How do I market a developer tool without annoying developers?

By publishing the thing they were going to search for anyway. Developers do not object to being sold to so much as to being interrupted and to being made to talk to someone before they can evaluate - so a quickstart that works, a public pricing page and documentation that answers the awkward questions are all more persuasive than any campaign. The test is whether your page would still be useful to someone who has decided not to use your tool: if the answer is yes, you have written documentation, and if it is no, you have written an advert with syntax highlighting.

Do docs really work as marketing for a developer tool?

Yes, and for most small developer tools they are the primary acquisition channel rather than a supporting one. Documentation pages match the way developers actually search, which is by error message, by task and by library name rather than by product category, and those pages keep working indefinitely because the questions do not change. They are also what AI coding assistants draw on when a developer asks how to do something, which increasingly decides which library gets suggested in an editor before any human has visited your site.

Should I gate my documentation behind a signup?

No. Gating docs removes you from search results and from AI assistant answers simultaneously, because a crawler cannot read what a login blocks, and it fails the evaluation step developers insist on doing alone. It also inverts the trust sequence for this audience: they want to confirm the tool can do the job before they give you anything, and a wall at that moment reads as a signal that the tool cannot. Keep the docs open and put the account requirement at the point where the product genuinely needs one.

Do GitHub stars matter?

They are weak social proof and a terrible target. Stars are cheap to give, easy to inflate and uncorrelated with whether anyone runs your code in production, so optimising for them produces attention from people who will never use the tool. The signals worth watching instead are issues opened by strangers, forks that contain real changes, questions that show someone read the docs, and download or install counts that keep rising between announcements - all of which are evidence of use rather than approval.

Where do developers find new tools?

Mostly while looking for something else: searching an error message, reading the documentation of a framework they already use, browsing a package registry, or seeing a library referenced in someone else's repository. The deliberate discovery surfaces are secondary - link aggregators, developer newsletters, conference talks and a handful of community Discords and forums - and they produce spikes rather than baselines. This is why being present inside other people's projects, as an integration, an adapter or a documented option, tends to outperform anything you publish on your own domain.

First users · by product type · developer tool

How to get your first users for a developer tool

The audience most hostile to marketing is also the one that will read three thousand words of documentation at midnight. That is not a contradiction - it tells you exactly what to build instead of a funnel.

Published 2026-08-10Updated 2026-08-10

The honest first move

Write the quickstart until a stranger can get a working result in under ten minutes without asking you anything. That page is your homepage, your sales pitch and your highest-ranking asset, in that order - and for most developer tools it is the entire top of the funnel.

Developers are the audience most hostile to marketing and the most willing to read at length. Both facts point the same way: the content that acquires them is the content that helps them do the job - open, correct, ungated. Everything else here is secondary.

The one-line version

Developers will not talk to you until they have already decided. The entire evaluation happens alone, at night, against your docs and your repository - so the only marketing that reaches them is the marketing that is indistinguishable from documentation.

What makes a developer tool different

Your documentation is what ranks, not your marketing pages

Developers search by error message, by task and by library name - never by product category. "How do I paginate cursor results in X", pasted verbatim from a terminal. Your docs match those searches because they are written in the same vocabulary; your homepage does not, because it is written in the vocabulary of value propositions. This is why a small tool with excellent docs routinely out-acquires a funded competitor with a beautiful landing page and a docs site hidden behind a menu.

The package registry is a storefront you did not know you had

Your npm, PyPI, crates or module page renders your README, shows your download trend, and shows when you last published. Developers read all three before they read anything you wrote deliberately. A stale last-publish date reads as abandonment regardless of whether the code is finished, and a README that opens with a mission statement rather than an install command reads as a project that has not been used by its author.

One wrong code sample costs more than a bad ad

If a snippet does not run, the reader concludes - reasonably - that nobody at your company ran it either, and that judgement extends to the software itself. This is a real constraint on generated content: publishing volume is a viable tactic in most categories and an actively dangerous one here. Every snippet you publish should be executed before it ships, and ideally tested in CI so it stays true after the next release.

Being inside someone else's project beats anything on your own domain

An adapter for a popular framework, a plugin listed in its ecosystem page, a documented option in a tool people already run - each of these puts you in the path of someone solving a problem, with the implicit endorsement of the thing they already trust. This is the developer-tool equivalent of shelf space, and it is available to anyone willing to write the integration.

Assistants are now part of the evaluation

A growing share of library choices are made by a developer asking a coding assistant how to do something and using whatever it suggests. Those suggestions are assembled from public documentation, from public code, and from how the web describes your category - three surfaces you can affect and none of which you can buy.

