css puzzles

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12 days of cloud services

Derek Zumsteg

Strongly Typed Pt 1

Prefab.cloud joins the Manifold Marketplace

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scout php

Our first Cyber Monday Online Hackathon

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A/B testing our job descriptions

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prefab launch ready

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Lance Pioch

Sam Slotsky

Drew Powers

Danielle MacNeil

Jeff Andersen

Sascha Trifunovic

RedisGreen

What we learned A/B testing job listing text and why you should do it too

Launch readiness with Prefab.cloud feature flags

Strongly Typed

CSS Puzzles: a mentorship program for better styling

Cyber Manifold — Our first Cyber Monday Online Hackathon

Get festive with Manifold’s 12 days of cloud services 🦌 🎅 ❄️

How to Scale a Laravel Application with Memcache

Using Redis Streams for Time Series

PHP Frameworks are Difficult to Choose

creating high quality listing

Maximizing your product’s conversion rate

comarketing-at-manifold

An introduction to the Manifold co-marketing program

marketing to developers

6 Ways You Should Be Marketing Your API to Developers	

Marketplaces features

Marketplaces make it easy to add new features and extend your reach

The goal of any online business is to maximize its conversion rate. You want to create as many opportunities for developers to see your product at the top of the funnel and then you want to take your best swing at converting them while revising and optimizing over time to increase the likelihood they adopt your product.

On Manifold, you have a number of opportunities to surface your product in front of potential users, while also being shown amongst potential alternatives. So how do you stand out from the rest? How do you maximize the likelihood that a user will choose your services over another? It starts by creating a high-quality product listing.

Let's take a look at where your product is shown in the marketplace, and how you can take best advantage of every opportunity.

## Showcasing your product

The catalog listing and your service page are the two main opportunities for you to show off your product in the Manifold marketplace.

#### Catalog listing

The catalog listing is where users discover products by category (database, logging, monitoring, etc) and are inspired to use new services and learn different use cases for services they already know and love. The catalog is shown on the Manifold homepage and in the Dashboard.	

![discoverservices](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/7DEMdgOW4LfqdO8meCWibp/137e673fd9b10bac3c45a1811fb3e2d2/discoverservices.png)

#### Service page

The service page is a singular page which presents the value prop of a service. It gives a product overview, screenshots, and your pricing and features. Think of your Manifold service listing as a landing page for your product, it needs to convey the use case of your service and educate users on the breadth of your features.

![listing](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/6ooXmdFEpVqCqTYEn7cHi3/66a65713341322fb3c7f74e84701316d/listing.png)

## Where should you start?

Starting your service with a high-resolution color logo is the best way to grab a developer’s attention. Logos which are grounded on a backdrop of color stand out from the rest of the pack, and enable you to bring your brand colors to your listing on both the dashboard and website.

Your product overview should consist of succinct feature descriptions which highlight the core value prop of your service. Having 3-4 feature descriptions in your overview is ideal, so to not have users fight through a wall of text to understand your service (and maybe toss in an emoji or ✌️.)

If you have additional features you would like to highlight, I recommended including them as part of your pricing matrix. This will display the features being included with the product in a more compact manner.

![yesnoplanselect](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/k5bu7KAtPvBsHKBKasbbh/7d1ac890081003c92636b0b9090c504d/yesnoplanselect.png)

## Pricing and packaging

When it comes to pricing and packaging, you want to make sure you’re lowering the barrier to making a purchase decision. Your plans will show up in two distinct places: on the website where new users will be deciding whether to start using your product and in our dashboard where existing users are adding additional services or changing which plan they are buying. 

Each partner has full control over their pricing when it comes to selling your product on Manifold, but we encourage our partners to consider the impact of having clear, concise representations of your products’ features and pricing and can help guide you with targeting our user base.

## Tell your story in pictures

Your screenshots are the most compelling section of your listing. These pictures explain your product to users and enable them to understand what they can do with your product. To tell a good story in screenshots, it can be good to select a specific use-case. Users will project themselves in your solution, making their purchase decision easier.

