Search platform Algolia provides great user discovery experiences to any company. Though it had developer word of mouth, the marketing team struggled to move beyond their base who already knew and loved their product. They wanted to expand the technical audience that found them, but didn’t want to drown their blog in low-relevance, top-of-funnel articles.

Challenge: Find Developers That Don’t Know Algolia Yet

Algolia was successfully attracting developers who specifically searched for their brand name, but they struggled to reach the vast audience of developers who could benefit from their platform but had never heard of it—developers who weren’t including “Algolia” in their searches simply because it wasn’t on their radar.

It’s notoriously difficult to be objective about your own product, especially when you’re immersed in it daily. The marketing team needed an outside perspective from someone who understood the developer audience and could help them connect with developers at the problem stage rather than the solution stage.

Algolia engaged the EveryDeveloper team to better reach its audience with product-agnostic methods. Here’s how we applied our deep understanding of developer trust and helped Algolia build it with the right developers.

Solution: Speak to Developer Problems, Not Algolia’s Product

EveryDeveloper approached this challenge with a clear philosophy: the best technical content serves as a translation from a known problem to a solution that happens to be supported by the product.

Our strategic approach involved the following:

• Identify developer problems that Algolia’s platform solved, without making direct product pitches
• Build trust first by demonstrating a genuine understanding of developer challenges
• Save product mentions for after we’ve provided substantial value

To execute this strategy, we chose autocomplete functionality as a specific developer problem to address. Developers often try to build this feature themselves, and Algolia solves it elegantly. However, our tutorial does not show Algolia’s solution, it covers how the reader would build it.

In addition to giving developers architecture options, our tutorial shows:

• Front-end interface developers would need to build
• Back-end data source they’d have to create
• Complex code required to connect these components

Only after thoroughly exploring the DIY approach did we introduce Algolia as a potential solution, positioning it naturally within the developer’s journey. The highlighted section makes the first mention of Algolia, with this image showing this section in comparison to the greater post:

This approach respects the developer’s capabilities: some would recognize autocomplete was harder than expected and try Algolia immediately, while others would simply appreciate the learning experience and remember Algolia when facing similar challenges in the future.

Result: 100s of Developers Discover Algolia Every Month

The autocomplete tutorial quickly became one of Algolia’s most successful blog posts. One strategic content initiative delivered an outsized impact:

Since publication, the post has:

• Generated 20,000+ new visits
• Ranked for 100+ relevant keywords
• Referred traffic to product and documentation pages

And it continues to provide impact beyond the typical blog post due to its focus on problems over product.

As our team researched the piece, we cataloged insights and additional possibilities to share with Algolia. By working with EveryDeveloper, Algolia’s team received not just a piece of content but an objective analysis of the space around the problems they solve.

More than two years removed from the initial engagement, Algolia continues to receive 100s of monthly visits from developers through this single blog post. The post has become a reliable, low-maintenance asset that consistently brings in new technical audiences. Further, they received a valuable assessment of their problem space, which helped the team see their own product in a new light—revealing opportunities they were too close to notice and insights they couldn’t get from inside their own organization.

Need a fresh perspective from a partner that understands your technical audience? You can get results like Algolia when you collaborate with EveryDeveloper.