How ZenRows Went From $0 to $5M ARR Using Content

Key Takeaways

• Build Trust to Reach Skeptical Developers: Developers tend to distrust traditional marketing. ZenRows focused on creating high-value, problem-solving content that earned trust and bypassed the skepticism most new DevTool companies face.
• Make Fewer, Bolder Bets and Nail the Execution: Instead of doing everything, ZenRows doubled down on standout content plays like hiring hackers to write unique articles competitors couldn’t match. The key was choosing high-leverage ideas and executing them exceptionally well.
• Go Beyond Functional Needs,Tap Into Real Motivation: Great content doesn’t just speak to features. Enric emphasizes understanding the emotional and social “jobs” your product is hired to do. That’s how you avoid sounding generic and actually resonate with devs.
• Build a Scalable System for Content Quality: Scaling content with 60+ technical writers required structure. ZenRows used scoring rubrics and detailed feedback loops to ensure every piece met a consistent standard and drove results.
• Be Intent-First, Not Just Traffic-Focused: High-volume keywords don’t guarantee growth. Enric shares how focusing on developer intent and the underlying pain points led to content that not only ranked but converted.

Episode Transcript

(00:00) - Teaser Clip - Enric Baltasar
And then I saw a big opportunity with SEO because I saw gaps in the competitors everywhere. Some were doing better, but overall there were huge gaps and there were a lot of opportunities mostly trying to, in my first 90 days, to grow the revenue of Zenrows by around 2.5 times.

So in my case, I've been doing content since I am, I don't know, maybe 19 years old, something like that. So for me, it's easier to see things there.

How do you compete when you didn't have customer stories, didn't have reviews, didn't have anything at all? So how do you compete? Basically, you need to build trust, mostly with developers, because developers distrust any vendor. So content was one way to find a shortcut or bypass that lack of trust.

And honestly, I work with 60, plus technical writers. So I learned how to identify them, I learned how to balance their skill set, how to level them up when they are hired internally.

Anything that is not a tutorial. I actually built my own framework about the ladder of writers when it comes to format and so, because after working with dozens of technical writers, I realized…

Well, that's like a question about landing pages for developers. You can smell the craft from generic marketers everywhere. There are really clear red flags.

So I mostly focus on Google. The point is that we also deal with other things like distributing, using Stack Overflow, Reddit, Quora, that one less, but still a little bit.

For example, one thing I did early on at Zenrows was that we hired hackers to write content that nobody could write.

So we use different tools. We use Chatgpt, Perplexity, we use Surfer SEO, we have used Keyword Insights AI, and now we are starting to use LangDoc. I would say…

Important enough, sales will be slow. You will be ghosted. You won't make as much money as you believed. And in the end, it's about the bets. So focus on the pain points and you should know that for sure and also the exact person you are selling to. But the thing is, you need to focus on the by far most important things. If something is not…

(02:55) - Disha Agarwal
Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Modern Dev GTM Brew. I'm your host Disha, and today's episode is packed with insights for anyone looking to scale developer-first growth. Our guest today is Enric Baltasar. He is the chief growth officer at Zenrows. He joined Zenrows as the first hire and helped scale the company from a zero to five million dollar ARR. Along the way, he built the inbound engine from scratch and made content their number one growth channel.

In today's episode, we'll understand how he was able to build inbound from the ground up, what great content looks like specifically for a technical audience, and why having an intent-focused mindset is one of the most important things that a DevTools GTM team can do. Welcome, Enric. We're really thrilled to have you on board.

(03:43) - Enric Baltasar
Thank you, Disha, for inviting me.

(03:45) - Disha Agarwal
Great. So Enric, before we sort of dive in, would love to understand what Zenrows does.

(03:51) - Enric Baltasar
It's an API that allows any developer in the world to scrape data. So you can use the data to do a lot of different things like price monitoring, feed your LLMs, and honestly, we have customers doing hundreds of different things. And that's the beauty of data.

