Robert Reiz learned the hard way about marketing to software developers. An experienced dev himself, he shares his insights from growing VersionEye , a notification system for software libraries.

This is a guest post in our series "A Word of Advice". We're asking successful developers, designers, and entrepreneurs to share a bit from their experience.

I'm not a marketing expert! I studied computer science and I never really had to deal with marketing. Until I built my own product. Building a software product was the easy part for me. That's what I learned. That's what I did the past 15 years.

Unfortunately, simply building a SaaS product is not enough. You need users who use it - and users who pay for it! So I did "marketing" the way I thought it has to be done: I paid for online ads, sponsored events & conferences, and wasted money on a lot of other marketing activities.

I learned that these efforts don't necessarily bring the desired results. Software developers are different. They don't click on ads! And, by the way: if your conference talk is sponsored, only few people will show up...

So I stopped paying for marketing: since January 2014, I don't spend a dime on marketing!

Now, the only things I do are blog posts and SEO. Since the beginning of this year, traffic has grown by 52% every 3 months. All while not costing any money - just a bit of time for high-quality content.





Robert Reiz is the CEO at VersionEye, a notification system for software libraries. VersionEye helps developers stay up-to-date. The tool started as a cloud solution and now offers an on-premise version for big companies as well.