognition for contributions, not just usage.

And it's developers actually want. Not "Why you need better authentication" but "How to implement OAuth in fifteen minutes." Not marketing fluff but real solutions to real problems.

Most companies get this wrong because marketers design it, not developers. They create personas from surveys. They build campaigns from B2B playbooks. They measure success with marketing metrics.

But developers aren't normal B2B buyers. They don't care about your thought leadership. They don't want to be nurtured. They just want to solve their problem and get back to work.

The companies that win understand this. Developer marketing isn't B2B marketing with different colors. It's a completely different thing.

You need people who actually understand the technology. Not just the positioning, but the real implementation details. The edge cases. The gotchas.

You need to understand what it's like to be a developer. When you're debugging something at 2 AM, marketing emails are the last thing you want to see. This means, yes, you need a developer relations team — and they need to be former/current developers.

Your marketing and product teams need to work together. The product experience is the marketing experience. Developer trust takes forever to build and two seconds to lose.

Developer marketing isn't dead. But the way most people do it definitely is.