Developer Content Marketing 101
With Paige Schwartz, founder and CEO of Copytree, my new go-to technical content agency.
Content marketing is one of the most critical, and challenging, motions to “get right” in developer marketing. So, in our next to pieces we’re talking content!
Read on for tips from Paige Schwartz, CEO of the best technical content marketing agency I’ve worked with. And coming up, we go deep with Dave Nunez, Stripe’s former long-time head of docs.
If you’re struggling with content, from docs to blogs, both of these guests run consultancies. Reach out to ceci@calyx.consulting if you’d like an intro!
We all know that a strong content strategy drives compounding growth over time, but when you’re starting from zero, or attempting in fits-and-starts that haven’t picked up, executing against a content plan can feel…almost insurmountable.
In my advising work I am always looking for excellent technical writers to help clients execute ambitious content strategies and honestly, it’s hard to find them! I recently got introduced to Paige (thank you Rich Taylor!) who runs Copytree. While so many technical writing agencies disappoint, Copytree does not. Paige has an all star client list and works with companies like OpenAI and Grammarly to help them bring content to life. We hired her at my last client and expect to do so with more going forward.
I wanted to bring you, dear reader, a comprehensive take on how to approach and execute against excellent developer content and I think this interview does just that. We cover:
Marks of excellent technical content (if you’re missing these, try again)
How to set goals with content, and how to work effectively with agencies or freelancers
Cringy dev content and how to avoid it
Biggest content marketing fumbles and delusions (these lists are so good, pulled into a little image for you here)
How writers like Paige use AI in their process
Writers Paige follows and story telling/writing resources she suggests for guidance and inspiration
As someone who aspires to write more, talking with Paige really did spark inspiration for me. I hope this article does the same for you!
What are the hallmarks of excellent technical content?
Excellent technical content is so hard because it requires an extra level of expertise layered on top of what your stakeholder needs would be for regular content.
Any given piece of content needs to achieve marketing goals, sales goals, and brand promotion goals. With technical content you then layer on a technical goal or benchmark you’re trying to hit.
My litmus test for content is that I want it to be something an engineer at the company would forward to their friends.
What I aim for:
Be persuasive without being salesy. There’s this misconception that engineers hate marketing and you can’t try to write content for them. Nobody likes being obviously sold to! However, we all like things that are honest, transparent and that solve a problem we have and generously share a solution or story with us, and developers are no different — in fact they’re very open minded! They are constantly learning and looking for new ways of doing things. Ultimately, persuading is about letting the quality of your content speak to what your brand is doing.
Address skepticism up front. Developers are smart! They’ll see the other side of an argument almost instantly, so imagine you have a skeptical colleague on the other side of a given piece — how are they going to object? Address that! If you can’t, then you shouldn’t be writing that piece in the first place.
Don’t forget that part of your job is to entertain and engage. In creative writing, the advice is “if you're not having fun, the reader isn’t going to have fun,” and that applies to technical writing too! Technical writing can be engaging, emotional, and dramatic — it just takes work to get it there.
A neat example: a writer on our team recently was writing about prompt injection, which is essentially a cybersecurity attack on generative AI models where you add something into a piece of text and it fools the model. He built the piece so that if you copy and pasted the whole article into ChatGPT it would output “you’ve been pwned” - people found it really fun. Little things like that elevate what you do!
Relatedly - SHOW don’t TELL. The right example, diagram, or code sample is truly worth 1,000 words. Just show me how it works, don’t try to tell or convince me, I’ll try to do that for myself. This is a valid way for developers to think!
Last - the rules of good writing apply. It has to be well written. One of the best resources that has stood the test of time is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” He writes about how bad writing is lazy thinking, and I think a lot of engineers would agree with that. I won't restate all he said but it’s a quick read and is worth your time.
How do you think about content strategy? What are the key pillars to a strong content strategy?
My clients are usually more responsible for strategy, and we do execution. But, one thing I notice works well is when people have a single campaign that everything aligns to.
Often our more advanced clients structure content around campaigns and everyone moves in lockstep towards one concept or theme for that quarter — it’s one of those helpful constraints that generates creativity. It also makes your work very repurpose-able and lets you get the most out of what we can do as an agency because we can adapt content from a single source in a variety of ways.
