I have been the first Marketing VP at 3 dev-facing unicorns: Neo4j, Sourcegraph, and JFrog. I write about creating developer categories for startup founders.

Activate quickly.

Devs have discovered you, researched you, and evaluated you. Now you need to move them to activation.

Activation is the step after they have made the mental decision to adopt your technology, and it includes everything up until they achieve the value they hoped to achieve.

Minimize the time cost.

The most important thing about activation is that you must minimize the time required. This includes clock time, how many minutes or hours it takes from the developer, and calendar time, how many days it takes. It will take days if it involves more than one person, waiting for responses to emails, or provisioning.

Move from "This sucks" to "I'm awesome" ASAP.

The excellent Kathy Sierra talked about the importance of the time needed to make users awesome. If it takes too long, users will abandon you, and all that expensive effort to obtain them will go to waste. On the other hand, if you can make your users achieve value quickly--have them have an "Aha" moment, then they will tell their peers and colleagues.

If devs need to schedule multiple calls with your sales and support teams before they get to the point of achieving initial value, you have already lost.