Book and training help

Picks and Shovels: Marketing to Developers During the AI Gold Rush is a 494-page paperback about how to market products whose buyer is a developer. The title comes from Samuel Brannan. He got rich in the California Gold Rush by selling supplies to miners, not by mining. The same pattern shows up in every platform wave: internet, cloud, mobile, and now AI. The book is the playbook I used across thirty years at Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Meta, Twitter, and Supabase.

The spine of the book is Help First. Teach before you pitch. Developers will try the product themselves, and they will walk away from puffery.

Founders, executives, product marketing managers, and developer advocates who have to take a developer product to market. Chapter 0 says it plainly: if you are in a crowded field of picks and shovels, and the market of software engineers keeps growing, this is the job.

It is not a general B2B marketing textbook. It is not an engineering book. If you sell to procurement officers who never touch the product, most of the tactics will feel wrong, and that is the point.

Twenty-eight chapters, from 0 through 27. The first third is the operating system: how to start, how to organize the team, how to measure with the ACES framework (awareness, conversion, expansion, systems), and how developer advocacy, content, community, events, education, brand, and docs do the work.

The middle is product marketing: positioning, messaging, ICPs, pricing, launches, and staying aligned with product. The last third is how you grow: product-led, sales-led, and partner-led motions, PR and analyst relations, budget, AI as a copilot for marketers, and how to build a career in this field.

You should leave able to run advocacy, marketing, and product marketing as one program, not three disconnected teams.

Not as a full chapter. The 2025 edition treats AI as the gold rush you are selling into, and Chapter 25 treats AI as a copilot for the marketer: research, drafts, personalization, and customer insight. The reader it assumes is still a human developer.

Agents reading your docs, pricing page, and changelog is a later argument. I wrote that up as the chapter I would add if the book went to a second edition. Buy the book for the human buyer. Read the essay for the machine reader.

DevRel is in the book. It is not the whole book. Chapter 4 calls advocacy the tip of the spear: capture product feedback, write credible content, know the community leaders, and speak for developers inside the company. The rest of the book is demand, positioning, pricing, launches, sales enablement, and budget.

If your only question is how to hire an advocate, start with the DevRel posts. If your question is how the whole motion makes money, start with the book.

Strategic Nerds Press published the paperback on September 23, 2025. ISBN 9798999111104. 494 pages. Amazon and Barnes & Noble sell the print edition and set their own prices. Amazon also sells the Kindle edition.

The digital bundle on this site is a separate product: an EPUB, markdown files for LLMs, and the marketing prompts and agent skills. Retailers do not include those files.

The $19.95 bundle is a one-time purchase. You get the EPUB, markdown files so an LLM can read the book without scraping a PDF, and the prompts and agent skills I use for positioning, launches, content, and competitive work. When new prompts ship, you get the updates.

It does not include the paperback. Buy print from a retailer if you want paper.

The $499.95 bundle adds one hour of live work on your product. We pick one problem: positioning, messaging, or go-to-market. I will have read what you send in advance. We talk through the actual choice in front of you, not a generic lecture, and you get a recording.

That hour is not the three-hour team training. It is one person or a tight group, one decision, one recording.

A three-hour live workshop for a team of up to five people. You bring real projects. I start with a live demo of a workflow I actually use, then we run the same kind of work on your research, positioning, content, and automation. The list price is $1,500 for the session.

This is not a slide deck about the future of AI. The session exists so your team leaves with workflows they can run the next Monday.

Claude Code installed, and a short list of the projects you want to work on. The homework walkthrough covers setup. You also need a laptop and the actual docs, drafts, or research you would have done anyway.

You do not need to be fluent in AI. The first half hour is foundations. I have run this for teams that were curious and for teams that already live in these tools.

Homework first, on your own time. Then 30 minutes of foundations and a live demo. 60 minutes of research and strategy on your projects. 60 minutes of content and automation, building workflows you keep. 30 minutes of questions and a rollout plan for your team.

You get a recording, the prompt templates, and the automation recipes. If something is unclear in the first two weeks, email me.

The cap is there so everyone gets hands-on time. For a larger team, we run a second session or we talk about a custom format. Email hello@strategicnerds.com and say how many people you have.

If you are not satisfied, I refund the payment in full. I have not had to do that.

The book is the doctrine. Help First, ACES, positioning, advocacy, content, community, events, docs, pricing, launches, and the three growth models. You read it at your pace.

The training is the shop class. We install the tools, run them on your work, and leave you with a workflow. Buy the book if you need the map. Book the training if your team is already on the map and stuck on the tools.

An agency takes the work. I teach your people to do the work, then I leave. The book and the training both assume you keep the function in-house.

If you want someone to own the calendar after the session, that is advisory, and we price it per engagement. The training is not a retainer.