Ingredients for building a successful developer PLG motion
With Rahul Chhabria, VP of Marketing at Sentry
One of my favorite things about getting to know Rahul as a marketer is that he doesn’t think of himself as…a marketer.
Rahul’s career started in aerospace engineering and product. He was a product manager at Apple and then Atlassian, but today he’s the VP of Marketing at Sentry. As a result, he brings a very non-marketing-y lens to all things marketing that I think you will find surprising and refreshing.
Why was I so keen to interview Rahul?
Sentry is a marked success in open source - a business structure that only boasts a handful of real break-out success stories. The spicy take here is that the marketing team does NOT market to the open source community…at all!
Sentry is a highly self-serve-driven business and Rahul has been running growth there for years - he has secret sauce that you need to learn from if you’re trying to do PLG
He’s bucks marketing expectations and sees a ton of success. For instance, he won’t use messaging frameworks, and will only hire technical product marketers into Sentry. He’d rather a PMM who is more of a product manager than a sales enablement guru….read on for more :)
Rahul, thank you so much for joining me. You lead growth and product marketing at Sentry so I’d love to start by talking about open source. Can you talk through the advantages and disadvantages to user growth with an open source model and how you think about this as a marketer?
From a marketing perspective, we don't really have an open source model, which is a weird way to think about things.
Sentry started off as an open source project and now continues to maintain a self-hosted version, which is effectively open source. You can use it however you want to. And then all of our source code is built under one of our own licenses called a functional source license. It's open: you can see it, interact with it, contribute to it. The only thing you can’t do is build and sell a competing solution. And after two years, it converts to a fully open license with no restrictions. But we don't market to our self-hosted community. You can find our self-hosted offering on GitHub, download it, install it, and run it at scale to 80, 8000, or 80,000 employees - and many companies use it without paying a Sentry a dollar. We have no way of telling who you are. We can't market to you. We don't have anything in the product to report back that you’re using it.
But - if you ever decide that you don't want to maintain it on your own, then you can self-select into our cloud offering or call us and we’ll help move you over. So, we offer delayed open source software, and supporting the open source community is important to us, but we do not market to them.
How do you think about your funnel, then? You run growth - what metrics do you evaluate to understand the health of the business and hit your targets?
My team’s goal is customer acquisition via our self-service channel. We have a target for net new paying customers and churn goals for the year.
Our PMMs work very closely with our digital marketing lead to test our messaging at scale to see what influences organic and paid traffic. We also work closely with our business operations team to make sure that our products are priced competitively but also in a way that people can try and buy without ever having to talk to sales.
But because a majority of our customer base is from people swiping their credit card, we have to make sure the onboarding experience makes it super easy to get started with and adopt Sentry – especially for error monitoring. PMM heavily influences the end-to-end product experience.
For example, when someone starts using, what do their first 14 days look like? To figure that out, we define profiles of a successful self-service customer based on tenure, product usage, team size, project counts, feature usage, etc. Then we map out touch points from day 0 to 14 providing you contextual education on key things you should try to ensure success with Sentry. So if you're in the product for four days during your trial and you haven't invited anyone to your organization, there'll be an in-app notification to tell you to invite your team. And an email to follow, telling you why this is important. And then other time-based sequences to help you throughout your journey to decide if you want to actually pay for it or not.
We do our best to make sure that there’s a connected experience from clicking on an ad or clicking through from a newsletter down to the last day of your trial. And at the end of it, we hope you have enough information to continue with us.
And when that person comes in, do you assume they are familiar or unfamiliar with your product?
We assume they don't know anything about Sentry. This is a weird assumption because we hear that word of mouth or using us at another company are very common reasons why people choose Sentry. If we assume anything different, it would likely influence product experience and the content we create. But that said, in the event you are familiar with Sentry, we give the option to skip all the onboarding so you can jump ahead.
