The hearts of robots
Stop treating engineering and developer ICPs like Klingons.
Why a developer brand is the same job as every other brand: emotional and informational at once.
Every time we start on a developer tool, somebody says a version of the same sentence. Usually in the kickoff call, usually a little proud of it: “Our users are technical. They don’t fall for branding. Skip the feelings, just show them the product.”
It’s the most confident wrong thing said in our whole industry.
The belief underneath it is that a technical person is a different species of buyer. That somewhere on the way to learning how to ship code, the part of them that responds to how a thing looks and feels got compiled out, and what’s left is a machine that reads a feature list and makes the optimal decision.
They think their user is Spock.
Pure logic, no sentiment, unmoved by anything you can’t put in a benchmark. And... it's not like them at all.
They have kids, they have families, they have pets, guts and hearts, and they have hobbies enjoyed outside of sitting at their computer. They're just as human as you are, and as a result they still judge things at face value to decide whether this company is sufficient for them or not.
Watch what engineers actually do, not what they say
The tools developers genuinely love, the ones with something like a cult around them, are almost never the bare-bones ones. They’re the ones that obviously sweat the craft.
The typography in the docs, how the CLI talks back to you, or the little moment of delight when a deploy goes green.
Here’s the part people miss: an engineer knows exactly how hard good front-end work is, because they’ve tried to build it.
So a fast, considered, beautiful website doesn’t impress them less than it impresses everyone else. It impresses them more, because they can read the difficulty right off the screen.
A great site and brand is one developer flexing on another. It says “we can actually build” without saying a word. Silent competence.
Three brands that prove it
We’ve done this with three developer companies now.
DevStats.
Sensible.
Prisma, (whose new site just went live, yay!).
Same process every single time. And not one of them ever asked us to be more technical. What we brought to each was the opposite: an emotional layer they hadn’t thought to consider and a point of view on how the thing should feel, not just what it does.
You don’t spend three years building a database tool you feel nothing about. They cared enormously about the product. They just hadn’t been given permission to let the brand care that visibly too.
Here’s what’s actually true
A developer brand has one job, and that is to be the flavorful delight on top of the necessary information that is being provided.
"This can do the job and be cool? Sign me up."
Nerds have hearts too. Make sure you appeal to them.
— Zach 😎
