Developer marketing when everyone is a developer

0:05Today we're joined by Matt Palmer, developer relations and developer marketing expert, formerly of Replit, vibe coder and weightlifting enthusiast. The AI boom has minted a lot of winners, but no category has absorbed more value than coding assistance. So what happens to developer marketing when everyone is a developer? I'm Helen, and today we're joined by Ashley and Matt. Great chat is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking loved by over 300 ,000 entrepreneurs. We use Mercury to run this podcast and love recommending it to other founders and fund managers. It's free to get started.

0:36Try it for yourself. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply in minutes. Hey guys. Hi guys. That's when you say hi. Oh wait.

0:48Welcome to the pod. Yeah. Welcome to the pod, Matt. It's a great thing we have an editor for this. Thank you. Yeah. It's great to be here. Did you guys read the SF social scene led by the terminally online post last week made me sad well i read it got sad because i'm like oh i guess this is what the kids are doing but then i got actually like a ton of messages about it or i was in some group chats with like true sf gen zers who were like that's not how it is at all and this is so out of touch and i was like oh okay that's good um but curious matt what did you think there's some truth to it, but I think largely out of touch with reality.

1:27Well, what do you mean by that specifically? Well, I think that there is a group of people who are terminally online in San Francisco that do get together and throw parties. But I think that that's a much smaller portion of the population than people tend to assume.

1:40Matt Palmer:They're just the ones telling us all they're doing it all the time. Yeah, exactly. A vocal minority, I think. Somebody was like, can you imagine if any of these people try to get into a club in LA. I'm like, yeah, that's right. There's a whole world outside of San Francisco. But one thing I thought was kind of interesting, there was a young woman who said like, I'm terminally online. I go to these things and I always leave feeling kind of sad that there's almost like this, you know, kind of dynamic where everyone's sizing each other up and like how many followers you have and how popular you are.

2:12The internet has democratized like a lot of things and I think that that was really inspiring and cool but like when there's like an in-group and an out-group kind of like the same dynamics just reappear of like exclusion and you know there's a whole movie about this uh called Mean Girls uh when Katie gets really popular she's like kind of turns into an asshole.

2:32Matt Palmer:I have a young friend who moved to San Francisco and what she described felt so different from the San Francisco in my 20s when I worked in startups like it was so status driven and like it was more about like where you worked like what role you have at what company was sort of the ticket in to like whether you belong or not and you know there was some of that I guess like in the prior era but not nearly at the level I think they're really only like a handful of companies that like quote-unquote matter right now and so if you're not at those companies and also you know we've we've shared commentary in our group chat about being an early Sage founder is no longer necessarily high status, like it's lower status than having an operator role at some of these sexy companies.

3:19Matt Palmer:And so it's just interesting that status has become this pretty significant metric in a community that just used to be a bunch of nerds and oddballs. So yeah, I'm happy to hear that the blog post isn't representative, but someone should write a piece on like status in San Francisco. I would eagerly read that. Well, Matt, you were talking about one, right? Yes. There's another Twitter article that I think went kind of semi-viral about the SF group chat, which is like a metaphorical group chat. The main point of the article is that there is some cadre of people in San Francisco who interpret who you are or form opinions on who you are based on what you post online, based on the fact that you're terminally online.

4:01And so it's not a literal group chat, but you can create a reputation for yourself for better or worse by being terminally online, essentially. this weekend basically i went to several like you know parties with people who are terminally online and then my friends and i went out afterward and so right it's like okay you're i was in these environments where people come up to me and be like what are you building which i hate i hate when people do that um and then we went out to like bar part-time oh lovely awesome spot and it's like this is where the actual normal people are none of these people are going to recognize me from twitter or whatever and if you ask somebody what they're building they're just going to like laugh in your face.

4:36Matt Palmer:So a tale of two cities. Exactly. And this is what people don't understand. And I actually think this is where a lot of the kind of clash comes in with people who are very like status driven in tech space or in the startup space. They come into San Francisco and they're all, you know, 996, look at my startup. I'm so cool. And then they wonder why they can't date anyone or they don't have any friends. And it's like, OK, well, you're losing access to 99 % of the city if all you think about is your AI startup or your, you know, agent that you're building. This isn't like a totally new trend. Matt, it looks like you're pretty on Twitter.