(04:08) - Disha Agarwal
Wow, that's really interesting. And you're right, you know, data is everything in today's world. There's so much that you can use data for, and you can decide how you want to use it. So I think that's really great. And then you joined as the first hire at Zenrows. What convinced you to take that plunge?

(04:24) - Enric Baltasar
That came a little bit by accident. So I was approached by a recruiter telling me that there is this thing called the Scraping API and it allows you to extract data from any website. And I was like, is that even possible? Because my first startup failed in part because of data extraction. And I could not believe that thing could exist, or even be possible. So I was really interested in that. It works. And yeah, I also had a matching with the culture and some goals, interpersonal things. So I decided just to join them and help developers get the data they need.

(05:01) - Disha Agarwal
So would you say that Zenrows is like one of a kind, or are there similar solutions that exist?

(05:07) - Enric Baltasar
Well, of course, there are similar solutions and some that are better in some regards, we are better in other ones. It's a very competitive market and evolving very fast, and I find that very interesting because things change all the time.

(05:28) - Disha Agarwal
And that's the early phase where a lot of dev tool companies really get stuck. But you managed to build something that really scaled. So we'd love to understand, you know, how did you decide what you would focus on in the first 100 days?

(05:41) - Enric Baltasar
Okay, so when I joined it was just the founders and me. And I spent one week trying to understand the market, the different players, what they are doing, the opportunities, and also trying to pick up with the things that the founders did, which was around, they wrote a few blog posts, mostly for social outreach. And then I saw a big opportunity with SEO because I saw gaps in the competitors everywhere. Some were doing better, but overall there were huge gaps and there were a lot of opportunities mostly trying to focus on paying points.

(06:14) - Disha Agarwal
Understood. So how did you start, you know, generating demand with no sales team and no content? How did you start that?

(06:22) - Enric Baltasar
So I think it was in my second week, I started looking for freelancers because it was too early to look for full-time people. And it's actually in my first 90 days to grow the revenue of Zenrows by around 2.5 times.

(06:37) - Disha Agarwal
Wow. What do you think worked? Like what did you do differently that you were able to sort of scale that fast? Because that's something that you don't see every day.

(06:46) - Enric Baltasar
Yes, I mean, I would say it's a combination of things. One of them probably is that I have wasted too much money and time in SEO projects in the past. So some worked, brought their ROI, but I learned a bunch of things that people don't know or cannot implement easily. For example, one of the things that for me was super important to learn in one previous SEO project, something like that, was that people don't get to connect the customer journey well enough. And that's a huge problem because you end up doing what doesn't look like, but it is spray and pray. Because you basically write things that look like might be interesting for your audience, but you don't really connect the content and you don't really connect what the people are reading with your product in the end. Because of that and the similar or related reasons, you end up producing a lot of content, takes a very lot of time to produce. It's very expensive and their ROI is very low.

(07:44) - Disha Agarwal
Understood. Understood. But when you're sort of the only person running growth, there's pressure to do everything, right? You have content, you have SEO, you have campaigns, you have partnerships. But you clearly had a sense of priority, right? So what did you prioritize? And what was the decision-making process like?

(08:02) - Enric Baltasar
So several points here. One, I would say that everyone is biased. We tend to do the things that we have more experience with. We don't necessarily default to that, but obviously that takes a big importance. Because let's say, for example, that you are a master on paid ads, you're going to see things that others don't.

So in my case, I've been doing content since I am, I don't know, maybe 19 years old, something like that. So for me, it's easier to see things there. That being said, I have experience and with positive revenue, with different things. It could be partnerships, it can be sales outreach, different channels. So it's not that I just picked SEO and extremely focused on it because of that reason. There were several signals there. There were the signals that the founders did something that few people did as founders, I mean, and it made sense. Exploring the market, I saw that there were gaps or cracks everywhere. Nobody was dominating topical authority very well. People didn't really know how to sell things from content that well, and so on. There were huge players, but I knew I could improve that a lot. And definitely there were a lot of reasons.

