✍️ Product Led Growth for Developers
"Developers, developers, developers" - Steve Ballmer (a sales guy)
Developer tools is by far the most difficult category to build a company. You have to have the engineering reliability of Boeing, but the easy of use of Snapchat. Your customers can vary significantly in complexity, budget, and even programming ability. People can “use your product wrong”, and it’s your responsibility to educate them. And to even use your product, they often have to do work!
It’s a miracle that new developer tools companies come into existence in this unforgiving market. But when evaluating the companies that endure, you’ll find they overcome three main hurdles:
They start on the right foot: The original strategy of successful companies like Stripe, Twilio, Clerk, Supabase, and Vercel has been continuously accurate. There wasn’t an early pivot. They had a straight line from idea → execution. Just like how software needs to be architected well from the beginning, developer tools companies need solid strategic foundations.
They grind for their first 100 believers: Each customer in this stage is extremely precious, and is taking a massive bet on a very much unproven product. These first 100 customers will have a bad time using your product, but it’s how you respond to them that sets the tone for the duration of your company. At 100 paying customers, you’ve likely found the majority of the sharp edges of your product, validated the core offering, and established yourself in the market.
They innovate on distribution: Going from 100 → 1000 customers requires not only excellence on product, but also true innovation on getting the product into customers hands. Developer tools companies must find, educate, and win over developers, who are notoriously critical buyers.
The focus of this memo will be on hurdle #3.
Developer Trust
The most important factor to building a category defining developer tools company is to win the trust of developers. Especially in the early days. I’ve been a CTO, technical lead, and buyer at companies large and small. The first thing I would do when making a build in house vs buy decision was simple: I’d ask another developer what they recommend.
Developers often feel like they have no control. Their CEO demands a feature be built, and doesn’t care about the tech debt or tooling issues that are really weighing them down.
That’s why when a developer feels understood, they have unusually positive reactions.
Word of mouth and positive developer reputation is one of the hardest things to build. It takes a long time, and can easily crumble. You can’t growth hack your way out of a negative reputation.
That’s why the most important driver of growth is positive NPS. At the core of everything we do, we need to ensure that we’re continuing to earn the respect and trust of our customers.
But how do we do that? It’s hard to capture every way within a single document, so you should start with this core value: Will a customer speak positively of this interaction with Browserbase?
A central part of this is customer communications. We need to be prompt, polite, and genuine in our communications to customers. The customer isn’t always right, but as long as we’re authentic when speaking to customers, they cannot fault us.
This happens in many small interactions via our support channels, but also bigger conversations like sales calls and product documentation. If we’re able to master the ability to empathize with customers and win their affection, we’ll benefit from the word-of-mouth growth that’s core to everything we do.
Product First Growth
How would you define our product? What if I told you it was much more than our APIs and SDKs.
Our product encompasses every touch point a developer has with Browserbase. From our website to our documentation, our onboarding flow to every little email they receive from us. It’s critical to think holistically about our product as a driver of developer trust.
While it may seem unrelated, a customer will judge the reliability of our infrastructure based on the care and consideration we put into our documentation. Would you hire the gardener who has weeds growing in their front yard? Investment in our product experience outside of our core offering is a multiplier on growth.
Time To Magic
The most important milestone in a prospective customer’s journey is the “a-ha” moment. However they discovered us, they’re still trying to put the puzzle pieces together on why they need what we’re offering. If a prospect doesn’t understand why they need us or what we do, we have an uphill road to climb.
The most scalable way to educate customers on what we do is to “show not tell”. And luckily for us, our “show” is pretty compelling! With one click of a button in our Playground, we can show them a web browser being automated on their behalf.
Even if we’re not a good fit for a prospect, if we’re able to successfully educate them on what we do, and impress them with our product experience, we may win a potential advocate.
The Art of Objections
I wish it was sufficient to simply get our prospect to the “a-ha” moment. But any savvy developer will have a plethora of reasons why our solution won’t work, won’t scale, will be too expensive, etc.
