HN Explorer

How do you describe a developer tools?

4 points by sebscholl ↗ HN
Please help. My boss is killing me with this.

Our product is a developer tool. We're trying to give the landing a page a clean and direct value prop. I don't know whether or not to make it address the "why", "what", or "how". Furthermore, I don't know which would be the most valuable to developers trying to understand what we do.

Currently, we have "Develop Smarter, Developer Faster". I totally hate that. It's vague, assumptive, and tells NOTHING about what we are. I suggested, "Accelerate app development using technologies that scale". I'm not crazy about it either, as it's also not direct.

However, I'm not sure whether we should be super explicit, like "Leverage GraphQL + Serverless in data-driven SaaS apps".

Any guidance would be welcome!!!

7 comments

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sha666sum
While I'm not at all familiar with the stack your tool is for and have no qualifications whatsoever to give solid advice on this:

My cynical impression is that the vague punchlines are meant to impress middle management, but if you want to win over developers, it's best to be straightforward. From my point of view (which is an amalgamation of Linux nerd, security & FOSS advocate and Windows gamer), I'm going to bounce right away from your webpage if it doesn't give me a clear description of what the product is about. The entire internet competes for my attention, so if your website contains stock photos of smiling office workers who are "working smarter", I'm going to press Ctrl + W quite fast. Having said that, I have no issue with "Leverage GraphQL + Serverless in data-driven SaaS apps". It's honest about what your product is about, and in my experience honesty correlates with other good properties of software.

I had a look at how Microsoft markets some of their developer products, and I think their messaging is on point here[1]:

- Visual Studio IDE

Rich IDE, advanced debugging

- Visual Studio Code

Editing and debugging on any OS

- Azure DevOps

Agile tools, Git, continuous integration

- Visual Studio App Center

End to end developer services for mobile and desktop apps

[1] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/

sebscholl
This is actually super useful sha666sum! It's interesting looking at the difference between the two too. Where Visual Studio IDE is super direct, and Visual Studio spans a number of use cases. I feel like that's where I'm getting caught in the middle of.
mceachen
There are tons of great articles about what makes successful marketing verbiage, but in general, don't make your audience think. Describe how your tool solves an expected problem. Don't just describe the feature and hope they can figure out how that feature is applicable to them.
sebscholl
Totally! But very few of those articles focus on developers

...which feels like a totally different BEAST

asantalo
I agree 100% on "don't make the audience think." Competing against everything on the Internet is daunting so simplicity and reducing cognitive load wins.
ljw1001
Make it a user testimonial.

Then explain the benefit: almost always time, money, or risk-reduction, but it could be something like "Build things you could only imagine before...". If the testimonial does this, you can skip this one.

Then explain what it does and how. Not necessarily on the first page.

If you can't tell me why I need it, maybe I don't need it. Ideally, you have some class of customer who will recognize the benefit when they see it because they're dying for it. It's usually better to talk to those people than to the great mass of app developers.

sebscholl
Hey ljw - I get it, but don't you feel like user testimonials are better as a section of a landing page rather than the header?

We're had some people pretty stoked on twitter lately, but it feels awkward throwing their testimonials front and center.

Have you seen or tried this?