At Auth0 we pitched ideas to my 7-year old. You should too.

When I was running developer marketing at Auth0 I did an exercise with my team at our offsite. I asked everyone on the team to split into pairs and create a 3-minute demo or pitch that explains the value of Auth0 to professional developers. There was only one hitch, I was not going to judge these myself, instead my 7-year old son Elliott, was going to judge these pitches.

If you ask Ana Cidre, James Quick or any of the folks in that room that day, I bet you they can remember the thrill or jolt when the pitch was either applauded or rejected by Elliott. He was more than happy to explain to them how their metaphor using Legos was a little too childish or elucidate to a team why their pitch was “quite good”. It was hilarious and fun, but it was also important and I think it’s important enough that I have run similar exercises with every team I’ve lead.

Why you should enlist a 7-year old for your marketing offsite

Here is the problem. Technical companies, serving technical audiences, too often lose their audience with the technical details, complicated messages and misattuned value props. Don’t misunderstand me, technical accuracy and credibility are cornerstones of a good developer brand, but you’ll never get the chance to speak to a developer if you offended them in the first 5 seconds.

The skill that I want my teams practicing is telling a technically accurate story simply and specifically. Simplicity is key. It quickly communicates 3 key things to your audience:

• Your product is not complicated (They will be able to explain it to their team and their boss)
• You know your audience
• You know what you are building (this is a huge red flag to many developers, when it’s clear you think your building an observability platform, but you’re actually building a plugin)

When my team presented to Elliott they had to forget their practiced pitch for Auth0 and think about a few things to cater this message to him:

• What does Elliott care about? What are his interests?
• What is Elliott’s technical skill level?
• What motivates Elliott?

What was interesting was that when people missed one or two of these points, it had a stark impact on how much Elliott paid attention. When they underestimated his technical skill it offended him. When they mischaracterized what is was to be a 7-year old, it annoyed him. And of course, these things happen all the time in technical marketing. When I open documentation and it assumes I know more than I do, or less than I do, I bounce. I recently opened the OmniSend documentation and realized that this was written for a customer (probably a specific customer) and in no way a helpful doc for someone just exploring. Or maybe I will open a website for client and realize they have no idea what their customers care about, certainly not “Reliability and Speed” when they could just have easily said “Cutting your sprint points in half”

After our team offsite I remember how impactful the session was for me personally. I never spoke about Auth0 the same away. I simplified the story and made sure we prioritized expert mode and always starting at page zero. And while Elliott may have picked a winner, that wasn’t really the point. The point was we were practicing a skill that I think too often technical teams take for granted.

But of course there is another point to this exercise and it is of the metaphysical kind. Especially right now, with the market flooded with devtools and infra plays….if you can’t simplify your story, and have it make sense to a 7-year old. You might be building the wrong thing.

Please feel free to book some time with me if you want to talk marketing for dev tools. I am winding down one project and excited to find the next one.