DevVIA

Human marketing for developers. Just tell us the product name, we'll make socials, warm them up, post & engage for you. 100% human. We'll hand you the credentials whenever you wanna take over

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Inspiration

Background & Pain Point I came up with DevVIA halfway through JustBuild’s May-Revenue-Race. Leading up to this point, I had just:

Launched RoomVamp MVP (2 weeks building from scratch Fixing all those v1.0 bugs Promoting like crazy on my developer X account and finally managed to get a grand total MRR of $1 JK it was actually a flat $1, but at least my first internet dollar ever!

I had big plans v2.0, 3.0, the iOS app... But then I got overwhelmed with marketing. At this point, I was juggling: Full time job (since my $1 wasn’t gonna cover my expenses just yet) RoomVamp iOS app development trying to do 150+ replies & a thread a day on my developer account (joined X May 2025 with no following anywhere, trying to grow my personal brand)

... and now suddenly had RoomVamp X, Insta, TikTok, and marketing plans to somehow squeeze into the time allocations: it didn’t go well, as you can guess

Research & Existing Solutions And so at this point, I decided there must be a better way. Along with my job, I could handle the building, and developer account on my own (it’s busy but manageable)

But the RoomVamp (and future apps) I wanted to outsource. It’s just not scalable as a solo indie developer with no time as it is. Imagine (15min a day) * (3 platforms) * (just 2 apps) = 1.5 hrs DAILY and thats just engagement, we aren’t even considering the content creation & posting.

I just didn’t have 10.5 spare hours weekly (and that would just be the absolute bare minimum) And so I began searching for a solution. I looked at marketing agencies, AI automation, freelancers.. There really was NO good option for specifically developers like me (1) Marketing agencies were too expensive. $500-3000 is certainly not in my 0 MRR budget. And they require your account passwords, which I really didn’t feel comfortable giving. (2) AI honestly defeats the purpose. You can’t warm up an account with AI, I don’t want bots, and all the UGC stuff still requires me to spend time creating scripts, CTA, etc. And I’d still need to spend that 10.5 minimum weekly hrs engaging with my audience. (3) Freelancers first off are expensive ($50-150 an hour) and also they have the same password trust issues as the marketing agencies (but now it’s worse since it’s some random person on the internet). And did I mention, interviewing, vetting, managing, checking their work: that‘s all time consuming, and time I didn’t have.

What it does

My Perfect Solution After searching and searching (and believe me, I really wanted something to solve my problem), I could not find anything out there. And so, I decided to craft my own solution.

I made a list of criteria:

  • fully hands off (ZERO time commitment)
  • account warmup, engagement & posting handled (ZERO bots or AI)
  • No passwords from me
  • Super cheap (like as in, cheap enough I can pull the money from my grocery budget)
  • Quality account management
  • posts have a good CTA
  • engagement with right targeted audience
  • and most of all it should actually be CONVERTING into customers for me No commitment from me (if it’s not converting, i don’t want to be stuck on a monthly or not be able to take over control of the accounts)

And then I had a list of nice to haves: High level of communication (if i have some cool features, i’d like to give a bullet point list and have that be a crafted post). As in, a “hands on if i want to” approach Flexible to increase engagement or posting if i want to magnify marketing efforts with a product Able to keep tabs on my accounts and analytics, while still having someone else manage and monitor them. That way, I can check in when I want, knowing it’s handled to my standards. Introducing DevVIA: Human Marketing for Developers

If you resonated with my list of criteria & nice to haves, well I think DevVIA is the perfect fit for you because I was able to incorporate ALL of these (I did say it was the perfect solution!)

With DevVIA, it’s a 5 second process on your end. (1) Give us your Product Link (url for SAAS or app) (2) Tell us your target audience

That’s it. Hands off from there. Our team here at DevVIA will: Create professional business emails for you Set up social media accounts (X, instagram, TikTok, your choice! We recommend checking off all three for optimal marketing reach) Engage daily with your target audience (you can expect 15-30 min a day, for every social media platform). Post human crafted content (2x a week) for every social media platform

What’s it cost you? It’s a modular $25 per social media account. Charged weekly and cancel anytime. This way you can craft the perfect budget for your needs.

How we built it

Coding wise (or vibe code wise) I needed to build the various DevVIA dashboards. I created user, admin & project manager dashboards for my users, myself & my team. This I was able to fully create using bolt & cursor. In order to address the security concern of vibecoding, I actually separated all my secure account credentials info using a separate third party system rather than have any social media credentials integrated in any of my dashboards.

The other component (business side) was putting together a human marketing team. This was honestly alot of interviews, training, putting together training materials, and altogether a huge learning process with what worked and what didnt work

And then pretty quickly I needed to start getting some initial users to test my workflows & beginning to automate portions. I would automate the dashboard notifications into systems communications for my team as the interface connecting my vibecoded dashboards to our communication network (we used slack) to our disconnected third party password security system (we used lastpass).

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges was the unique value DevVIA provides. It's not a SAAS. But its also not just a marketing agency. Instead, its a unique combination of a human marketing agency with highly optimized tools & strategies to keep price point as low as possible for devs while still providing that essential marketing value.

As a result this has really just been uncharted grounds for everything. From the very basics of "how do i charge subscription on stripe?" (since i am actually non-tech and just learning code through vibecoding) to "how in the world do i hire and manage people?".

And then the next point of "Was i too ambitious with margins? Now how do i provide the value at such low price points??"

Every day felt like another hurdle, but every day was also a new discovery or learning. Or maybe even just getting the knack of it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Honestly, I am just so proud of myself for actually putting everything together, having the full cohesive system working, all up to the point where we now actually converted one of our first users into a subscribed and paying customer.

This month has been the crazy zoo chaos of training a team, fixing bugs, building integrations, optimizing flows & working with test users all at the same time. I needed to create training materials on the spot, constantly be interviewing, and all the while fixing bugs & coding. It really felt like i was everything at once: the true startup one girl company. I would be bouncing between interviewing a replacement, working around an account ban, pivoting our system strategy due to social media restrictions, pivoting engagement strategies (and the communication of those strategies.

What we learned

How do I start? Well I learned that social media platforms are really good at banning. That was a pretty big learning curve in figuring out a robust email & sms system to consistently create & securely manage my users social media accounts. I remember after the first couple bans and hurdles I definitely felt like "wow what in the world did I get myself into? this feels impossible!"

But overall I think the main learning point is that practice makes perfect. I put together all my vibecode skills and learnings from RoomVamp to vibecode DevVIA. I now learned how to put together a team and manage people. And then take that team, communicate with them, and optimize their workflows.

What's next for DevVIA

My main "what's next" goal is what i had hoped to finish by the end of the hackathon, but unfortunately could not finish in time: ai tools to allow my human team to be able to post daily posts. I got medium close, id say, to getting tiktok daily videos but i think i am still to be honest at least a week or 2 out from being able to release. My goal is actually to be able to have all platforms be daily posts, still keeping at my same $25 price point. Which is really tricky with margins. I don't want AI slop & I can't have my costs be higher than my profits (especially considering all engagement must be human or else it defeats the purpose of the account warmups period). Anyway, so daily posting is my next capability. After that, my roadmap is to focus on boosted engagement, boosted content creation (like specialized content options), and then having an ads budget.

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