context.dev's In-Feed ads peaked at 3× the industry CTR benchmark.
How a pre-YC founder turned a first In-Feed test into a channel he plans to run again.
What the In-Feed test delivered.
- 1.27%Peak-day CTR, top-performing result
- ~3×Above the typical industry text-ad benchmark (0.3–0.5%)
Getting developers to actually pay attention
context.dev gives teams building software and AI agents a single API for live web context: scrape any URL to clean markdown, crawl whole sites, and pull typed brand and company data. The person deciding to use it is the developer. Which makes marketing to them hard: developers don’t act on a thing they’ve seen once, and they can smell a sales push from a mile off.
For Yahia, the challenge was never a good day on Twitter. It was doing it again the next day, and being somewhere developers already are, without turning into noise.
“Are they going to be on Reddit? On dev.to? daily.dev is a daily place for devs to go. It’s an awesome place to show up in front of people and not be too salesy. Just, ‘hey, we exist.’”
What a win looked like
Yahia wasn’t chasing one headline conversion number. He wanted to reach as many of the right developers as possible and land in a way that stuck: presence that builds the brand, not just a spike in a dashboard.
“I wanted to get in front of as many people as possible, and have people take it seriously. Conversions are great, but it was also: is this building my brand in a way that makes sense in people’s heads?”
He ran a focused In-Feed test across five creatives, going in, by his own account, expecting it not to work.
A 1.27% peak CTR, and the quality never dropped
It worked. And the part that mattered to Yahia wasn’t a single blowout day. It was that the quality never dropped. Engagement stayed high across the flight and peaked at a 1.27% CTR on the best-performing day.
To put that in context, a strong CTR for text ads in the industry runs around 0.3 to 0.5%, so on its peak day this campaign ran roughly 3× the benchmark (per daily.dev’s data), with every creative landing above the daily.dev feed average. For an audience this skeptical, that’s the tell that the message connected and kept connecting.
“It wasn’t that it blew up. It was that a certain baseline level of quality was maintained. It feels super reliable as a channel, and it’s something you can do repeatedly. That really helps.”
And this is a founder who came in expecting the opposite. Yahia is a developer marketing to developers, and he brought the same skepticism to the test that his audience brings to ads.
Why In-Feed worked
Ads work best when three things line up: right people, right place, right time. This campaign had all three.
Right people
Targeting built on actual reading behavior: tech stack, topic interest, seniority. Geo targeting focused spend on context.dev’s highest-value markets.
Right place
Native In-Feed cards sit inside the developer feed. When your product shows up here, it shows up with context, and borrows the trust developers already have in the platform.
Right time
daily.dev is desktop-first. Developers read it at their desk, during the workday, while they’re actively thinking about new tools. The intent is already there.
“Single burst campaigns tend to not work. Even just posting on Twitter. Someone might check it out, but they won’t take it seriously unless they see it repeatedly, and see other people using it.”
What context.dev's In-Feed cards looked like.
Every creative variant from the campaign, exactly as it ran.
Launched without the founder tax
Running a campaign usually means another thing on the founder’s plate. This one didn’t. Yahia set the direction and the team handled the rest.
“You guys were awesome. I didn’t have to do anything. I basically just said what I wanted and it was running. Very useful for my life right now.”
He bet on it before YC, and he’s coming back
The truest read on any channel isn’t the debrief. It’s whether the founder spends on it again.
Yahia committed to this pilot before context.dev joined Y Combinator. The bet on the channel came first, on its own merits, well before any funding landed. context.dev is now YC-backed, and a follow-up campaign is already on the way.
“It’s super reliable, and I will try it again. Making a big splash is great and all, but if you have something you can do constantly that drives traffic, that’s what works long term. And this works.”
Would context.dev recommend it?
It’s worth a shot. It’s better than 90% of the stuff out there. Try it. Hopefully it resonates with the audience. It probably will. It’s just worth it.
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