The Steadybit Guide to Developer Marketing: Converting Technical Skeptics into Customers

The Steadybit Guide to Developer Marketing: Converting Technical Skeptics into Customers

Marketing to developers requires a different playbook. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Benjamin Wilms shared how Steadybit turned technical skepticism – including his own – into a powerful marketing advantage that attracted customers like Salesforce.

Leading with Technical Skepticism

Steadybit’s marketing approach began with an unexpected asset: healthy paranoia. “I’m a paranoid guy. I don’t trust normally everything at the first look,” Benjamin explains. This skepticism became the foundation of their message to developers, acknowledging the harsh realities they face daily: “Production hates you. Production would like to kill you.”

This brutal honesty resonated with their core audience because it came from authentic technical experience rather than marketing spin.

Building Credibility Through Demonstration

Instead of relying on traditional marketing materials, Steadybit built credibility through practical demonstrations. Benjamin describes their early approach: “I was able to talk about this approach to my colleagues… I was able to do public speaking at conferences. I was able to create my own chaos engineering team to do trainings at other companies.”

This hands-on approach proved particularly effective with their target audience: “Our core persona is located in the SRE Performance Q, a testing area in this kind of organizations. And they are the people who are responsible for if a system is not working properly.”

Understanding Developer Pain Points

Their marketing message centered on a reality that every SRE team faces: “The SRE is sitting in front of production and if production is not working, they are in a very unpleasant situation and they are getting a lot of pressure. But on the other side, the SRE or Performance groups are very limited by resources.”

This deep understanding of their audience’s challenges shaped everything from their product development to their marketing messages. Rather than promising to eliminate all problems, they focused on giving SRE teams more control over their testing and validation processes.

Community-Driven Growth

Steadybit’s approach to community building focused on practical value rather than marketing events. They used their technical expertise to create educational content and training programs that helped developers understand and implement chaos engineering principles.

This education-first approach paid off when their first customer came from the United States, leading to unexpected investor interest: “On a Tuesday my phone ringed and there was a number from New York and I don’t have any friends in New York… it was like Elliot from Ballstudd.”

Evolution Toward Accessibility

As they’ve grown, Steadybit has evolved their developer marketing approach to reach a broader audience while maintaining technical credibility. “We don’t would like to be an expert only tool. We would like to be a tool where people without any knowledge about chaos engineering or complex systems are able to start easily save and to get value out of it as fast as possible,” Benjamin explains.

This evolution reflects a sophisticated understanding that making technical tools more accessible doesn’t mean compromising their power – it means presenting them in ways that different technical audiences can understand and adopt.

For technical founders marketing to developers, Steadybit’s approach offers valuable lessons: lead with technical authenticity, demonstrate value through practical examples, and build community through education rather than promotion. Most importantly, embrace rather than hide from the technical skepticism that developers naturally bring to new tools and solutions.

Their success suggests that in developer marketing, technical credibility and practical demonstration trump traditional marketing approaches every time.