The Different Types of DevTool buying journeys

Overview

Previously, we looked at the different types of GTM motions - bottoms-up, top-down, hybrid, open source, and partner-led.

Now, let’s go a level deeper; unpacking what the buying journey actually looks like in each of those motions.

This means:

• Who kicks off the buying process?
• What are the steps along the way?
• When (or if) does sales get involved?
• And how do deals actually get done?
  

Each GTM motion creates a different path to purchase -  and understanding those paths is key to aligning GTM, product, and content. Let’s break it down.

1. Top-down (Sales-led) Buying Journey

This is the most traditional motion - where you're going directly to the buyer.

How it starts:

• The buyer (or someone on the buying committee) is reached via sales outreach - email, phone, LinkedIn, etc.
• Or they discover the product through inbound efforts - ads, brand awareness, referrals, or content marketing.

How the process unfolds:

• The buyer gets on a sales call.
• The sales team runs a demo or discovery call.
• If there’s interest, it leads to a POC or technical evaluation.
• Once that’s successful, it converts into a closed deal.

This is a linear motion - sales drives every step.

Works best when -

• The product is complex or high-ticket.
• The decision is made by leadership.
• Implementation requires orchestration across teams.

What GTM teams should focus on in this motion:

• Identifying intent early: In sales-led motions, there's no self-serve funnel generating bottom-up signals. That makes it critical to track intent signals - behaviors that suggest a company is evaluating tools like yours. These can include hiring for relevant roles, viewing technical content, adopting adjacent tools, or running POCs.

• Prioritizing outreach based on that intent: Don’t treat outbound like a numbers game. Use those signals to narrow down your target list. Focus your energy on the 50 accounts that are in-market, not the 500 that aren’t.

• Sales enablement: Once you're in the door, execution matters. Your team needs to deliver sharp demos, tailor messaging to buyer needs, and guide stakeholders through the decision.

• Operational consistency: This motion is about discipline. You won't scale through virality -  but you can scale through predictable pipeline, rigorous follow-up, and repeatable playbooks.

Top-down doesn’t scale exponentially. But it gives you high control, predictable forecasting, and large deal sizes. 

2. Bottoms-up [Product Led/ Marketing Led] Buying Journey

This is the motion where the journey begins with the developer, not the buyer.

How it starts:

• Developers find your product through content, community, or word of mouth.
• They explore the product on their own - no sales calls, no demo requests - just a direct path from interest to hands-on usage.

How the process unfolds:

• The developer tries out the product and starts getting value.
• If it solves a real problem, they keep using it.
• At some point, they might hit usage or feature limits that prompt an upgrade.
• In many cases, this entire journey happens without ever talking to sales, the primary drivers are product experience and marketing.

Works best when -

• Product is largely self-serve and easy to get started with
• It’s valuable for an individual developer, does not need team buy-in

What GTM teams should focus on in this motion:

• Signup enrichment: In a PLG-first motion, you're often flooded with signups - but not all of them matter. Enrich free user signups to understand which companies they come from and whether they match your ICP.

• Understanding usage patterns: Track developer activity on product that suggest genuine interest - things like repeated logins, advanced feature usage, or inviting teammates. These signals help you separate hobby users from serious evaluators.

• Personalized nurture: Use usage insights to create onboarding flows, lifecycle emails, and in-product nudges tailored to different user segments. Even without sales involvement, you can guide users toward upgrade triggers through timely, relevant messaging.

Even in a sales-free motion, bottoms-up GTM benefits massively from user intelligence. If you can identify who's actually engaging - and where they are in their journey - you can turn anonymous usage into a predictable revenue funnel.

3. Open Source/ Community - led Buying Journey

This motion is different from traditional PLG or sales-led motions - the journey doesn’t begin with a signup or demo request. It often starts with a developer discovering your open source project online - through GitHub, a blog post, or a recommendation - and trying it on their own.

Most open source buying journeys unfold in two phases:

Phase 1: Community-led adoption

^The first phase is all about building developer adoption and community traction -  often long before monetization begins.

How it starts:

An open source project is typically released in one of two ways:

• Internal tool goes public: A company decides to open source something they built in-house, often to encourage adoption or encourage community adoption and build trust around the tool. Examples: Backstage by Spotify, Kubernetes by Google, Kafka by LinkedIn
• Independent side project: A solo developer builds something useful, publishes it publicly, and it starts gaining traction within the dev community.

How the process unfolds:

Once the project is public, the team invests in building awareness:

• Writing content
• Speaking at developer events
• Hosting webinars
• Running community meetups or DevRel programs

Over time, a community forms. Developers begin trying the project, giving feedback, raising issues, and sometimes contributing back.

This phase can last months - or even years. It’s not about monetization yet. It’s about earning trust, proving the tool’s value, and gaining traction.

Phase 2: Monetisation

Once an open source project gains traction and community adoption (Phase 1), it enters Phase 2 - where monetization becomes possible. At this point, the GTM journey shifts from community-building to converting users into paying customers.

How it starts:

By this stage, the project is already well-known -  with traction across GitHub, dev communities, and search results. Companies discover the project through channels like some in the team with prior experience using the OSS in a previous role, content and SEO, GitHub or referrals from peers

The developer or team has a real need and begins considering the open source project as a serious solution.

How the process unfolds:

1. Initial evaluation: The team assesses whether the tool fits their use case:

• Is it actively maintained?
• Does it integrate well with their stack?
• Is the documentation clear?
• Is it truly open source, or are there blockers/paywalls?

