2 min lesson
Show, don't tell
Work through the cases in "Show, don't tell", pairing each signal with the move that fits.
Step 1 of 3
Show, don't tell
The strongest developer marketing is barely recognizable as marketing. It's a real task, the actual output and a clear account of what worked and what didn't. An engineer who can verify your example trusts the next claim you make.
Ship the snippet, the repo, the reproducible steps.
If they can run it, they believe it. Adjectives can't compete with a green test.
Document an actual task end to end, friction included.
Authentic workflows over generic marketing is a direct JD signal.
Name where the tool falls short before they do.
Conceding a weakness is what earns belief in the strengths.
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Full explanation
Meet them where they already are
Meet them where they already are
Developers don't sit through your funnel. They live on GitHub, in docs, on X and on Hacker News and they expect content that respects their time and their intelligence. Marketing that interrupts gets ignored; marketing that's genuinely useful gets shared.
The instinct to round up a number or smooth over a rough edge is exactly what burns you here. One inflated benchmark a developer can disprove discredits the whole piece and the comment section will do it publicly. Under-claim and let the example over-deliver.
I'd never write "Cursor makes you 10x faster" for this audience. I'd show one engineer's real PR, the prompt that produced it and where they had to step in and fix the agent's first pass. The honest version is more persuasive because a developer can check it.