It can be good to isolate parts of the UI you want to be fixtures in the story you are telling, calling attention to specific features which were described so users can understand how what you’ve described before operates. They are effectively test-driving your product by looking at it.

![plan-screenshots](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/7EsfhFCCSOtPqBtYXCTiB9/999a0b163a94f9423c1135ca5f429a2c/plan-screenshots.png)

## Don't forget about the command line

Our users are primarily developers, which means they often live inside their IDE and terminals. We take pride in integrating with developers’ existing workflows through a suite of integrations. If developers are operating from the command line we want to meet them there, so we have replicated our web experience in the Manifold CLI.

You can review your product’s buying experience in the Manifold CLI using `manifold create` before launching on our platform.

![cli-creating](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/S0jhfyAbAafnKNNWLbXrC/e545e6caf155f01de9543af71a07cce0/cli-creating.png)

## Take advantage of co-marketing opportunities

We have [recently launched a program](https://www.stage.manifold.co/blog/an-introduction-to-the-manifold-co-marketing-program) for our partners to collaborate on marketing opportunities. This program aims to amplify the amount of exposure a partner receives throughout the Manifold network through collaboration across marketing activities such as content creation and social media.

## Are you interested in becoming a partner?

If you would like to learn more about how to list your service on the Manifold marketplace, [click here](/partners) to read about our partner program and start your integration.

So you’ve developed an amazing service, listed it on Manifold and might be thinking, what's next? The Manifold co-marketing program is just one way we support our partners through their launch in our marketplace, through coordinated marketing strategies.

Marketing your service on the marketplace is just as crucial as integrating it. You have spent countless hours developing something you're proud of, now it's time to get it to the developers that will appreciate it (almost) as much as you. Through marketing your service you can share the story behind the product, its use cases, and why developers should depend on you. Knowing where your service fits in a project lifecycle, and actively promoting it to developers helps keep it top of mind for when they need your solution, and help your product stand out when it’s time to make a purchase decision.

Our co-marketing program is starting out by focusing on three main areas:

1. **Content** – showing developers why they need your product, and helping them to understand how to implement it goes a long way to inspiring developers to choose your service. More content increases your visibility and augments your chance at converting a user.
2. **Community** – developers operate in fragmented communities which are difficult to reach, we help navigate these intricacies and reach them more effectively through identifying opportunities for integrations, and participating in communities and social media channels native to them.
3. **Your listing** – establishing a narrative with your product listing to explain to users how your product can solve the pain they are experiencing is really important. Your product listing is the main opportunity to do so in the Manifold marketplace. It is your opportunity to explain the features you have available, and how easy it is to use your product.

We have noticed that our most successful providers are active in creating content and reaching their developer audiences. A part of Manifold’s approach to helping users discover your service is integrating inspiring content alongside the purchase decision. 
This approach to content has been successful and we want to help our providers benefit from it. As part of the co-marketing program, content produced by providers is surfaced in a number of areas which increases your product’s exposure. This, in turn, generates more interest in your service and helps you maintain a presence in relevant communities. Generally, providers that have a large amount of content supporting their listing have a lasting impact on our audience and maintain a strong presence on Manifold.

We recognize that nobody knows your service better than you do, that's why our co-marketing program is focused on supporting you and helping to amplify your voice.

Let’s take a look at ways you can participate: 

### Tutorials, Stories, and Patterns
Stories and patterns are specific formats of content we’ve created to structure particular narratives about services and cloud service architecture. [Stories](/story/till) aim to humanize your product and help developers understand your vision and establish a relationship with the people behind the product. [Patterns](/pattern/rate-limiting) help developers understand how your product fits in the grand scheme of cloud native architectures. Overall this content is a great way to be memorable to developers, and help them understand what services are available to them through Manifold. 

Tutorial posts can provide an opportunity to co-create content with complementary services. In our experience content which focuses on the product, and has a specific use-case example, performs best. The goal of these blog posts is to strike a balance between being educational but also inspiring so to generate interest in taking your service for a test-drive. Seeing your service used in different scenarios can help developers to apply your solution to their own projects helping turn page views into service provisions.

