They die because the founders run a B2B SaaS playbook on a buyer who reads code.
The first dev marketer you hire will cost $180,000 a year — and will spend six months figuring out that devtools is different.
Generic positioning. Marketing-shaped blog posts. "Book a demo" CTAs on a $20/mo product. Cold emails that sound like a sales kickoff.
The pattern is the same every time. So I wrote it all down.
Score yourself. Find the leaks. Run the plays. Everything plug-and-play — duplicatable Notion workspace, copy-pasteable templates, real examples, no fluff.
Score yourself across positioning, content, dev rel, distribution, activation, and retention. Brutally honest. 90 minutes. The gaps are the point.
The 6-box canvas + three ICP archetypes (Builder, Decider, Architect). The generic SaaS canvas was built for buyers who read trade magazines — devs read code.
3 repeatable post formats. 30 post starters. The compounding loop. Twelve great posts a year beats fifty mediocre ones.
10 email templates. 5 LinkedIn DM templates. The 5-touch sequence. The breakup that gets the highest reply rate of all.
HN, Reddit, Lobsters, Dev.to, niche Slacks, GitHub, conference CFPs. When to use each, posting cadence, what gets you banned.
Week by week, 3 weeks pre-launch through month 3. Print it, cross it off. If you're not at 100 paying users by month 3 doing this honestly: it's product, not distribution.
15-minute videos of me running the audit on a real (anonymized) devtools company. Watch the framework move from canvas to action plan, live.
The canvas isn't a wall of text. It's a printable worksheet, designed like a Strategyzer canvas, that you and your team can sit around and fill in.
Every chapter ships with the same level of design care. This is what you actually want when you're paying a marketer — the artifacts they'd build for you, minus the salary.
At Vaticle I helped build the developer community for TypeDB. At MinIO I led GTM during the years it became the de-facto S3 alternative. At Pusher I worked on technical content that brought millions of dev impressions. At Pluralsight I worked across the developer education stack.
Across Ankr, Fossa, QuestDB, Near Protocol, and AnyTracker — several of them YC alumni — I helped early-stage devtools and infra teams find their first hundred customers and structure their content from scratch.
Across all of them, I watched the same pattern: smart founders, real products, broken go-to-market. Generic positioning. Marketing-shaped content. The wrong channels. The wrong sequencing.
This toolkit is what I'd hand a new dev marketing hire on day one. It's the version of the playbook I wish someone had handed me when I started.
Get the standalone PDF of Chapter 1. Score your devtools company across positioning, content, dev rel, distribution, activation, and retention. Most founders score 31–55 the first time. The gaps will tell you what to fix this quarter.
Some founders want the toolkit. Some founders want me embedded for a week, running the audit on their product, building their 21-day plan, and shipping the first piece of content under their byline.
Five working days. Daily standups. The audit run live with your team in the room. A bespoke 21-day GTM action plan written up after. One piece of content (positioning rewrite, technical post, or HN launch draft) shipped by Friday.
Ninety minutes. A clear scorecard. Three things to fix this Monday.
Get the toolkit — $97 →