Would you rather a channel send you 100 or 1,000 new users?

Most marketers would choose the larger number. That’s my instinct, too!

To answer the question accurately requires more information. Are those 100 or 1,000 of the right users?

In our research for a client, we once enthusiastically recommended content around a partner’s integration. From the outside, it appeared the products worked well together and one existing piece of content already sent some traffic. Build on what’s working!

Then came the call where we presented that concept (along with several others) to the client.

“Not that one,” they said about the integration that seemed to have so much interest. “Our team ends up supporting the other product.”

In other words, we were right that there was a lot of interest.

But we were wrong about it being the right kind of interest.

When developers discover your product, ideally it’s with ​a relevant use case in mind​.

Sometimes, like with our client above, you can control the use cases that are discovered. Other times you cannot.

That was the case for another client who saw a rise in trials, but very little success after signup.

Then came the support requests: non-developers asking how to track someone’s location based on their phone number, a feature not at all supported by their API. A popular YouTube video claimed it was possible and had sent thousands of users their way.

Even though the team’s ​blog post​ explicitly said it wasn’t possible, LLMs trained on the YouTube video sent another influx of users. The client updated onboarding to call out the irrelevant use case, which now limits the support requests.

These two clients have learned the 100 vs 1,000 question is impossible to answer.

Not without more information or a strategy for why a particular use case matters.

This is the sort of thing we love to think about with our clients. Reach out and ​have us think about how you reach developers​.