{"id":3638,"date":"2024-01-13T17:46:28","date_gmt":"2024-01-13T23:46:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=3638"},"modified":"2024-01-13T17:46:28","modified_gmt":"2024-01-13T23:46:28","slug":"should-your-customers-be-your-devrels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/3638","title":{"rendered":"Should your customers be your devrels?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Saw this spicy take:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Spicy Take \ud83c\udf36\ufe0f<\/p>\n<p>You shouldn&#39;t have devrels. Your customers should be your devrels  \ud83d\ude2c<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Stefan (@StefanTMD) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/StefanTMD\/status\/1735022106822295920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">December 13, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>If Twitter goes away, this is from Stefan Avram, who said &#8220;You shouldn&#8217;t have devrels. Your customers should be your devrels&#8221;. (Stefan is a cofounder of Wundergraph and head of growth. Good on him! It&#8217;s hard to found a company.)<\/p>\n<p>I wanted to talk about this statement because, well, I&#8217;m a devrel (a developer relations professional) and I don&#8217;t agree with it.<\/p>\n<p>First, let&#8217;s rule out a few obvious points.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If you aren&#8217;t targeting developers as users, you shouldn&#8217;t have devrel as a function.<\/li>\n<li>Even if you have a devtool, if your main sales channel is top-down, devrel is not super useful.<\/li>\n<li>If your product doesn&#8217;t have some kind of free version, devrel is going to have a tough time. Not everything has to be free, but it&#8217;s really tough to get a developer to offer both time and money to learn about your product.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I hope this goes without say, but it is fantastic if your customers are advocates for your product.<\/p>\n<p>However, I think this approach is a bit naive. It&#8217;s a bit like saying &#8220;You shouldn&#8217;t have sales people. Your customers should be selling your product.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The truth is that there will be some subset of your users who are enthusiastic and advocate for your product if it is good enough to buy. I have interviewed <a href=\"https:\/\/fusionauth.io\/blog\/tag\/community-story\/\">some for FusionAuth<\/a>. You should do everything you can to encourage this behavior, including:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>talking to them<\/li>\n<li>learning about their companies and successes<\/li>\n<li>giving them swag<\/li>\n<li>sharing their stories far and wide<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But these folks&#8217; job isn&#8217;t to promote or support other users&#8217; use of your product. They&#8217;re busy building their product, company or project. As they should.<\/p>\n<p>A high functioning devrel team can offer:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>quality content<\/li>\n<li>support for a community<\/li>\n<li>up to date, relevant code<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This team should be working to improve all of these and make the experience of all of your potential users better and better.<\/p>\n<p>And they&#8217;ll care about the company&#8217;s overall mission. And they&#8217;ll have inside access to the codebase, the engineering team, and the product roadmap. And they can offer reified, constructive feedback from users to your teams.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a large number of important business functions. If they are performed by customers, who are, again, busy working on their own stuff, they&#8217;ll be done at best haphazardly and at worst not at all.<\/p>\n<p>Think about it. How many blog posts have you written about a product? How many of them were deep dives?<\/p>\n<p>I can say that I&#8217;ve done it for a few products (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2350\">stripe<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/1461\">zapier<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/category\/aws\">AWS<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/1484\">lob<\/a>) and none of those are deep enough to qualify as anything other than the briefest introduction to a product. A developer who encounters posts like these will either be intrigued and want to dig in further or bounce, but they certainly won&#8217;t have enough info to make a decision or use the product.<\/p>\n<p>By making documentation, community and code examples the developer relations team&#8217;s problem, you&#8217;ll get more focus and better results.<\/p>\n<p>And more users and happier customers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Saw this spicy take: Spicy Take \ud83c\udf36\ufe0f You shouldn&#39;t have devrels. Your customers should be your devrels \ud83d\ude2c &mdash; Stefan (@StefanTMD) December 13, 2023 If Twitter goes away, this is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-devrel","category-fusionauth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3638"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3640,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3638\/revisions\/3640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}