Developing content with multiple services is another way you can increase your reach by tapping into networks outside of your traditional audience and introduce developers to more use cases for your service. As part of the co-marketing program, we are more than happy to help brainstorm ideas or introduce you to your complementary providers and services.

With different types of content, it is our goal to consistently deliver new content and inspire developers to find their next favourite service. We are always excited to work with you to develop ideas and help you create content that allows your service to stand out to developers. We find this type of content to be long-tailed, having lasting benefits and impressions on developers after the initial posting. This helps keep your service memorable for when developers need solutions for their newest projects. 

[![Screen Shot 2019-03-26 at 3.10.10 PM](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/4WRqA7gHKMIpWZiaqHNEbL/3bb662758c98c0e5350b3e4f2c7b7f97/Screen_Shot_2019-03-26_at_3.10.10_PM.png)](https://www.manifold.co/blog/introduction-to-message-queuing-and-rabbitmq-6cb8e6e9b2)


### Social Media

Through collaborative social media efforts, we can combine our networks to be more effective at amplifying your message. This is a low-cost way to reinforce or promote any announcements you may have about your service or new feature launches. Additionally, it can help promote other content you’ve created help those build traction in your communities. We aim to be active on social media with our providers and are willing to support your promotional efforts and amplify your messaging in any way we can.

[![hosted](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/5K2K06Wwc7svKAMMmlRPqY/9e7e130491916257a0d1f2c9978ed7dc/hosted.png)](https://twitter.com/hosted_metrics/status/1108389097989685248)

## Your first steps to co-marketing

Co-marketing doesn't have to create a strain on your team and can be easily integrated into your current marketing activities. If you want to create new content but are unsure where to begin, remember that your inspiration can come from anywhere!

For example, you may choose to write a blog post on what you are currently working on, or interested in. Or, if you are launching a new feature, creating a tutorial to go along with it may help promote the launch. It is easier than you think to create content that could have a positive impact on your listing and help educate developers on your service.

We are both more successful when working together, which is why we are excited to formalize this opportunity and work with you through our co-marketing program, making 2019 our best year together!

## Are you interested in becoming a partner?

If you would like to learn more about how to list your service on the Manifold marketplace, [click here](/partners) to read about our partner program and start your integration.


Build it and they will come, right? Unfortunately, that's not always how it works. In a world where every existing product is battling for fleeting attention and new developer tools are launching every day on ProductHunt, it can be tough to get the right people to notice your product – and more importantly, remember it when they need it.

Even the most promising technology can struggle to gain traction without a thoughtful marketing strategy. Understanding the fundamentals and learning from some of the best in the industry can put your company on the right path for growth.

## Defining the Challenge

Marketing a new service to developers can be tricky for several reasons. First, developers are consistently sold to because they carry significant sway in the purchasing decisions for the companies that they work for. This pent up ad and sale fatigue make difficult to get your message across typical marketing channels. 

The second factor is that there is a high overhead for changing mission-critical services and switching  typically involves significant work on the part of the developer(s) and their team. So the benefits of using your new tool or technology must outweigh those hefty switching costs clearly and obviously.

Lastly, technical audiences tend to vet new products in a much more critical way. Standard landing pages with fluffy copywriting underperform solution-based product pages backed up quantitatively. 

Taking those factors into consideration it becomes more clear why some of the best developer focused software products build their marketing strategy around content.

## Kicking off with Content

Not all content is created equally. Browsing Medium you're sure to come across posts announcing the launch of a new product or service that leaves readers thinking "ok, so what?" A post like that might get a few clicks throughs,  but after that visit, the product fades away. 

What best-in-class companies do is use content to create a story. They deeply understand their ideal user's daily life and daily struggles – and understand how their product can fit in to that flow. They then create content around questions, concerns, and solutions that are truly useful. Sometimes, the content doesn’t even mention their product. It is advice, suggestions, and data that builds brand recognition around a known problem.

