Productising Development Process

Twitter Research

Validation of Interest

Pre-order on Gumroad

Reddit Ads

Motivation

Our software development process is quite unique and this shall be put more to the outside so that we can benefit from it in other ways than just applying it ourselves

Challenge

“Benefiting in other ways” is not trivial.

if we create a content asset (blog post, presentation etc) on our website, I don’t expect much new benefit

In terms of increased credibility (sales enablement): Most leads (and even existing customers) don’t care about the development process

In terms of lead gen (SEO/SEA): Relevant people (not developers) are rarely searching for those kind of terms

Approaches

We need to “validate” less obvious utilisation of the development process.

A possibility is the “education” axis so we describe the process to an audience. This audience than can learn from it and apply it for themselves (Note: this is different to content on our website where we rather try to convince the people to work with us)

For education I see (at least) 3 audiences

Corporates that want to have the same development process inhouse → we teach them how to get there and might also (later) do some sort of certifications — this seems to me to be the most elaborate option as we would need a whole “training concept”, wouldn’t we? probably with info materials, some sort of workshop etc — and what kind of certificate would they want to have/how would they benefit from our certification?

Builders/Entrepreneurs → The perspective here can be: The development process that helped us gain XXY as customers and grow to 7 figures in 18 months — sounds interesting and “sale-able” — and probably there is a huge bubble for this kind of audience? (as in your Twitter example below)

Programmers/Want-to-be Programmers → The spin here is to teach them in a similar fashion as we educate our junior developers — also very interesting as there also might be a big community to distribute/offer our ideas to (probably reddit? any forums?) — I was also thinking about sth like “Masterclasses” on certain topics but this might be a lot of work

As we don’t know what works, we need to experiment a lot → the effort per iterations should be as minimal as possible

Factors for Iterations that I see here

Distribution: Gumroad, Ads, Reddit, LinkedIn etc.

USP & Product: We need an initial Content Piece that we can easily adjust for the different audiences and experiments → if everything “fails” we can still easily create content for our website

Important: We need to make sure that we just present relevant things for every audience and not “dump” everything that we have

We also need to find a away to get a first version here quickly as I don’t want to spend multiple days on V1 of the text (we can also market with life long updates which would enable us to publish a nearly version and then improve it over time)

Bias for action: Let’s not overthik and overresach stuff but bring it out quickly

A nobrainer would be to publish it on gumroad (e.g. for the 2nd audiince) as we have never done that before so we will definetly make some learnings.

For Some Gumroad best practices I would consult Twitter advance search (using Twemex extension) and potentially look for similar products on Gumroad

Here is on Thread that might be useful:

https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1432695370438479876⁠

⁠

General question: What would be the desired return/conversion (on a general base but also for each audience for example)? When trying out Gumroad, I see we can define a goal because you sell stuff. But for the other options I am not sure what exactly we would be working towards?

open up sth new → get expertise

Other question: Does it make more sense to do stuff in English or German or both? (probably also depends on audience and channel)

English

What would be a useful first content piece? Sth like a One Pager that describes in bullets how our dev process in the team works? Then blog article (as pdf download) if time for more iterations? Maybe even videos?? Because on Gumroad, it seems like it’s mostly longer content pieces or videos. — Sometimes there’s also Notion documents.

pre sale (gumroad etc), vvk seite, describe what we wanna do

validate interest? without having to create too much content directly

hacker news as a channel for Gumroad sales?

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