2. Proof of concept (POC): Since it’s free and open source, they often build and test a small-scale implementation -  without talking to anyone from the vendor.
3. Adoption of the OSS version: If the POC works, the team rolls out the free version. It’s used in production, but without any formal contract or support.

4. Pain points at scale: Over time, as usage grows, pain points emerge:

• Scaling challenges - the OSS version wasn’t built for their volume.
• Debugging and support - it’s not their code; they don’t know how to fix issues.
• Security vulnerabilities - who’s patching them?
• Upgrade and maintenance overhead - internal teams are now managing infra they didn’t write.

5. Conversion trigger: When the cost of managing the OSS version outweighs the benefits, teams look for a commercial offering:

• They buy support contracts from the original maintainers
• Or migrate to a hosted enterprise version with SLAs, monitoring, and security baked in

Example: A team starts with open-source Kafka. As scale and reliability needs increase,they move to Confluent or Amazon MSK for managed infrastructure and support.

What GTM teams should focus on in this motion:

• Track the right intent signals: Most OSS users won’t raise their hand. You need to watch for clues -  repo activity, documentation visits, issue threads, or even code references - that suggest someone is evaluating or scaling your tool.

• Spot the pain before it escalates: Teams typically upgrade when running into scale, security, or maintenance friction. Your goal is to detect that friction early and step in at the right moment.

• Show up with the right message at the right time: Don’t wait for users to struggle. Step in with a targeted pitch that speaks to their situation:
  “You could continue self-hosting, but if you need better reliability, easier scaling, or less maintenance overhead, our managed offering takes care of all of that -  out of the box.”
  

• Make the upgrade path obvious and helpful: Provide clear CTAs, support links, and pricing pages that make it easy for users to transition to a paid offering -  when they’re ready.

Open source GTM is about timing and visibility. You’re not pushing a sale -  you’re helping the right users make the right call at the right moment.

Why Open Source Creates Unique GTM Advantages:

Open source isn’t just a GTM choice -  it creates structural advantages across the buying journey. Some of the biggest strengths include:

• Easier Discovery: Popular OSS projects are often discovered organically through GitHub, blogs, SEO, forums, and dev communities - without needing a large marketing budget.
• Lower Evaluation Friction: Devs can try the tool without a sales call, lowering barriers and increasing trust from day one.
• Perceived Cost Security: Users feel safer adopting tools that have a fallback - “Even if the company raises prices later, I can always revert to the open source version.” This reduces fear of vendor lock-in.
• Built-in Brand and Trust: OSS projects build credibility through community. GitHub stars, contributor activity, and word of mouth build strong mindshare - often before any commercial outreach begins.

4. Hybrid (Product/Marketing Led Sales) Buying Journey

The hybrid GTM motion blends developer-led discovery with buyer-led decision-making. It reflects the reality that in many dev tool purchases - developers are the evaluators, while buyers are the approvers.

How it starts:

It usually begins with an organizational need - like improving observability, security, or infrastructure.

How the process unfolds:

1. Developer-led evaluation
   
   • The team tries out 2–3 tools independently.
   • They dig into features, docs, and usability
   • They try out tools independently, often spinning up lightweight POCs to compare capabilities.

2. Buyer Enters the Process
   
   • Once devs shortlist the serious contenders, they involve someone like a VP Eng or CTO.
   • The buyer generally asks about cost, support, security, and long-term fit.
   • Devs go back to validate answers with deeper testing or documentation review.

3. Joint Decision & Sales Engagement
   
   • The decision is made collaboratively between the developer and the buyer.
   • If a commercial tool is chosen, this is when a sales conversation begins - often involving:
     
     1. Pricing discussions
     2. Trials with extended feature access
     3. Legal/procurement checks
   • Finally, the deal is closed and the tool gets adopted org-wide.

Why it’s hybrid:

• Like bottoms-up, the journey starts with developers.
• Like top-down, it ends with buyers and a sales-assisted deal.
• Unlike OSS-only motions, the tools being evaluated may be open-source or commercial from the start -  the motion is license-agnostic.

What GTM teams should focus on in this motion:

In hybrid motions, a big part of the buying journey happens silently. Developers evaluate tools independently -  reading docs, building POCs, and narrowing down options — all before sales is ever looped in. If you’re not tracking those early signals, you risk showing up too late, when the shortlist is already locked in.

• Spot developer-led exploration: Watch for signs like activity on docs, usage of free- tiers, POCs, or GitHub interest that suggest developers are actively evaluating your product.

• Identify in-market accounts: Look for broader signals  like developers reading your blog or docs, companies hiring for relevant roles, or increased activity around your ecosystem -  to surface accounts that are likely evaluating tools like yours.
• Influence the evaluation early: Shape the decision before it's made. Use comparison pages, technical blogs, or outreach from a solutions engineer to support the developer’s journey.
• Show up with the right message: Intent signals give you context. Use that context to craft outreach that actually resonates - based on what the user is exploring, reading, or testing.
• Catch the buyer handoff: Know when a developer loops in their VP or CTO. That’s your window to engage with sales support before legal, pricing, or procurement steps kick in.
• Show up warm, not cold: Reach out when the account is already showing traction - not after they’ve made up their mind.

The key to winning in hybrid motion is timing. Sales needs to engage when the devs are still testing -  not after the decision is already made.

In hybrid motions, the most important part of the journey happens before sales is ever looped in. GTM success depends on spotting that early, invisible phase and showing up with the right message, at the right moment.