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What's Your Dark Matter Strategy?

Why devrel strategy must include the long tail of developers

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•4 min read
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swyx

Writer & Curator, DX.Tips

When looking for something, we have an extremely strong bias to only search where it is easy to search.

This is known as the streetlight effect, named after a 1920's joke:

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".

It's easy to make fun of streetlight searchers when it is someone else exhibiting this behavior. Recruiters trying to fill software engineering vacancies will camp out all day on LinkedIn, not because LinkedIn is the favorite platform of software engineers. No - recruiters spend all day on LinkedIn because LinkedIn is the only platform that takes recruiters seriously. Cue the criticism: "That's so lazy!" "You're missing out on all the developers who have sworn off LinkedIn!" "The in-demand developers don't even check LinkedIn, by definition!"

Then it's useful to go out-of-body and turn the streetlight on ourselves.

Developer content creators hang out all day on Twitter and Reddit, and travel around the world on the meetup and conference circuit. This is, unsurprisingly, a formulation of the world that just so happens to put content creators at the center of the universe.

And yet, of the 73 million developers in the world:

With the most optimistic take, summing across ALL of these audiences (no overlap), you only capture ~33% of the market. Meaning if you, as a developer content creator, reached every conventional audience there is on every platform there is, you still would not be reaching two thirds of developers. And those you could reach would be majority newer developers who have the time and desire to spend on your content.

The other 2/3 of developers aren't spending their free time at meetups or watching livestreams. They'll maybe go to one conference every three years. They don't care about the hot takes. They have to look up the acronyms you take for granted. They don't know what new framework is obviously the future, and which code pattern was so yesterday.

I'm not the first to make this observation (though to my knowledge I am the first to put real estimates on them).

  • Scott Hanselman first named these the Dark Matter Developers - you can't see them, but you can see their footprint, in packages downloaded and software shipped. He described them:

    Where are the dark matter developers? Probably getting work done. Maybe using .NET 1.1 at a local municipality or small office. Maybe working at a bottling plant in Mexico in VB6. Perhaps they are writing PHP calendar applications at a large chip manufacturer. They use mature products that are well-known, well-tested and well-understood. They aren't chasing the latest beta or pushing any limits, they are just producing.

  • Ilya Grigorik called these "the torso and the tail" of the Rogers curve - thought leaders spend most of their time speaking to other thought leaders, but the people that thought leaders most need to reach aren't even in the same room.

And yet. People are never really cut off from the world. Even people in small towns know when there is a new President. You just have to reach them where they are, not where you prefer to be.

Dark Matter developers are more likely to be shipping production (if not flashy) software, more likely to have decisionmaking and buying power (as a generational tendency), and far more likely to be sticky to whatever technology they pick (by definition). If you are in developer relations, it is very much in your interest to reach the Dark Matter Developers.

So: do you have a plan to reach them?

Aside: sorry if you read to the end looking for solutions - I have some ideas (see the comments section), but no solutions to offer you yet. But I do think it is a thought provoking question to ask for rounding out content strategy. Please get in touch if you have thoughts and I'll include in a future writeup!

#content-strategy#marketing#devrel
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Comments (3)

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Aaroh Mankad3y ago

I think podcast sponsorships are also a pretty useful area to market/reach out to these "untapped" developers! A lot of folks I talk to don't consume active content in written/video form, but are much more likely to passively listen to a podcast and absorb some information that way.

Popular podcasts that I know reach out to tech and entrepeneurial folks: SyntaxFM, ReCode, Changelog, How I Built This, Masters of Scale, Software Engineering Unlocked, Programming Throwdown, etc. etc.

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swyx3y ago

Some folks have commented that this article "leaves them hanging" - this is somewhat intentional but also just an honest reflection that I don't have this fully solved yet.

Some suggestions for the impatient:

  1. SEO. Check out this podcast with Steph Smith: “Most companies focus too much on social channels... People like following people, not companies. The underrated area is that people punt until later is SEO. If you’re doing a company publication, focus on building up your domain authority and keywords."
    • Says Raman Sharma: "Fair to say more than 75% of developers search? If so, organic content that provides high-quality solutions to relevant technical problems can be more powerful and wide-reaching than optimizing for popular channels"
    • Digital Ocean famously pursued this strategy , building 6000 tutorials and 28000 Q&A's to generate 3.5m uniques/mo to its properties.
  2. Commissioning art pieces (opera? comics?) https://twitter.com/GalaxyKate/status/1534660494577000448
  3. Paid Ads https://www.developermarkepear.com/blog/paid-advertising-developer-marketing
  4. Out Of Home (OOH) Advertising. That's the marketing industry term for, basically, billboards and posters. Yes, many people ignore these. But if you figure out how to get CAC/LTV right in OOH, you are suddenly playing in a pool that very few tech companies compete in (outside of SF).
    • Says Lewis Liu: "If I learned anything about marketing at Brex, it's that billboards are still an amazing channel for building brand awareness, and unintuitively cost effective compared to most digital channels that developers tend to tunnel vision onto."

image.png (great response from ClickUp CCO)

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Jakub Czakon3y ago

Hey, swyx, great post, and thanks for the shout-out (wrote that paid ads article)!

I've been actually thinking about this exact thing a ton lately.

The same observation, a ton of more senior devs just don't spend their day on twitter/reddit or anywhere.

You do your work and after work go spend time with your family, do hobbies etc.

Yeah, you google, you StackOverflow.

But as a marketer is that all the channels I can use to reach you?

And then I started thinking about connecting it to the idea from Purple Cow by Seth Godin.

tldr: market to talkers -> then talkers will talk to doers.

So the first thought is to go talkers -> the actual talkers at conferences, socials etc.

I think this is partially true and works to an extent.

But the only talkers you should actually care about when thinking about those dark matter devs are people who actually talk to the dark matter devs.

Who are they?

So I think funnily enough those are devs they work with and talk to daily.

Now some of them are also dark matter devs.

But some are not.

Who?

My feeling is that those are junior devs or career/focus switchers (going from back-end to ML Ops for example).

As this is the moment when devs have a lot of incentive to "be out there" build a network, and learn new things.

So then paradoxically when marketing to senior devs you may want to explicitly create content/ads/talks all the stuff for juniors.

As juniors will later talk to seniors at work.

So maybe solving the "dark matter devs dilemma" is similar to how you can see a black hole :)

By looking at things around it.

That was long, figured I'd just "think in public" as it has been on my mind for a bit now but didn't know of anyone thinking about it as well :)

Again thanks for posting swyx!

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Monica Matthews3y ago

Interesting read, Shawn! 👏

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