I took Writing The Essay, the equivalent of a freshman writing seminar, my first year at NYU. I got straight Bs until I finally figured it out on my last, suspiciously lengthy exposition of Bell Hooks and transcendentalism. Now I write about developer tools, which is only slightly different. Most of the things I’ve written have been completely ignored by everyone, which I think might be what forges good writers. For everything I’ve gotten to the front page of HackerNews, there’s a tweet with 4 likes sitting in the trash can. They say rejection gets easier, which I am still looking forward to!
The secret (hint: not a secret) to marketing to developers is the same as marketing to anyone: understand your audience, help your audience. Developers are practical, solution-oriented, and like specifics.
Any success I’ve had doing developer marketing is rooted in being a developer, albeit a bad one. I did Data Science in undergrad, and since then have been a mostly self-taught full stack developer. You need to stay fresh, no matter what; for me that has meant building marketing site pages, making small commits to the frontend, and picking up side projects outside of work, basically whatever I can do without breaking things. Former coworkers will attest to my uncanny ability to break things anyway – ask me about how I got Retool kicked off of Mailgun.
My job at Amplify is to help founders get their product in front of developers and data teams, ideally to critical acclaim. Before Amplify, I worked the gamut at technical startups, from blog writing to community management to growth. I’ve seen some impressive bottoms-up operations firsthand and helped build others myself from scratch. You can count on me for help with getting your first website live, building out a blog that’s genuinely interesting, starting your community, writing your first quickstart doc; pretty much anything that involves words and technical teams. And perhaps most critically, I will make jokes in Google Docs comments.
I’m a big hobby guy. I’ve been playing guitar for most of my adult life, and I think music is probably my higher calling. I’ve got a decent little axe collection starting to form. I like biking and running long distances (#checkmystrava), making fancy drinks at the home bar, and reading anything at the modernist / magic realism intersection. And like many of the other members of the Amplify team, I am, shall we say, well versed in the Seinfeld universe.
B.S. New York University
Amplify's resident cocktail aficionado and bartender.
B.S. New York University
Amplify's resident cocktail aficionado and bartender.