A hot dog lesson for every developer marketer

Hey Reader, You don't even need to like sports to see the beauty of this ballpark moment. I flew back to the Bay Area to watch the A's baseball team play its final games in Oakland. Not so much for a game itself as for the community that gathered. But it was a great night for baseball: The Coliseum, the hunk of concrete from the 1960s where they’ve always played, does not hold up to modern ballparks. But it evoked a certain nostalgia, so I stayed for about an hour after the game ended. Lots of others did, too. Several vendors were selling hot dogs when I exited the gate. Other fans were milling about, so I bought one and stood around taking it in. The hot dog setup itself was a flexible little stand. Each seller had a small wheeled cart holding a grill and a disposable fuel can. They could move to another location without a lot of rigamarole. Just a normal amount of roll. Check it out: As I stood outside with my dog, talking baseball with other fans, I watched the vendors find their customers. See the bustling business on the left side of the photo? Two minutes before this picture was taken, a group of fans didn’t know they wanted hot dogs. The vendors had been closer to the exit, but wheeled the cart over and began selling. Like the fans enjoying the post-game revelry, developers are doing their own thing. They aren’t thinking about your product. Before developers discover your product, they are doing something else: solving a problem, learning a skill, or chipping away at their issue backlog. You need to wheel your cart over and unobtrusively let the developers know you're there (ok, "unobtrusive" might be the harder part for stadium vendors). For you, this presence can be attending a developer event, chatting authentically in a community, or posting a technical article that shows you understand them. It's true, this will endear you to the devs. You'll build trust. But you'll also learn exactly how they talk about the things they want. The sort of things they'll be asking search engines, agents, and the LLMs that power them. Do you know what they're asking? Do you know how your product shows up? I just published the latest LLM rankings for dev tools on llmrank.fyi — if you don't see your category there, let me run some numbers for you. Just tap a reply here. Adam