What is developer led growth and why it's not slowing down anytime soon
65% of developers have some or all of the influence on decisions; over 80% are the ones investigating new tech purchases.
Developers hold the keys, much more than a decade ago. This is also why we’re hearing more about Developer Led Growth (DLG) and why it’s critical for developer tools companies to make a key part of their strategy.
Developer Led Growth is a go-to-market approach that revolves around developers as your core customer base. It leverages specific product experiences, customer journeys, technical enablement, and contributor models built around the developer to cultivate a flywheel of growth.
This is not to be confused with (though is very well aligned) to Product Led Growth (PLG). Wait, couldn’t any PLG be called [insert end user segment here] Led Growth? Maybe - Figma is considered a PLG success…or is it actually a Designer Led Growth success? The real differentiator is the combination of the market opportunity and the specific GTM motions aligned to developers as customers. The application development software market is projected to reach $78.5B by 2032, API management $41.5 billion by the end of 2030, and software development tools to hit $15B to name a few.
The power of DLG is that it puts customer advocacy at the center of your growth, giving you the ability to cultivate that flywheel of advocacy that drives awareness and adoption from day one. DLG empowers developers to not only build products but also to actively contribute to the distribution, adoption, and optimization of those products.
I have seen developer platforms reject DLG. They focus on enterprise experiences, marketing, and selling to the detriment of the developer customers - the actual end users of their products.
At its core, it’s being incredibly focused on solving your customer’s problem, offering tools that are grounded in great experiences, and authentically engaging with customers like they are humans - because they are humans.
Understanding Developer Led Growth
A first touch product experience that enables a meaningful testing milestone
Based on your specific developer customer needs, the sign up and trial access is critical. You have to offer a first touch experience that not only gives them a full view of product capabilities but also supports the journey in reaching a ‘hello world’ moment as soon as possible. Sometimes if your product is complex or solving complex problems, pair that hello world moment with an extended trial to ensure developers have the ability for deep exploration.
This is also aligned with your pricing model - freemium or pay as you go often gets your customer base to scale faster. The main consideration is does your enterprise model sit nicely in parallel to this or if you want to gate access, are your other developer GTM motions strong enough to balance the lack of access.
Lead with technical resources and enablement - it’s a customer success-first content strategy that doesn’t gatekeep
Developers visit documentation, tutorials, how to’s focused on use cases that align with their pain points first. They learn about your product through technical resources, technical talks, and other engineers. The incredible outcome of this approach is that while you are cultivating an authentic content strategy you are also building out the pillars of deeper customer success for users who are active in your product.
I believe with our new AI-fueled world, content created by humans, for humans will prevail especially for developers.
Empower your customers to innovate by democratizing access
Building features and resources into your product such as APIs, SDKs, sandboxes enables control and testing within the rails of a great product experience. Developers are then fully empowered to experiment and innovate. The other side of this is how much can you make these elements open for contributions. You can’t solve every challenge for every use case but enabling extensibility with your platform unlocks real innovation for both your and your customers. Plus it builds trust and shared ownership in your customer base.
Test product often and early to leverage feedback for agile iteration
While I stand strong in the belief that user experience is critical for developers ( stop shipping unfinished features to them), I do believe that there is a higher interest in early testing. Leveraging customer research earlier in the development process and gathering UX feedback goes a long way in shipping products that maximize value. Developers do also have a higher tolerance to experiment and try new things if the framing of the experimentation is accurate and they are brought along the journey.
This brings major value to your product and engineering teams with the ability to iterate early, reduce overhead of shipping things that don’t matter, and leading with the right UX from the top.
Community is table stakes - overlooking the long tail growth can be detrimental
Developers expect to see social validation up front through an active community, whether it’s hosted by you or happening elsewhere. I always recommend creating the space for community but if you’re starting from scratch, you need to meet developers where they are. An active community becomes clutch for scaling an authentic GTM motion by creating advocates for your brand, reducing overall support burden, and reducing your overall CAC.
Metrics that go beyond conversion
It’s important to measure your typical GTM and product success metrics from conversion to churn but with DLG you want to really understand the success in the product beyond conversion plus the impact of the ecosystem. Indicators like API usage and time to integration help you understand if developers are finding value. Understanding your ecosystem impact on your developer engagement programs and aligning this to your funnel metrics is key - including the sales funnel.
Developer awareness and brand recognition is one you can align with your corporate marketing in larger organizations and shouldn’t be overlooked.
DLG metrics often revolve around developer-centric indicators such as API usage, developer satisfaction scores, and time-to-integration, reflecting the effectiveness of developer outreach and ecosystem building.
The ecosystem flywheel and open source models
There are different types of ecosystems that fuel different types of growth. For example, there is the Salesforce/MuleSoft play – developers certified, new markets created. Or the Cloud Native Computing play, such as with Kubernetes skills, open source but adopted so widely it became the industry standard that opened job markets, upskilling requirements, and enterprise businesses. Both of these approaches focus on tools that augment product functionality and expand market reach.
The power of the ecosystem play opens new channels of revenue and the common trend that these all started with a dedicated community of developers who made it possible Invest in them and they will invest in you.
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This blog post was written by a human! I did however use AI to gauge a wide view of perspectives on this topic and SEO optimizations.