Not sure how you guys are managing tokens, I exhaust it very quickly.
People who are asking for the extension: https://github.com/abhiunix/AgentHarbor https://agentharbor.openxsecurity.com/
i maintain an open source developer tool. free. couple thousand regular users, a lot more who just read the docs. by any normal measure thats an audience.
i cannot convert it. subscriptions dont fit because theres nothing to subscribe to. donations got me pocket change. consulting off the back of it works, but thats me selling hours again which is the exact thing i was trying to get away from.
the part that actually bugs me is i KNOW companies want these people. i get cold emails from devtool startups every month asking to 'collaborate', which always turns out to mean write about them for free.
so theres demand for my audience, and theres my audience, and somehow theres no pipe between the two.
has anyone actually bridged this? what did it look like in practice
devrel-ish role at a small devtool company, so this is my problem to solve and i dont have an answer for it.
everything that works for us is manual. me answering questions, writing something actually useful, turning up in a thread at the right moment. it works. it does not scale, and it stops completely the week i take leave.
everything i can put budget behind reaches the wrong people. linkedin targeting for engineers is a joke. google eats the budget on about twelve overpriced keywords. a conference sponsorship got us lanyard impressions and not one signup i could trace back.
the good newsletters and podcasts do work, but theyre booked months out and there are maybe ten of them, so everyone in our category is in the same five inboxes.
what i actually want is to pay the long tail. the small libraries and docs sites our users already have open. i have no idea how you would even do that.
has anyone found something buyable that works? or is manual just the job
thinking out loud, tell me if this is stupid.
we sell a devtool. our users are already using twenty other free things, libraries, cli tools, docs sites. those maintainers have precisely the audience we want, and most of them make nothing at all.
carbon ads and ethicalads exist but they only take sites with real traffic, so its the same handful of big properties everyone already sponsors. github sponsors is charity, and i cant expense charity or measure it.
what i actually want is to say 'reach people deploying ai stuff into production' and have that land across thirty small relevant projects, with a click number at the end i can put in front of my boss.
does that exist and im just bad at googling? and if you maintain something, would you even take that money or does it feel gross to you