5:07Matt Palmer:I'm pretty on Twitter too. And there are a lot of contacts I made and relationships I built because of my participation in that community. But the way you gained status online previously was like being funny. Like if you had good jokes about things and now it's very performative. It's like, this is my open claw setup. and like, you know, 996, performative productivity. Like I think people would have been kind of a little turned off by that maybe 10 years ago. And now that's the way to the top of the social ranking. So I'm opting out of this wave. I still think that you have to be funny. Like I think that all these accounts that have, you know, gotten huge followings, there's like a wittiness and a cleverness to the content that they share.

5:53I don't know.

5:53Matt Palmer:There's a lot of rage baiting. There's a lot of like you're doing it wrong. I miss funny Twitter Twitter used to be a lot funnier there's a lot of shit posting which is like a form of humor but is a little bit different than I think the earlier vibe well Matt I was curious what you thought about this I saw this like sneak peek of Claude's cooking up something in the vibe coding space or Anthropoc's cooking up something you know with Claude code and it lets you shit like you know full stack apps maybe And so thinking about like players in that category, I guess Replit included, Lovable, there's many.

6:32We, I guess, always had a hunch that the models would get into this game eventually. Yeah, it's felt inevitable. But like now is the kind of the first time where we've seen something. What do you think and how is the community reacting to that? Well, I've seen a bit of buzz about it online so far. And I think every time Anthropic kind of edges into that territory, there's like a response, right? There were first artifacts a few years ago, or I guess a year ago at this point, where you could just write HTML JavaScript and get something very simple, like a preview in Cloud, but that didn't really go anywhere.

7:03And we've seen Google with AI Studio and some of these other things that they're building do similar things. I'm not too concerned about that. I think there'll still be a place for Lovable and Replit and all these tools because of how much of it is cloud services, right? Can you build a full stack application or have a database or have objects or have all these essentially developer tools built into your app? I think for people that just want to build a portfolio site or a landing page, that's definitely squarely in the target here. But another opinion that I have, which we can get into more, is that I haven't seen exactly the best product sense from the labs lately.

7:38And so I think the market is so big that there's so many different types of products you can develop. And it wouldn't surprise me if this just is a test for Anthropic or they're just like putting out something that's a bit more surface level rather than a real product. Well, I feel like OpenAI was playing that game like a year ago where like their developer day, to me, the takeaway from their developer day was basically like, hi, everyone, we've gathered you here. And just to say, please don't bother because we've got that category and this one and this one and this one and everyone left like, okay.

8:08And so I kind of feel it's a smart move, right? Because I think the questions that VCs ask is like, oh, well, how will you compete against, you know, one of the model companies or big tech companies? and so I you know I think that that's sort of like going on the offensive is something that is probably just smart for them to do yeah I don't disagree but like there are all these things from developer day for example apps and chat gpt how many people actually use apps and chat gpt I don't know anybody right like maybe maybe you use these but like um open ai also announced the ability to like build agents I was at developer day last year so I remember these things build agents in the browser I don't know anybody that uses that at all right anthropics announcing the same things actually like the ability to build agencies in cloud code and the ability to create applications do these become real products i don't know or are they just trying half-baked ideas i have no idea well what about the new anthropic model that's just too powerful for release it's too powerful i don't i don't even think we can talk about it the memes are so good

9:07Matt Palmer:on the one hand if you take the story at face value it's like oh thank goodness anthropic is being so responsible and like not releasing mythos into the world for cybersecurity reasons. But I'm getting like cynical now. Like I'm like, Anthropic is too good at storytelling. And I'm just like, oh, this is such a, this is such a self-serving narrative. Like, oh, this model, it's like so powerful. We can't even give it to you. It would just like destroy the world. And so we're gonna, we're gonna create this council. And I mean, it's probably like, there's probably both truth to the rhetoric, but also it's very much rhetoric and it's very much intended to build a lot of hype and excitement ahead of their supposed IPO later this year.

9:50Matt Palmer:So I do love how it's become a meme of like, well, I can't release this because it's too powerful. Did you see this TikTok video of this British woman talking about how marketing roles have been, what's the phrase? Masculinized, which I did not know if that was an actual word, But basically talking about how there's all these like growth engineering roles and, you know, she's just like scrolling through LinkedIn of all these posts of new jobs that when you read the job description, you're just like, that used to be a social media manager or that used to be somebody who, you know, trafficked a bunch of ads.

10:23That got me wondering if the whole like, oh, we don't need a marketer. We need a growth hacker is back. And you brought this up earlier about how like comms people also went through something where it was like, oh, comms people. Yeah, that's PR. We need a storyteller. And so I just feel like we're going through this, these different phases. And I saw some dialogue of people clapping back on like the, I am actually a growth engineer and here's how it's different from marketing. Totally.

