A Playbook for Marketing to Developers
Lessons from the OG of computing; Plus the end of the newsletter
This is George from Orama, or Fintechorama, or Investorama. Yes, I’ve been suffering from brand confusion, and I’ll explain how it will be cured at the bottom of this email. But first, I wanted to share a playbook for marketing to developers: a challenge that is facing many B2B Fintechs.
Below is an edited transcript from an episode of The Fintech Files podcast with Pahal Patangia, Global Developer Relations Lead, Consumer Fintech at NVIDIA.
You can listen to the full episode on your favourite podcast player or watch it on YouTube.
Foreword: About Nvidia
Nvidia is not usually included in the Big Tech conversation that’s. Yet it’s 100% Tech, and it’s Big. It’s huge. It’s the 9th component of the S&P500 ahead of Meta (Facebook), and its capitalisation is 5 times larger than that of Netflix.
Pahal Patangia:
Nvidia is a full-stack computing platform and a leader in machine learning and data science, AI across industries. Nvidia invented the GPU, the Graphics Processing Unit which was meant to accelerate applications around graphics and rendering. And in 2012, deep learning researchers found that you can be used in training, large AI models, deep learning models, which would be very computer intensive otherwise.
And from there, it's become a different story for Nvidia. We have been picked up in every vertical to try to accelerate workloads, in a full stack fashion. So it's not just software, it's not just hardware. It's not just networking. It's the entire stack, which we are accelerating and serving the different industries and applications.
Nvidia’s Playbook for Marketing to Developers
Pahal shared his playbook, which I’ve annotated here to make it easier to follow.
Pushing Code
What we have seen works, and it has been a big part of our strategy, is pushing developer friendly samples, pushing code relevant to particular applications.
So if you are a hedge fund and if you have to validate your trades? If you are a developer there you can come to Nvidia website and Github, and check out samples on the repository. Or if you have to do something with fraud detection using, say graph neural networks we have samples for that. So what we have done is that, we have tried to attract developers by something, which they are very close to. We want to make their live easier.
And that is what has been the biggest attraction factor for developers to come on to Nvidia.
A Flagship Conference (GTC)
There are other mediums we have a conference, Nvidia GTC. GTC is that conference where we bring developers from all over the world, across different industries, across different domains. GTC sees a lot of developers signed in and that's a way for us to have access to their developers, educate them.
We recorded the podcast the day of the GTC conference! It’s an event that gathers 75,000 people, so it’s not an easy hack, but the take-away here is the value of tentpole events.
Communities & Competitions
We also go into the community, via competitions, Nvidia has a separate Kaggle competition's team. So we bring in the Kaggle grandmasters. These are people who have won numerous competitions across the years across the world.
Nvidia has created an ecosystem of Kaggle grandmasters. We have a team who goes and participate in the competitions and use Nvidia tickets.
Kaggle (Part of Google) is an online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners that organises competitions.
Portals and Blocks
We have developer portals and developer blocks where there is a lot of healthy discussion around what kind of applications are being worked upon? What kind of use cases are there? How are our SDKs being used? It's a close knit environment wher people can interact and feel connected to Nvidia.
Cutting edge products
And then we lead by example, Nvidia would definitely try to keep bringing something which is cutting edge and new to the industry. That attracts eyeballs as well.
You may notice the absence of ‘marketing talk’: personas, content, funnels, KPIs, etc., from the conversation.
The rest of the conversation was about data science for fintech. You can listen to it here.
About this newsletter
In the latest post, I wrote about my thought for this newsletter:
I think the content will be more targeted around:
Fintech and sub-topics that I’m mainly involved in: Investing, Wealth building, Open Banking
Practical, actionable advice from first-hand growth and Marketing experiments
Because that was six months ago, it’s fair to say that it didn’t work. I’ve been much more active on my other Substack. Fintechorama (this newsletter) was meant to be about Fintech and Marketing. Investorama was about the ‘future of investing’, a segment of Fintech.
The idea initially looked like this:
But I was wrong to think I could split my interest into two different channels. The separation is not so clear. In practice, it looks like that:
And I need to adapt my publications accordingly by merging the two newsletters.
To do so, dear Fintechorama reader, I’m going to break a Substack taboo and copy your email to the Investorama list. I’d understand if you’d prefer to unsubscribe now (at the bottom of this email or just hit reply).
If you decide to stick around, here is an overview of what you can expect
Interviews with executives from companies like Pinwheel, Consensys, Nvidia (and smaller startups)
Thoughts and research on alternative assets, web3.0, bridging traditional finance and Defi, investment strategies
Pop culture references and explainers, linking series (like Billions) or films (like Avatar) to current fintech topics.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and the previous ones and that I will see you on the other side, or if you prefer, here are other ways to stay connected: Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube.