Tucked into the far east of Los Angeles County is a small engineering school.

Harvey Mudd College is the alma mater of LaunchDarkly co-founder Edith Harbaugh. One project particularly impacted Edith’s view of selling to technical audiences…

All students were given a blueprint of a hammer, a block of wood, some metal, and plastic.

To get a passing grade, they needed to produce a hammer within specific tolerances.

Harbaugh says it took over 80 hours to make the hammer. That’s a long time for something that could be purchased at any hardware store.

And that’s exactly the point.

When selling to developers, Harbaugh says, it’s important to convince them that they could build something… but that they have better things to do.

Early on, LaunchDarkly published a blueprint of its feature flag system. Inspired by this Harvey Mudd assignment, the goal is to show that feature flags are more complicated than people think.

Many technical projects seem simpler on the surface.

Robust software has found and handled all the edge cases.

It includes useful features that might not make the initial homegrown version.

In this feature flag example, LaunchDarkly wanted developers to understand the complexity of real-time capabilities, audit logging, and the ability to scale to billions of feature flags per second.

The blueprint approach is present in much of LaunchDarkly’s marketing.

And the company’s research shows that it works. LaunchDarkly customers are much more likely to try open source or homegrown solutions first.

It’s not build vs. buy, it’s build then buy.

Does the marketing of your technical product embrace and support alternatives?

It’s one of the best ways to fill your calendar with strategic content.

My book, Technical Content Strategy Decoded, shows how you can incorporate the mindset of your audience into everything you publish.