On the power of marketplaces and third-party integrations
Alright, let's get this newsletter rolling by answering the first question I received on Twitter from @radiothomas_, which I thank — and I encourage anyone to throw new topics at me!
Do you know how you get your brand awareness and new customers?
Well, not exactly. Like I previously shared, at DatoCMS we don’t actively monitor any metric except quality of support and MRR, so we don't have any number or fancy pie chart to share here, sorry.
But I can tell you one thing that has worked extremely well so far, apart from natural word of mouth: marketplaces and integrations.
Since the very beginning we've invested heavily (and faster than many other competitors) in high quality integrations towards pretty much every big player gravitating around our product, mainly static site generators (Next, Gatsby, Hugo, Nuxt, etc) and hosting solutions (Vercel, Netlify, etc.). Every new feature they released, we were right behind them, ready to support it the minute after the official launch.
This has multiple positive effects compared to other marketing strategies.
First. It allows your product to stand on the shoulders of giants when it comes to marketing capabilities and customer reach. You can ride the wave of their launch campaigns, their SEO efforts, their tweets, and get excellent visibility, that you could never get on your own.
The best part? You don’t even have to ask for it, a single tweet will be enough. If you've built a great integration, they'll be the first to be excited about promoting it, because what's better than a product announcement? A product announcement with a series of social reinforcements from the community immediately below it.
Second. Unlike marketing campaigns for their own sake, any integration is a living thing that continues to pay dividends.
Let's take a concrete example. As soon as you sign up to Gatsby Cloud, as part of its onboarding process it will propose you to start from a template — which makes a lot of sense:
Do you see what I see?
Who has the first two, most eye-catching spots on the page? DatoCMS.
Why us, because we lobby people? Nope. Because we paid them? Nope. We didn’t ask for anything, we were just the first to offer a quality integration with their product.
How many users have tried DatoCMS through this touchpoint? Thousands.
How many more will come? Tens of thousands.
How much active effort do we put into getting these ongoing leads? None. It’s a free gift.
I could give you a long list of such moves we've closed in recent years. They've always brought a benefit, and the effort on our side to pursue them has always been minimal.
Of course, after you get a new potential lead, you need to convince them that you're the best. But that shouldn't be too hard if you're a product-driven startup, right?