Here are some ideas to get your gears churning:

- __Tutorials__ - If your product truly solves a problem (and it should!) creating content around defining and solving that problem is a great place to start. You can create tutorials for several mediums like blogs, video, and social to see what works and what doesn't. Then, once you start to see results you can narrow your strategy moving forward.
- __Comparisons__ - These are typically the top performing search engine landing pages for technical products and once your company starts to get some recognition is an area that should be invested in. When users are evaluating a new tool they want to see how it stacks up technically and monetarily. Creating well-designed product pages and blog post that can rank well in search results is a great way to own the conversation and highlight your differentiators. 
- __Courses/Webinars__ - If you're an expert on a topic, teach it. There are several low-friction platforms out there for hosting this type of content that make management easy. One caveat is to make sure the content is directionally related to your product. Educational videos are a great way to give some of your knowledge away in exchange for an email. They are also a helpful lead tool for your website and for advertising campaigns.
- __Case Studies__ - spending time on case studies is an easy way to ease buyer concern about using your product. They want to see recognizable names that have used and have loved your product. Give away a free subscription if you have to, it will be worth it. 
- __eBooks__ - while they may be more time consuming to create, eBooks are great way to provide deep value and instantly brand yourself or your company as an expert on a topic. CloudAMPQ and Intercom are two companies that have successfully used eBooks to drive customer growth. A great way to cut down on the time and cost to create an eBook is to write a series of blog posts on a particular topic. Once the series is complete, repackage and bundle the collection as an eBook.
- __Data__ - if your product offers interesting insights try to package it in a way that would be useful to other developers. While in a different category, Match.com annually publishes a study on singles in the US and it drives traffic, press and undoubtedly users back to their product. 

## Learn from the best
One of the best ways to learn a new skill is to watch how the best in the industry execute. Here are some of the best-in-class that are worth a follow:

- __Digital Ocean__ - Regardless of industry Digital Ocean has one of the most impressive [content machines](https://www.digitalocean.com/community). They consistently publish fresh, original content that specifically caters to their audience and is always on-trend. It doesn't hurt that they have an amazing product, but the way they source, create and organize content is top-notch.
- __Basecamp__ - the company has transcended project management software and has become the leader of a no-nonsense business movement. Their founders have [published four books](https://basecamp.com/books) on the topic (one being a national bestseller) and have a high traffic blog that consistently beats the drum of this story which also trickles to their brand and product pages. 
- __LogDNA__ - the log management tool does a great job with content and branding to make B2B feel very approachable and customer focused. Their blogs and [white papers](https://logdna.com/whitepapers/) are very digestible for all types of customer personas. They also have a public Slack channel which adds a great layer of trust to potential custmers.  
- __New Relic__ - the company uses their large content library to power their wide-reaching advertising campaigns and target large enterprise companies. Take a peek at [their website’s](https://newrelic.com/) footer and you'll find answers to every possible question an end-users, manager or CTO might have before agreeing to a contract. 

## What next

So you've spent a few weeks creating great content you think potential users will love. Now what? Here are a few things you can start with:

- __Let SEO do its thing__ - The more content you create, the better your existing content will rank. This process typically plays out over several months, but you should start seeing consistent gains in organic search traffic
- __Start small with advertising__ - The great added benefit of creating a library of content is that you can use the content for advertising assets on Facebook, Google, Twitter and Reddit. Ads using helpful content tend to perform much better than those screaming BUY NOW and act as a great introduction to your brand. Even starting with a small budget can be useful for baselining content performance and guiding future content creation.
- __Partner with a marketplace__ - adding your service to a marketplace like Manifold is a great way to get instant distribution. Marketplaces have established marketing muscle that you can leverage to help spread the word to entirely new audiences.
- __Syndicate__ - A helpful rule of thumb is that you should spend 50% of your time creating your content and 50% promoting. That means posting on social networks, Reddit, hackernews and reaching out to friends that can help spread the word. If you mention complementary products in your content make sure to tag them or ask if they would be willing to share the post as well. Also, emailing new content to leads or free users is a great way to re-warm them to your product.

The benefit of investing in content marketing is that it has compound returns. Start today and start seeing the results grow month-over-month. As the adage goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.



