How to create your own DevRel

In tech startups, marketing efforts in the early stages are mainly focused on interacting with developers – and this is up to the creators. So where should you start?

For tech startups, early-stage marketing efforts are often indistinguishable from developer engagement (DevRel). And it is the creators who are responsible for this. So what is DevRel and where do you start?

The essence of DevRel – be the face of your organization’s technology, solve developers’ problems and inform them about possible solutions and best practices. Developer advocates are people who speak at conferences, write blog posts, host webinars, answer questions on Discord/Slack, communicate with open source users and clients.

In other words, they do everything a founder does in the early days of a startup. When you think about what you, as a founder, should be doing to raise awareness for your new company, many of the tactics you need to use are classic developer relationships.

Tech founders are ideal for developing DevRel on their own. First of all, most techies have a product that solves a problem they personally struggled with as an engineer. This allows them to speak with confidence about existing pain points and how an open source project or commercial product can solve them.

So what should you think of DevRel as a founder? Let’s figure it out.

Implement DevRel as early as possible

While your young company may remain in stealth mode, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start your DevRel program right away. According to Austin Gunterproduct marketing director Primer.aiformerly of Gremlin and Ambassador Labsstarting relationships with founder-led developers well in advance of the company’s launch gives a much better chance of success.

According to Gunther, before the Gremlin company was widely known, Colton Andrus (Kolton Andrus)chief technology officer and founder of Gremlin, “had already spent a couple of years investing in company positioning, chaos engineering, and himself. As a result, by the time Colton wanted to launch Gremlin publicly, he already had brand potential for this topic.”

DevRel looks a bit different early on than it does later, as the focus is on establishing the authority of the founder, not the company, especially if the company is still in stealth mode. Early DevRel for open source startups later usually focuses mainly on the open source projectso any DevRel for a particular product is often already the third iteration of the program.

What does devrel look like?

There are a ton of organic activities that aren’t paid for and are great DIY ways to get out into the community.” Kirsten Gaffneydirector of marketing for Codefresh, a software delivery platform.

However, before you start, “make sure you understand your purpose as a business,” she said. “Because if you don’t understand your purpose, you won’t be able to build a content strategybecause you won’t know where to start.”

Here are a few ways founders with technical backgrounds can get started with DevRel on their own, perhaps even before leaving the main job.

Write blog posts. They can be on the project’s open source site, on the Medium site, or even on the founder’s personal blog – although it’s best to use the project’s dedicated site. However, if your company is in absolute stealth mode, then the goal is to create credibility for yourself as a founder.
Write for various publications. There are many sources, including blogs from other larger companies, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation newsletter, and technology news and analysis sites such as The New Stackwho publish guest articles. Writing for these publications is a way to talk about the problems developers face and how you will solve them.
Be active on Twitter. “Every week I learn something new on Twitter from the founders or investors,” says Gaffney.
Speak at conferences or meetups. The most important thing about organizing talks is that you can’t actively promote the product, so this can be a great option initially.

One note about DevRel is that it’s quite normal to “divide and conquer”. If you have multiple founders, it’s only right for one of them (probably the most extroverted) to do most of the work at DevRel and the rest to do something else. The founders have very little free time, and the company really needs only one public face at the initial stage.

How do-it-yourself concept changes over time DevRel

As the company matures, moving from stealth mode to a commercial product, some things need to change.

First of all, you need to make sure that people really know that you have a product. “The ultimate goal of any DevRel team is to try to make sure that the dotted line between your paid product and any open source project that the DevRel team promotes is completely invisible,” says Gaffney.

This approach means that it will be easy for people to move from being familiar with your open source project to understanding why they will now want to pay you for something.”

At some point, most startups that build tech products end up hire someone to do DevRel full time. But even then, founders shouldn’t completely neglect their relationship with developers—they often continue to be the face of the company, speak at conferences, and even log into Slack channels until they leave the company.

“It’s never your product that makes or breaks your business over time,” Gunther said. “This is always your go-to-market process.”

For tech companies, especially those using open source, developer relationships will always be a big part of their go-to-market strategy.

How does DevRel act as a tactician? Let’s discuss it at open lesson, which will soon take place in OTUS. In this lesson we:
– Let’s get acquainted with the main tools and types of Devrel activities that will help you develop your company or your project.
⁃ We will find out what metrics can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of Devrel activities.