Keith Messick is the SVP of Marketing at LaunchDarkly, a feature management platform built by developers for developers. Keith has served as CMO at companies like Dialpad and Lucidworks, and also held senior leadership roles at Topsy, which was acquired by Apple.
This episode features an interview with Keith Messick, SVP of Marketing at LaunchDarkly, a feature management platform built by developers for developers. Keith has served as CMO at companies like Dialpad and Lucidworks, and also held senior leadership roles at Topsy, which was acquired by Apple.
On this episode, Keith delivers actionable insights around the importance of creating great content for developers, the key differences between category creation and category capture, and how to avoid rebranding nightmares.
“If you can build a successful business in the developer space and win the hearts and minds of developers, you can build a very big company. There are so many good examples. So it's a fun challenge.”
“When you have a very mature market and people know what they're looking for, you're trying to capture your share of that market. When you have a new category, you are having to generate interest like it is legitimate demand gen. And then over time, pieces of that market become more mature and then you try and capture that. But you always have an eye towards expanding the size of the opportunity.”
“Activity can be a dangerous KPI because you can do a lot of activity, but it doesn't amount to anything. So you try and balance the amount of activity with the results you can prove. And then you look at things like are we adding more people to the database? Are we activating the existing database? Are we doing something to make those people take action? That's job number one.”
“Rebrands are just setting a date on your calendar sometime in the future where half the company is going to love something you did and the other half is going to hate something you did, and the entire company is going to Slack you their opinion.”
“More people are going to see you for the first time moving forward than have seen you previously. And you're just presenting something new. They'll never know it was a rebrand. So you have to get over that mindset. You're not rebranding an airline. You're just trying to package yourself up in a different way that you want to present yourself moving forward.”
[Our website does] both education and conversion and is the way we think about it, but it actually plays all of the classic roles. It plays as our billboard. It's our always-on asset. We have complete control over it, so we want it to be great.”
Episode Timestamps:
*(3:03) - Keith’s first job in demand gen
*(4:25) - LaunchDarkly explained
*(6:14) - The Trust Tree
*(7:36) - Keith’s main marketing strategy
*(9:45) - How Keith thinks about spreading marketing resources
*(13:00) - Justifying ROI for building community
*(15:40) - Rebrands and avoiding the nightmare
*(21:46) - The Playbook and Keith’s uncuttable budget items
*(32:42) - How Keith thinks about his website
*(36:16) - Customer marketing strategy and perspectives
*(39:00) - A tactic that is fading away to be aware of
*(42:25) - The Dust-up
*(44:16) - Quick Hits
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