Build trust before you build pipeline

TL;DR

• Developers don’t want to be sold to — they want to be taught. Make education the top of your funnel.

• Start with proof, not promise. Every claim should map back to performance, scale, or a real user story.

• Adopt the “trust loop.” Build, share, validate, repeat — credibility compounds like code.

• Instrument the journey. Track engagement by intent and influence, not just clicks or leads.

• Make marketing a contributor to product, not a consumer of it. Bridge GTM and engineering through shared language and metrics.

Developers buy stories written in data

Manish’s core belief: developer marketing isn’t about persuasion, it’s about credibility.

At LaunchDarkly and before that at Redis, he led teams that marketed deeply technical products to highly skeptical audiences — people who know when they’re being sold to.

“You can’t market to developers with adjectives. You market with benchmarks, architecture diagrams, and shared learning.”

That means the first job of marketing is translation: turning complex technical value into accessible context. Case studies and tutorials are more powerful than taglines. Data becomes your brand voice.

At Redis, his team ran proof-first campaigns — every major launch paired with a live benchmark, open code samples, and performance data customers could test themselves.

“When your marketing is verifiable, it becomes part of your product experience.”

The trust loop: how credibility compounds

Manish calls his framework for long-term developer brand building the trust loop — a simple four-step cycle that turns content and community into pipeline.

1. Build something valuable. Launch new capabilities or integrations that solve real engineering pain.

2. Share what you learned. Publish the why and how behind it — the tradeoffs, not just the triumphs.

3. Validate in the wild. Let customers and the community test, comment, and critique.

4. Feed it back. Use that feedback to improve both product and story.

“The more transparent you are about the process, the faster credibility compounds.”

Each loop increases your surface area of trust — across docs, meetups, GitHub, and content. Marketing stops being broadcast and starts being participation.

Don’t measure activity. Measure influence.

Traditional attribution doesn’t work for developer ecosystems — the path to purchase is nonlinear and community-driven.

Manish’s solution is to measure influence velocity, not conversion rate.

At LaunchDarkly, the marketing org tracks three key signals:

• Engagement depth: how much technical content a prospect interacts with (time on docs, webinars, repo stars).

• Network amplification: how often users share or reference LaunchDarkly content in forums or Slack.

• Feature intent: which product areas attract early-stage interest (flag management, experimentation, security).

“Awareness is a vanity metric. Influence is the leading indicator of trust.”

These signals inform how field and product marketing prioritize investments — and which programs move from community to pipeline.

Align marketing and product around a shared operating system

To market developer platforms, marketing and engineering need to share a common vocabulary.

At both Sonar and LaunchDarkly, Manish embedded marketers inside product teams — pairing PMMs with engineers to co-own documentation, demos, and even roadmap storytelling.

“If product is the codebase, marketing is the README. They have to evolve together.”

He treats marketing as a feedback mechanism for product adoption: the insights from campaigns feed directly into roadmap decisions. In return, PMs provide the narrative backbone for campaigns.

This blurs the traditional handoff — and turns launches into joint releases between product and marketing.

Use community as a force multiplier

Rather than buying reach, LaunchDarkly invests in community gravity: developer advocates, local meetups, and open conversations on channels like Slack and Stack Overflow.

Manish’s rule: don’t manufacture community — amplify it.

His team focuses on three practical levers:

1. Spotlight contributors. Feature community-built integrations and extensions.

2. Reward education. Sponsor content that teaches, not sells.

3. Build feedback rituals. Office hours, release retros, or “flag clinics” where devs troubleshoot together.

This ecosystem thinking compounds trust and drives word-of-mouth adoption.

Marketing to engineers means removing friction, not adding polish

One of Manish’s biggest lessons: frictionless beats flashy.

From Redis to LaunchDarkly, every website, doc, and trial is optimized for time-to-value — how quickly someone can test or deploy.

“Our job is to remove every barrier between curiosity and clarity.”

That might mean self-serve demos over gated assets, or quickstart guides instead of eBooks. When users experience value before the sales conversation, you win credibility before you pitch.

Final word

Marketing to developers is less about messaging and more about earning the right to be part of their workflow.

Start with proof. Share your learnings. Measure what compounds.

Or as Manish puts it:

“The fastest path to growth is the slow, consistent work of building trust.”

About the CMO

Manish Gupta is the Chief Marketing Officer at LaunchDarkly, where he leads go-to-market, brand, and community for the leading feature management platform.

He has spent over two decades building marketing engines at developer-first companies including Sonar, Redis, Oracle, and Liaison Technologies.

Across his career, Manish has built a reputation for turning technical complexity into compelling storytelling — helping brands earn trust with engineers, accelerate product adoption, and build community-driven GTM systems.

About the series

This is from Breakout Sessions, where marketing leaders unpack how AI is changing GTM and the way buyers buy.