Like, for example, we didn't have trust signals. I mean, how do you compete when you didn't have customer stories, didn't have reviews, didn't have anything at all? So how do you compete? Basically, you need to build trust, mostly with developers, because developers distrust any vendor. So content was one way to find a shortcut or bypass that lack of trust. And also, for example, our product was very mature. So we could have spent money on paid ads, for example, or on partnerships or things like that. But there was a problem, which is the product is immature. I can send traffic, but will it convert? No, it will be super expensive. So I wanted something that allows me to learn and create impact at the same time. Because in the end, I think it took me about seven to nine months to really feel like, okay, I get this industry.

(10:00) - Disha Agarwal
So content was like a natural fit for you because as you said, right, winning that trust from developers was one of the most important things. And what were some of the early wins? While we did talk about you growing the revenue to 2.5x, when you started focusing on content, what were some of the early wins that really helped validate your approach?

(10:18) - Enric Baltasar
So, so I was targeting keywords that had high pain or mid-pain, low keyword difficulty, and that I thought that it would make a lot of sense. Obviously, not all of them worked, but most of them did. So I saw them being featured on ranking pretty fast. I saw signups growing up, I see the first revenue going up. So it was pretty fast, I would say. Basically, I was just applying what I learned not to do from previous projects or how to speed up things.

(10:52) - Disha Agarwal
So when you started, you know, with content, by what time do you start seeing results? So if someone starts investing in content today, is there like a, you know, short understanding of by when they should start expecting results, or is it like a wait and watch game?

(11:08) - Enric Baltasar
I mean, that's the magical question. And it really depends about how much focus you want to give to it. It depends on the market because more saturated markets are more difficult. It depends on the awareness of the market. If you are, for example, building awareness, then it's going to be much harder, much longer than if you are just targeting an existing unfelt pain. So it really depends. And also depends, for example, if you rely exclusively on Mr. Google, or you have complementary channels for distribution. For me, the question itself needs more precision. And the problem is that it's too easy to say on average projects take three months, projects take six months, one year. Could be, but depending on what? That's the important thing because if we want results and fast, we need to go much deeper than what people usually go. And if you go to agencies, they will tell you it takes six months. Why? Because they are not going to enter your mindset and the day-to-day of your customers that well. But if you do, you will understand their pains, their operations, and then you will understand, okay, I need to do this and then that with that.

And when you produce content, you can share it in different ways. You can distribute it on Reddit, you can distribute it on different places. Even you can create SEO content and then reuse the same content with paid ads and that converts.

(12:35) - Disha Agarwal
Understood. So it's really dependent on a lot of factors. And then how your market is, where you stand, and how much effort you are putting in content. So there's no one size fits all approach, is what I'm understanding.

(12:48) - Enric Baltasar
Exactly. It really depends which, I mean, I know that it would be the best to say it takes one month. Well, not really. It takes six months. Not really. But usually people say it takes several months to start seeing results. But again, what is a result? Because some people talk about leads. Okay, what is a lead? Lead is, and then people say signups, other people say ebook downloaders.

(13:09) - Disha Agarwal
What were some of the things that you did try, but would not want to do again when building inbound?

(13:16) - Enric Baltasar
So, one thing I learned, well more than I learned, I upskilled on it, is to prevent bottlenecks. So I had a lot of issues trying to scale up the content because there were a lot of things that required a bunch of ad hoc customizations, things like content pipelines work in most industries versus what we actually do. Things require a massive amount of not overthinking, but almost like it.

I would say that now, if it was the same industry or a different one, I would be way more prepared not to make the same very painful mistakes again.

(13:59) - Disha Agarwal
Any anecdotes that you'd like to share?

(14:01) - Enric Baltasar
Yes, so for example, we had a lot of trouble with technical writers because it was very difficult to find good ones. And honestly, I work with 60 plus technical writers. So I learned how to identify them, I learned how to balance their skill set, how to level them up when they are hired internally, something that takes a lot of effort. And mostly the first time you're doing that, good luck.