So then how as a marketer, do you think about the open source offering? Or do you think about it as a branding channel or do you think about it as a totally different part of your company that just operates separately and you're not worrying about it?
It’s not that I don’t completely not worry about it. It’s really important to us as a company and what it means to our brand. We have a Head of Open Source that maintains the self-hosted offering – which is 100% identical to our SAAS offering. Additionally, we work with several open source projects and the community in general. Sentry has a pretty strong opinion of what open software should be. So we don't actively market the self-hosted offering, but we are in the community, supporting open source projects. As I mentioned earlier we also just published our license, Functional Source License. Several companies are starting to adopt FSL so they can run a for-profit business but also build in the open.
Also, once a year during October, we donate several hundreds of thousands of dollars to open source projects.
That squares with how I see successful developer go to market working, it's often not direct marketing. It's the amplification of an authentic belief your company holds, which draws developers in.
Exactly. It comes back to the fundamental belief that we think people should have access to quality software regardless of how much they can pay for it. It should be a decision if you want to pay for it, and there are certain features and conveniences you pay for.
Let's switch gears to growth marketing. We've had a lot of clients referred to our consulting business who come in asking; what channel should I be leveraging? Or where should I run paid ads to grow with developers? I'm curious - if you were asked the same, how would you respond? Do you think this is the right question to ask? And if not, what question would you start with if you were just tasked with figuring out how to grow a developer audience for a product?
First, I think you need to narrow down your ideal persona. At Sentry, we build for the individual developer. Internally, we make it very clear that if we have 1 dollar to spend, we spend that whole dollar on the developer. Once you know who you’re building for, you have to figure out which communities or verticals you want to invest in. For us, we look at three things - product strength, community growth, and competitive advantage.
Sentry supports over 100 languages and frameworks. To figure out where we’re the strongest, we look at SDK adoption, time to active, tenure, and a few other indicators where we can say, for example, based on that analysis we know that Sentry is really strong with JavaScript, Python, and PHP developers. So now that we identified those three communities, we figure out what events to go to, what newsletters to syndicate new content through, and even what podcasts to sponsor.
We apply this similar logic to fast-growing communities like Next.js. Next is one of the fastest growing, from an adoption perspective, JavaScript frameworks. Because of that, we invested in making onboarding super simple for Next.js developers – it went from 5 lines to one single command that will even create a brand new account if you don’t have one. In parallel, we realized that the Next community was pretty active on Reddit. So we ran some cheeky display ads on Reddit telling developers not to click the ads to keep our CPC costs low and just run the command instead.
So if someone were to ask me today what channels to invest in to get in front of eyeballs I’d ask them to identify where their product is strongest. What are some of the big bets you can make and where is the biggest opportunity to grow developer eyeballs? Align your product strengths to strong communities and you’ll see the most growth - a spray-and-pray approach won’t work.
Developer tastemakers or influencers definitely exist and do impact markets. How do you approach working with them from a growth perspective, if at all?
We work with influencers but, just like them, we're very selective about who we work with. We look to partner with individuals who are credible and are an authority in their space. We work with them on product announcements, tutorials/how-to videos, and they join us on workshops or simply share how Sentry folds into their day-to-day. Sometimes they will also join us at events to share how they got started with Sentry and why they continue to use it.
Having trusted people from outside of your company is a great way to present an unbiased opinion who is also an authority figure in their craft.
But it’s really important to note, that these relationships are more partnerships than transactional. Influencers work with us because they too believe in the product - similar to how Shaquille O’Neal says he doesn’t endorse companies he doesn’t believe in. That’s how we can trust them to go out and represent the brand - it’s almost like they are consultants or augmenting our staff. We’re not buying people with Twitter followers, that’s not something we care about. We care about who can speak authentically to a technical audience.
How have you uncovered the people who would actually champion your product? Did they just emerge from the community naturally? Or did you have to find them, somehow?
It's both. In some cases, we work with people who have worked in previous tech companies that Sentry partnered with. And they go off and go on their own but want to continue the partnership - that’s a great way to kick things off because we already know what it’s like to work with them.
There are also people that post on social media talking about how they use Sentry and we'll reach out offering to work together. We use Common Room to help identify these people - it scrapes Twitter, Discord, and Reddit and analyzes sentiment. So, we use this across support, sales (to identify people at big companies) and to see who is influencing the community. It gives us an automated way to reach out to people instead of having to watch these channels manually.
Any really surprising growth levers that you've uncovered over the years? Or is it more of a slow, steady systematic growth that you pursue?
This couldn’t be a more obvious statement, but the more eyeballs you get in front of will result in people talking about you, then will amplify where people hear about you.
But when I first started at Sentry, I ran a partnership with Atlassian, which is probably unfair because I used to work there. So I set it up by calling a friend and pitching a few ideas. None of mine made the cut, but they came back with a better one. We ran a bundle where anyone who bought Bitbucket Premium would get free Sentry, free vulnerability testing with Snyk, and AWS-sponsored build minutes for Bitbucket Pipelines.
As part of the partnership Atlassian mentioned us in the keynote of their developer conference, logo placement across several of their sites, and 2 blog posts that were shared in consecutive newsletters. This got us to reach 2 million individuals and we saw the highest number of signups and referral traffic that we have ever had. I loved these projects, but I also hate them because you get that shark fin growth, and unfortunately, the chart comes right back down after some time, and then you need to figure out a new way to get back up there again.
If you can figure out a strong partnership motion, I think it can be a great way to raise awareness because you can draft off of someone else's big brand. It’s a great endorsement too.
How do you feel developer growth marketing playbooks differ from your classic B2B SaaS growth marketing playbook? Is there anything that stands out?
Everything we do is to get as many customers or as many users on the platform as possible, because once you show value to those developers, they become advocates for you within their organizations and then they help the sales-led motion.
We don't create a lot of one-pagers or pitch decks. We don't create extensive messaging houses and things like that.
Our PMMs work with sales, but they're not sitting there side by side, constantly building sales enablement materials. They’re working with digital marketing to figure out what we need to rank for, what content we need to create by funnel stage, and partnering with DevRel on top of funnel pieces. In parallel, they’re figuring out how to make sure the product is accurately represented in blogs, the site, lifecycle emails, and any other touch point. Constantly asking “What should we educate on next?” And once someone signs up, they ask “How do we make sure this developer is successful?”
On the other side, they’re aggregating customer feedback, and working with the product team to define key features and the rollout process. All while defining the opportunity size of certain investments and keeping a pulse on the competitive landscape. I’m not sure how this differs from a classic B2B marketing playbook because I’ve never worked in a company that didn’t have a big self-serve motion, but what we do feels more like product management than enterprise product marketing but with more focus on education.
How do you uncover use cases for Sentry, especially the ones your product marketers focus on?
We talk to a lot of customers. I think each one of the PMMs is talking to anywhere from three to five customers a week.
We also have the benefit of having around 90 developers using Sentry to build Sentry. This gives us access to a handful of unique dog food stories to source ideas and use cases from.
That said, I don't have any novel ways of discovering use cases outside of getting out there, talking to people in the community, running customer interviews, speaking to your developers who are building the tool and using the tool, and then looking at every social channel you can participate in. Watch Discord communities, listen to podcasts, and read newsletters. We acquired Syntax FM, a podcast, not too long ago. I also encourage our team to listen to the episodes because they learn a whole lot more from the hosts and guests too.
What was the first major product marketing success for you at Sentry? Let’s say after the Atlassian partner bundle.
When we introduced Performance Monitoring in July of 2020.
Sentry had been known for error monitoring through and through. And if you'd look at our package installs compared to our competitors, we kept climbing and we became the default solution, but we needed to figure out what the second chapter of the product was. So, before I got here the team decided it was application performance monitoring (APM).
This launch was essentially our entrance into a brand new category with new competitors. In product marketing, we were trying to figure out our angle. Were we just another “me too” product at this point? How are we different? Turns out that the technology behind our SDKs and the way we collect events is extremely unique and lightweight compared to our competitors, which were installing agents or hosts.
So - I had to figure out what that angle was, how to promote the product, and how our launch sequence would work with our media agency to get coverage. And to be fair, I'd never done any of this before. I was one year into product marketing. I got this job out of luck because I knew some people here who I ran into on the street and they trusted me with it.
And figuring all of that out worked! When we launched it we started making money on day one. We had emails and social posts. We had digital campaigns that I had never done before. And then we got coverage in seven different outlets. The most coverage we’d ever seen for the company, including TechCrunch Japan. I learned through the firehose. I had to understand why customers cared about performance monitoring, learned that they didn’t care about it, and figured out how to teach them about performance monitoring so that they would care.
At the same time, I sent cold emails to a bunch of analysts trying to get them to speak with our CTO/Co-Founder - I built my first-ever analyst decks, this was all new for me in my career - I had never run a true tier 1 launch before. The success of seeing people go on to adopt the product was really rewarding - APM could be a stand-alone business on its own now, which is amazing. I grew a lot of empathy for product marketers in the process.
Lightning round!
What product marketing metrics do you live or die by?
We look at two things, new customer acquisition and retention. I feel with a self-serve business, that's where we become the most valuable. I try to tell the team that we provide contextual education and I think that works for both new people coming to the product and also people that may consider leaving.
Messaging frameworks or even messaging houses. Like them, hate them. Do you use them?
I hate them. I feel like in theory, I like them. Product promises, problems we’re solving - having it all codified sounds nice. But I have never seen anyone use it beyond us writing it down - so who are they really for? Is this for the marketing team to understand what the product does? If so - does it need to be this heavyweight? How about we fold this into a campaign brief, get the three messages (the short, long, and medium versions) ready, and call it a day? If sales wants something more to work with, then build them something custom.
Biggest developer product marketing no-no? What makes you wince?
I don't like jargony copy, and I will probably stop reading a blog post that starts with, “We're so excited to announce.”
Oh yeah, I love that. I have to correct that out of everyone. Even really good companies still say it!
Yeah, no one cares. I see it sometimes in our changelog and have to ask “How did that get through?”.
Whose product marketing do you admire in the industry? Or outside of the industry?
Figma does a really good job for designers and developers.
Is there an unpopular opinion you have about product marketing as a discipline?
No matter what industry you work in, or what vertical you work in, PMMs should be very technical people. I would almost rather hire, at least at Sentry, a former engineer who wants to learn marketing as opposed to an experienced PMM who is used to the sales enablement side of things.
Some people live for the sales kickoff. I need someone who wants to be best friends with the product managers. And I want someone who wants to act like a product manager because I want them to influence the roadmap based on what customers and the market are saying.
I don’t need someone building flashy decks to get sales to sell the next seven-figure deal. And I don't know if people agree with that. I think there's definitely a group of PMMs or product marketers who are all about flash and I don't care about that.
How do you hire? It’s hard to find engineers turned marketers.
Most of the people on the team have come from technical backgrounds, we have individuals from Stripe, AWS, and Twilio/Segment. Each one of these companies build technical products. So I look for people who have a decent tenure marketing to a technical audience. It tells me they’re up for the challenge. But yes, it’s super hard to find engineers turned marketers – those people usually go DevRel, not PMM.
How do you get good, technical writing produced regularly for Sentry?
PMMs and DevRel teams combined are the content team. Everyone on the team writes and every single product marketer can write for Sentry.
Huge thanks to Rahul for joining us on the newsletter! I hope you found this interview as useful as I did. If you want to follow Rahul you can find him on LinkedIn.