Disha - Reo.dev (00:00) Hey, so today we're talking about something that every DevTool thinks about, but very few get right, which is technical content.
Right? So how do you create content which not only educates developers, but also drives adoption and revenue? And to help unpack this, I'm joined by Henry Bassi from Hackmamba. Henry works with some of the most exciting developer-first companies, helping them build content that resonates with developers and drives business outcomes. So Henry, before we dive in, could you share a bit about your journey and the work you're doing at Hackmamba?
Henry Bassey (00:32) Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Disha It's a pleasure talking with you today. So I'm Henry, and I'm the head of technical content at Hackmamba. And we help dev tools companies drive their GTM through content. So we work with some of the dev tools. We might come across the popular ones and the less popular ones. Just trying to make them popular and get their products out there so developers can adopt and get to use.
Disha - Reo.dev (00:59) Great. Thank you for sharing that, and really look forward to our conversation today. So Henry, you work with a lot of developer first companies, right? So let's start a little broad. Why do you feel technical content is such a critical part for GTM for a DevTool?
Henry Bassey (01:14) I've had the brush with some companies that that still confused if they should I don't if they should invest in content and we've also had clients that move from content marketing to self-select strategy, so yeah, this is a very critical question and I always say there's no GTM strategy for dev Tool companies
without technical content. So because it's the core of developer marketing. And even beyond DevTool, if you are looking at the first principle of marketing, know we say marketing exists to connect what people need with what you offer. And what's that connection, what's that bridge that connects your product and what people need? There loads that goes into there and one of them is content. Content is that bridge.
Let a developer search for whether a fix, whether proof or a better way to do stuff into your product. And for every DevTool company, we always say that adoption runs on trust. So developers adopt when they can trust, they can test, verify and see your product solving a real problem. That is why technical content is essential because it drives that discovery.
it supports evaluation and it falls at focusing.
Disha - Reo.dev (02:42) Understood.
Understood. What role does technical content play in sort of creating awareness and adoption and does it also create conversions?
Henry Bassey (02:51) So yeah, we love to have this discussion about conversion, conversion. think ⁓ most people that are investing in content, they just want, they don't want just that educating part. They want to see drive results. But when we say conversion, I usually think that conversion is a black box. ⁓ In terms of developer marketing, it's a black box. So we have to unpack it. In Dev marketing, it could mean a sign up, it could mean a...
of Github star it could mean a trial or even someone dropping your SDK into their side project so if we say the role of content is just to convert we haven't said much at all so I think the better way to look at great technical content is through the roles it plays and for me there are four of them right the first of four is the I've mentioned proof before so I will say a hammer on that is the proof content should dispel
doubt by showing the product works in practice. Right? And that might be maybe a demo environment or a reproducible setup guide or even a side by side comparison with alternatives. Then second for me is enablements. Right? So the best content gets developers to their first win and also quickly. And that could be a copy a paste snippet. It could be a start
template or maybe a five-minute quick start that allows them to experience your tool in action.
The third one is trust. love this part. we love to say trust. developers trust honesty. So you should show it with trade-off discussion and lessons from failed experiments or a candid here's why, here's where our product doesn't fit section. And that openness signals that credibility. I love how most of our partners are doing this when we write content for them. They always want us to
state where the product doesn't fit in and that helps build that trust. at the fourth and the last one is advocacy. Right? So great content spreads when it is easy to use and share with others. So that could be like checklists, reference diagrams. It could be walkthroughs that make a developer to look smart when they drop them into their workspace or maybe send them to their colleagues.
So beyond just education, I would argue that the great technical content proof enables pure trust and fails advocacy. Those rules are what eventually drives the adoption or the conversion we are all looking for.
And beyond that, you have this credibility that will drive your brand reputation
Disha - Reo.dev (05:54) Understood So if I'm a founder or a product marketing person and I'm sort of commissioned to write a blog post, what is the very first thing I should clarify before writing a single line? Is it the audience? Is it the journey stage? How do you actually begin that journey?
Henry Bassey (06:11) Okay, all those are very important, the audience, the journey stage, the pain point. But ⁓ before writing a single piece of content, I like to step back and run through a framework that gives me the full picture of what I want to do. So I call it the 4WH framework, the what, the who, the why, the where and how. So once you have this in place,
you can see the picture will build itself. So I start with what is this topic really about? What's the current conversation in the industry? And where does my perspective fit? then the why would be like, why this topic now? Is it a problem urgent enough that people care and want to solve immediately? Then I now move to who am I writing for? What's their pain point?
what do they want to achieve.
where are where are they in the journey? Are they just exploring or are they close to making that decision? And finally, how does my solution naturally fit into this workflow? So when I run ⁓ through those questions, I'm not just writing a piece of content, I'm an end-to-end story that connects the problem, the reader, and the solution in a way that
feel so natural and compelling.
