How A Buyer Persona Research Turned Into An Industry Report

So, here is how it all happened. A while ago I joined DevMate as a Product Marketing Manager, which was one of the best opportunities I've ever had, btw. And, obviously, I was responsible for a go-to-market strategy: messaging, positioning, campaigns creation, defining customer buyer personas and their buying stages.

A definition of the buyer personas for DevMate was a big whilst an interesting challenge. Yes, it was kinda tough to segment and describe the "Mac Developers" audience.

Note: should you deal with the definition of your business's buyer personas, here is an awesome framework by HubSpot. This is the one I would definitely recommend.

I did what a product marketer would do - started gathering insights from our existing customers through a series of interviews. And, to tell you the truth, I was happy with the results achieved: personas were defined, I knew their demographics, goals, challenges, shopping preferences, common objections, etc. Our copywriters did an awesome job designing the value propositions for each of the personas. Who could ask for more?)

But I felt like I needed more intelligence (my apologies for the buzz word - but this is really the best way to describe it). I wanted to better understand the whole Mac development industry. The next to-do thing was obvious - "go and conduct a deep market research".

And, the question was: "How do I do that?". I decided to run a survey. Which actually this story is all about. I wanted to collect the valuable data to satisfy my personal marketing needs but having seen the results I understood that the data I got would be interesting not just for me. The thing was that I was way too hungry for the information, and my survey contained a lot of questions, and when I am saying "a lot" I mean it). I wanted to know everything. Having designed the survey, I was a little scared that they would not invest their time, but... 679 Mac developers have taken time to tell us about their experience, we got a ton of industry insights.

(I am giving a credit to MacPaw, the company behind DevMate, who has always had a good reputation and good connections. That helped to engage developers to take the survey).

And boom! The same day we shared the results they were picked up by the press and top industry influencers:

The data we collected showed insights on such important and trending topics as:

How to succeed as a developer
How to choose an app distribution channels: Mac App Store or Outside of it
Which channel brings more money
How to go about the tools Mac developers need

To be honest it was great to feel that you contributed to the whole industry. That is why we decided to run another survey a year after to see what's changed in the world of Mac applications development over the year. This time we had 742 filled-out questionnaires! To keep it consistent, we asked the same questions as in 2016, and added a small section to learn about one of the hottest topics on the market — subscription model.

And, like it was last year, the report appeared to be a great PR campaign, MacRumors, CultofMac and others we were willing to publish news on that.

Some of the key insights are the following:

The choice of the marketplace has shifted mildly from selling only outside the Mac App Store to selling both on it and outside.
Mac App Store brings less money.
Developers wouldn't recommend Mac App Store to their colleagues
The perks of the Mac App Store are not worth giving away 30% of revenue
Subscription model is being actively adopted by the Mac developers

All of the above mentioned and more topics can be viewed over on the survey page.

Enjoy!