Got a call last week from a sharp developer. Seriously smart guy. He’d built this incredibly detailed WooCommerce extension for managing subscription data exports. The code was clean, it was efficient—it was a real piece of work. But he’d sold maybe three copies in six months. He was convinced his checkout flow was broken or that a server setting was blocking payments. 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. The problem was 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’s not how developer marketing works. It just isn’t.
It reminds me of my first few years running the agency. I was obsessed with writing the most elegant, bulletproof code imaginable. I thought if I just built a better “for loop,” clients would magically 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. Trust me on this, 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 was the most important thing. It’s not. The *trust* in the product is. And for a solo dev or a small agency, your content is how you build that trust, long before anyone clicks “Add to Cart.” You have to show your work. You have to solve problems in public so people know you can solve their private ones.
He was writing articles, but they were 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 about the elegance of your solution; they care that it works. It’s the same trap many of us fall into, a concept I first saw articulated well in a post from Carl Alexander about his own struggles, where he admitted he’d “failed at writing” before realizing its role in distribution.
I told him to change his approach. Stop writing for other developers and start writing for his future customers. Frame every post around a painful, real-world problem. Here’s the kicker: I showed him this simple transformation:
// 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? One is a diary entry. The other is a lifeline. One shows off your knowledge. The other *uses* your knowledge to solve a problem. That’s the entire shift in mindset.
So, What’s the Point?
It’s not 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 is the bridge between the two. The real 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 alleviating. The code is the proof, not the point.
- Consistency Beats Brilliance: One useful, problem-solving post a month is better than a masterpiece once a year. It builds momentum and trust.
Look, 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 is it a sales tool for your future clients?
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