Which marketing channels do you use to reach dev audience during your launch? Do you ignore emails? Do you use dev communities?

We have a strong community in the dbt Slack channel, but it's not inclusive of all dbt practioners. So we use four main channels to get in front of our target audience:

1. The dbt Slack community, when announcements are highly relevant to their work

2. Quarterly product launch events targeting existing users that want to go deeper on new releases

3. A "how to" write-up for our DevBlog paired with a "why we did it" blog for our Corporate Blog 

4. A monthly product newsletter that might include an invitation to participate in the beta, or quotes from early users.

Bonus 5. I think we'll start bringing back product team office hours to make ourselves more available as a resource for digging deep in new functionality.

I'll answer how I get to creative value props for developer-focused products, I hope that helps!

1. Be unfailingly curious about who your persona is—developers are incredibly diverse, so you need to dig into the nuance of your target's unique motivators, goals, beliefs... Capture this detail and use it to inspire the core message.
2. Take inventory of the messaging in your space. Understand what it's like to be your target persona in a sea of messaging that they encounter each day. If your core value prop blends in with the background, keep re-working.
3. Ask yourself why your persona will care about a given value prop. Then ask why again. While things like "faster" or "more performant" matter, they aren't the root motivation. What does your developer want to achieve both for their company and customers as well for themselves.

First off, I recommend reading my friend Adam DuVander's book Developer Marketing Does Not Exist. He is the master of teaching people about how to work with developers.

In the past, when I've done developer marketing, these were some of my most successful initiatives (but please read Adam's book as he's much more comprehensive):

1. Create a solid developer portal that not only provides access to your developer tools and technical documentation, but also includes examples of what other developers have created. Developers learn from other developers.

2. Ask developers — either your own or partner/customer developers — to speak at developer events. Back in the day, pre-Covid, some of my biggest developer relations wins were at in-person events like this. I haven't had as much luck with online developer conferences, but short webinars and videos have performed well in this remote-work environment.

3. Working with your CTO or a developer to blog about developer topics, and then sharing those on Hacker News, etc. is daunting for some marketers, but it can outperform anything in terms of one-off tactics. At Meridian, an indoor mapping software company acquired by HP/Aruba, we drove heaps of interest in our software development kit (SDK) by working with our CTO to write about topics such as "An iOS Developer Takes on Android" or "GIT is Simpler Than You Think." We didn't directly promote Meridian or even the SDK, but instead talked about what it's like to tackle developer problems while an employee of the company. The association drove interest in the company, which in turn drove usage of the SDK.

I'd suggest:

• An engineering blog on your website which would include blogs about how your engineers did x,y,z; overcame certain professional challenges, etc. 
• Using Twitter and LinkedIn for communicating about the product and for pushing the Engineering blog/posts
• Participating in Stack Overflow channels that are relevant to you 
• Depending on the current size of your customer base, I'd create support/forum channels specifically in Slack and/or
• Provide proper developer documentation - check out Twilio, Facebook or other similar sites for ideas
• Using a notification widget within the sites that you host that developers visit in order to engage with them

Before launching, work with someone or a company in your developer community to build something interesting with the features. Document the process, put the code up on Github if possible. Make it part of the messaging. It's gives developers a real example of why they should care about the launch.

The slack channels, and other push marketing like corporate / engineering blogs, developer docs and portals, release notes, office hours, newsletters, and podcasts are table stakes now.

No one buys the "we are used by all this famous tech companies" because someone signed up for a free account messaging.

If you want to be developer-first, literally put the developers up front. Promote the developers and their companies and the work they are doing with your products.