Yes, this time I did read the comments. 😱
After spending the afternoon celebrating that my article, Nerds Don’t Respond to Marketing: Try Technical Documentation Instead made it on the front page of Hacker News, it was time to buckle down and start parsing the comment section. Below are some of the most illuminating comments.
Note: these are direct quotes, lightly edited.
The 13 Comments
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When marketing to nerds, it is important to delve into details.
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A product that "works outside of the box" has the potential of hurting a nerd's ego.
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Developers rather inspect the specs than "hop on a call."
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Traditional marketing caters to the stakeholders who want to buy the product, as opposed to the stakeholder who actually needs to use and customize the product.
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Software developers are afraid of being scammed or deceived by a professional bullshit artist (a marketer).
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Details help developers make more rational buying decisions.
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Products that lack detains in marketing are usually geared to C-level execs for decision making, with their underlings being the ones who are then supposed to call a dozen vendors for developers.
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A sea of tech specs may, after all, be entirely meaningless and could actually hide important aspects by drawing attention to irrelevant details.
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"Anyone can do it" is not going to win over a nerd. "You can do it," might.
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If we accept that a lot of nerds are on the spectrum, and quite a few are full-blown aspies - focus on details instead of the big picture is the core feature of this particular non-neurotypical demographic.
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"Out of the box" can work with nerds if that feature allows them to do what they "really want to do" more easily and faster.
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Nerds respond to being told they are more rational or otherwise superior/cool/etc. That is emotional appeal and conference organizers and such play on it.
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Nerds are people who are incredibly easy to market products to - it just needs to appeal to the rational mindset more than the emotional mindset.
Putting out a website full of statistics, or a tutorial, or a Product Hunt launch, or just a Show HN with a paragraph about how your product is incrementally better than the existing solutions will get thousands of nerds showing up at your door.
We might like to think we're better than people who follow ads, but really we just follow different ads.