Growing a developer-focused product doesn't require a massive marketing budget. In fact, some of the most effective strategies for driving developer adoption and engagement are completely free or very cost-effective. Expand your developer user base while staying lean and focused on what matters most—providing real value to your target developers.

“Free” Ways to Drive Developer Growth

Understand Your Audience

The most important step to driving developer growth is identifying which developers truly need your product and can pay for it. While curious developers who constantly experiment with new tools are great, they may not be your target if your product solves specific pain points for enterprise teams.

To identify your target audience, start by conducting thorough market research to understand which developers match your initial criteria. Analyze your current customers' demographics, company sizes, industries, and usage patterns. Look for common characteristics and patterns that indicate where your product provides the most value. Use these insights along with market analysis to define your target personas and create a detailed ideal customer profile (ICP) that will guide your growth strategy.

Check out this Effective, Comprehensive Developer ICP Framework for more insights.

End Result: Focus on a clearly defined segment of roughly 5,000 developers. Don't try to target every developer out there—make sure each decision aligns with your ICP and ideal persona.

Interview Developers

Interview your target developers to understand their daily workflows and how your product might fit in. Remember, you're not selling—you're learning. Focus on understanding the pain points they face that your product could solve. Your current customers are also invaluable sources of insight: learn what value they're getting from your product and how to find more developers like them.

You can reference Best Questions for Dev Tool Founders to Ask Developers for insights into what questions to ask and how to format the interviews.

Help Developers Where They Are

Engage in developer channels where your target audience spends time and look for ways to help them. Don't promote your product—instead, assist developers with their questions, even if they're unrelated to your offering. Share your expertise freely when you know the solution. For example, early in my career, I spent hours daily answering questions in Joomla forums, which naturally led to freelance opportunities. When you help others selflessly, people take notice. Just ensure your bio clearly shows what you do and includes your offering.

Hang Out With Developers In Real Life

While many founders and teams chase various growth hacks and techniques, the solution is surprisingly simple: spend time with developers. Whether virtually or in-person (with in-person interactions often being more impactful), the key is dedicating time to connect with your target developers. Since you likely have a technical background yourself, it's natural to return to those familiar developer spaces and communities. Once you try this approach, you'll discover it's the missing piece you've been seeking. Not only will it spark nostalgia for your developer days, but the insights you gain will transform your business.

Founder Thought Leadership and Social Media

Founder thought leadership is incredibly valuable for growing your developer audience. Consider the CEO of Vercel, Guillermo Rauch. His strong reputation stems from sharing deep technological insights and clear vision—developers eagerly follow his guidance. This exemplifies how developers seek out peers they can learn from and engage with. They gravitate toward thought leaders who keep them informed about industry trends and innovations, which Guillermo consistently delivers.

Just as you engage in developer channels, also be active on social media, like Guillermo, to build authentic connections with developers. Social media platforms deserve special attention beyond other developer channels because of their unique advantages. They allow you to learn from thought leaders who influence your target developers while directly engaging with those developers themselves. Through social media, you can show your authentic personality, grow your audience, and increase awareness of your work. Founders should make it a priority to build their social media presence and thought leadership—especially on LinkedIn.

Write Content and Distribute It

Developers actively search for tools and products only when facing specific challenges. As natural problem-solvers, they'll first exhaust every possible solution on their own. Therefore, the most effective way to reach them is through content that directly addresses their needs at the moment they're searching for answers.

Structure your content strategy around four essential pillars: founder vision and technology insights, practical use cases, step-by-step tutorials, and customer success stories.

These resources prove invaluable when you're engaging with developers and helping them solve problems—you'll have relevant content to share without appearing promotional. Additionally, these pieces will boost your brand's SEO visibility for searches related to both your solution and the pain points your product addresses.

Listen for Pain Point Keywords and Engage

Content only provides value when people can find it—so distributing that content effectively is the real challenge.

Establish a consistent practice of listening and engaging in your most valuable developer channels. These channels exist anywhere developers spend time—if you understand your audience and have gathered feedback from your target developers, you'll know exactly where to begin. As you monitor these channels, you'll discover which channels yield the best results. Develop a routine of watching for keywords that signal opportunities to engage with developers and share your helpful content (meant to inspire rather than sell). Begin with public platforms like Reddit, GitHub, and Dev.to, then expand into more specialized spaces like private forums, Discord communities, and secret developer group messages.

Cost-Effective Ways to Drive Developer Growth

What I’ve shared thus far is mostly free approaches to driving developer growth. It’s about authentically engaging with developers where they are, helping them, and sharing your insights along the way. Nothing in what I’ve shared should feel salesy, or even like you’re doing marketing at all. Because that’s the developer way.

Sponsor Dev-Curated Channels

If you have a budget to drive developer growth, I recommend investing in developer-curated channels. Let me share a recent example. A few weeks ago, I attended Commit Your Code, a developer conference in Dallas, TX organized by Danny Thompson and his team of developers. Throughout the event, Danny enthusiastically acknowledged the sponsors—far more often than their sponsorship packages promised. Developers actually paid attention to these sponsors because the event was developer-focused and authentic. There were no corporate agendas or expensive $100k+ booth setups—just developers gathering to learn from and engage with one another.

When developers are the ones curating channels, the results are magical—and other developers naturally follow! Take RenderATL, That Conference, and All Things Open for example. These developer-curated events have grown into powerhouses in the developer event space.

Developer-curated channels include, but are not limited to:

1. Podcasts
2. Livestreams
3. Meetups
4. Events or Conferences
5. Newsletters
6. Courses or Learning Programs
7. Communities
8. Blogs or Content Hubs
9. Open Source Projects or Contributors

Invest your funds where developers already trust the channel so you can be the hero that not only cares about these developers and their curated channels, but also contributes in meaningful ways.

Hire a Developer Advocate

If budget allows, consider hiring a Developer Advocate (full-time or part-time) to handle developer engagement and community growth initiatives. This allows you, the founder, to focus on thought leadership and other crucial business aspects.

If you're considering hiring a developer advocate, this article is essential reading: When to Hire DevRel, the Million Dollar Question.

Here’s What I Would Do

If I was a founder planning a marketing budget for an early-stage dev tool or product, I would do all the free things in the most efficient and impactful way, as well as invest my monetary resources into supporting and sponsoring developer-curated channels where my target developers spend time. If budget allowed, I’d develop a lean and mean DevRel growth strategy and hire a Developer Advocate to deliver against it.

And in case you need help…

If you need help understanding and interviewing your target audience, establishing your content strategy or engagement practices, or establishing a DevRel function within your organization, book a growth strategy consult. These are the services I deliver each and every day with my clients. I also have a vast DevRel network and likely have the best candidate already in my rolodex eager for an introduction.