You shipped the thing. You wrote the launch post. You even got a few hundred upvotes somewhere. Then nothing happened, and now you are reading marketing FAQs at 11 p.m. looking for the part where it explains why.
PostHog published a good one in August: The most common questions about developer marketing, answered, by Joe Martin. Thirteen questions, honest answers, the kind of thing a company that size can afford to say out loud. I agree with most of it. Repeat the launch across channels. Pick channels you can actually be good at. Hire a product marketer first. Batch small updates into a changelog.
Four questions are missing, and they are the four that decide whether the other thirteen were worth doing. Here they are, with the answer I give the developer-platform teams I work with.
1. How do you know the launch worked?
PostHog's answer to ROI is, roughly, that they track sign-ups closely but judge success on cultural resonance. That is a fine answer when you are PostHog. It is a bad answer when you are a Series B platform whose board asks what the launch did.
Bad: "We got 4,000 views on the post and a lot of positive comments."
Good: "Baseline on 1 March: 212 signups a week, 3 of 48 unbranded AI answers name us, comparison page gets 90 visits a week. Read on 30 March: 340, 8 of 46, 410. The migration guide did most of it."
The launch has an owner and a read at day 30 against a baseline you wrote down before it shipped. If you did not write the baseline down, you do not have a launch, you have a post.
2. How do you attribute anything when you sell to developers?
The article's answer to "how do you track ROI for your campaigns" is to focus on awareness rather than direct attribution. I understand why. Developers block trackers, read docs logged out, and sign up three months after they first saw you.
That is a reason to measure differently, not a reason to stop. The unit is not last-click. It is the ratio between what your systems see and what actually happened, read before and after each change.
Bad: "Attribution is impossible for developers, so we look at brand search."
Good: "Server events carry the identifiers the browser loses. Signups per week, referred installs from the comparison page, and unbranded citation share are read the same way every month. When a number does not move, the readout says so."
If your ad platform sees a third of your real conversions, it optimises toward the third it can see. That is not an awareness problem. It is a plumbing problem, and plumbing has a fix.
3. How do you actually show up in AI answers?
Question six in the article is "how do you approach showing up in LLMs," and the answer is, in effect, delegate it to specialists. I am one of the specialists, so I will say what the specialists do.
Bad: Add an llms.txt file, write "AI SEO" on the roadmap, wait.
Good: Run your 30 category prompts against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Count how many answers name you and who they name instead. Find the page the engines cite when they recommend a competitor (in one engagement this year it was the client's own comparison page). Fix that page. Re-run the prompts in six weeks.
SE Ranking looked at 2.5 million pages last month and found that what AI cites is not llms.txt. The file is table stakes. Citation share on real prompts is the metric, and it moves when you fix the pages the engines already read, not when you add a file they might.
4. Who owns the launch when the first marketer is not there yet?
PostHog says hire a product marketer first. Agreed. The search for a senior developer-platform PMM runs about six months, and the launch is in eight weeks.
Bad: The founder writes the post the night before, the engineer who built it tweets it, nobody owns the comparison page, the read at day 30 never happens.
Good: One person owns the messaging hierarchy, the comparison and migration pages, the per-channel pack, the enablement for whoever sells, and the 30-day read. If that person is not on payroll yet, it is a program with a start and an end, not a retainer.
That is how I run launches for developer platforms: a fixed scope, measured before and after, while the req stays open. It is also why I think the "death of the developer advocate" thread on r/devrel is half right. The role is not dying. The version with a salary and no number attached is.
I'm Daria, a product marketer who spent seven years at JetBrains and now runs marketing engineering programs for developer platforms at GTM Labs. The launch playbook I use is public at How to Launch a Developer Tool.
Which of the four is the one you are stuck on right now? Drop it in the comments and I will give you a specific next step for your situation. I answer every one.
Top comments (0)