mrb: Yes, your team should be blogging

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After more than three years helping to build a business around a developer facing SaaS product, I've left to start my own consulting company called Reify. We do sales and Marketing software and process consulting for developer-facing, business to business SaaS companies. Get in touch if you make a product for developers and need help!

Yes, your team should be blogging

I tweet a lot. Enough that when one particular tweet gets more attention than others, it makes me wonder why. Today, that happened with this tweet:

An engineering blog with actual things that actual engineers have shipped is the best recruiting tool there is /c @patio11
— mrb (@mrb_bk) November 2, 2016

I’m hoping that a good number of people saw this tweet and agreed, and that’s why they told me they “loved” it, or Retweeted it. I started to think about the reasons why your developer-facing company should be blogging, and realized that recruiting is only one of them. So, I decided to take my own advice and blog.

Here are 10 more reasons why technical blogging should be just as important to your team as feature development or fixing bugs:

It helps with quality assurance - if you’re speaking out about it publicly, you’ll go the extra mile to make sure its battle tested
It helps create a rhythm around shipping
It signals to the outside world that the company behind the product is highly-functioning, and that people are excited about and invested in their work
It shines a spotlight on individuals or teams within a company who don’t typically get enough recognition
It helps diversify the voice of a company and its audience as a company grows
The best marketing communication is helpful and authentic, and being a developer writing to an audience of developers makes great writing that much easier to pull off
It helps promote technical ideas and Open Source projects that might otherwise have a hard time gaining momentum
It explicitly involves technical individuals in the revenue side of the business, something that is sorely needed in B2B startups
It helps outsiders understand products that they love to use
It lets you brag about how amazing your team is

…and I’m sure there are many more.

In addition to blogging, your team should be giving talks, and documenting, and contributing to evergreen resources, and a lot of other things, but start with blogging. In my opinion, there are few things with a better ROI for developer marketing and community growth.