developer-gtm
Developer GTM (Selling to Developers)
Overview
Developer go-to-market fails when teams run a generic B2B playbook at a technical buyer: gated whitepapers, "request a demo" walls, cold SDR sequences, and pricing hidden behind a sales call. Developers evaluate by building, not by sitting through pitches — and they route around anything that feels like marketing. This skill encodes the motion used by developer-first companies (Vercel, Stripe, Twilio): earn trust by helping developers ship, let the product and docs do the selling, then bring sales in to enable the champion and close the economic buyer — never to pitch the developer.
The mistake this prevents: treating developers as leads to be worked instead of builders to be unblocked, and confusing bottom-up adoption (the developer) with the top-down purchase (the economic buyer).