(14:29) - Disha Agarwal
So it's something that you sort of learn by doing is what I'm understanding, right? So you have to go through it.

(14:36) - Enric Baltasar
Exactly. And the thing is that even if I had experience selling to engineers, it's really different. Mostly when you go from low awareness to pain-aware markets, you really need to rethink a lot of what you do. You need to prioritize other things. And there are a lot of playbooks or a lot of tactics that work in both, but still you need to have an extreme focus because, for example, in other industries with engineers, it's much easier to find influencers, get them engaged, and so on. Meanwhile, in the developer industry, you can do that, and there are definitely a lot of good ways to do that, but I would say it might not be necessarily that easy or that fast.

(15:19) - Disha Agarwal
Understood. Understood. Makes sense. And thanks for sharing that, Enric. And one thing that really stands out in Zenrows' growth story is how central content has been to your success. So we'd love to understand what does good content mean for you, specifically for a technical audience.

(15:36) - Enric Baltasar
Well, that's like a question about landing pages for developers. You can smell the craft from generic marketers everywhere. There are really clear red flags. For example, fluff, buzzwords. Like when you hire marketers that have never marketed to developers, you can see they use buzzwords. I know that this is written by somebody who does not understand me. Another thing is people get lost in the introductions. They don't know how to start. So you, for example, see a bunch of articles starting with three paragraphs of intro, and then one "what is" section. And then what developers really do, if you go to the heatmaps and you see the recording of the sessions, what you really see there is that they scroll, scroll, scroll, or get back to Google.

(16:32) - Disha Agarwal
Understood. So when you are creating content for, or you're getting content created for developers, I think one thing that I understood is that they don't like fluff and they would like more proof. And instead of being sold to, they would like to understand how your product is working. Is there anything else that you keep in mind, any framework that you keep in mind when getting content created for developers?

(16:55) - Enric Baltasar
There is one thing that for me is super important. The thing is that when people read, even if they are developers, they are human. And that means several things. So instead of writing as fact, fact, fact, or statement, statement, statement, and many people even write literally, bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, it really feels like reading a grocery list. So what I approach it is differently. What we do is, okay, let's think of a story. There is somebody who has a specific feeling or emotion. They try to achieve a specific goal. They have gaps they are not aware of. What is the probability that they are coming from their scenario? And so on. So we do different things. So we celebrate small achievements. We intentionally use some emotional triggers. We connect sections.

(17:44) - Disha Agarwal
Understood. You also mentioned, Enric, that you know, you use heat maps to see where developers are, what are they reading, and what their journey of discovering and reading a content piece created for them looks like. What other things do you track? And then how religiously does tracking become important when creating content for developers?

(18:04) - Enric Baltasar
The thing is a qualitative measure. I know that a lot of people what they like is quantitative, but the thing is, the customer journey is very qualitative. It's like when you're trying to adopt a new behavior. So I would say what you try to pick is a combination of sources. One thing is how you feel. Try to do this exercise. It's very simple, but very effective. Get one of your texts, an article, a landing page, it doesn't matter. If it's an article, better, but that's it. So you copy paste the text and then you paste it into Medium or in a text-to-speech tool. And then you click play. But important, you do not look at the screen. So you just don't look at the screen and hear. And then you think. You need to ask yourself several questions. I started to read, does it connect with what I really want to achieve and my frustrations? No. Do I feel like I want to keep going? Do I feel like it's easy to follow? Do I feel like, why? Because you lack, you cannot see the code snippets and you cannot like have much more ties. So you switch your mind from the perspective of I am consuming logical things to the perspective of I am consuming something that will change my day.

(19:30) - Disha Agarwal
That's such a cool exercise, Enric. And I'm sure, you know, anything that passes that test is something worth listening to and worth reading.

(19:39) - Enric Baltasar
It's very useful. I mean, forget about logic. I know logic is your default, but think about all the other things because that really hooks people. That's what makes people convert.

