The Developer Marketing Flywheel is a guide to what needs to get done, when to do it, and how to measure the results. It’s a roadmap for developer marketing practitioners on how to build successful programs.
Discovery is the starting point for this roadmap, where you’ll build your strategy by figuring out the core principles of product-market fit. This is ultimately what gets the entire flywheel in motion!
In this post, we’ll explore the second phase of Discovery: Secondary Research.
How can you build a clear understanding of the market for your product? Where can you learn about developers, competitors, tools, and technologies? And, most importantly, is finding this information as overwhelming as it sounds?
Conducting primary research on your own is an expensive and time-consuming task. Developers are hard to pin down, and surveying them in large groups is a huge undertaking.
The good news is that ample information about the developer audience as a whole already exists and is easy to access. There are three main categories: Developer Reports, Audience Insights, and Competitive Analysis.
Free developer reports are great places to start because they provide a high-level overview of the developer landscape. The organizations that produce these reports collect data and survey thousands of developers from around the world, often annually.
Here are a few to get you started:
Insights from your developer audience will show you what they think about your brand, platform, or product. Again, finding these insights may be easier than you think. Developers are generally very vocal online and very open with their opinions. It shouldn’t take long for you to find conversations, reviews, and comments that you can use.
Start by looking on Reddit, Stack Overflow, Hacker News, and your product forums. You can use what you find to identify:
If your product isn’t available to a wide audience yet, you can try offering free versions to a small group of developers in exchange for their opinion.
A competitive analysis will show you how you fit into the market. The Catchy Developer Marketing Framework is one tool that can help with this. It uses six key components that make up a developer marketing program and a ranking system for each of these components to determine how you stack up with the competition.
These rankings will give you some quantitative information to help you understand:
Secondary research is a great way to build your understanding of the market. Although it can take a lot of time and effort to go through these exercises, you can find the resources you need for free, and the insights you gain will help you stand out from the competition.
It’s important to note that you may have a few remaining questions to answer before going to market. Next in our Developer Marketing Flywheel series, we’ll explain how primary research can fill in these gaps and prepare you to get your program off the ground.
Read our entire Developer Marketing Flywheel Series:
