In this week’s episode, I’m joined by Ivan Burazin to talk about his creative approaches to developer marketing – from designing custom fashion to an API onboarding game. We discuss why adopting a bottom-up motion to attract developers is tough for a traditionally sales-led organization, how to break through the noise, and what it means to design an onboarding game experience for developers. Ivan was Chief Developer Experience Officer at Infobip at the time of recording and is now the CEO and co-founder of Daytona.io.

Talking Points

• What does Ivan do as a Chief Developer Experience Officer?
• Why B2B sales-led tech companies need to get creative with their developer marketing
• How Ivan justifies pushing the boundaries of creative marketing to stakeholders
• Balancing needs between sales-led and developer-led motions
• How games can help developers learn the API and SDK
• How a game differs from the “traditional” developer experience
• The challenge of gaining attention from developers
• Does headcount matter when doing creative marketing?

<Blockquotes>

Lightly edited for context

“How do you get the word out about the problem you're solving to developers without ‘marketing’? How many communities can a developer be a part of? How many Slack groups can you have before it falls apart and you're not looking at them anymore?” – Ivan

“[Developers] have a home. They're never going to go to InfoBip.com because there's nothing for them there. They're not going to read marketing material because they're not interested. It's: does it have the feature set that I have? Is the documentation good? And how can I sign up, and how long does it take me to get to my first sort of hello world.” – Ivan

“The way I look at it is like we can create the best sort of experience, you know, onboarding, documentation, sign up, whatever, but if no one knows you, no one's gonna come.” – Ivan

“There are two things that you have to break through to get developers to sign up and to use your services: you have to be better than competitors, and you have to educate them that you actually exist.” – Ivan

“What can I do that's sort of over the top – because there's just so much noise in the dev space.” – Ivan

“If you're just gonna do what everyone else does, it's gonna be really, really hard to compete.” – Ivan

“If you count how much revenue comes from bottom up, comparable companies to Infobip generate anywhere from 40 to 50%. These end up being upgraded to account executive and managed accounts and whatnot. But they originated from the developer and self-service.” – Ivan

“Constraints breed creativity. In order to compete when you have less resources – that can be an asset. You can look at it as an opportunity to get much more creative with what you do.” – Kamran

“Yes, if you want to build an RPG, then it's probably gonna use some graphics, but you can also do different types of styles that don't require a ton of graphics.” – Kamran

Links

• Follow Ivan on LinkedIn or Twitter
• Check out his newest venture, Daytona.io
• Infobip’s developer hub
• Infobip Shift conference
• Read the Make Time book
• Read the Mythical Man Month book
• Read the Purple Cow book
• Read about Kevin’s experience with Twilio Quest on Developer Mode
  • Note that the Twilio Quest program is now sunset but the game is still available
• Excalibur.js, the open source TypeScript 2D game engine I help maintain
• Play some of the games I’ve made