Developer Journey Optimization
For when engineers love you, yet you keep missing growth targets
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It’s a common struggle, especially for dev tool startups. Your customers rave about you, yet bringing in new paying subscribers is still an uphill battle.
Unfortunately, product market fit isn’t enough if your user journey is causing issues.
Sure, you can use ads and other marketing efforts to increase traffic, but the impact will be minimal if there’s fundamental issues with your site, docs and onboarding.
“Hardly anyone was using the new product that we thought would be a gamechanger.
Through his interview process, Zach uncovered major problems, even including incorrect code in the docs and confusion with using the UI. The changes have multiplied our daily paying signups.”
“Working with Zach was great, he created messaging that spoke to the pain points of enterprise users and nailed the pitch, giving a 2x lift in trial signups.”
“Working with Zach was great, he created messaging that spoke to the pain points of enterprise users and nailed the pitch, giving a 2x lift in trial signups.”
Why great products still fail to grow
Going from initial discovery to paying customer is always a multi-step journey, where a dozens of blockers can collectively kill your growth.
For devtools, common issues often appear across these five critical stages:
Promotion - the hook doesn’t resonate with urgent, real-world pain
Website - Fails to clearly show how you're different or better than alternatives
Docs - Unclear guidance, missing edge cases, outdated terminology
Onboarding - Friction or confusion going from signup to hello world
Scaling - No path from initial success to production deployment
To make it harder, these steps can’t be viewed in isolation. For example, how you communicate the general idea on the site will impact who reads the docs and what they expect to see.
Support and sales calls don’t hold the answers
Lots of startups will interview developers at the MVP stage, then stop once they’ve validated the idea. After that, the only conversations are demo and support calls.
Sure, these conversations might help you identify some feature requests or points of confusion.
But, they’re also biased. They won’t tell you that a doc page took them twenty minutes to figure out, or that they only understood what your product does because a colleague explained it.
To find out why 90% of people drop off at each journey step, you’ll need to talk to a cold audience.
Interview-lead optimization for every journey step
Seeing someone’s first-time experience is the fastest way to uncover problems with your user journey.
This means finding developers with relevant skills and experience, then talking to them as they go through your website, docs and onboarding.
You’ll be able to see them:
Fail to understand how you compare to alternatives
Disagree with the pain points you’ve been targeting
Get lost trying to find relevant information
Frown at doc pages with missing or unclear explanations
Misunderstand what you thought was an obvious bit of UI
It’s both a painful and extremely helpful process.
Unlike watching session recordings, you can hear their train of thoughts, ask follow up questions and probe their reactions.
“Zach helped me interview ideal developers who’d never seen Judoscale before, while they saw our website and docs for the first time. At times it was embarrassing witnessing the holes in our documentation, but it was exactly what I needed to see. Our primary value proposition didn’t resonate at all, and we were effectively ignoring the things that were most important to them.
I learned more in these calls than I ever imagined, it was incredibly eye-opening and honestly quite overwhelming. As well as organizing and leading the calls, Zach helped pull together a plan of attack to address the issues we uncovered, and I have complete confidence that these changes will have a huge impact to our onboarding funnel.”
Optimize for enterprises or new markets
Going upmarket or into new territory is especially hard if all the journey steps aren’t aligned.
Interviews can be especially helpful if you’re trying to get developers to switch from an established market leader or legacy product.
Whether it’s uncovering the actual pain points of sophisticated users, or the migration guidance they need from the docs, interview-based optimization can open up a whole new revenue stream. The resulting changes can be as simple as laying out equivalent terminology you and competitors use, or as complex as building an onboarding tool for importing historic data.
It’s about researching the potential big spenders, instead of focusing on the first-timers who make up the majority of signups but minority of revenue.
What’s the process?
You don’t need dozens of interviews for game-changing insights. A few carefully chosen and run calls can be eye-opening.
Here’s how it goes:
Create an audience - Define an audience, such as “senior fullstack devs at medium sized companies, with experience scaling Kubernetes on AWS”, then build that audience on an interview platform
First round of three interviews - Together we will have the calls, with me guiding them with relevant questions to talk about their experience and go through the user journey to draw out the best possible insights.
Plan of attack - I will help process the overwhelming amount of resulting ideas into a plan of attack, outlining changes to the site, docs and UI for your team to carry out.
Second round of interviews - It’s time to test the improvements on a new cohort. We get to confirm the changes and catch ways to improve their implementation.
Refinements and promo - We will plan out how to incorporate the further feedback, as well as promo material that can tap into what we’ve discovered.
(Optional) Promo feedback - We can perform a final round to gather feedback on an article, demo video or advert you’ve created during the process.
I’m Zach, a dev tool optimization specialist
I’ve spent the last 10 years helping startups communicate why they’re great.
My work drew me to help a company interview developers to find the reasons for their low conversion rates. While the updated website was getting a good reaction, it turned out there was lots of confusion around the docs and onboarding.
I helped them improve their communication across every step of the journey, which together gave a huge boost to their daily sales.
Now I do the same for other companies, assisting them with performing the necessary research and figuring out how to put the feedback into practice.
Request a call
Please send me an email at hello@zachgoldie.com if you would like some help optimizing your developer journey. We can have an initial 15-min call to go over your situation and whether I would be able to help.