Some developers are not developers

Some data you just don’t want to believe. If you ignore its message, you’ll miss out on the real opportunity.

So why would I suggest looking for non-developers? Because sometimes that’s the audience you already have. If you’re insistent on developers as an audience, you could be under-serving the people trying to use your product.

At Zapier, we spent months struggling to get adoption for a command line interface only our deepest integrators wanted. After several changes, the developer UI looked something like this:

And yet, more users clicked that little link than the big blue button. Significantly more.

That data backed up stories we heard in a handful of interviews with our “developers:”

“That CLI looks useful eventually, but right now I don’t want to write code.”

As much as I believe in a developer audience, I think it’s worth asking these questions. In Find Your Portal’s Invisible Audience, you’ll find ideas to help you confirm who you’ve attracted—and ways to serve them better.