(19:51) - Disha Agarwal
Thanks, thanks for sharing that insight. And in terms of, you know, content format, is there something that consistently works better? Have you sort of worked more with tutorials? Is it more blog posts? Is it more guides, benchmarks? What is it that works?

(20:06) - Enric Baltasar
Okay. Okay, so everything works. The thing is this, some things work more than others. For example, if I were to answer with black and white your question, I would say tutorials. It's very, I mean, it's very normal to write them, developers write them more easily than many other formats. There is a lot of inspiration out there and so on. The reality is not that simple. It's not about the format. Some other formats can convert way better. It's about the execution. Because I can see that. So it's not just about, do you have the best product or do you have the best ideas? It's about how can you execute on this? How can you build the growth ecosystem on this?

(20:54) - Disha Agarwal
And in terms of, you know, content, where do you feel most startups or most dev tools lack in execution? What is it that is missing when they're sort of executing?

(21:04) - Enric Baltasar
Anything that is not a tutorial. I actually built my own framework about the ladder of writers when it comes to format and so, because after working with dozens of technical writers, I realized the pain when I try to skill them up. So, you know, like tutorials is not the, I wouldn't say it's easy, but I would I would say is not the most difficult one. But there are a lot of other things. There are listicles, comparisons, a lot of things. So I would say that if we take into consideration the natural tendency of most of the markets serving this content and we also consider what converts and what people are doing, probably anything that is not a tutorial can convert very well, but the execution is pretty lame in many cases.

(21:55) - Disha Agarwal
Understood. Is that because, so what did Zenrows do differently so that you know, you were able to strike the right chord? What doesn't work? So are they not using good technical writers? Is their framework not well? Are they not deciding the content that they want to speak about right? What is it that is missing generally?

(22:12) - Enric Baltasar
I mean, it's a lot of factors. There is this thing that in the industry, technical writers are used to the following scheme. They deliver an article and then they expect automatically to be said, yeah, all of this is amazing, just approve it and pay. No, we have feedback, real feedback. So what do you do with that feedback? You need to apply it, find a solution. What is the solution? Honestly, a lot of different things and it really matters if it's an external or internal person. But for example, we have internal scores. So what I did was to find, if we were to assess an article, a technical article, how to understand if this is good or bad and how to tell the writer if this is improvable or not and in which aspects. And what people do is that they give no feedback, they give two lines of feedback, or you can do other things. Those other things are find factors that are the main constellations for what you're trying to assess both technically and non-technically. Then you give a score from one to five to each one, and the score is not hazard. Why? Because if you just say it's from one to five, if you have different feedback givers or even over time, there will be a deviation. So what you do is for each one in your guidelines, one means this, two means this, and so on, with clear examples. And then you also can leave notes of improvement points. So that way I saw that writers improve much faster, not just because we gave more feedback and expected the feedback to be applied. I know we are maybe not the easiest employers, but we look for excellence. And I know a lot of our content is improvable in many regards, but we try to seek and pursue excellence as much as we can. We try to, we have a mantra, which is we write the best content on the internet. There is no exception. So I need to build guardrails so the team doesn't go to write a lot of things, take much longer. The ROI is even lower by writing more and all of that. Anyway, getting back. So after all of those scores, I also have other things there, which is that I created an overall score.

(24:32) - Disha Agarwal
Wonderful. So, so giving valuable feedback and making that feedback actionable and, you know, making sure that the writers are taking action on that and then giving them clear direction as to how to improve is something that really has gone a long ways what I understand at Zenrows. And that is something that is showing in your content.

(25:39) - Enric Baltasar
Exactly.

(25:40) - Disha Agarwal
I think that pursuit of excellence shows, Enric. So writing good content, I think is one half of the battle. The other half is making sure that you know, the distribution is happening. Because great content that nobody sees is a wasted effort, right? So how do you distribute content? What are some of the channels that work for you?

