Developer product positioning and messaging examples that slap

Dissecting killer examples from modern dev startups and why anchoring is your best friend when marketing to developers.

Product is marketing. So why is “build it and they will come” a fallacy?

Let me try to explain the dynamic between product and marketing in engineering terms. I like to think of product, positioning, messaging, and copywriting as a stack:

Product = Core logic / backend

This is the backbone of the thing you’re building. But without the rest of the stack, it won’t get you anywhere.

Positioning = API

Defines what the product does, who it’s for, what it replaces, and why it’s different. It sets the boundaries and expectations — the contract your product makes with the market.

Messaging = Component library

Modular, reusable narrative pieces that define the problems, capabilities, features, and benefits — built from the contract. It’s what you use to assemble coherent, consistent communication.

Copy = UI / frontend

What people see: the words that enable them to understand, evaluate, and engage. This is the UX that ultimately presents your product — and shapes how the market responds.

So that’s how product and marketing are one: users come only when you build with and for the market.

Positioning 101

Before we get into the cool examples I promised, let’s unpack a few more things first.

You may have come across positioning statements like this one from the Developer Marketing Alliance’s B2D Guide to Product Positioning:

“For (target customer) who (statement of the need or opportunity), the (product name) is a (product category) that (statement of key benefit – that is, compelling reason to buy). Unlike (primary competitive alternative), our product (statement of primary differentiation).”

This format originates from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, published in 1991.

But today, product marketing consultant Anthony Pierri argues that such a math-equation-style template is unnecessarily complex. Instead, he suggests boiling positioning down to four simple questions:

• What’s the product?

• Who’s it for?

• What does it replace?

• How’s it different?¹

Simple — but not easy.

Because even after you’ve answered those questions, you still need to:

1. Convert them into messaging (reusable narrative components)

2. Execute that messaging as actual copy, like in a website hero

And just like you aim to write as few lines of code as possible to build something elegant, the same applies to copywriting: optimize for time-to-clarity.²

How anchoring helps

As humans, we perceive everything in relation to what we already know.

That simple fact creates an opportunity: we can use familiar products as anchors when introducing something new.

The classic example of anchoring in dev tools is Supabase calling themselves open source Firebase alternative.

This works incredibly well because those four words immediately explain:

• What the product is and what it replaces → Firebase alternative

• How it’s different → open source

• Who it’s for → Firebase users (their beachhead market)

You probably can’t beat answering the four positioning questions in just four words. But of course that only worked because their product strategy was so sharply defined.³

These days, Supabase has become a point of reference itself. Just check out the fire new homepage from Tinybird:

Why I love this:

• The headline is a no-frills description of what the product is.

• They skip the typical descriptive subheadline in favor of a strong CTA that shows off time-to-value through their API generation capability (Tinybird’s differentiator).

• Just as you start scrolling, you hit a fantastic anchoring testimonial. It draws an open-source parallel: Tinybird–ClickHouse in relation to Supabase–Postgres. This nails both what the product is and what it stands for.

• Postgres and ClickHouse are complementary database technologies (transactional vs. analytical), so the mirroring is super clean and it immediately clicks with the audience: devs looking for an easy way to use ClickHouse for app analytics.

The best part about anchoring in messaging is that it reflects how devs naturally talk.
By boiling down their positioning to just 10 words (“Tinybird is to ClickHouse what Supabase is to Postgres”) they make it easy to talk about, and easier to share. That’s how word-of-mouth happens.

And actually, even if a product doesn’t use anchoring intentionally, devs might still position it that way. Here’s what one HN user wrote when Laravel Cloud was announced a few months back:

To be fair, now that Laravel Cloud has launched, calling it “Vercel but for PHP” doesn’t really do it justice.⁴

Cloud is full-stack — with storage, stateful logic, background jobs, and more. It covers one more capability layer (the backend), so that word-of-mouth snippet doesn’t quite cut it.

The actual homepage hero clearly leads with the use case, and perfectly captures what Laravel Cloud is built to do.

