You built the thing, you ship the features, you write the changelog, and the marketing is the part you keep deferring because writing a launch post takes three hours and shipping a feature feels like progress. Compass helps you build your visibility with the right users through a well researched marketing plan that earns you signups, paying customers and word-of-mouth growth whilst teaching you the marketing craft that your product can rely on in the future. Try Compass today with a free 90 day growth plan.
It's Tuesday late. You ship the build, you write the commit message, you look at the launch post sitting half-written in a doc you opened three weeks ago, and the picture is patchy. Hacker News didn't pick up the last launch, the GitHub stars chart has gone flat, the analytics from the dev twitter post got six clicks, and every marketing thing you try feels like shouting into a void. The last fifty users came from a friend's retweet, the next fifty have to come from somewhere else, and the founders Slack is full of people writing growth threads about tactics that have nothing to do with shipping software. You know you need to do something about distribution but the marketing options run into the dozens, writing about your own work feels like the worst kind of self-promotion, and your time is whatever is left after the codebase and the customer emails. So what do you do?
Most marketing advice was written for companies that already have a marketing team and an ad budget, and most of the writing about developer marketing assumes you have a growth engineer and a content lead. The agency playbook leans on tactics that fit Series-B companies, and the trade press is full of operators with paid teams that have nothing in common with you. The advice you can find online slips into trying everything once, committing to none, and ending the quarter with the analytics chart still flat and the launch post still in the same doc.
Other AI tools generate your marketing and produce filler you could spot as machine-made in a second. Compass runs the other way. It pairs AI speed with coaching and craft and gives you the reason behind each one, so you ship marketing in a voice that is yours and understand the system the way you understand your stack.
Compass starts with positioning, because the words you use to describe your product decide whether the developer reading your page understands what it is for them inside the first ten seconds. It surfaces the README, landing-page, and changelog actions that lift your understanding rate against what your category typically does, and it names the reason behind each one so the craft stays with you the next time you ship. It sets the mix of places you show up to fit a developer-led launch, calibrated to the platforms your audience reads, whether that is Hacker News, developer twitter, the GitHub trending page or the specific subreddits your category lives in. It teaches you how to build the launch and content rhythm that earns distribution at zero spend, with the small automations that pay back the setup time rather than steal it from shipping.
You stay in control of how the product is explained, you learn why each play works, and you get the thinking of a senior marketing executive without leaving the keyboard for long.
Compass calibrates to your specific business. Each of these has its own page with the actions that fit the work best
Twenty minutes. You answer a handful of quick questions about your product: what it does, who you've sold it to, where you're already showing up, what your roadmap looks like. Compass researches your category and surfaces what it finds, then a short guided conversation captures your last great user, the next quarter, what you've tried, and the time and budget you can put behind it.
The free 90 Day Growth Plan lands first: a single on-screen plan personalised to your product, with the market truth about your category, the user profiles most worth pursuing, the moments that turn a stranger into a signup, and a 90 day roadmap of the actions that matter most. Pro turns that into a full 12 month strategy with deeper research and five user profiles instead of two.
A short daily task list, sized to the time you have, anything from one task to a few, calibrated for a developer who is also the marketer. Some tasks Compass handles for you in the background, such as competitor tracking, the GitHub and Hacker News mentions that need a response, and the listings monitoring across the marketplaces your product lives on. The rest are short and clear, designed to fit between shipping sessions, with the marketing science behind each task explained in jargon-free language.
Developer marketing has its own canon of science: how positioning decides whether a developer understands what your product is for them inside the first ten seconds, the launch-post mechanics that turn a Hacker News submission into the front page rather than the second page, the GitHub-trending and changelog dynamics that compound while you build, and the small content surface that earns distribution at near-zero spend in the communities your audience already reads. Compass applies the science to your product and names the reason behind every task in plain English, so you learn your marketing craft every day until one day you won't need Compass anymore.
Pro Plan subscription £19 per month for as long as you stay.