10:52Matt Palmer:It's a real role. yeah it is a real role um but I mean even storyteller to me feels maybe female coded like it's funny because comms people are usually called PR people and PR is kind of like a subset of comms and so we're always like no we're comms people people tried to make storytelling happen and it just sounded so douchey um but now it's been embraced and yes I think it's less less gendered than like the marketer to growth hacker but definitely like like a rebranding to make something that has been around for a while sound new I wonder if we just start slapping engineer on everything because oh for sure now building a lot of technology to do their jobs and so um and so just like this engineer become meaningless um as a term and do we have to find like a new word for the actual engineers to like designate them from like the the people engineers and the operations engineers and it's just going to be everyone yeah front front desk person is like office experience engineer not wrong not wrong so but yeah there there are no limits to this and then we will truly have 100 male workforces as everybody wants uh which is a great segue into why Matt is here today.

12:14I was like, I'm just staying out of this conversation. So Matt and I connected over developer marketing and developer relations. Like, you know, how do they overlap? How do they intersect? Are they adjacent? And I think that for a lot of AI companies that are targeting developers, there's a real bleed and an overlap here. And so just a little bit of context on how we think about developer marketing, because it means, I think, different things to different people. And it's definitely something different in 2026 than it was like when I first started, you know, talking about that openly and started recruiting for roles at Plaid.

12:52So like the concept isn't new, right? It's like when you think about when I think about developer marketing and DevRel, it's like the Steve Ballmer, you know, shouting developers on stage with the sweaty armpits.

13:03Matt Palmer:For our Gen Z listeners, go look that up. It's a classic moment. he's very passionate exactly but like developers have always been really important to microsoft right and and um they get this idea that whoever wins developers is who wins the platform there have been many companies like sass companies that have like also gone through this wave slack had a really big developer team square had like a really big developer effort i don't know if it was successful or not but like stripe is a great company that you know i think started really with how do you create a great developer brand? And so I think now when AI is really like kind of broadening the definition of who is a developer, right?

13:41Like the number of people who are picking up, you know, computer and learning how to code or like, you know, using vibe coding. All those growth engineers.

13:49Matt Palmer:All those growth engineers, they're just prompting, right? And they're building, right? It's undeniable that they're building. Are those folks developers now? And how do we think about them in the context of developer marketing? And so, Matt, most recently you were running DevRel and DevMarketing at Replit. And I'm kind of curious, based on your experience there and other folks that you've talked to, how does a company think about allocating investment across audiences when they're both trying to reach novice builders, people who would probably identify as non-technical, who are absolutely building things, undeniably now, versus like the true, you know, engineer who's been, you know, building with code for most of their lives.

14:37Like, is there a distinction? Is there a difference now? Absolutely. I mean, there still is a difference. You have to understand who you're talking to. And if you think about, you know, developer marketing or developer relations in the traditional sense, you mentioned companies like, right, Stripe, or I would add Twilio, or some of these other companies that were built on developer marketing, you still have to have like the technical prowess and like the understanding of what these things are, you have to have developers, but then you have to be able to communicate with just like normal people.

15:00So me communicating a vibe coding tool to a developer is very different from me communicating that to, you know, somebody who has a business or somebody who's trying to start a business or, you know, build a portfolio site for the first time, a college student maybe. And so it really does become more about empathy in that sense and the ability to communicate. But my opinion, and especially when I was like hiring for these roles is you still need an engineer because I can't go out and tell, you know, a plumber, why they need a database in their application that collects signups without understanding what a database is and how it fits into that architecture.

15:33But then I also need to be able to explain it in terms they would understand around persistent data. You have to really simplify things. So I think it becomes more important now than ever to have people who understand the concepts who are developers. But then kind of what we were talking to earlier, having these storytellers, having traditional marketers who can take the importance of these technical concepts and then relay that to folks who are otherwise like completely non-technical or semi-technical. And that's a pretty rare quality as it would turn out. Well, how do you like balance the two?

16:01Because I assume that there's probably this like delicate balance that you need to strike where like, if you're going out there with too generic and like approachable of a message, maybe like more hardcore developers would be like, whoa, this is not for people like me. I don't want to use it anymore. When it is absolutely for people like them, right? It's just like the audience has gotten larger. So like, is that like a sort of tension that you've seen companies struggle with? And how do you think that you do that? Well, absolutely. I mean, it's a tension I think everyone's struggling with currently, because the market is so big.

