Developer Journey vs. Classic Funnel: what's the difference?

I don't think that marketing to developers takes you away from the classic marketing funnel. You still need to drive awareness, adoption and advocacy. The difference is that the personas change across the funnel and the steps taken before progressing change. In my opinion, developers have a goal in mind but are task oriented. If you split that statement up, and focus on the goal in mind section–it's about solving a problem that will help their company, drive new user interactions, create a monetization stream, etc. That requires thought about the end user and how to influence the business to cater to that end user. And for that task oriented section–a developer may read your documentation or go to Reddit or Stack Overflow before signing up for a sandbox, then build a proof of concept, then test all of this before publishing anything live. So the fundamental funnel is still the same, I just tend to look at it as though you’ll need to consider different persona types and different checkpoints than you would in a classic B2B or B2C journey.

Yep, a question that's near and dear to my heart because accurately representing your developer journey is such a clarity boost for everyone on the team. I like to think of the developer journey as a developer funnel. That's why developer marketing is still marketing at its heart. 

Traditional funnel, as always:

• Top of funnel: Awareness, Interest
• Middle of funnel: Consideration
• Bottom of funnel: Preference, Sale

Developer funnel, is very similar, with the exception of BoFu:

• Top of funnel: Awareness, Interest 
• Middle of funnel: Consideration
• Bottom of funnel: Adoption, Advocacy

This is why your GTM will require many of the elements of traditional marketing across brand, growth, demand gen. But instead of a handoff with sales, you're going to have your developer advocates/evangelists, product team and solution engineers involved prior to an actual sale or purchase taking place. This is especially true for complex solutions like middleware or PaaS but anything you can do to grease the skids towards BoFu motions that lead to adoption and advocacy should be what you goal yourself on. 

Of course, if your product is self-serve then adoption should lead to a credit ard being swiped and recognizing revenue. But if you're part of a more complex sales motion, your job is to get the developer to fall in love with your product, get immediate value out of it so that when their IT buyer or LOB leaders asks thems about your solution, they can give them an enthusiastic thumbs up. 

There's a reason why Twilio has that excellent tagline: "Ask your Developer". What a flex!

There is not really a difference if you are working at a product led growth company. You should drop developer sign ups the same way you would track any marketing funnel:

• Site visits
• Evaluations
• first day usage
• second week usage
• monthly active usage
• feature usage
• upsell
• customers
• revenue

The real difference is the channels you use to market to them. See some of my answers from channel questions in the AMA for where to go for those!