AI and developer tools
Developers and technical founders do not click a hero banner and book a demo. They search the problem, read the docs, try it on a Friday, and tell a colleague. The work is being present at the search, honest on the page, fast in the signup, and measured by what people actually did after they signed up. This is the same engagement, for startups in ai and developer tools and for companies in it that no longer call themselves startups.
Where the buyer is
The thing they are trying to do, the library they are replacing, the model or framework they are using. These searches are specific and cheap compared with the category term, and they convert because the page can answer them.
“Alternative to” and “vs.” the tool they have. Mid-decision, expensive, worth it when the page is honest about where you are better and where you are not.
Meta and LinkedIn work for developer tools less than founders hope. We test them with a small budget after Search is producing, and we report them honestly.
Students on a free tier with no path to pay, competitors, and hobby use outside the product’s shape. Logged apart, so activation stays readable.
Qualified, defined
Written in week one, used unchanged for ninety days.
A signup from a company or an individual that matches the use case, with a working email and a first action inside the window we define. Logged against the campaign and creative.
The first meaningful action in the product: an API call, a deployment, a pipeline run, whatever the product counts. Reported by cohort against spend.
For companies with a sales motion, an opportunity created from an activated account. Carried with the source.
Free-tier signups outside the shape, logged apart and not counted.
The work
Growth Partner
Search on the problem and the integration. A page with real code and the honest comparison, inside the system. Measurement from the click to the first API call, by cohort.
The tech that carries it
A system over your documentation that answers the questions your support queue already answers, cites the passage, and says when the corpus does not contain the answer. Piloted against an evaluation set your engineers would sign.
The records under it
Activation lives in your product’s event stream, the account in your CRM. The design names which is right about what, and the index keeps the permission of the source.
Worth knowing
A developer deciding in ten seconds wants to see the call, the config, or the output. Pages built for a marketing buyer lose them on the first screen.
Signups are cheap to buy and worthless to count. We instrument the first meaningful action before launch and manage the account on it.
If there is a repo, the star, the clone, and the first deploy are part of the record, and the cloud signup is measured downstream of them.
Copy and creative go past someone who would roll their eyes at it. Ours do too.
Questions
If yours is not here, ask. We answer plainly, including when the answer is that this is not the right engagement.
Developers hate irrelevant ads. A Search ad that answers the exact error they typed, landing on a page with the fix and the code, is useful. We buy that and not the banner.
Yes, with an event from your product to analytics or a webhook into the record. We scope that in week one and it is usually a small change for your team.
Probably for the cloud or enterprise tier, and probably on the problem and the comparison. We say what we would start with on the first call, including if the answer is a better docs site first.
The AI work here is one workflow inside your company, in accounts you own, with an evaluation set. A feature inside your product is your engineers’ work; we will say so, and we can write the design they build against.
We will say which channel we would start on, and why, on the first call.