16:35You have companies like Replit that want to go out and say, hey, you know, we're for everyone. We're for your grandma. Grandma can build a bunch of apps. In reality, she probably can't yet. You know, like I wish I wish my mom doesn't want to be vibe coding anything. I'll just be very, very clear. She's not on her phone. So she's probably not actually the target audience, but then they'll go out and they'll say, but look, our tools are so powerful. Like you could use this. Engineers could use this. And when you do that, you ostracize both of those people because engineers try this thing out and they say, this isn't for me.

17:02The super non-technical people try it out and they say, this is too powerful. And so I think there's actually a huge problem today, which is that people in the market, people in the AI coding market, they have no idea who they're building for, right? And what you get with products in that sense are products that are for no one and for everyone at the same time. But I think the market is just so giant, and it's expanding so rapidly that it actually doesn't matter. You know, like Cloud Code can just go out and be Cloud Code. And then yeah, it's a terminal. And yeah, people are like, confused about what the heck's going on.

17:31But it's such a magical tool, like the technology, the AI and the harness that people are going to like figure out ways to get value out of it anyway. And that's just because the models are amazing. This technology is amazing. So that's kind of how I feel about the whole thing.

17:45Matt Palmer:Is it possible that like technical and non-technical are the wrong buckets? Like, could it be more of a like psychographic or like what people are aiming to do? Because I agree, I feel like that's limiting. And if you pick one lane, it's like harder to appeal to the other. And this is maybe where I see some companies like really focus on like builders as their audience, right? Which is like a more expansive term than developers. I think Lovable did this very well. Replit does this, like where it's more like, oh, like you're a person who is creating things and this tool is for you. And then like how technical you are is kind of secondary to that inherent motivation to build.

18:26100%. And, you know, I think you even miss this if you go into like personas, because you could have, you know, let's talk about marketers, for example. You could have a marketer that just doesn't want to do things the new way, right? Versus a growth engineer who is very, you know, builder coded or whatever. And it's like always pushing that. I think about it a lot in terms of like agency. Do you want to go out and learn new things? The same people are going to be successful with a Google sheet are going to be successful with AI, right? Because it's hard to like learn the formulas to like figure stuff out to like actually build with that tool.

18:56In the same way, it's hard to be a developer. You have to figure a lot of stuff out, you know, and these tools are making it easier for people, but it's still difficult. And you still have to like try and fail over and over again and experiment. And so it really, to your point, is about that. And I think a company that did this really well, maybe in a prior era, is Apple, right? Apple is for creatives. Apple is for people that are pushing it, right? Like if you're a student, you buy a Mac because that's like for serious people who create things, right? You don't want to be Windows guy. You don't want to just like have your like ThinkPad.

19:26Matt Palmer:It's a lifestyle brand. Exactly. It is a lifestyle. And so I think the way you separate these things and what, you know, Lovable has done very well, what Repl.it is trying to do and is doing better is marketing yourselves for people who classify themselves as either like professionals, not in the sense that you have a job, but like the sense that you do your job well and you pride yourself in the work that you put out or like builders or creatives or people that think about themselves this way. And in that way, you're self-selecting into a group of people that's going to be successful, right? If you have someone who's a builder and I say, I figure out hard things and I come to the product, like, okay, I'm actually going to be successful because I'm putting effort into the product versus going out and saying, hey, this tool is for a four-year-old.

20:07If you're a four-year-old, you can build an app. And then you get everybody coming in dissatisfied because they don't just magically get applications that work. Yeah, I mean, I also think that there is probably like a generational shift happening where like, I think young, you know, kids who are like, K through eight kids today are probably interacting with things like this much earlier than we did. And that's like our parent telling us about that they had computer class when they went to school, right? So every generation sort of like sees this a different way. But there's always this part of me that's like, well, you know, and especially if you're a parent, like your kids just are who they are, like they're born a certain way.

20:42and some people are going to be inclined towards some things versus another. And it's like, with my face, there were the people who were going to take the time to customize their like skin and like get into the HTML, you know, and like do the fun colors and the music and like the effects on their page. And then there were the people who were just like, yeah, that looks cool, but like, I'm not going to like open that up. Right. And that's fine. It doesn't mean like you're not going to make it. But I think that there are just some people who are just like excited about those things. And some people who are like, I'm going to pay for that, or I'm going to, you know, ask my buddy to do it for me because I don't trust myself.

21:23And that's where I think the real buckets are versus like technical versus none, if that makes sense. In Silicon Valley, we really do reward builders and we've, you know, we've made builders like the highest, you know, sort of thing that everybody talks about, right? Like, even venture capitalists refer to themselves as capital builders, or whatever. It's just like, this is the thing.