Weaviate’s Three-Team Marketing Framework: A New Approach to Developer GTM

Marketing to developers requires a fundamentally different approach than traditional B2B marketing. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Weaviate founder Bob van Luijt revealed how his company splits marketing into three distinct teams, each playing a crucial role in their bottom-up growth strategy.

“I’m taking the liberty to look at marketing in the broad sense of the word,” Bob explains. “We have three teams that are doing something related to marketing. So one team is what we call the developer growth team, another team is what we call the developer relations team and the other team we call just the marketing team.”

Let’s break down each team’s role and how they work together:

Developer Growth: Winning New Users The developer growth team focuses on expanding Weaviate’s user base. As Bob describes it, their mission is “getting people in, making people aware that our developers in this kit, making developers, where do we exist? Telling developers, hey, this is what you can build, hey, you want to do this cool AI stuff, this is how you can do it.”

This team builds example applications, creates videos, produces their podcast, and generates content. Their focus is primarily quantitative – reaching as many developers as possible. “The focus is on quantity just as much as we can, capturing as much mind share as we can,” Bob notes.

Developer Relations: Deepening Engagement The developer relations team takes a different approach. They focus on developers who have already shown interest in Weaviate. “Here it’s more of focus on quality,” Bob explains, “in the sense that the content that we’re creating for them, that comes in the form of the software documentation, that comes in the form of we have the Weaviate academy those kind of things.”

This team creates in-depth technical content and resources that help developers successfully implement Weaviate. Their content includes comprehensive documentation, detailed blog posts, and educational materials for building AI applications.

Product Marketing: Traditional Marketing Activities The third team handles what Bob calls “product marketing,” focusing on activities like event presence and broader market positioning. He gives an example: “Last year in November I believe, or early December, there was this really big conference in Las Vegas from Amazon Web Services… and that is one thing that the marketing team focuses on.”

This structure supports Weaviate’s bottom-up adoption strategy. As Bob explains, “Rather than selling to CTOs and CIO’s, you sell bottom up. So you go to the developers, you make the developers adopt your technology and they move it up in the organization.”

The effectiveness of this approach becomes clear when you look at the results. Since launching their serverless offering in April 2023, Weaviate has seen significant traction across both individual developers and enterprise customers.

For founders building developer tools, this three-team structure offers several advantages:

• Clear ownership of different parts of the developer journey
• Balance between quantity (growth) and quality (relations)
• Specialized focus on different types of content and activities
• Support for bottom-up adoption

But perhaps the most important insight is Bob’s emphasis on helping developers succeed: “Help people be successful in what they want to build. Don’t push your technology. Help them be successful using your technology.” This principle guides all three teams, ensuring their efforts align with developer needs rather than just pushing features.

The framework also acknowledges a crucial reality about developer marketing: different stages of the journey require different approaches. The content that attracts a developer’s initial interest isn’t the same content that helps them successfully implement your technology or that convinces their organization to make an enterprise commitment.

For technical founders looking to improve their developer marketing, Weaviate’s three-team structure provides a practical blueprint for organizing marketing efforts around the entire developer journey, from initial discovery through successful implementation and organizational adoption.