What are the goals you set and you see clients setting around content?
With each piece there’s a goal that usually fits into 1 of 3 buckets:
Explain: what you're doing, why you're the best, or some new feature that you have
Respond: to a trend, or something a competitor put out
Inspire: share an emotional story, or introduce a new way of thinking about a problem
On the Copytree side, our goal is to understand:
What is that big picture and what’s the brief?
Who is the audience?
What’s your unique perspective we need to capture?
What part of the funnel do we need to capture?
What is success for this piece?
How will it be distributed?
How much research is needed and how can we help conduct it?
Do you have a subject matter expert we can talk to for this piece?
So we spend a lot of time for each piece setting up goals and getting aligned. This ends up being half of the work.
Content success is usually a long game, and I have this sense that everyone wishes they could have better metrics for their content. You can tell how many people read, but you can’t always tell if the content actually resonated. We end up looking for supportive anecdotal evidence, those are our gold nuggets, such as when a candidate references a piece they read, or a prospect brings up a post in a sales conversation.
What do you find yourself editing most? What’s cringy that everyone does and needs to be adjusted?
There’s a version of the “how do you do, fellow kids” meme that happens with technical content where someone who is not an engineer doesn’t quite get it and says things in an awkward way that reveals they’re pretending to know what they’re talking about. This happens less often than it used to because I think people are becoming more savvy and more tech terminology has entered the mainstream. Like, in my opinion the billboards that you see in San Francisco are actually 70% good these days rather than 70% cringe. But it’s still the thing that clients most often rely on Copytree to a barometer for if they are asking us to edit something.
The new cringe thing is stuff that has been obviously written by generative AI. There are certain phrases that are tipoffs — I think “on the other hand” is something it likes to say a lot, or the other day I was noticing a bunch of articles starting with “in today’s data-driven landscape” or “in today’s blah blah landscape.” With social media captions too, it tends to be really tonally weird, both boring and overly dramatic. It’s just something you can spot a mile away.
The funny thing is that there seems to be this bias where if you’ve asked ChatGPT to write something, you’re like, oh yeah, that’s pretty good. And everyone else is like, no, that sucks. I see it happen again and again. Once it’s performed for you, it kind of tricks your brain into thinking that what it came up with was actually pretty much what you wanted and basically good enough, maybe because you had this hand in making it.
What are the biggest content marketing fumbles you see teams make?
Lack of consistency! Showing up is a big part of the battle. There are a lot of people with good ideas and they fizzle out because they can't be consistent.
Undervaluing presentation - The content itself is just part of the picture. What are the graphics, how does it look on your blog, is it scannable, is the typography good? Is it laid out well?
Do you have distribution? It’s amazing how much people will pay for a piece without having distribution, or sometimes they’ll pay for a piece and not publish it for months!
I also think a lot of people have many untapped resources in a company that could help produce great content but there are a couple of squeaky wheels, often not on the engineering team, who want specific content published and end up dominating what gets shipped. If you just asked the engineering team for what they’d read, they have great ideas and that’s such a key way to get good content built.
What do people think will work and never does when it comes to content?
Having the engineering team write it. I wouldn’t say that this never works, but it’s very rare that engineers have the time to write the content and they usually aren’t given the right incentives to do so. Other work is always going to be more important and even if they are interested in writing and commit to it at first, I see timelines just drag on and on, especially because (to generalize) anyone who is that close to the thing is also going to be a perfectionist about it and able to spend almost limitless time trying to get it right.
Having the founders write it. This does sometimes work very early on, but then it leads to lack of consistency because founders will always have a million other things to do and they will never have enough time for content even if they believe that they will!
Mistaking thought leadership for “I need to write everything about what our company stands for and why, in this one think piece.” It’s much better to write things that are short and focused. Both for people’s attention spans and because it gives you a lot more things to write about over time!
Investing a lot in content before you’ve found product-market fit or figured out what you want to say. You end up churning and burning out the people who are working on content and the pieces become irrelevant almost as soon as you write them! If you are just starting out, you shouldn’t ignore content, but I think that short pieces on LinkedIn and/or talking about your journey as you’re building can be good strategies.
