My #1 strategy to get in a developer’s head

The woman is insistent they return her car to its previous color. She moved quickly from surprise to indignance. And I can’t blame her.

Imagine how you’d feel: your grey car is starting to show some dirt. You hand your keys to a car wash attendant, who talks you into an eco-friendly “green” wash.

Then, a few minutes later, the car emerges… painted green.

That’s the premise from one segment from The Carbonaro Effect, a hidden camera magic show I’ve watched a bit too much recently.

Some of these bits clearly get in the heads of the innocent victims. They get in my head, too, but perhaps in a different way. It may be my developer background, or just a natural human tendency to wonder: how do they do that?!

(Two different cars, right?)

Developers go through a similar problem-solving process as they do their work. You can get inside their heads without even angering them.

My #1 strategy is to head to a search engine, but it’s not Google.

When a developer is faced with a problem (like one your product may solve), their first instinct is to build it themselves. The natural pieces of that solution will be their familiar tools, which often means open source.

Let’s say it’s an AI chat bot on the developer’s mind…

You can head over to GitHub search and see what open source results await the developer. While they may not perform this exact search, this will show what’s available if they did. You can start to piece together how they’ll think about the solution before they find you.

And that’s the key point: if you can put yourself in the place of a researching developer, you’ll understand how you can get their attention.

Open source is one of several audience approaches the EveryDeveloper team uses to get in the head of developers. You can apply it to your product to attract more of the right developers.

​Reach out to our team to learn more (no sleight of hand—we promise).