This is the first in a series of episodes where I'm going to talk about the book, Developer Marketing Does Not Exist. I'm going to go through chapter by chapter and this one is the introduction and the introduction is titled "There Is No Spoon." On the cover of the book is a bent spoon. And so the most common question I get asked is "What's with the spoon?"

The very first cover that I created, which was just a placeholder, I'm not a designer, had a bent spoon on it. And I made perhaps a mistake of showing a designer that mock-up. And I said, now all options are on the table. It doesn't have to be a spoon, but I got lots more spoon concepts than non-spoon.

And so the final version is, of course, a bent spoon. And the very first chapter actually answers that question. So the people who have that question, I say just, read a few pages into the book. But I will tell you the answer to that question before this podcast episode is done. And it's related to the other question that I get a lot, which is what do you mean that developer marketing doesn't exist?

I mean, I put it on the name of the book. I tell a story in this chapter about how it was on three giant screens at a conference and the name of my talk. And yet here I am having been someone who's had the title with developer marketing in it. I describe the work that we do at EveryDeveloper as developer marketing. We work with a lot of developer marketers, and the best I can say is developer marketers exist, and we have to have some name for what their activity is.

But if you think about marketing to developers with the same toolbox you might use with other audiences, it's very likely to fall flat. And that's because developers are just a very different audience. Their job is to understand how things work and reverse-engineer that. And so when they see a giant lead form with lots of phone number and email information, they are seeing, rightfully so, that it's going to end up in emails in their inbox that are not personal or related at all to their problem, phone calls on their phone that they're going to just have to silence anyway because they're in code mode with the blinders on. They don't want to talk to a salesperson on the phone. They probably don't want to receive those emails, certainly the emails that are just trying to get them on the phone.

So they're a skeptical audience of typical marketing tactics because, in the past, they've just seen that those have not ended up in them getting the solution that they want. But the approach to be able to reach these developers is to go at them with what they do want. They care about developer problems and they want to think through ways to be able to solve things.

They want to learn new things. And so that's really what the book is about—that philosophy of approaching developers with education and not promotion. And using that to pull them closer and show them that you are a source to be trusted and that you have something that could solve their developer problems.

Sometimes when I explain this, people say, well, that sounds like that would work with any audience, not just developers. And yes, this is my answer to that. I really do believe that it could, but surprisingly, it's not done that often. And I think the reason that it's, particularly something to consider for developers, is that the other stuff probably won't work at all, or very rarely. Whereas you might be able to get away with some of those, more typical marketing approaches with other audiences.

So absolutely you could use the same approaches with other audiences. Swap in tools and things that they do for code and tutorials.

But it's especially important for your work with developers. And if you're listening to this podcast, you work with developers.

And so, why the spoon? The answer is that it's a reference to The Matrix, a story that I do tell in the book, it's about Neo going to the Oracle. And while he's waiting, he sees a young child with a spoon and the spoon ss bending and he was watching it. And wondering, how is this spoon bending? The child's just holding the spoon. And then the child says there is no spoon. And that's because Neo at that point is still trying to figure out that he's living in this illusion. And when it comes to developer marketing, your marketing should also be that illusion, the things that you're doing to market should not look like marketing to the people who are watching it.

So there is no spoon. There is no developer marketing. It does not exist.

Look forward to going chapter by chapter through here and telling you more about this book. Thanks for listening.