Disha - Reo.dev (07:49) Okay, so I want to understand that are there any elements of a technical content or is there any particular format that developers actually like reading and sharing?
Henry Bassey (07:59) I think when I design content briefs, I always emphasize two things. That's the uniqueness and practicality. I'll break that down. I usually think of content ⁓ marketing as a room full of knowledgeable people having a conversation. So the way you contribute determines if people ⁓ want to stop and listen or simply walk away.
Imagine someone in that room says developers hate marketing or any other topic you are having that conversation You could either not alone or you could say for me I will say I get what where you're coming from But I don't think they do so and here's why so that second response pushes that conversation deeper And that's what content should do bring down unique perspective instead of repeating what everyone else has already said and the second piece is practicality
So your content must provide the reader with something they can use immediately. So you don't need to give me a 1,500 word essay that leaves me with nothing actionable. So I always advocate proof and practicality over pros. And if a developer works away with a solution they can test immediately, then the content has done its job. So these are the elements you need to see in technical content that someone would
Enjoy reading.
Disha - Reo.dev (09:31) Understood. And how do you actually decide what is it that you would like to write about? This is where developers would generally see a problem and this is something that I should solve with content.
Henry Bassey (09:42) When people come to us, you I work in an agency and it's quite different so they must have had the topic in mind or if they don't have that topic in mind they come to us, okay these are our audience, these are products, this is what we want to do. So first of all you need to research your audience, yeah, get to discover their pain points, what issues they are facing and then the next step is to know how your product will solve that problem.
So most times we get into social media to run our research, get on Reddit, and all those channels you know developers are in. And then you might run through the conversations they're having and pick ideas from that. That's how we now collect ideas and use it to build our brief which we later develop into technical content.
Disha - Reo.dev (10:36) just trying to understand that all DevTools understand that technical content is very important and everyone is trying to crack it. But what are some of the biggest mistakes and most common mistakes that you see people when they're creating technical content?
Henry Bassey (10:51) So that there a lot of mistakes right there are a lot of mistakes But I think two two are the most outstanding I could actually rake threaten the effectiveness of your technical content So either things are pushing their product too early in the article and that could break trust or they get they get too scared of Even introducing that their product to avoid backlash. I know of clients
work with that that are facing this issue. So, yeah, I've seen both extreme. But on the first mistakes, because of ⁓ the one feasibility and the one to drive conversion faster, they shove the product into content without building that narrative. So imagine you are writing a tutorial. Instead of ⁓ throwing the tool in one line, you build from the problem, explain the technologies.
that can solve it and then introduce your product as one of the natural enablers. So if you do this well, it slides into the reader's subconsciousness as part of the workflow. regarding the second mistake, many teams are hesitant, like I mentioned, to integrate their product into content. One way to overcome this is to create a narrative tension that makes the product the obvious choice. For instance, I had this one client that I was
that I needed to introduce their product in a top of funnel content, you know, every top of funnel content is very hard to productize Yeah, so because it's information, you're just supposed to teach, don't market to them. So, but how I approach this is I created a gap in the brief that will naturally lead to the product in terms of, after learning about this, you see how it's hard to deploy.
due to how different the languages and the frameworks are. But we have a walk around we'll show you at the end of the tutorial so you can easily deploy without issues. And that led us to introduce the product naturally into the top of funnel content that we wrote for this client. And for me, the mistake isn't the product inclusion itself, it's doing it without the narrative. And with the right flow, your product feels inevitable.
you
Disha - Reo.dev (13:22) Understood, understood. So instead of just, you know, talking about your product in one line, you are positioning it as a natural solution to the problem that the devs will be facing. And then you talk about the entire story and you build the entire narrative. ⁓
Henry Bassey (13:37) book.
Disha - Reo.dev (13:38) Understood. Henry you spoke about top of funnel content. So just wanted to understand how How do you think about technical content in top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel? And do we have any bottom of funnel technical content, or should it all be top of funnel?
Henry Bassey (13:53) always say I'm always against Top of funnel content. actually, we just need to understand that marketing is a system.
We used to write Top of funnel content and that's where all the educational articles reside. But this stays where AI can easily summarize. I think Top of funnel is losing that ⁓ impact. So there's one article I wrote sometime ⁓ that all CMOS should Productize Top of funnel content. And that really brought us on fire. But then...
