Marketing on X for developers who hate marketing
By Naod Tadele · · 7 min read
Most developers don't hate marketing. They hate what they picture when they hear the word: hype, threads full of emojis, "10 things I learned" posts written for the algorithm.
The good news is that the marketing that works for developer products looks nothing like that. On X, it looks like a person telling other people what they're building, what they learned and what went wrong. You already know how to do that. You do it every time you explain your project to a friend.
What actually works for developer products
- Specific beats clever. "Search now matches typos" gets more real interest than a witty one-liner about search.
- Progress beats announcements. Showing up weekly with real work builds more trust than one big launch post.
- Honesty beats polish. A post about a mistake usually gets more replies than a post about a success.
- Replies beat broadcasts. Answering people who build similar things grows your audience faster than posting into the void.
What to post
You need a small rotation, not a content strategy. Something like:
- What you shipped, explained from the user's side
- What you learned building it
- A number, when one moves
- A question you genuinely want answered
That's the core of building in public. If you're stuck for specifics, here are 30 post ideas.
How to write it
Lead with the concrete thing
The first line decides whether anyone reads the second. Put the change, the number or the problem first.
Nightshift now groups related alerts into one incident. A 3am outage used to be 40 pings. Now it's one timeline you can read in 10 seconds.
Cut the hype
Delete "excited to announce", "game-changer" and "revolutionary". Plain words read as confident. Hype reads as insecure.
Name your product
People can't follow what they can't name. Mention it naturally, not in every sentence.
One idea per post
If you have three things to say, that's three posts or a short thread.
A routine that fits around coding
The biggest reason developers stop posting isn't fear. It's that posting competes with coding, and coding wins.
So make posting a small batch job, not a daily decision:
- Once a week, collect material (10 minutes): what shipped, what was hard, any numbers.
- Draft three to five posts from it (15 minutes).
- Schedule them across the week, at most one a day.
- Spend 10 minutes a day replying to people in your space.
That's under an hour a week of focused work, and the rest of the time you're coding.
What to ignore
- Follower counts early on. Your first hundred followers matter more for the conversations than the number.
- Posting at exactly the right minute. Consistency matters far more than timing.
- Copying viral formats. They work for the accounts that invented them. Your advantage is that you're actually building something.
Let your work write the first draft
The routine above is what Loudcode does for you: it reads what you shipped on GitHub, your revenue milestones and a 30-second weekly check-in, and turns them into posts in your voice. You pick, edit and approve. It posts to X on your schedule. You go back to coding.