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.

Evaluation does not mean what you think it means.

Devs have discovered you. They researched you. They experienced the inciting event. Now they intend to evaluate you.

Easy, you think.

You make claims on your website; anyone can check to see if my product meets those claims.

But that is not what Devs are thinking. They assume your product works some of the time. Otherwise, you wouldn't be in business. So when they evaluate, they evaluate whether it works for them now.

Every dev thinks their shop is a special snowflake.

No two organizations share the same set of tools, platforms, frameworks, languages, cloud providers, APIs, etc. Every dev even has their setup. So when a dev is evaluating you, what they are interested in knowing is whether you play well with everything else they already have going on.

One conflict and you will be tossed out the window.

This is why you have that fruit salad of partner logos on your home page. Devs know what they are using now. They want certainty that you won't break it.

The point of an evaluation is to ensure that your product works in their specific environment.

There's a timeframe for evaluation as well.

Imagine that a lead dev at a major enterprise is struggling with a problem—the problem you solve. They go home at the end of the week and think they will try you out over the weekend. On Saturday morning, they download your product or sign up for a free account using a burner email. By Sunday afternoon, they are done. If they reach a roadblock, they are done. They will not call for support.

If they got it to work, at Monday morning standup, they would say, "I may have a solution." If they didn't, they wouldn't say anything. And your eval is over.

Make sure new devs can get your product working over a weekend with no support.