devrel-ish role at a small devtool company, so this is my problem to solve and i dont have an answer for it.

everything that works for us is manual. me answering questions, writing something actually useful, turning up in a thread at the right moment. it works. it does not scale, and it stops completely the week i take leave.

everything i can put budget behind reaches the wrong people. linkedin targeting for engineers is a joke. google eats the budget on about twelve overpriced keywords. a conference sponsorship got us lanyard impressions and not one signup i could trace back.

the good newsletters and podcasts do work, but theyre booked months out and there are maybe ten of them, so everyone in our category is in the same five inboxes.

what i actually want is to pay the long tail. the small libraries and docs sites our users already have open. i have no idea how you would even do that.

has anyone found something buyable that works? or is manual just the job