This came from watching a lot of promising devtools get early traction, then stall when trust signals weren’t consistent. Would love to hear how others think about earning developer trust without over-marketing it.

Trust is critical, but it is earned over time. The most that marketing messaging can do is buy a minimal level of trust required to get someone to try a product out. It can't buy enough trust to get actual dev customers in any real quantity.

However, a couple of the items recommended in the article immediately reduces my trust in the companies that do them:

> Here’s a missed opportunity I see constantly: developer tool companies that don’t capture email addresses from visitors who aren’t ready to convert.

Asking for my email before I'm at the point of wanting to try a product is a negative signal to me. The list of "compelling reasons" why I might want to provide an email address is the opposite of compelling -- the risk of getting stuff like that is one of the big reasons why I don't want to give my email address to companies.

> Do you have testimonials from recognizable companies? Are respected developers advocating for your tool?

The existence of testimonials in marketing materials is a negative signal to me. If the product was actually good, the company wouldn't need to provide me with them at all. I don't care what some famous dev somewhere thinks about the product anyway -- I don't know what their tastes and needs are, so I can't put their comments into the proper context. The only testimonials that matter are those from devs I personally know and respect.

> Are your founders visible and opinionated? Do they contribute to the broader conversation?

The more I hear directly from founders (particularly if they're opinionated), the more suspicious I get of the product.

Anyway, all that is a bit of nitpicking and, of course, is only relevant to how I form decisions about what I will and will not use. I'll leave this with agreeing wholeheartedly with what I think is the main point of the piece:

> Developer tools marketing isn’t about quick conversions or viral growth hacks. It’s about systematically building trust through consistent, valuable interactions with the developer community.