Our marketing is an extension of who we are as a company—friendly, fun, and approachable. While we sell to enterprises, we believe in showing personality because enterprise doesn’t have to mean “grey suits and no smiles.” Our goal is to engage and educate with authenticity, even if that means not appealing to everyone.
Here’s an overview of how we handle marketing, the tools we use, and the strategies we’ve developed to connect with our audience.
We keep our social media friendly and fun. Our posts are often informal, sprinkled with emojis (blowing kisses, sending love hearts, and the like), and designed to engage the community. It’s not about being overly serious—it’s about being real and approachable.
Since Twitter (X) lost its charm under new management, we’ve expanded our focus to include Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn. We use Typefully to manage our presence across these platforms. Typefully allows us to:
That said, don’t feel pressured to post every day. We tried this approach before, lasting only about two months before running out of ideas. It was a slog and didn’t generate noticeable results in engagement or leads. It’s better to post when there’s something meaningful or fun to share.
The Avalonia UI Blog is another key marketing channel. Developer-focused content performs best here, so we prioritise articles that inform, inspire, and educate our audience.
We use Markdown to write blog posts and publish them through our CMS, Squidex. Posts can be previewed before publishing by saving them as a “draft” and appending ?preview=true to the URL.
Key Focus
Reddit is an important platform for connecting with the .NET community, but success depends on navigating the rules and culture of different subreddits.
Our quarterly newsletter is another important channel for sharing updates. Written by Mike with input from the team, the newsletter offers exclusive news that we don’t share publicly.
We use Customer.io to manage and send the newsletter, ensuring it reaches our audience consistently.
The newsletter gives us an opportunity to:
Our YouTube channel serves as a place to share educational and promotional content, though we seldom have the bandwidth to create regular videos. Instead, we’ve found success collaborating with existing content creators who already have an engaged audience.
Rather than producing our own videos, we prefer to sponsor content created by independent YouTubers. However, our sponsorship model differs from traditional approaches:
This approach aligns with our commitment to authenticity and transparency. It fosters genuine relationships with the community while enabling creators to showcase Avalonia in their own way.
Using StreamYard, we host hour-long live-streamed conversations between team members. These sessions give us an opportunity to:
These live-streams are an easy and effective way to create valuable content with minimal effort. They’ve become incredibly popular, offering transparency into our work while allowing the community to feel involved in Avalonia’s journey.
Community update videos:
This approach ensures that we regularly create content without overwhelming the team, all while strengthening our relationship with the Avalonia community. It’s a win-win for both sides.
User Groups are informal, local events that provide an excellent opportunity to connect with the .NET community. These events are typically free for attendees and organisers, creating a relaxed atmosphere for sharing knowledge, networking, and building brand awareness.
While valuable for networking and community building, User Groups rarely lead to measurable conversions or sales. They’re best approached as part of a broader community engagement strategy rather than a direct sales channel.
To maximise the value of User Groups:
Conferences are often prohibitively expensive, and the return on investment can be disappointing. For example, our participation in NDC Porto cost approximately €20k and yielded no measurable revenue. While these events can be enjoyable for team bonding, they are not a cost-effective way to generate sales or leads.
If we can secure speaking engagements at conferences, they may justify further sponsorship on a case-by-case basis. This would be done as an experiment to determine whether our NDC Porto experience was an outlier or indicative of broader trends.
Sponsorships like our 2024 engagement with the .NET Conference are unlikely to be repeated. The effort required outweighed the benefits, and the experience caused unnecessary stress. Moving forward, we will focus on presenting at key conferences rather than investing in costly sponsorships.
In 2024, we experimented with sponsoring podcasts as part of our marketing strategy. While this provided some exposure, the results were underwhelming in terms of measurable outcomes:
However, the experience wasn’t without its benefits. Sponsorships opened the door for us to appear as guests on podcast episodes, giving us the chance to share Avalonia’s story, technology, and vision with a wider audience.
We will no longer sponsor podcasts, as the cost is not justified by the returns. Instead, we’ll focus on opportunities to participate as guests. Appearing on podcasts allows us to:
By prioritising guest appearances over paid sponsorships, we can continue leveraging podcasts as a platform to share Avalonia’s story while staying true to our values of authenticity and transparency.
Paid advertising is not a significant part of our marketing strategy. Over the years, we’ve tested various forms of ads, including Google Ads, YouTube Ads, Reddit Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.
The results have been consistently disappointing:
Paid ads often dominate the thinking of traditional marketing professionals, but it’s a flawed strategy for reaching developers. Developers value authenticity and tend to tune out or block intrusive advertising. Instead of spending money on ads, we believe in focusing on efforts that:
Quite frankly, paid advertising feels like setting money on fire. We’d rather invest those resources in initiatives that align with our values—such as improving our tools, supporting our community, and creating organic content that developers genuinely appreciate.
Moving forward, we will continue to avoid wasting money on paid advertising and instead focus on strategies that deliver real value to both our community and our business.
Swag is a physical representation of the brand, and it should reflect the same quality and care we put into our tools and community. However, creating high-quality, meaningful swag isn’t cheap, and for that reason, we’ve decided to avoid doing it for now.
The goal of swag is to create something developers are proud to use and wear—not something that ends up as paint clothes or in a landfill. Too often, swag falls into the trap of being poorly made or hastily designed, which only diminishes the brand it’s meant to promote.
Here’s why we’ve held off on offering swag:
We absolutely plan to create Avalonia swag in the future, but only when we can do it right. When we launch swag, it will:
For now, we’ll focus on building our resources and ensuring Avalonia swag, when it arrives, is something truly special. We want our community to feel proud to wear or use it—and that’s worth waiting for.