At Catchy, we've been focused exclusively on building developer programs with our clients. 

We get to work across the industry, so we don't focus specifically on one vertical and one client. We're typically running anywhere between eight to twelve different client relationships at the same time, and that happens across three main categories. 

The first is large enterprise tech companies like Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft. We've been able to ride alongside them and help build and develop some of the world's leading developer marketing programs.

The second group is our unicorns. We have our startups and scale-ups, who we do a decent amount of work with as well. This gives us the ability to stay on the front foot and the cutting-edge of tech, whether that's Web3, blockchain, Metaverse, AI, or ML.

Finally, a segment that’s been relatively new for us over the past handful of years, is what we refer to as legacy technology. These are companies in telco, manufacturing, and automotive banking. They’re seeking to adapt, modernize, and open up their developer ecosystem for the first time, and are looking for help in doing that. 

We work with a lot of them in a consulting fashion, and those are some of our most rewarding relationships because we get to build from the ground up. 

That’s where the cross-section of the data I’m going to talk about comes from. It's across all these different companies across all of these different industries.

Catchy’s data set 

“Growth” can mean a lot of different things, but we're talking about it from the money side. What programs have we seen growing when we look across the market? 

When looking at all of our data, which companies have been growing their actual investment into developer marketing? Which companies have been growing their spend in developer marketing? And which companies have done a good job, especially considering the last 18 months to two years haven't been the best economic conditions? 

Which companies have bucked the trends and still been able to grow their investment in developers despite the current scenario that we're in? 

Where does this data come from? 

Catchy does a lot of quantitative developer programs and benchmarking. A lot of our clients come to us and say, “Hey, we have three to five to ten key competitors, can you give us an understanding of how much they spend on developer marketing and where a lot of that money goes?”

Our Head of Consulting has developed a framework, and we run it about 30 times a year for different clients. It gives us this really interesting cross-section of a lot of different verticals and a lot of different industries, to get a rough sense of how companies are spending. 

Because we've been doing this for about three or four years, we get to track this data over time. We get to see who’s spending is going up and down year over year, and it's given us this really interesting database of information.

So, we get insights into what’s going on in the market from this data and we track this year over year. 

The other half of it is the ‘why.’ Again, we work with this large cross-section of clients, and we get to talk with everyone about what's happening. We talk about the trends we're seeing in the market, rises, and dips. We ask companies, “What's driving that? What's happening at your company? What's happening internally? What's happening in your vertical? What's happening in your industry?

And then we get to pull all that together. 

Last year was the first year we saw things that were outside of the normal trend of where we see developer programs’ spend going, and I'll elaborate on what we saw and why we thought it was interesting.