Put Your Product
in Every Builder's
First Repo
Developers grow up in the MLH community, from their first hackathon build to production at their first job. We put your product at the center of it.
Awareness gets you recognized. Activation gets you adopted.
Most developer marketing buys impressions. A conference booth, a newsletter ad, a homepage takeover: developers see your name, nod, and go back to the tools they already use. Usage changes when a developer builds with your product once and it works. MLH creates that first build thousands of times a year, with a prize for using your product and staff on site to make sure it goes well.
One partner from first build
to production.
MLH and DEV take your product from first discovery to lasting adoption through three pillars that feed each other.
Your program starts with a baseline.
We benchmark your brand across the community in the partnership's first weeks. Each program that follows gets measured against that baseline.
- Awareness & sentiment benchmarks vs. your competitors
- Structured focus groups with your product in hand
- The exact step where your onboarding loses developers
- The words developers use when your product clicks, verbatim
Put your product in builders' hands.
We bring your technology to hackathons and festivals year round, and match each product to the audience most likely to adopt it.
- Hundreds of in person hackathons a year
- Campus hack days & conference events
- Monthly online learning festivals in 100+ countries
- MLH staff run it all; you never send anyone on site
In front of developers year round.
DEV keeps your brand in front of developers between events, and the write ups your builders publish keep working for you in search and AI answers.
- Builders publish each project as a searchable DEV write up
- Takeovers, newsletters & livestreams between events
- Content the LLMs cite when developers ask for tool picks
- Quarterly video stories of real builders
Developers build with your product at our events → publish what they made on DEV → search engines and LLMs point the next developer to it. Your reach keeps growing between the events you pay for.
Where your product shows up.
MLH staff run each program end to end. You bring the technology; we handle everything from promotion to judging.
League Hackathons
Builders at student hackathons worldwide meet your product season after season, with a prize category that rewards using it.
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 where thousands of developers sign up for your product through workshops and challenges.
12 festivals a yearDEV Challenges
Online hackathons where each 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 events.
10M+ annual impressionsDeveloper Stories
Quarterly films of real builders using your product, shot at our events and cut for your channels.
4 films a yearPartnerships that moved the numbers.
A hackathon participant spends 6+ hours building with a sponsor's technology in a single event, longer than any ad or booth conversation gets you. You see that time again later, as preference in surveys and as production usage at their first job.
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.
Students picking their first stack, and
the senior engineers picking their team's.
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, and our partnerships team will reach out within two business days to start scoping a program around your products and goals.