Hey Dev.to 👋
I'm Daria — a product marketer who's spent most of her career figuring out how to bring developer tools to market without making developers cringe.
I've worked on go-to-market across a range of dev-facing companies:
JetBrains — the company behind IntelliJ, PyCharm, and Kotlin. Marketing to developers who make developer tools is a humbling experience.
Huawei — Enterprise-scale GTM where "move fast and break things" is not an option.
Lightrun — real-time debugging platform. Positioning a new category of tool that developers didn't know they needed yet.
Odigos — open-source observability. GTM in a space where your competition is literally free, and your users can fork your product.
Each one taught me something different about what works — and what absolutely doesn't — when your target user can read your source code.
What I'll write about here
Developer marketing is a weird niche. Most marketing advice assumes your buyer responds to urgency, social proof, and emotional triggers. Developers... don't. Or at least not in the ways marketers expect.
So I'll be writing about the stuff I wish someone had written when I was figuring this out:
- Positioning dev tools — why "we're like X but for Y" rarely works with technical audiences
- Pricing strategy — the unique dynamics of free tiers, open-source alternatives, and developer willingness to pay
- Launch planning — what a realistic launch looks like when you're a solo founder or a team of three
- Community-led growth — how to actually contribute to communities without being "that marketing person"
- Content that converts — the difference between content developers bookmark and content they ignore
My angle is practitioner, not pundit. If I haven't done it myself, I'll say so. If a framework didn't survive contact with a real launch, it won't show up in my posts.
What I'm building right now
After rebuilding the same positioning, pricing, and launch planning frameworks from scratch at every new company, I finally packaged them into the DevTools GTM Toolkit — 6 templates, 3 frameworks, and 6 checklists designed for dev tool founders who need structured GTM without hiring a consultant.
Come say hi
I'd love to connect with other folks building or marketing developer tools. If you're:
- A solo founder trying to get your first 100 users
- A developer who accidentally became "the marketing person" at your startup
- Someone who's ever stared at a blank positioning doc wondering where to start ...we'll probably have a lot to talk about.
Drop a comment, or find me on LinkedIn. First post coming soon — a positioning framework built specifically for how developers evaluate tools.
See you around ✌️
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