Supply Developers With What They Need and Reach New Audiences
Developer portal helps you reach developers, who very often decide the solution to be used in their company. Give them all necessary materials and get traction through word of mouth in the developer community.
Problems, costs and sunk opportunities
CEOs of companies of all sizes face a lot of challenges. New digital products are rolled out every day, just to saturate the market even more. What it leads to is overwhelming the customers with many options, and thus getting to them is much more difficult.
Frankly, to stand out today is harder than ever, which makes selling harder. According to this survey, 61% of respondents find sales harder than five years ago. Proving your unique selling points is harder since all companies use the same buzzwords. Your audience is sick of underdelivering on promises from your competitors, making your own communication harder.
The second you sell, you are in. Awesome! A new round of problems arises—you probably have a team of Customer Success Managers or Account Managers, who help customers/users get on board and manage accounts respectively. These are usually large departments with many heads, which means they are costly.
Getting new customers onboarded into your digital product takes time and human capital. Not only to teach the client's users to work with your tool but also to integrate into their systems properly (which can be costly). It is especially costly if you don't have the necessary resources for developers, such as documentation or code examples.
A typical solution to that problem is technical support, which is again a large department. Developers then drown your technical support in an excess number of support tickets. On top of it, the longer the integration time, the longer the time to the first payment. The longer you have to wait for the payments, the worse your cash flow is going to be.
There's a fix called developer portals!
Luckily, for all digital products, there is a way to minimize these problems—developer portals.
They help you promote your product to developers and help them integrate your product faster.
A developer portal is a centralized website with content designed specifically for developers, that covers complete documentation such as Getting Started, Tutorials and Guides to meet their requirements. Along that you find code snippets in different programming languages that are ready to be copied.
Now, let's mention some benefits of a good developer portal:
- helps your clients integrate faster
- showcases your product to new developers and converts them into clients
- reduces the pressure on your technical support department
In order to simplify the integration, it empowers developers with a testing environment, which leads to fewer problems in the production environment and lower cost of maintenance.
A developer portal with good content significantly decreases the number of tickets that your technical support department receives on a daily basis, which leads to fewer people needed.
Toil-free marketing
If you choose to build a developer portal, you are opening your way to sell your product through developers, which can make or break any sale. Get them on your side, and you have one less stakeholder to worry about, making the process much faster. And we know that a shorter sales cycle means making money faster.
Hand in hand with empowering developers with necessary and additional information comes a lower cost needed for support channels.
You should consider building a developer portal if you are looking for new ways to reach your customers. Have a look at our success stories, or let's have a chat and figure out the best solution for you.
You might also be interested in:
How to build a developer portal that developers will adore
Why is external DX important to the success of your product?
Author
Josef Zeman
CROUsing his almost ten years of experience as a tester, technical, and business analyst to communicate with clients and propose the best possible solutions for them.