No, have top of funnel, we have middle of funnel, we have bottom of funnel. So as marketing assistant, you should just find a way to bring all these into view. You shouldn't just do top of funnel and leave the rest because you don't want to be salesy or you just want to educate developers. So have a ratio between top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. And middle of funnel, bottom of funnel could be your case studies, all those.
your product tutorials, benchmarks, and all of clients that always want to produce benchmarks to compare with other competitors and that will give developers the feasibility into what they should expect if they integrate your product. yeah, as a system you should always focus on bringing all these top of the middle and bottom into your strategy so that you are not just dishing out free education.
and then not only is working no conversion after all these
Disha - Reo.dev (15:35) Henry. that you you mentioned that one should maintain a good ratio between your top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel content, right? Just wanted to understand how do you decide that ratio? So if I'm publishing ⁓ X amount of top of funnel, how much should I publish bottom of funnel content or does it depend on my growth journey?
Henry Bassey (15:56) yes. actually, growth journey is part of it. But how I think about this is that, let's say you are a new company because we always have companies that come with new products. So if you a new product, you need to align your new product with the current ranking so that you get a chance to rank in terms of SEO. So what we do for that, we write
like let's say a ratio of 30 % or 40 % top of funnel content just to educate the industry about this product. You know you can have something like what is composable architecture but your product is AI composability. But you need to tap into that into that general topic in order to bring people in to introduce
your
own product that is AI embedded that can even make them work faster. So we allocate like 40 % to top of funnel. Then as you produce all this stuff, as you produce this top of funnel, you also need to back them up with product specific content like tutorials to show people after they must have been introduced to the content and then they know, they understand your architecture.
them how it works. is where we bring in the middle of funnel content. So we have like, let's say like 30 % of those. Depending on, you know, I work in an agency, it also will always be different. So you need to show them how it works. Then beyond that, there's always this kind of comprising article, which is like bottom of funnel. You want to pitch your product against others in the industry to see how yours
if yours is a better fit for your audience and that will make up to let's say 20 percent of your content strategy. So that's how we see it, we go about it.
Disha - Reo.dev (18:06) Thank you for sharing that framework, I think very ⁓ helpful for someone who's starting out their content journey to understand what is it that they need to focus on. could you walk us through your own process of writing technical content, from ideation to publishing?
create a strong technical piece.
Henry Bassey (18:25) For me ⁓ a strong technical piece has to fit into the larger marketing plan Right. So I always start from there. I want to know what's your marketing plan for For this this quarter then what's this? What's the strategy? Who is your ICP? What do they care about and ⁓
What are their pain points? So I need to know this high level information. Then from there, we go deep into the product. Like how does this solve the problem? What's the philosophy behind it? Because without that philosophy, your content will not be that unique. So how is it different from competing alternatives? At Hackmamba what we do is we host demos with the
with the company to take us through how the product works with our technical writers. So we run the demos to see how it works in practice, identify the quirks and determine the work around and develop as my need. Then from there, I look ⁓ for the baseline of topics or keywords we can build on. So sometimes I go through
the Google Search Console data or other times is the use cases or topic categories. Then once I have that foundation, I cluster the ideas using what this principle I call MECE I actually learned that from McKinsey. So the way you cluster your topics should be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive pay-per-cluster. So that way, completely cover the space
without repeating ourselves or causing keyword cannibalization. Once your clusters are saved, I develop topics and titles based on the real pain points and search intents. Then I create briefs which I run through my 4 WH framework I mentioned earlier, the what, who, why, where, and how, to make sure the article speaks to the audience.
and ties naturally to the product. Then finally we get into the writing. I always remind people that technical writing is both arts and science. So the science is the factual accuracy, the code, and the benchmarks. So the art is the storytelling, the rhythm, the readability. So when you blend all those two,
You get content that developers not only trust but actually enjoy reading.
Disha - Reo.dev (21:26) I Any tools Henry that you use to create content, anything that helps you?
Henry Bassey (21:32) Every piece of content undergoes at least five stages of review before it even reaches the client. So those stages enforce quality using standards, reference models, and tight feedback loops. The standards are very simple but strict. we always ask, can other engineer replicate the steps exactly?
the steps in this tutorial exactly as we've written it. Then is the language simple and scannable? Does it match the reader's situation and funnel stage? Are claims in this article proven with code, with data or case studies? Does it leave the reader with something actionable? And does it respect developer culture and house style?
⁓
And finally, does it show trade-offs and edge cases? ⁓ If the piece doesn't check those boxes, we don't ship it. Then beyond the QA, we also use storytelling frameworks like PaaS.