(25:57) - Enric Baltasar
So, I mostly focus on Google. The point is that we also deal with other things, like distributing, using Stack Overflow, Reddit, Quora, that one less, but still a little bit. The thing is, it really depends on what you are doing. I would say thinking of distribution first is extremely important. You can do search first with social blending. You can do parallel activities. You can just try things not for social, not for search, but to help you in the customer journey so that you convince people. So you need to think about who is going to consume that and through which way. That helps you to get started, but the reality is that you can achieve a lot of things just by blending things or doing things in parallel, and that's the title. Imagine that they tell you this is the trends. Okay, who are you? I mean, even if you have a brand, who are you? Maybe this is written by some marketer and they have no idea what they're writing about. They just went to Chatgpt and asked, hey, what are the trends or perplexity? That's what many people do. So just this example is extremely different saying, hey, this is my truth versus this is the truth I understand based on this.

(27:16) - Disha Agarwal
Understood. Very interesting insight. And as you were saying, right, Google is something that you focus on. Is that by choice or what is the thought there?

(27:25) - Enric Baltasar
It's by choice because it's just the biggest search engine in the world. There are a lot more search engines, but that's the most important one consumed by our audience. It's... now Bing is growing because of different reasons. So it needs to be paid more attention mostly because of LLM optimization. It just makes sense as a rule of thumb. There are people who say, yeah, you should optimize for multipolar, you should optimize for all of them. And well, I don't think so. You should optimize for, you should always try to have few bets, but very ambitious ones. And that's what I did. So don't just chase any shiny thing because you will get lost.

(28:06) - Disha Agarwal
Right. What are some other ways that you've used to build credibility? Because I think that's specifically for startups, I think that's one really big challenge.

(28:15) - Enric Baltasar
It really depends. I know, that's not the answer you want, but it depends on different factors. The network you have, I mean, I've been in different scenarios. For example, I was at a startup for targeting engineers where the problem was that we had no network. So I needed to build it from scratch, and that's slow and painful. But I found ways to do that because you identify people who have more voice and then you start to nurture the relationship, and then you invite them to your podcast or your webinar or whatever. So the thing is, what you need to build more than credibility is value. So, when you invite somebody who is known and respected, you get a share of their influence, of their authority. So you invite those people and then people start to trust you more. But it depends on the situation. So the thing is, it's slow, but if you want to find shortcuts on that, there are different ways. For example, one thing I did early on at Zenrows was that we hired hackers to write content that nobody could write. And that's one of the ways we grew so fast because we did things that others didn't. And yeah, it was very expensive. It requires a lot of collaboration, rewriting a lot of things. It was super hard to find, but it paid off. The thing is, if you want to build authority, there are two main ways or two main paths: the curation path or the insider's path. The curation path is good and it's the fastest. The insider's path is way more difficult. But then you need to think about, okay, I don't have a network, I don't even know how to attract people. I don't know a lot of things. So, but think about it broadly. Why do you trust companies? Because people talk to you about them, because they tell you things that you already believe in, because they have their own perspectives. So you need to simplify reality to then understand how to target it. Like, for example, Notion. So case studies work well, or customer studies work well, pretty, pretty well, and also for outreach, cold outreach. But then what? Reviews. Okay, you will leave some reviews there. You will ask some customer, hey, leave a review. Okay, my question is, if you are an engineer, will you trust an anonymous customer story and anonymous reviews?

(31:01) - Disha Agarwal
What is the impact that it is creating actually?

(31:04) - Disha Agarwal
Exactly. So for example, if you're doing cold outreach, the case studies, real ones are really good. But other than that, I mean, if you have, let's put the worst scenario, you have no network, no skills for marketing, and you have very little time and you are not funded, then go for curation as much as you can. Try to mix search with social, try to do a blog part of your time to do both things at the same time. And I have a trick here because it might help some people. It's more general, but for me it was very helpful. You know, there is this advice on "eat that frog", which is very practiced and very believed in, which is you basically eat the worst thing, the thing you don't like to do first in the morning. No, I disagree with that because if I if I do that, I will procrastinate. I just want to start my day with fresh ideas, explosion of productivity, and then block a time to do what I don't like to do or what I like to do less. So you have the high-level bird and you have focus. And also you avoid distractions. And that way, people feel way better, way more productive, achieve more, and in the end, everyone is happy. The team player, the company, and the customers.

