Developer Reports
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:
- Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey
Stack Overflow is one the world’s largest developer communities, and every year they publish an incredibly detailed report sharing the results of their annual developer survey. This edition includes insights from more than 70,000 developers around the world. Check out our key takeaways from the 2022 report.
- SlashData’s State of the Developer Nation
SlashData’s Developer Nation survey tracks the developer experience across platforms, revenues, apps, languages, tools, APIs, segments, and regions. The 22nd (and most recent) edition reached more than 20,000 developers globally.
- For more valuable information about developers, check out: Product Marketing Alliance’s State of Product Marketing Report, GitLab’s Global Developer Report: DevSecOps, State of Developer Relations, and JetBrains’ State of Developer Ecosystem.
Audience Insights
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:
- Developer attitudes toward your brand
- Problems users are having with your product
- Places where developers are getting stuck
- Opportunities to serve users more effectively
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.
Competitive Analysis
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:
- Where does our program fit?
- What are our competitors doing?
- Where are the opportunities?
- Where do we want to go?
What comes next?
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: