Maximizing dev marketing impact & the AI marketing tools that you should try today
With Kathleen Estreich, GP and co-founder at MKT1
Kathleen is a marketing leader that hundreds of founders look to for guidance. She has built and led marketing teams at a number of high growth companies with a focus on technical audiences including Intercom, Box (on the platform team, where we worked together!) and Scalyr.
Kathleen is currently a co-founder and GP at MKT1, where she invests in and advises early and growth stage B2B companies. She has a deep background in developer marketing and is at the forefront of thinking about how AI is changing the marketing landscape - so we cover both with her today!
Here’s what you can expect:
Traits that make for a strong developer marketer
The subtle ways to slant marketing for a B2D audience (versus B2B)
The advice Kathleen gives nearly every company she works with (it’s really excellent, I learned something!)
How AI is changing the marketing landscape, the companies she’s watching and what comes next for marketing given these fundamental shifts
You’ve got an incredible track record of marketing to a technical audience - what got you into developer marketing?
I wish I could say it was deliberate, but I’m an accidental developer marketer! I started my career at Facebook where, early on, I worked on PR/comms, some of it focused on our engineering team and open source projects. I then moved into product marketing focused on our platform products – I really enjoyed working with a technical audience so I doubled down. I think I enjoy developer marketing because:
I’m very curious to understand the technology myself. Developer products keep you focused on the forefront of what’s happening in our field, it’s always interesting.
Developers as an audience are very discerning, so the marketing work is held to a higher bar. You have to be value-add in order to be effective.
Translating a technical product into language that both technical and non-technical people can understand is a fun challenge.
You’ve advised hundreds of B2B startups on how to do marketing - what are the couple of things that you’d recommend that B2D companies do that differs from classic B2B best practices?
Your website is critical when selling to developers.
Developers are inherently skeptical, so you need to show, not tell. Being able to articulate what you do, who it’s for, why they should care, and how you do it better is a must. There are lots of product tools you can use to set up a sandbox or product walk through to get prospects interacting with the product right away.
Documentation is a part of marketing for a developer product. A link to the documentation needs to be topline on the site. Treat the docs as a product - they are a big part of why engineers might end up buying your product.
Pricing - you should list at least SOME pricing on your site; this audience doesn't want to talk to sales first. I hear a lot of grumbling from engineers who evaluate a product but have no idea how much it will cost. This can cause them to leave for another solution without evaluating yours seriously.
Is marketing to developers as different as many developer focused marketers think it is?
No. I have a running joke with a couple of other dev marketers that it’s just…good marketing!
Good marketing consists of really understanding your audience, your product, and the pain points that the product solves for your audience. I don’t think that this is different across B2B and B2D! But, as a marketer it will take a bit more time to really understand how or where a technical product fits into an engineer’s day, or the technical mechanics of how the product works.
I was speaking with a founder today who was asking about whether he needs to hire an engineer or a marketer to do marketing. I think this is a total fail mode. It’s easier for a (smart) marketer to learn the tech than for an engineer to learn marketing. Marketing is a skill set that you have to hire in. What you need is an excellent marketer who's excited about marketing to your audience and knows how to do the work to understand them deeply. If a marketer doesn’t get to know their audience then it doesn’t matter who you’re marketing to, they’re not going to succeed.
Given the scale of MKT1’s reach today - what’s the marketing advice you hear yourself giving again and again?
Two related things
Focus on impact over activities. I spend a lot of my time talking to startups, there’s a ton that you can do but that doesn’t mean you should do it. Focus on the couple of things that you can do well that will have a large impact.
What are your marketing advantages? Build your marketing strategy around them. As a startup or big company, you have certain marketing advantages - network effects, an interesting wedge, a free version that gets good pickup, an ecosystem play, a founder-market-fit story that’s really compelling - maybe you have 1-3 of these. Build your strategy around them. You can’t use someone else’s strategy to win. I think in templates, not playbooks. What’s unique to you that, when you accelerate it, can help you grow faster? This is the number one thing I talk to companies about; after doing some discovery we double down on their advantages. You’re not going to win against your competitors using their ground game, so pick the things you can win at and double down.
I love the work you’re doing to help marketers and early stage founders think about applying AI to their GTM efforts - let’s spend some time here!
How do you see AI changing the marketing landscape already? And, where do you see it shifting in a couple of years once tools are more advanced?
AI has made it possible for an individual marketer to do way more than they could previously do on their own. You used to have to rely on a designer, a developer, video editors, etc - but today marketers can be much more self-sufficient and can get more done with smaller budgets.
The other interesting thing is content personalization at scale. It used to be quite expensive and time consuming to do account based marketing, but now you can run ABM at a scale that was previously inaccessible to small teams.
What does this look like in a couple of years? Marketers will be much more efficient, and teams will be leaner. I expect that marketing teams will be staffed by generalists who hire tools and contractors with specialties to enhance their work.
The advice I’d give to marketers is to (1) get comfortable using technology and experimenting with new tools, because you’ll likely be required to be able to do more in the future. And (2) if you’re not already, get strategic. AI makes the cost of content creation lower, but a winning strategy or content that really stands apart and has a unique take is going to be human built.
What are the couple of tools that you either use regularly or are recommending?
Clay - we’re huge fans and recommend it to everyone.
Tofu is great as well - Elaine Zelby is awesome. The product helps you 10x your content strategy with AI.
Storylane and Arcade are great for making product walk-throughs easier.
Goldcast - excellent for virtual events, we run all of our MKT1 events on Goldcast now, and on the backend they have a clip generator that makes follow up content marketing much easier.
There are some newer tools that we’re intrigued by:
Ignition is building a product marketing platform that I’m curious to see in action
Bestever.ai is a portfolio company that helps you with ad creative - the bar to creating at scale is going down, and they can automate and help you tweak content to get the highest possible conversion rate on ads
How about writing - your newsletter is amazing, have AI writing tools been helpful yet or are they still in the uncanny valley?
We’re not using them for our newsletter but they are great for generating ideas. Most of our content is pretty dense so AI hasn’t been useful yet. We’re looking at Tofu for repurposing the newsletter into other formats.
Differentiated content is human created, so I like having a human write the V1, but AI can repurpose content effectively to improve reach.
And finally - how are these shifts in technology impacting the way you think about investing? You have an amazing portfolio of companies you’ve invested in - are there any adjustments to your thesis going forward based on
AI is changing so fast, we’re trying to understand who owns specific workflows and are investing in products that take on those very specific use cases. Generalist AI tools are harder to build a moat around. We see a lot of MarTech companies given the nature of our backgrounds. That space is pretty noisy, but I still think we’re in the early innings of the impact AI will have on the GTM landscape. We’re in a big platform shift, and these are the very early days. We invest based on the founder, product, market and unique to us- teams that we think can win on GTM. A great product is not enough, you need marketing advantages to build a massive business.
Lightning round!
Who is a marketing leader that you respect and follow?
Vanta’s marketing is excellent - Sarah Scharf has done a really great job there.
If you were trying to help a marketing friend join a startup, how would you guide them?
When you’re joining a startup you should think with an investing lens. Who are the founders, what problem are they solving, do they have a differentiated take? Don’t just look at the role.
Then I’d think about the work of marketing there: are there marketing advantages that you could accelerate? Can you see a path to success in a marketing role?
Last you need to have alignment with the founders: you don’t want to have complementary strengths to a startup’s founder/CEO. For example - we have a founder in our portfolio who is really good at design. He has to hire a marketing leader who is excellent with design, or he simply won’t let them run marketing. Or, if you’re an analytical founder you need an analytical marketer, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to trust them. Your strengths won’t be valued if the founder doesn’t already value them.
One company in your portfolio that readers should check out?
Daydream- we even built some marketing templates with them to help you map your funnel.
Huge thanks to Kathleen for joining today! You can follow Kathleen on Linkedin and you’re not subscribed to the MKT1 newsletter you should do so now!