But I can totally imagine a testimonial that anchors on the relationship between the frameworks and their hosting platforms — and makes the differentiator clear:

Laravel Cloud is doing for Laravel what Vercel did for Next.js — but full stack: complete with DBs, stateful logic, background jobs, and a tight ecosystem.
— Dev Agency Co-Founder

Actually, once you start thinking this way, the hosted backend in Laravel Cloud starts to feel a lot like Supabase territory.

Which brings me to:

Are platforms coming to rescue devs?

The fear of vendor lock-in — and the frustration with bloated tools — helped shape the “does one thing extremely well” mindset behind many craft products.

But what if stitching together all those specialized tools creates more friction than flow?

Solving that integration mess is exactly what sets PostHog apart.

This product analytics platform for developers already replaces multiple tools — and they just keep shipping, expanding into new categories with every launch.

At first glance, the headline might seem vague.

But the funny thing is — it’s kind of perfect.

Because their customers? They actually are successful (as you’ll see on first scroll).
And with the subheadline and product list, the message lands: this is a product analytics platform built for developers.

Once you’re past the wall of fame, you hit the on-brand second hero:

PostHog’s brand mastery (and how their brand is an extension of the product) deserves a post of its own. But make no mistake: this consolidation strategy, aimed at replacing a whole stack of competitors (some of them multi-product too), depends on clearly explaining how PostHog’s products are different.

To make the switch, devs need to know exactly what to expect. And their content delivers with dozens of detailed, scannable comparison pages, complete with clear product matrix tables against alternatives.

Already serving over 100,000 customers, PostHog is clearly winning. But does that mean there’s no room left for a does-one-thing-really-well, crafty tool in the product engineering space?

The team behind Bucket seems to think otherwise. Their product strategy (and consequently messaging) anchors on a core problem with most feature management tools: they’re built for A/B testing around individual users and e-commerce use cases. But teams building B2B apps need feature flagging that prioritizes companies, where A/B testing is mostly irrelevant.

That’s who Bucket is for.

Building for an underserved audience is a product strategy classic.

But notice how deliberate Bucket is about this.

They’re not just building for any B2B SaaS devs — they’re building for the ones who already use Linear (first on the list in the integrations section)⁵ and have that crafty product engineer mindset.

As you can see, the what and for who parts of positioning are the foundation of differentiation, because taking an existing product category and reimagining it for a specific audience is a wedge into the market.

In Bucket’s case, this means niching down.

But when you look at PostHog and its breakout success, it’s worth pointing out that the traditional audience for the product analytics category isn’t developers — it’s product managers.

So PostHog doesn’t just consolidate specialized tools. It does that for a completely different audience than those tools were originally built for.

What if appropriating adjacent categories is what actually enables building platforms for devs, who’d otherwise swear by best-of-breed tools?

Aikido Security’s example certainly fits this hypothesis. Just like product analytics — traditionally PM-owned — cybersecurity is a category usually owned by SecOps and infosec, not developers. And like PostHog, Aikido doesn’t just address tool sprawl. It goes straight for the developer.

I love how the subheadline crosses out fast (definitely one of the most overused words in dev tools) and in doing so, underscores the real value: hassle-free automation.

Then, when you scroll past the hero and logos you hit a conversational contrast block:

Sure, you can juggle between multiple security tools with confusing pricing models. Tools that will overload you with irrelevant alerts and false positives.

Or you could get Aikido

…followed by a grid showcasing all their different products:

Notice how each section clearly says what the product is, what it does, AND what it replaces, complete with competitor logos. This is a product marketing masterclass 👏

TL;DR

Positioning and messaging are inherent to the product — you can’t just bolt on marketing after you’ve built something.

Conversely, understanding your product’s positioning helps you make smarter product decisions.

As a founder, deciding what to build means making a bet with the market: for whom you’re building, what you’re replacing, and how you’re different.

To get to product–market fit, scratching your own itch isn’t enough. You need to know exactly where you stand among the alternatives.

And if you want word-of-mouth growth, you’ve got to explain that in as few words as possible.

1. Actually, Anthony wrote “better” not “different”, but why I insist that “different” is better than “better” is a topic for another post.

2. The sooner you can clarify the product positioning to your audience, the more you reduce time-to-value.

3. Product is marketing, remember?

4. Or Vercel, for that matter — if you’re thinking static sites.

5. Not to mention how similar the homepage design is to Linear’s.