Got a call last week from a sharp developer. Seriously smart guy. He’d built a detailed WooCommerce extension for managing subscription data exports. The code was clean and efficient, a real piece of work. But he’d sold maybe three copies in six months. He was sure his checkout flow was broken, or that some server setting was blocking payments. A total mess, in his mind.
I spent a couple of hours digging through his setup. The site was fine. Payments worked. The plugin itself was solid. The problem wasn’t technical. Nobody knew who he was, or why they should trust his solution. He’d spent a year building in a cave and expected customers to be waiting when he finally opened the door. That isn’t how developer marketing works.
It reminds me of my first few years running the agency. I was obsessed with writing the most elegant, bulletproof code I could. I figured if I just built a better “for loop,” clients would appreciate the craftsmanship and line up to hire us. My blog was a ghost town because I was too busy refactoring things no client would ever see. I was building a perfectly engineered boat with no ocean to put it in.
Your blog isn’t a diary; it’s your pre-sales engineer
The client’s mistake was thinking the product mattered most. It doesn’t. What people buy is trust in the product. For a solo dev or a small agency, your content is how you earn that trust, long before anyone clicks “Add to Cart.” Show your work. Solve problems in public so people believe you can solve theirs.
He was writing articles, just the wrong kind. They were technical deep dives that only another elite developer would appreciate. That’s not your customer. Your customer has a problem they want gone. They don’t care how elegant your solution is; they care that it works. It’s a trap a lot of us fall into. I first saw it put well in a post by Carl Alexander about his own struggles, where he admitted he’d “failed at writing” before he understood its role in distribution.
So I told him to flip his approach. Stop writing for other developers and start writing for his future customers. Build every post around a painful, real-world problem. Here’s the shift I showed him:
// BEFORE: A Title for a Fellow Developer
"A Technical Look at Modifying WooCommerce Subscription Post Meta via a Custom Endpoint"
// AFTER: A Title for a Frustrated Store Owner
"Why Are My WooCommerce Subscription Reports Wrong? Here's How to Fix Them."See the difference? The first is a diary entry; the second is a lifeline. One shows off what you know, the other puts it to work on a problem someone actually has. That’s the whole shift in mindset.
So, what’s the point?
This isn’t about becoming a “writer.” It’s about documenting your value. For a developer, your brain is the product and your code is just the output. Your content connects the two. The takeaway is this:
- Start before you’re ready: Your first blog post should go up the day you start coding the product, not the day you launch it.
- Solve problems, don’t just share code: Frame everything around the pain you’re relieving. The code is the proof, not the point.
- Consistency beats brilliance: One useful, problem-solving post a month beats a masterpiece once a year. It builds momentum and trust.
This stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.
So ask yourself: is your blog a portfolio for other developers, or a sales tool for your future clients?
