developer-first-gtm

Roll individual usage up to accounts, then write a one-sentence qualification rule based on depth, spread, and boundary-contact signals derived from your own conversion data. Contact only qualified accounts with a technical offer, and write down an explicit do-not-contact line for everyone below the threshold.

Test three friction gates first: entry, value, and spread. A salesperson added to self-serve should return roughly 4x their fully loaded cost in incremental revenue; if qualified-account volume times deal size cannot clear that bar, no human-in-the-loop motion is available yet.

Contact accounts, not users, only after they cross a written threshold such as multiple active developers plus weeks of production usage, or any boundary contact like SSO or security pages. Respond within hours, and never contact accounts below the threshold.

Developer-focused companies show a median free-to-paid conversion around 5%, roughly half the median of non-developer companies, so blended benchmarks mislead. Also verify you measure accounts paying within six months by cohort at account level, not a lifetime user-level ratio.

Bottom-up fails when first value requires infrastructure, approval, or a second person, and when usage has no spread mechanism to reach a second developer. Team-scale value means self-serve is only the entry, requiring a hybrid motion with human-assisted conversion.

Identify the expansion vector per account: more developers, more teams, more workload, or more product surface, each with a trigger and owner. Reach a standardization decision by a platform group and multi-thread with a second technical advocate plus a manager-level contact.