(32:28) - Disha Agarwal
Makes sense. So while we're on the subject of productivity and how you're making sure that people are giving their best, right? Are there any AI tools which you are using to make sure that your GTM work is happening faster, anything to increase productivity there?

(32:45) - Enric Baltasar
Well, yeah, definitely. You know, like, Chatgpt is my, like, thinking partner. So, we use different tools. We use Chatgpt, Perplexity, we use Surfer SEO, we have used Keyword Insights AI, and now we are starting to use LangDoc. I would say AI is the flashy thing and you can get a lot of advantage out of it. At the same time, nothing will replace thinking about yourself first. So AI is amazing. So it hallucinates a lot. I think we will see an increase in adoption of AI. There is one thing that I personally, based on my experience at least, it doesn't work that well, which is the AI agents. They work for some things, but they believe more in AI workflows.

(33:33) - Disha Agarwal
So is there any particular tools or AI workflow that you really, you know, love and that you use?

(33:40) - Enric Baltasar
Well, I tried N8N mostly to learn about AI some time ago, but in the end, it's limited, so I, in the end, defaulted to Python.

(33:51) - Disha Agarwal
Understood. Understood. So I was just saying that, so Enric, we discussed, you know, how content is very important and then after content comes distribution. But one of the more important things is timing. So, and that's where intent comes in, right? From what I understand, you're not just publishing content for the sake of traffic. You're also deeply focused on understanding when someone is ready to act. In one of our conversations, you had mentioned that you would like to call yourself as an intent-first marketer. So just wanted to understand from you what that mindset actually looks like in day-to-day GTM execution.

(34:24) - Enric Baltasar
It means a lot of things. To give some tips here or focuses here would be that focus on the one or two main reasons people would buy your product. But the thing is, you need to focus on the by far most important things. If something is not important enough, sales will be slow. You will be ghosted. You won't make as much money as you believed. And in the end, it's about the bets. So focus on the pain points and you should know that for sure and also the exact person you are selling to and think about different dimensions. For example, how big the company is, how much money they have in the bank, who is taking the decision, what are the biases they have, and so on. Because when people are asked these straightforward questions, they zigzag a little bit.

One easy tip: developers don't like maintenance. I see a lot of messages now saying, it's so cool, it allows me to do things, but I am smarter, I can, I can do this too. But will you like also to spend 10 hours per month, 5 hours per month maintaining this? Probably not.

(35:34) - Disha Agarwal
Understood. But you also look at signals which indicate that, you know, this company or this person might right now have a problem that I am solving. Are you looking at signals like that also?

(35:45) - Enric Baltasar
Yes, so I trust behavior. I don't trust event data. So one thing that a lot of people do is they go to Ahrefs or Moz, Semrush, doesn't matter. The thing is, they go there, they validate their hypothesis based on the volume. Intent is not a matter of volume. Obviously, volume matters. But you should focus more on your gut feeling and you should focus more on understanding if these are real pain or not. Talking to people, seeing how they operate nowadays, and ask questions. If you are selling to a bigger customer, they are less likely. If you are selling to an indie hacker, a small startup, and so on, they are way more likely because they have too many fires to worry about building systems just to detect and fix and then manual time to improve that. So just go to events, you know, like go to events and see people failing. There is nothing more insightful than seeing people failing with what they are doing. And then there are other things like, they really feel like it's a pain big enough? Do they have budget? A lot of different questions, see their faces. Are they frustrated? Are they complaining about their day? Like, what really happens? What is the things that they won't tell you in a discovery call?

