Startups selling dev tools over the last few years have seen the pendulum swing. On one hand, developers rarely need anyone’s permission to start using their tools, which resulted in teams within the same organization using wildly different tech stacks. On the other, a growing number of companies are attempting to limit this chaos at the organizational level.
The latter trend is known as platform engineering and is embodied by platform engineering teams. Talking to TechCrunch, Boldstart Ventures partner Shomik Ghosh described these as “groups within typically larger organizations that are given the role to improve the developer experience for other developers in the organization.”
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The role of platform engineering teams includes coming up with their own tools and documentation but also making buying decisions on core tooling that developers across their entire organization will be able to use.
For dev-centric startups, this presents a question: How do you sell your product to platform engineering teams?
We asked this and more to three people with deep knowledge of this space: startup founder Nora Jones, CEO at Jeli; Armon Dadgar, CEO and co-founder of NASDAQ-listed company HashiCorp; and Draft.dev CEO Karl Hughes, a developer content marketing expert. Let’s dive in.
Seize the momentum
Platform engineering comes with a promise: It can make developers more efficient at their job. In a recession, and considering how much developer headcount weighs on the cash balance, this is a popular value proposition.
The rise of platform engineering, an opportunity for startups
“During good times, businesses tend to focus on growth and new revenue rather than cost-cutting, so platform teams building internal tools may not have as high a priority as new product development teams. That said, during a downturn, cutting costs is typically much more appealing,” Hughes said.
That platform engineering teams have internal leverage is good news for startups hoping to turn them into clients. Hughes also had a suggestion on how startups can adjust: “If your tool helps a platform engineering team lower build times, write less code or hire fewer engineers in the future, I’d lean into that right now.”
He cited three of Draft.dev’s clients — Fiberplane, Loft.sh and Pipekit — as being good at selling their value proposition to platform engineering teams. For instance, Pipekit “has really leaned into the cost and time-saving their platform offers.”
If you want to emulate them, go for it: Cost and time savings are music to companies’ ears these days. “Just be careful not to commoditize your offerings,” Hughes warned. To avoid this pitfall, it helps to bring across what your company is doing better than what the platform engineers could come up with.
In Pipekit’s case, its value proposition is to enable massive data pipelines. According to Hughes, that’s a “product that almost every company has to develop in-house, but they’ve done a great job building a better, faster solution that doesn’t require internal tooling” — and apparently, at pitching it.
I am using “pitching” loosely here: Developers hate being marketed to. What’s more, dev tools are one of the fields that are ripe for product-led growth, in which users engage with the product first. But as we’ll see, it doesn’t mean that platform engineering teams don’t need to be sold to.
Draft.dev CEO Karl Hughes on the importance of using experts in developer marketing
Users and buyers
Dev tools companies have more stakeholders than their enterprise predecessors.
In a centralized world, a startup wanting to sell a B2B solution would have had to pitch the person in charge of procurement and meet their criteria before any employee tried the product. But the consumerization of B2B means that individuals within an organization are more and more often free to sign up for services of their choosing.
HashiCorp’s Dadgar knows this well: His company is behind a portfolio of tools that help companies operate in the cloud, such as Terraform, Vault and Consul. These tools are open source, meaning that anyone can start using them for free.
This puts HashiCorp in the same position as other freemium companies: It has users, and it has buyers. Indeed, how HashiCorp makes money is by selling proprietary features on top of its open source tools. While any team can decide to shell out, the largest opportunities lie in convincing platform engineering teams to enter organizationwide deals.
This ties into another trend: the rise of product-led sales, in which a sales motion needs to be deployed on top of product-led growth.
The rise of product-led sales, or why product-led growth requires a sales makeover
Indeed, the open source offering helps HashiCorp get its foot in the door and find leads but doesn’t do the whole job, Dadgar said.
“I think for us the value of our open source [offering] is that we’re already in the organization; they’re using our tooling and so they’re open to having the conversation with us. But the product that they’re buying as the platform team is a different product than the open source one that app teams are using,” Dadgar said.
Developers and platform engineers don’t just work on different teams: They have different sets of priorities. For instance, the app dev team cares a lot more about time to market than compliance, while the latter is one of the top priorities of platform teams, Dadgar explained. For a company like HashiCorp, this requires talking to both and having the kind of features that a platform team will want.
A common thread of these conversations, though, is that developer relations experts need to have a lot more technical knowledge than their peers who were only interacting with product people and nontechnical executives.
Jeli is an incident management startup, and its CEO, Nora Jones, is a former Netflix and Slack engineer. Via email, she said that it wasn’t only about technical knowledge: “Our DevRel staff are not only experts, but also practitioners. They aren’t marketers, but they are people that have been in platform engineering’s shoes.”
Jones also noted that DevRel is evolving as a discipline. “I believe it’s replaced by going through cycles. So it’s a cycle of doing the work, popping your head up and teaching about it, and then popping your head back down and doing the work yourself. It’s just that endless cycle, so that you can remain close to the practitioner.”
At HashiCorp too, almost all of the DevRel staff members are former operators — of the kind that the company is selling to, Dadgar explained. “So rather than them being end developers, they’re the ones who often either operated the platform teams, or were in the site reliability engineering (SRE) and operations line of work.”
Of course, this profile isn’t exactly easy to find. According to Dadgar, this is one of the main limiters to the creation of more platform engineering teams. But while this is still pretty early, he and his co-founder are convinced that the transition is inevitable.
I tend to agree, and I hope they are right: It would be good news for startups who have honed value propositions to improve the developer experience.
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