How we won April Fools 24 (because it’s a competition)

Or: How to get the most discerning target audience (developers) to spread your brand name in their personal LinkedIn profiles.

When tech companies prank their users, it’s fun and delightful: Google Scent, the Duolingo toilet paper, were all funny and refreshing. This year, for April fools, we decided to take it up a notch.

What’s better than pranking our community? Helping our community prank their friends. Because that’s what we aim to be: every developer’s partner in crime. When you prank alone, you laugh alone, when our community pranks together, we get tons of brand engagement and exposure.

We knew whatever we did had to be about embracing the language we know best. No, not Python, but suffering.

Suffering is key to developer culture, so it’s key to daily.dev culture. Dedicating your career to building complicated things is committing to a life of suffering. Figuring out edge cases, solving bugs, explaining to your PM why we don’t care about the 15th bullet on the spec, or to sales that it won’t be ready for whatever obscure deadline they promised, all these things are about suffering. So if we’re going to suffer, we may as well do it together.

Introducing the role of Chief Suffering Officer at daily.dev

No compensation, stock options plan or PTO, also, no expectation of work. Update your LinkedIn, notify your network, and get stickers.

How we did it:

Our design team built an incredible web page using Webflow: a (funny) job page, in which we made it clear this is all to be taken with a bucket of salt, inviting users to “apply”
Once users applied (by pasting their LinkedIn profile) a spinner appeared while rolling text told users we’re uploading their medical files and cross referencing interpol records.
Final step: Confetti! Now for the tough part: how do we get users to update their LinkedIn profile? We bribe them in the only way that matters: stickers.
Spreading the word, means spreading emails, and this specific email was designed to make you feel like it’s already happening.

Screenshot of the email blast sent to our community at daily.dev announcing the campaign

We hoped for 100 participants. When we crossed 300 brave souls who “joined our team”, exposing our gag and our brand to hundreds of thousands of users Worldwide, we were pretty chuffed.

A screenshot from X (formerly Twitter) with an announcement from one of daily.dev's community members and her new role

*A particular moment of delight was a few hours after we posted when Notion released their "Chief Pet Officer" role; in the comments, you could find a few of our users pointing out, daily.dev did it first. 🤗

A screenshot from LinkedIn that's featuring the Notion parallel campaign and the comment from the daily.dev community member

Key Takeaways from Our Campaign

‍Design and Flow Matter: A meticulously crafted job description, a humorous spinning wheel, and the indispensable confetti made the application process unforgettable.‍
Clarity is Key: We made sure our users knew this was all in good fun. Transparency, especially in delicate matters like job postings, is crucial. ‍
Incentives Work Wonders: The promise of exclusive stickers for participants was the nudge needed for many. Even some of our team members admitted they did it for the stickers. Tough crowd. ‍
Video Content Reigns Supreme: A video by Francesco Ciulla not only captivated our audience but significantly amplified our message within the devrel community.‍
Close to Reality: The genius design of our email campaign made the prank all the more believable. Seeing is truly believing.

Kelly, a comunity member of daily.dev, writing a comment about her new title

Lessons Learned

Not every operation goes without its hitches. Our April Fools' prank coincided with Easter Monday. While we still don’t have the pull to move around global holidays, realizing this hours before, when we’d already put a lot of time and effort into setting it up, wasn't great for our mental health.

Sticker operations are not for the soft at heart. We had to respond manually to every notification about a new Chief Suffering Officer, and once all the answers are in, we’ll have to check them one by one with our lists to make sure they meet the conditions to participate.

So.. any ideas for next year?

P.S

Special thanks to HTMX for their inspiring CEO hunt and Tom Orbach's April Fools post. We love you. Most of all, thank you to all the light and fun souls who joined us for a moment of fun. We wish you luck in your new roles 💜