Ha! I have a ridiculous amount of insight into this =)
For over a decade now I've been building and leading Developer Relations teams at developer companies. The reason why so many startups have a blog is because... It's one of the best ways you have to attract users to your service in a high-ROI way.
Think of it like this: you're a startup founder for a developer company. You want to get developers to know about your product, and ideally, try it out. How do you do it? You have a handful of options!
- Paid Advertising (expensive, hard to manage, immediately stops working once you stop advertising)
- Cold outreach (aka, outbound sales and prospecting, it works but nobody likes it and it's labor/time intensive, immediately stops working once you stop it)
- Organic outreach (aka, blog posts, YouTube videos, etc.) <--- This is the only category of things that last for a long time: once you've published an article or video, it'll be around as a reference that people will stumble upon in searches, LLM training sets will pick it up and potentially use it for future recommendations, etc. It has a long shelf-life.
When I ran DevRel at Stormpath (acquired by Okta), and later Okta, here's a fun secret most people won't know: a majority of our business and new developer users came from our developer blog. Shocking, right? Even at a large post-IPO company like Okta, the developer blog (back when I was there, anyhow), represented a massive portion of ALL website visits.
The amount of influence you have through educational content is truly massive, and can make or break even the largest tech companies.
> The amount of influence you have through educational content is truly massive, and can make or break even the largest tech companies.
This is true, but it neglects the "spark" that's required to get some sort of amplification to the content and related downstream benefits. Companies spend money on marketing, events, etc.
For INDIVIDUALS who want the ancillary benefits of educational content, they use tools to create and deploy across multiple channels and also engage with others ("shit post", "reply guy", etc.) that drive attention to their content.
For an individual, driving economic outcomes with educational content (on average) seems like an investment with low probability of success. I suspect that many individuals who create educational content are doing it because they are passionate about the topic, and do not expect any other benefit.
Thanks for posting, something that I'm thinking about a lot in the age of increasing participation in "Tech" and ever-increasing amounts of content while simultaneously divided attention.
I'd add that, if done well, it humanizes the company. It tells us something about the author, and you don't get that in other forms of advertising.
Fogbugz is just another company, but Joel took the time to write (well) about it in a way that was interesting, relatable and smart. It made you believe that the products they make are interesting and smart.
Paul Graham did the same. YC was humanized via his essays (which didn't really talk about YC.) Patrick MacKenzie made a business making bingo cards, but look at him now.
Fundamentally people do business with people they like. Writing stuff down allows enough personality to come through to give readers "someone to like".
Of course writing quality blogs takes a skillset lacking in most businesses. So yes, there's an element of cargo-cult, in that the result requires more than "we have a blog". Good blogs are enormously valuable- but most blogs are not terribly good.
Slightly longer answer: Depending on the business, building organic inbound traffic via evergreen content like blog posts can be an effective way to get potential customers in the door. This type of inbound lead is usually higher quality and lower cost overall than paid ad traffic, which has gotten pretty miserable over the past few years.
Interesting. Well, it must be worth it seeing as almost every single business is doing this. Or maybe it's just cargo-cult? Is there any data on the effectiveness?
If I haven't heard of a company before, I instantly see if they have a blog so I can judge if it's AI slop or an actual operation.
Anyone can write a website with react and make it look nice, including scammers who just want your money and never deliver a product. A good human-written blog goes a long way to build confidence.
Not long ago, it was all about SEO. Nowadays, it’s more about building reputation and trust. When you see a real face and a name—someone you can connect with on LinkedIn—it instantly boosts the credibility of a startup or any company you’ve never heard of. Even if AI writes the content, once you know there’s an actual person behind it, the trust factor jumps.
While SEO and organic reach are still useful tricks, more and more people are turning to ChatGPT and its alternatives as their search engines of choice. This shift means that Google traffic is taking a backseat to the curiosity and engagement of LinkedIn users.
If they don’t tell what they’re doing, nobody knows.
This includes prospect customers, target investors, potential hires, etc.
SEO could be a reason but more often than not blog posts are not optimized and/or are on a different domains.
It’s also good as education material, for example if you build dev tools or sdk or sw for other devs, certainly you’ll have docs, but I think having blog post with concrete use cases helps a ton.
IMO blog posts are an indispensable tool for customer acquisition.
All those engineering blogs are signaling "look at these interesting problems we're solving with cool technology, this could be you if you worked here"
At least partly for recruitment, partly for marketing. It's an advertisement for all the cool stuff you'd get to work on if you joined the company or bought the product. Without a blog, I can't tell if a company is actually doing anything or just squatting on a url.
We (Start-up) publish high-quality blogs almost every day on our website, and some of them have received significant views, bringing real impact to our site. This strategy has proven to be an effective way to attract attention and engage potential users.
Not soley for SEO. A good blog contributes to developer relations, meaning that customers and programmers of the product may find answers to their support questions directly from the company, rather than relying on StackOverflow, reddit, or jippity.
SEO, reputation building, and a dedicated place to share your news.
You could always use medium/other platforms, but then they get the SEO boost and added search mojo, rather than the startup's site
SEO and inbound marketing, not withstanding it also builds some trust. If I visit a site and see some in depth, heavily researched posts, I’m more likely to trust it vs a site with no useful content
as a company that was highly effective at building awareness of their product long before vector databases became hot with a blog. Their blog now is just another navel-gazing, self-centric 'enterprise' blog, which is sad.
For over a decade now I've been building and leading Developer Relations teams at developer companies. The reason why so many startups have a blog is because... It's one of the best ways you have to attract users to your service in a high-ROI way.
Think of it like this: you're a startup founder for a developer company. You want to get developers to know about your product, and ideally, try it out. How do you do it? You have a handful of options!
- Paid Advertising (expensive, hard to manage, immediately stops working once you stop advertising)
- Cold outreach (aka, outbound sales and prospecting, it works but nobody likes it and it's labor/time intensive, immediately stops working once you stop it)
- Organic outreach (aka, blog posts, YouTube videos, etc.) <--- This is the only category of things that last for a long time: once you've published an article or video, it'll be around as a reference that people will stumble upon in searches, LLM training sets will pick it up and potentially use it for future recommendations, etc. It has a long shelf-life.
When I ran DevRel at Stormpath (acquired by Okta), and later Okta, here's a fun secret most people won't know: a majority of our business and new developer users came from our developer blog. Shocking, right? Even at a large post-IPO company like Okta, the developer blog (back when I was there, anyhow), represented a massive portion of ALL website visits.
The amount of influence you have through educational content is truly massive, and can make or break even the largest tech companies.