⁓ problem, education and solution. For example, to help us structure the problem. But what I rely on mostly is the framework I developed internally. the years of reviewing and editing content, I call it the RX framework. So it's just like UX. ⁓ Designers have their UX. So the idea is to design a reading journey the same way you design a user journey. The writing has to
guide attention and emotion and momentum without bumps or friction. So the reader doesn't even notice they are being guided. I've had people tell me when they started reading my articles, they didn't even realize they have reached the end. And that's the Rx in action. So it captures attention, views that momentum, and lists the reader to a climax. So I'm planning to make this public.
soon but for now is what we use internally to keep the tone consistent and the quality high.
Disha - Reo.dev (23:58) Understood. Henry also spoke about something very interesting, that writing technical content is a mix of both art and science. So do you feel that specifically in technical content writing, you need to be an engineer to be able to understand their pain and write how they feel? Or do you feel that that's something that anyone can pick up?
Henry Bassey (24:18) This
is an interesting question. Because at Hack Mamba we say our writers are first of all engineers. So I think it's good you have that technical background because you ⁓ can't write for someone you don't understand them. You've not been where they are. So myself, I started from web development. So I have a lot of technical background before I moved into development.
marketing so it's a mix of ⁓ technical and marketing so I think yeah you need to be a software engineer or any of those any of those and provision before you can be an effective technical writer
Disha - Reo.dev (25:01) Understood. And before we move on, do you feel that there is any brand which is doing a great job with technical content writing?
Henry Bassey (25:10) Yes, so this might sound by us because I work in technical agency, but I think our clients are doing a job at But one I personally admire is Bright Data, also one of our clients. They set a really high bar for technical data and transparency.
they have a very strong demand for technical data.
And on top of that, they are radically transparent. They always address all these legal and privacy issues head on instead of avoiding them. Then they take a developer-faced approach. They want to see the code, the benchmarks, and use cases. And they will have us enforce that. If the article does not have all those ingredients, they will reject it. And we have to rewrite that. And the fourth one, they write with narrative authority.
what i admire most is that they don't mind if we rank competing tools above them so far the specs the specs are right that kind of play free and transparency is quite rare and is exactly what builds long-term credibility
so beyond
our client, would say Stripe, they have become like the industry standard for everything documentation. So developers often reference Stripe, so not just because they are payments, payments infrastructure, but for what good developer experience should look like. So at Hackmamba we even use Stripe as a tagline. My CEO will always say, we build Stripe-level documentation. So that's the kind of standard that have built over the years.
Yeah.
Disha - Reo.dev (26:54) All right, so I think we've covered how you create high quality content and what your process looks like. But of course, think publishing that content is just half the battle, right? The other half is making sure that people actually see it. And that gets us into distribution and conversion. So once a piece is live, how do you make sure that it actually reaches the right audience?
Henry Bassey (27:17) We rely heavily on developer communities and social media to get it in front of the right audience. ⁓ A few days after publishing, we actually cross-posed to dev communities with a canonical link back to the original post. I've even seen cases where
The post we made on a dev community out around our regional article.
Then for social, it depends on the type of content. So if it's thought leadership or business related, we usually post it on LinkedIn. Anything that's code heavy or deeply technical, it goes on Twitter or X. Reddit is a tough nut for us. We are still figuring out how to crack that distribution channel. what we want channel, the real work is the presentation.
Disha - Reo.dev (28:10) you
Henry Bassey (28:18) because people struggle with this a lot. Distribution is not just dropping a link and calling it a day. think people will click. ⁓ I spend time to write captions like I'm writing a mini-post. So I have to hook the reader, I have to agitate the problem, and I need to tease the solution without giving out everything. So I need to build the accuracy for them to click and read the full piece.
also repost content into short form video for platforms like TikTok and YouTube shorts. the rule of thumb is every piece of distribution should stand on its own and deliver value so that the audience feels compelled to go deeper. That's how to make this distribution work for you. And I think these days, most platforms want to return their audience without them clicking out. So that's why we have this current zero click paradigm.
So you just need to make sure that you provide value whichever platform you are and then if they are interested enough, click on one want to read the full piece.
Disha - Reo.dev (29:28) And then what about sales, know, so we understood, you know, how marketing and sort of distribute this technical content. But you feel that SDRs and AEs can actually use technical content for their outreach and make conversations more meaningful.