Where developers actually are

In issue trackers of adjacent projects, describing your problem in the form of a bug report on somebody else's repository. Being genuinely useful there - a working answer, not a link - is the highest-yield manual work available for this type.
In question-and-answer results from two years ago. A significant share of developer traffic lands on old answers. Answering an old question well, and disclosing that you built the tool, still works.
In the docs of the framework they already use. Ecosystem pages, awesome lists, plugin directories and "community integrations" sections are permanent, linked and rarely competitive.
In a handful of newsletters and link aggregators where sponsorship is tolerated because the audience knows the model. This is one of the very few paid channels this audience does not resent, and the reason is transparency, not tolerance.
Not on general social platforms, mostly. A technically interesting writeup travels because of the content, not the channel. The writeup is the work; posting it is the afterthought.

Channels ranked for a developer tool

Ranked for an open-source or self-serve developer product in its first month or two. Note where paid advertising sits: this is the one product type in the cluster where the audience actively blocks it.

Developer tool · first month · effort vs payoff
Channel	Effort	Payoff	Why it ranks here
Quickstart and reference docs	Days, then ongoing	High, compounding	Ranks, converts, and feeds the assistants. The closest thing to a free channel that exists here.
README and registry listing	Hours	High for the effort	Read before anything else you wrote. Install command in the first screen, output shown, no mission statement.
Integrations into projects people run	Weeks of code	High, durable	Shelf space inside a tool they already trust. Expensive, and almost nobody bothers.
Technical writeups with real detail	Days each	Medium to high, spiky	Works when there is a genuine finding. A post about your launch is not a finding.
Answering in other people's issues and threads	Ongoing, manual	High for the first ten	Slow, unscalable, and the most reliable source of early users who actually run the thing.
Developer newsletter sponsorship	Cash, low effort	Medium	One of the few paid formats this audience accepts. Buy a slot in a niche list, not a broad one.
Link aggregators	Low per post	Volatile	Occasionally transformative, mostly nothing, entirely dependent on whether the artifact is interesting.
Conferences and meetups	High, slow	Medium, later	Real, but it pays back over quarters. Not a first-month channel unless you are already speaking.
Display and social ads	Cash	Poor	Blocked, ignored, and mildly damaging to credibility with this specific audience.

What not to do first

Do not put marketing copy where a code sample belongs. The first screen of your homepage should show the thing working. Developers scroll for the snippet and leave if they cannot find it.
Do not hide pricing. "Contact us" on a developer tool removes you from the shortlist before a human ever sees your name, because the evaluation happens without you and you have just refused to participate in it.
Do not gate the docs, the quickstart or the changelog. A login wall makes you invisible to crawlers, assistants and the exact person who was about to try it.
Do not publish generated documentation you have not run. One broken snippet is worse than no page, because it transfers directly to a judgement about your code quality.
Do not open a Discord before you have users. An empty community is a public signal that nobody is using this, sitting permanently in your navigation.
Do not chase stars. They are cheap, gameable, and uncorrelated with anyone running your code in production.

What to measure

Developer tools give you unusually honest signals, provided you look at the ones that require effort from a stranger rather than the ones that require a click.

Install to first successful call. The core number. Time it yourself on a clean machine and be honest about every step you skipped because you already knew it.
Where the quickstart loses people. Instrument the docs by section if you can, and read the support questions if you cannot - repeated questions are a map of exactly which paragraph is wrong.
Issues opened by people you have never met. A stranger writing a reproducible bug report has invested real time in your project. It is the strongest early signal of genuine use available.
Download or install trend between announcements. Spikes measure attention; the floor between spikes measures adoption. Only the floor tells you anything.
Version adoption after a release. How fast people upgrade tells you whether the tool is in production or in someone's side project.
Ignore stars, homepage traffic and social engagement. None of them require anyone to run your code.

An honest note on the trade

The deal with this audience is straightforward and slightly brutal: they will find you, evaluate you and adopt you without ever contacting you, provided you make that possible - and they will reject you silently if you make it hard. So the marketing work for a developer tool looks almost entirely like engineering work: docs, integrations, correct examples, publishing what you learned. Slower than a campaign, and it does not stop working when you stop paying. That is the trade.

The pillar covers the manual stage before any of this, and the channel picker narrows which two channels deserve your first month.

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Docs, registry or writeups first?

The channel picker asks what you built, who runs it and how it makes money, then names the two or three channels worth your first month. For developer tools it usually separates the ones whose growth is a documentation problem from the ones whose growth is a distribution-in-other-repos problem.

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