Now, we can’t overwhelm them all at once with all of the counterpoints to their objectives. That feels sales-y, and developers hate being sold to. Instead, we need to offer breadcrumbs to the next step in gaining a deeper understanding of our product. There are a few channels for this:
Our dashboard experience
Our documentation
Our quick start guides
Our customer emails
All of these are canvases for furthering the customer journey. If we’re able to think critically about each of the objections a prospect might have at each stage in their journey, we can surface the right next feature or next step they need to take to further their understanding of our product.
The Sales Shortcut
Developers don’t like sales calls. They want to tinker, try things, and build. They want to come to their own conclusions.
But sometimes, they don’t have enough time to explore on their own. They want someone to explain to them how to use this thing. Other times, they’re a “special snowflake”, who believes they’ll need a bespoke implementation or feature.
The challenge: scaling this to thousands of prospects is expensive, and we can’t do personalized demos for every individual developer.
Our “Contact Sales” button is the gatekeeper for our time. We don’t want to waste our time, and we most certainly don’t want to waste our customer’s time!
That’s why we need to “qualify” customers before we invest time in them. Oftentimes, they might be better served spending more time in the product.
I really like how Posthog does it. There’s a demo video on the page, and information form that allows us to gate keep the calls. This form is an opportunity to remind customers of the self service documentation that already exists.
Each additional prospect we take on results in a lower likelihood to closing the others.
If product-led growth is a machine gun, sales-led growth is a sniper rifle.
Growing Weeds & Hunting for Whales
It’s no secret that 80% of our revenue will come from 20% of our largest customers. This is the nature of infrastructure platforms and usage-based businesses. If someone isn’t using your product at true scale, ACVs won’t grow.
But how do you find these large customers? There’s two main channels:
Growing Weeds: We are able to win customers early in their life and retain them as they become a household name.
Hunting Whales: We get in front of the qualified prospects that already have meaningful adoption and win their business.
Both of these channels are incredibly important for infrastructure businesses.
The former is more natural for a product-led-growth motion, as it’s incredibly hard to predict which early startup will be a break out success (just ask our investors). Being able to win the bottom of the market gives us an opportunity to capture the next Airbnb at inception.
The latter follows a traditional sales led motion. It’s highly unlikely that giant contracts will fall out of the sky and meaningfully adopt our product. Instead, we have to go to them. To repeatably win larger prospects, we need to be creating opportunities and inserting ourselves into their roadmap.
Running a dual motion (PLG + Sales Led) is generally ill-advised. Most companies that try this often fail to do well at either. However, I believe that a PLG motion, combined with targeted, high effort outbound can be very complimentary.
Here’s what targeted, high effort outbound looks like:
Crystal clear understanding of our ICP, value prop, and differentiation
A target logo list that is realistically serviceable by our current product
Warm introductions to champions and execs via investor + partner network
Persistent, candid follow up on conversations to move things along.
Regular, in-person engagement opportunities with our buyer (dinners, events) to build rapport.
Readiness to engage in a multi-quarter sales cycle (never rushing a deal)
What we aren’t doing is building a team of SDRs and cranking through every logo on the F500. Why? Well, at our stage, our GTM motion needs to be as lean and efficient as possible. But secondly, without strong reference-able customers, each deal will be extremely challenging to win.
The Logo Flywheel
One of the biggest hurdles developer tools need to overcome is market recognition. How can someone trust that we’re not going to break their product? Buying a developer tool is risky, especially when a prospect is committing to an annual contract.
The easiest way for us to derisk our product is to build social proof. It’s a tale as old as time: You’re more likely to go into the crowded bar than the empty one, because clearly something good is happening in there.
Recognizable customer logos earns us credibility. Credibility makes it easier to win deals. And thus, a flywheel begins to spin.
But I can not state this enough: it has to be backed up by a good product. Regretted enterprise churn is some of the worst out there. It spooks investors, employees, and prospects all at once.
If someone sees a logo on our website and decides to call the founder of that company, and they have nothing but positive things to say about us, it does more for our ability to close a deal than anything that comes out of our mouth.
In Summary
Building a category-defining developer tools company starts with winning the trust of developers.
Our product is our biggest lever for distribution, and investment in the product experience is a multiplier on growth.
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. By combining amplified word-of-mouth, impressive product experiences, and targeted high-effort outbound, we'll create opportunities that our product is prepared for, and build the logo flywheel that makes Browserbase the default choice in our market.