Reach the Developers
Building What's Next
MLH gets your product in the hands of 5 million builders at the exact moment they're most motivated to learn it, then makes sure they never forget it.
Awareness gets you recognized. Activation gets you adopted.
The developer tooling market is crowded, and brand recognition rarely matches product quality. But awareness alone isn't the finish line either. Plenty of well known tools are names developers recognize and never reach for. What converts is activation: a developer signing up, shipping something real with your product, and coming back. A homepage takeover buys you a spike. Activation takes distribution: reaching developers at the exact moment they're choosing their stack, with a concrete reason to build, a deadline, and support on the ground.
One partner. The full arc
of the developer journey.
MLH and DEV act as your integrated developer growth partner, from first discovery to lasting adoption. Three pillars, one compounding loop.
Ground every move in real signal.
Before anything scales, we get ground truth: a before and after measurement frame, so activations are built on data, not assumptions.
- Awareness & sentiment benchmarks vs. your competitors
- Structured focus groups with your product in hand
- Where onboarding breaks — and where the aha moment hits
- The words developers use when your product clicks, verbatim
Put your product in builders' hands.
We deploy your technology across our full event ecosystem, dynamically matching products to audiences as your portfolio evolves.
- Hundreds of in person hackathons a year
- Campus hack days & conference activations
- Monthly online learning festivals at global scale
- Fully run by MLH staff — no partner staff needed on site
Make every activation compound.
DEV keeps you visible between events, and every artifact your builders publish keeps compounding in search and AI answers.
- Every project becomes a published, searchable write up on DEV
- Takeovers, newsletters & livestreams between activations
- Content indexed by the LLMs developers ask for tool picks
- Quarterly video stories of real builders
Activations drive real integrations → integrations become published artifacts → artifacts get indexed, cited, and discovered. Every activation makes the next one more effective.
Where your product shows up.
Every program is run by MLH staff end to end. You bring the technology; we handle promotion, developer support, and judging.
League Hackathons
Sustained, compounding exposure to motivated early career builders at student hackathons worldwide.
300+ events per seasonConference Hackathons
Reach professional developers at the exact moment they're most open to adopting new tools.
10+ major conferencesGlobal Hack Weeks
Monthly online festivals with expert led workshops and hands on challenges that drive signups at scale.
12 festivals a yearDEV Challenges
Online hackathons where every submission is a published DEV post: durable, searchable proof of real builds with your product.
3.5M+ DEV membersDEV Takeovers & Newsletters
Homepage takeovers, digest placements, and newsletter sponsorships reaching 900K+ subscribers between activations.
10M+ annual impressionsDeveloper Stories
Quarterly video stories of real builders using your product, giving your brand an authentic human voice.
4 films a yearPartnerships that moved the numbers.
Unlike passive brand exposure, MLH integrations put your product directly in developers' hands: participants spend 6+ hours building with a technology in a single event. That depth converts into retained preference, production usage, and measurable shifts in brand perception.
lift in unaided brand preference over a five year partnership with a global cloud platform
signups and 24,000 projects generated across 850+ hackathons in that same partnership
more likely to adopt a partner's platform than the broader developer community
of alumni have introduced a technology they learned at MLH into production at their employer
Results from real MLH partner programs.
Learners today. Decision makers tomorrow.
Often both already.
MLH's acquisition of DEV combined the world's largest early career developer community with one of the largest developer content networks. The result: accounts with 10% of all software engineers globally, and a community that spans first hackathon students to the senior engineers who pick the stack.
- 75%of DEV members have 5+ years of software development experience
- 40%+of MLH alumni champion technologies from MLH into production environments
- 20%of a recent Y Combinator cohort were MLH alumni
Ready to become the tool developers reach for first?
Tell us where you are. Our partnerships team will reach out within two business days to start scoping a program around your products, goals, and stage.