(37:10) - Disha Agarwal
Sure. Understood. Understood. Enric, I think we discussed a lot of things. We discussed content, inbound, automation. But just let's take a pause for a second. For someone who's just getting started, specifically in a small team without a lot of resources, where should they begin? What is it that moves the needle for them?

(37:29) - Enric Baltasar
It's a broad question. I would suggest to try to do the following exercise: the jobs to be done. And I'm sure that our audience knows that. But what most people get wrong about the jobs to be done is that they think about them functionally. That works, but only in part and in some cases. The reality is that there are two more types of jobs to be done, the social and the emotional ones. And people tend to miss them. And that's very impactful because sometimes the social or emotional aspect is more important. I will give you one example. Let's say that, let's put a simplistic scenario. You are just copying a product from a competitor and you want to sell it. And you have the exact, the exact same product, for whatever reason. Same target audience, same everything. How are you going to win? If you don't change the positioning, you don't change anything. By connecting the jobs to be done, the three types: functional, emotional, and social, and picking the one that matters the most in the right moment, and the other ones are supportive when they matter. For example, if in a B2B SaaS, if you tell people that the tool they are going to pay for, or they could pay for, improves... if you have nothing unique, a very extreme example, messaging. Because it's pretty easy to outperform DevTools in messaging.

(39:00) - Disha Agarwal
What your story is and how you are sort of telling it is very important. And that's something that I totally understand. Thank you so much for your very tactical and honest conversation. I think, and thank you for walking us through what it took you to build a successful inbound engine. I think a lot of learnings for anyone who's wanting to build a DevTool GTM motion. Now, but before we sort of end, Enric, we would love to do a quick rapid fire. Shall we begin the rapid fire?

(39:28) - Enric Baltasar
Yeah, sure.

Rapid Fire Round

(39:34) - Disha Agarwal
Great. So what's the best piece of GTM advice that you have ever received?

(39:38) - Enric Baltasar
I would say read books. For example, right now I'm reading one, which is "The Dev-Facing Startup". It says a couple of things, more than a couple of things, that resonate a lot.

(39:49) - Disha Agarwal
Understood. What's the last thing that you Googled?

(39:52) - Enric Baltasar
It was this morning, I was Googling for Cloudflare domains.

(39:57) - Disha Agarwal
What's one DevTool marketing trend that everyone is talking about but you think is very overhyped?

(40:02) - Enric Baltasar
I would say AI chatbots because they can work really well. The problem is the execution or the implementation. AI chatbots are amazing, but you need to balance that with good input.

(40:15) - Disha Agarwal
Interesting take. So, if you could take a six-month break to master a new skill, what would that be?

(40:20) - Enric Baltasar
So right now one of the things I'm learning the most about is this AI. And another thing that I think is pretty, pretty important is video.

(40:28) - Disha Agarwal
What's a piece of career advice that people should absolutely ignore?

(40:31) - Enric Baltasar
Do your job and people will care, people will notice. The reality is that you need to work on your visibility. It doesn't matter if you're marketing a brand or marketing yourself. It's not about the creation, it's about the distribution. Think about it, not just with selling products, think about it in all aspects.

(40:50) - Disha Agarwal
What's a book that has had a big impact on how you think about marketing and leadership?

(40:55) - Enric Baltasar
"Breakthrough Advertising" by Jen Schwartz. You need to read it. It's really amazing.

(41:00) - Disha Agarwal
What's one go-to tool or software for staying organized and productive?

(41:06) - Enric Baltasar
Notion.

(41:07) - Disha Agarwal
What's one piece of content that every dev tool marketer should check out?

(41:10) - Enric Baltasar
I will, I will go for not an article, but another book that also helps a lot in understanding the people you serve and how they understand, how you speak, which is called "Gap Selling."

(41:22) - Disha Agarwal
Alright. That brings us to an end for the episode. Thank you so much, Enric, for your time. This was a really, really insightful conversation.

(41:31) - Enric Baltasar
Thank you for having me.