The Developer Opportunity

Can go-to-market teams build communities and market to developers and IT at the same time?

No. Fundamentally, developers and IT are two different groups that each have important but different needs and expectations. Developers are looking for SaaS services or software that can help them build an application or make it better. IT departments are focused on finding services and software that can help them deploy these applications quicker and more efficiently. Clearly, both audiences are important as part of enterprise SaaS and software but there are key differences that are often overlooked. Developer focused companies like Stripe, GitHub, Twilio, Algolia, Dropbox, and Amazon (AWS)have build communities, software, and APIs that speed the creation and quality of an application. On the other hand, IT-focused companies like Snowflake, Elastic, MongoDB, and VMware, enable IT teams to speed the deployment and optimization of these applications. There are fundamental differences between these two teams and how you can best enable them to achieve their goals. Specifically, the two audiences have a different primary call to actions, backend transparency, pricing models, and partners.

First, developer-focused SaaS services and software are optimized to help build a sample or real application as fast as possible. They want to enable a developer to get from zero to wow as fast as possible by providing documentation, sample code, and data that allow developers to immediately feel the progress they are making toward their goal of building an application. Frequently, this focus is demonstrated by the prominence of developer documentation on the website and its relative priority in SEO optimizations. Documentation is not just important but it can be one of the primary destinations for new visitors. On the other hand, IT-focused organizations are focused on onboarding an IT team via a download or a SaaS sandbox environment to deploy applications. These organizations realize that in order to demonstrate value quickly that they will need to provide sample applications, data, and use cases to show the power of their platform.

Additionally, teams that are focused on developers will do their best to abstract the controls and what is happening on the backend service or servers in order to simplify the deployment model so that the developers can see success with their application quickly. In the early phases of development, the developer is less concerned with where their application will run, how the CPU and storage can be optimized, or what the frequency of backups will be. The developers will ultimately make these decisions a priority but it will happen after they have seen success with their application. Alternatively, IT-focused SaaS and software companies will focus on the benefits they provide to simplify the deployment environment by making it easier to secure, scale, select deployment locations and determine back up policies. These benefits frequently are as relevant in the cloud, in a hybrid environment, or on-premise.

Thirdly, developer and IT-focused SaaS and software companies will approach pricing their services and software differently. Developers expect to pay for their use via the queries that they utilize and they want the test environment to last for weeks or months while they spend time developing and improving their application. The most common pricing is usually calculated and invoiced monthly as the application moves from development, to testing, and into production. Pricing that is optimized for IT teams is also based on usage but it is more closely tied to the data, CPU, storage, and servers that are leveraged. IT pricing is commonly packaged as an annual or multi-year commitment to the service and software. Also, the IT trial and test environments are usually tied to a time limit via a service expiration or a license key.

Finally, partners, their associated technologies, and events (virtual and traditional) can play a key role in introducing a technology to a new community and these partners can provide their own technology that makes it easier to deploy and have success while building or deploying an application. For developer-focused companies, they will look for partners who can grow their community, improve the development environment (IDE), expose new APIs, and help educate a developer on their use of new technology. The developer partner ecosystem will focus on partners like Salesforce, GitHub, Dropbox, etc. IT partners will also enable a company to grow its community but they will be focused on expanding the range of deployment options for the joint technology. Thes partners can include SaaS partners but they frequently have a longer history deploying software on-premise. Some example partners for IT companies are VMware, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.

In conclusion, emerging enterprise SaaS and software companies see the opportunity to target both developers and IT but they will ultimately need to pick who they are targeting with their primary GTM efforts. The two audiences have different goals and expectations when they are looking for new technology or solutions to address their need or to provide additional value to their organization. If you look at some of the best of these companies whether it be MongoDB (IT)or Stripe (developer), you can clearly see the difference in their website, GTM, and how they have built their communities. There is and will continue to be a tremendous opportunity to build services and software for both audiences and your ability to focus will enable your teams to deliver the best experience for your customers.