Every company’s goals simplify down to one or more of the following three things for creating value: enhancing user growth, increasing revenue, or decreasing costs. A feasible method for achieving all of these exists by listing your developer service in a marketplace. 

Marketplaces are a unique distribution opportunity as the platform nature of their business enables companies to focus on their core competencies while leveraging powerful network effects, underlying marketplace infrastructure, and gaining insights from data. Companies selling SaaS products to developers should consider selling their products in a marketplace to reach more developers and take their business to the next level.

# Problems you face selling direct

The developer services landscape is rapidly growing as the adoption of the cloud is accelerating across all industries. Each day there are new services targeted towards developers showcased on sites like Product Hunt and Hacker News, giving developers an exploding number of options while making it harder and more expensive for vendors to stand out. 

Further, each service vendor has to convince developers to integrate their product into their stacks making it a barrier to entry for the adoption of their services. This all results in slowed growth, lost sales, and decreased margins for developer services vendors. Fortunately, there is a distribution strategy that can negate these issues - list in a marketplace. 

# Marketplaces position you for success

Before diving deep into the powerful impacts that selling your product through a marketplace could have on your developer services business, it is imperative to understand the objectives marketplace operators are trying to achieve. 

The primary goal of a marketplace is to enable interactions between buyers and sellers– an active, healthy ecosystem of engaging parties that result in powerful network effects. Network effects are a significant force in marketplace ecosystems. They occur when a critical mass of buyers and sellers engage on a platform, resulting in additional participants coming to engage on the platform and enhanced liquidity in the marketplace.

In order to achieve this goal, marketplace operators have to build both a buy side and sell side on the marketplace which is no easy task. To accomplish this, the marketplace must add value that will drive network effects by encouraging participants to actively engage on the platform. As Manifold has a revenue-sharing business model, our success is entirely dependent on vendors being able to successfully reach the right audience of buyers. 

# The competitive advantage you gain with Manifold

Numerous advantages can come from listing your product on a marketplace if you know how to get the most out of it. The best way to take advantage of a marketplace is to leverage the inherent economies of scale and benefit from the value added functionality offered by marketplaces.

Take advantage of underlying marketplace infrastructure to save costs, as this infrastructure represents the product you don’t have to build and maintain. For example, at Manifold, service providers can leverage our [flexible, robust billing engine](https://www.manifold.co/blog/flexible-billing-the-dragon-85d39a17f5f9) as well as our underlying provisioning, and identity and authentication infrastructure. This enables vendors on the marketplace to focus on their core product and not have to worry about spending precious cash on building and maintaining additional features and functionality. 

A major value proposition of marketplaces that can be taken advantage of by vendors is the fact that they simplify the discovery of offerings. This has major economic benefits for both sides of the marketplace as it lowers search costs for developers, while simultaneously lowering distribution and customer acquisition costs for vendors and bringing the potential for faster growth and increased sales from more prospective customers seeing the listings. 

Streamlined discovery is extremely important in the developer services ecosystem. When developing modern applications, one service rarely stands alone and it can be extremely difficult to differentiate and reach the community your product can bring the most value to. Being listed in a marketplace next to complementary services that have brand recognition or traction in specific communities presents a massive opportunity to build awareness faster than otherwise would have been possible. 

Manifold aims to help listed vendors take full advantage of this opportunity and amplify their messaging by leveraging the benefits of marketing economies of scale. Manifold seeks to work with vendors to create engaging content that showcases multiple offerings on the marketplace, with the goal of educating and inspiring developers to try new products.

# Start selling your service through Manifold

Listing on a marketplace presents a unique opportunity for developer services companies and is a great distribution strategy. Marketplaces add value to developer services companies by allowing them to leverage their underlying infrastructure to save costs as well as build awareness and increase the prospective user base by enabling them to reach a large and diverse audience of prospective customers.

Manifold enables developers to easily discover, buy and manage the best services for their applications, while allowing vendors to leverage our underlying infrastructure and marketing reach.

If you’re interested in becoming a service vendor on Manifold, read more and connect with us on [our partners page](https://www.manifold.co/partners)!