They need a business interest beyond coding. The right person asks, Who buys the product and why? What is the running cost and where are the expensive transaction fees. They need to care about money to understand value. Some developers just enjoy coding and being an employee.
Are you aiming at developers as developers, or developers as employees who can put the company credit card details into your SaaS signup?
For the latter, you just need an honest service that would make their team's job easier.
A license for Sublime Text costs $70. I don't know how much money they make, but it's a popular product. The value perceived there is probably something like "I know it costs money to develop and maintain a highly polished, I'm willing to pay to support a tool I use every day, and I'm honestly kinda fatigued with all these ancient open source editors so take my money and give me a clean nice text editing experience."
Sublime Text is interesting, in that you also get unlimited usage without paying. That was helpful at a time when I didn't have a lot of client work coming in, and it helped me bootstrap into better work. Once I had solid client work coming in again, it felt like Sublime had helped me get there, and Sublime suddenly felt incredibly underpriced, so much less than an hour's work. There's incentive then to buy it to make sure they keep working on it, to get rid of the nag screens that occasionally slowed me down, and it looks & feels far more professional when you're not using unregistered trials as part of your work!
As much as it pains me to say this: recruiters are probably willing to pay highest-dollar for access to that audience. So letting recruiters run ads on your product, or creating some sort of native-advertising platform for recruiters will likely mean the highest short-term revenue for you.
...it just might alienate all your users in the process.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 25.2 ms ] threadFor the latter, you just need an honest service that would make their team's job easier.
A license for Sublime Text costs $70. I don't know how much money they make, but it's a popular product. The value perceived there is probably something like "I know it costs money to develop and maintain a highly polished, I'm willing to pay to support a tool I use every day, and I'm honestly kinda fatigued with all these ancient open source editors so take my money and give me a clean nice text editing experience."
More, is this something that will help me enough that it's worth the time of integrating it into my work flow.
As mentioned in another comment, it also depends who's money it is as to how that value tradeoff looks. The company they work for or their own.
...it just might alienate all your users in the process.
Talk to recruiters, ask them for good jobs that you yourself add to a curated job board that your dev audience has access to.
You can probably negotiate ~$300-500 per referral to the recruiter that works out.