Henry Bassey (29:43) So at HackMamba, we've used it in three ways. First, as a proof of work. So when we are talking to a promising prospect, we send them samples of content we've created, or even case studies that show how similar companies use a solution and what the outcome was. That kind of evidence.
the part to conversion. And secondly, has an objection handling, right? So we take the real questions from sales calls and turn them into content. Then we, it's no longer just saying trust us, it's documented evidence that can test, that can test our share internally. And third, so it can
also act as direct enablement. So if a prospect has a problem, you can send them a tutorial that works through exactly how they could overcome using your product that turns the sales conversation into something hands-on and helpful, which builds trust much faster. So in outreach, technical content works as proof as objection handling and as well as enablement.
equipped sales team with artifacts that substantiate their claims.
Disha - Reo.dev (31:10) Understood. And have you seen or do you remember any piece of content that really moved the needle, maybe helped open doors or build credibility or growth pipeline?
Henry Bassey (31:19) That's actually a tough question because attribution in marketing is always messy. ⁓ But what I've seen is that the impacts of great content usually compounds beyond discovery, beyond adoption and advocacy. The biggest impact is credibility and brand recall. So if I ask you, where's your go-to source for developer tutorial?
Disha - Reo.dev (31:26) Yeah.
Henry Bassey (31:49) The fact that a name can instantly come to mind is the impact of content. So take Mozilla Developer Network, for example, it has become the canonical reference for web development. So developers don't even bother to question this accuracy. MDN is simply the standard. So that's brand credibility built entirely on consistently excellent weldment.
Disha - Reo.dev (32:05) you
Henry Bassey (32:19) content or even this company, ⁓ Hashicorp their tutorials are guides around terraform and Vault shaped how engineers understand the whole categories like infrastructure as code. So I've seen engineers cite their tutorials to justify architectural decisions inside their companies. So that's content turning into influence. So yes, attribution is
Disha - Reo.dev (32:48) Yeah.
Henry Bassey (32:49) hard but the real impact of content is that it compounds into that trust. When your brand becomes the reflexive answer to where do I go to learn X or where do I go to learn Y, you've become beyond marketing. Your content has become the infrastructure for the community.
Disha - Reo.dev (33:11) But Henry, how do you make sure that your content stands out if everyone is trying to talk about the same problems?
Henry Bassey (33:18) I always advocate for subject matter expertise and this is also why I have problems with topophonal content.
The only way to stand out is to bring your internal experts to tell the story from your own perspective. Because ⁓ if I'm opening an article and I'm the same thing, close it, open the second one, I'm reading the same thing, it doesn't make any sense. But once you bring in your internal leaders and they tell you how...
how they are solving this problem, what unique perspective they are introducing into this. You see how the content will be transformed. So that's what I'm applying to.
all the clients that are coming to work with us. each, before we start writing, if they want to write top of funnel, we'll have this conversation with them. Tell us everything you know about this. And what's your perspective? What's that angle that we can come in so that we'll not just create the same article or recongitate what is already being stated.
Disha - Reo.dev (34:31) Make sense, Henry make sense. ⁓ And finally, when it comes to measuring success, I know we discussed this, that it's very difficult to attribute ⁓ things, conversion, et cetera, or metrics to marketing. But what metrics should a team look at beyond just page views?
so was just asking that, you know, when it comes to measuring success, I know we discussed that it's very difficult to attribute conversions, etc. to marketing. But what metrics should a team look at beyond just page views?
Henry Bassey (35:01) I think before you even start writing content, you must have known what you want to achieve with that yeah, so Teams usually give us the expectations. Okay, this is we want. Maybe we want more kit of stars or maybe we want to drive signups So yeah, but I get it people we like to say all these page views and impressions are vanity metrics
But I don't believe that so.
Because as I said earlier, marketing is a system. Everything works together to drive the ultimate goal. without the page views or impression, how would you know that people are seeing your content? You wouldn't know. And if you have this on social media, you post stuff and no one is engaging, there's no way you can convert. So everything like, like share.
Impression usually drives more engagement and if more people engage you set the path to that conversion you're looking for. So whether page views, whether impressions, whether sign-ups, they're all important. Marketing is a system. We should all put them into perspective. We should have that intention to drive all of them. So because at the end of the day, it all affects the final goal.
Disha - Reo.dev (36:26) I think that's very beautifully put, Marketing is a system, and just looking at things in isolation is never going to get us anywhere. Thank you so much, Henry I think this has been a very actionable, insightful session, how to write content which developers actually trust, and how to make sure that it ties back to business results. And thank you so much for sharing your playbook. I think it will help a lot of us rethink how to approach technical content.
Henry Bassey (36:33) Exactly.
you so much for having me.