Copying shiny competitor article X. Of course there are things you can learn from your competitors’ content strategies, but what made that article work is not likely to be the same thing that will make the article work for you. We have a question explicitly in our brief for clients that’s about “what is your unique POV on this topic.”
“Just one more step, we’ll have our founders (or VP, or head of engineering, etc.) review it now” – if you are outsourcing writing a piece where the founder actually needs to sign off on the message, you need to involve them early on and make sure that you’re representing their views from the beginning. Otherwise they tend to send everyone scrambling back to the drawing board.
Talk to me about AI - is it part of your world yet or not up to snuff?
We have a lot of clients in the gen AI space, so it’s very much a part of our world and something we have to know about. Anyone working in tech and technical content has to understand how to work with AI, it’s really exciting and is going to underpin our industry.
When ChatGPT first came out I was so anxious and afraid of it, I was being told by everyone I knew that I was going to be replaced at any moment. I went to a Google reunion in February of 2023 and I would tell people what I did and they would essentially say “I’m so sorry for your loss…”! But, honestly the tools today aren’t great at writing from scratch still, and business is better than ever. Gen AI won’t come up with that new, honest spark that tells a company’s story that hasn’t been told before. That said, it is an excellent research and editing tool!
The type of writing you get from AI today is the lazy/formulaic writing that George Orwell talks about in “Politics and the English Language” that I mentioned earlier. I don’t think it should be what you use if you want to stand out from the crowd.
Humans are getting better and better at realizing when something is human, as well. We’re writing SO much today, way more than we ever have in human history! We’ve created this world where ChatGPT is possible and is 90% good, but the 10% it doesn’t do is this huge abyss that can’t be crossed. That’s what gives me hope, along with the fact that there is so much laziness out there that you stand out when you’re going against the trend.
Who are some technical writers you respect?
He’s not necessarily a “technical writer” but I find myself lurking around for new material from Paul Graham. I don’t agree with everything he says or the way he says things but I really respect how forthright and opinionated he is. He’s engaging every time. Short and direct. I always finish his essays! There’s always something to react to, which is an interesting strategy and important thing to keep in mind when you’re doing technical content.
I also enjoy people who share about their process and their journey. There’s an ex-Google PM, Laura Homes, who is writing about her process of building a story-driven educational app called Wanderly. Her newsletter is called runningtowards.xyz and it’s really honest, transparent, generous and open about the good and the bad.
I’m also always interested in crossovers between literary writers and math and science. David Foster Wallace’s book called Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity that’s a great, and mind-boggling example of this.
Do you have any resources around story telling that you suggest people check out?
Wired for Story by Lisa Cron - talks about the evolutionary science behind why a structure like “the hero’s journey” resonates so much with our brains
Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer - like having the perfect persnickety editor in your back pocket for random difficult grammar and style questions, as well as opinions about all things to do with the English language
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders - like taking a university course in some great Russian short stories and why they work. It’s more geared towards fiction but the close reading of these stories is just so pleasurable and will improve your storytelling by osmosis.
How to Tell a Story by The Moth - I am a big fan of The Moth Radio Hour. This book distills how they coach people who have never told stories before to get up on stage and captivate an audience from beginning to end.
How did you decide to start & scale Copytree?
I founded Copytree after working as a freelance technical content writer for 3 years. Prior to that I was a product manager at Google. I left Google to spend more time doing what I loved most — writing — and after trying out different kinds of writing I discovered that technical content was a great way to combine my computer science / PM background and love of learning with my love of crafting words. I initially thought technical writing was dry/documentation-only, but I discovered there was a world of content out there aimed at connecting with developers and other technically-minded people — from engineering blogs to guides and reports.
As my client list grew, I was having to turn away a lot of work. I was also feeling a little bit isolated after years of freelancing (plus the pandemic). It seemed possible and even realistic to start an entirely remote team. So I looked for people like me — ex-product managers and engineers with a passion for writing — and that grew into Copytree. We're a small but mighty team that works with clients like OpenAI and Grammarly to produce the highest-quality technical content.
Huge thanks to Paige for this interview with DeveloperGTM! You can follow her on Linkedin or reach out to connect with Copytree via their site.
Here’s a PDF summary of this piece!
