Bridging DevRel with business decision makers

Speaker 1: Hi, guys. So, I'm Paul Wheels. I've, my background's more business development than, than developer, although I did grow up with a father as a CTO, so I was very fortunate growing up in the eighties and nineties, with computers around the house. So it's sort of embedded into me. It's almost like the digital breathing generation of my children today.

Speaker 1: So as we know, DevRel is a great way to get your products into businesses and users, getting internal evangelists that could find the tools to make their job quicker and easier and then taking them into their, working day and, make make, use of them. As I mentioned, you know, I come from a business development background, and I moved into product when I worked in wholesale SMS, with EE around 2011, which is around the time that Twilio and Nexmo were entering the market and really making a stir with that really developer focused, strategies. So I I did a fair bit of research on it, and, it just really resonate that that was quickly gonna be, a real key to my success by, making our tools and APIs usable and and much easier to adopt. A number of years later, when I had my own business, BMW Designs, is when I created IoT North as a meetup. I was running a customer discovery session for a startup called Mechanics, which was an IoT startup for Tardot Communications with a guy called Stuart Mitchell.

Speaker 1: That service, was, IoT cellular connectivity with network layer APIs, so we could really empower developers to be able to, not only just supply connectivity, but also, monitor monitor and manage bandwidth latency so to choose when they send data and such like across which networks they would as well. There's a multi MC, which today, there still isn't something competitive in that market, and that is actually a product that's using Jaguar Land Rover cars, for their connectivity. There was lots of stuff going on when I was out doing the customer discovery. It was the first time I've been in the Northeast for a while. I've been traveling around the world with work for about five years.

Speaker 1: Then I discovered there was a lot of IoT stuff going in the region, but, a lot of people were replicating what they were doing from hacks with companies like Northwind Wind Water, where people got, inspiration to create solutions for problems using IoT. As I mentioned, you know, nobody was talking to each other. There wasn't a community, so I thought this was a great opportunity to start to bridge that. IoT North is community founded on mostly developers, but it's evolved to having data scientists, especially with the big adoption of artificial intelligence, academics, and more recently, since the pandemic, business decision makers. I found the evolution of our attendance really interesting because it always been much more developers, much more developer conversations that we were having.

Speaker 1: But then we start I started to notice within the sessions, we would get business decision makers, ask asking more business orientated questions. So I start to scratch under the surface to learn and understand the why of that. They wanted to understand the benefit of the technology without feeling like they were being sold to. And this kind of resonates to me about DevRel, but developers, you know, don't like that hard push sales side of things. You know, they like to be educated, try it, take it, play with it, and then either continue on or go and find something else.

Speaker 1: What I found really interesting with business decision makers was this was the similar kind of mindset as well. You were kinda over the hard sell push and, being told about these old big solutions, which then you find out are much smaller, but they want to get a much better baseline understanding of the technology so they could then go and have those conversations, but also then connecting out because they recognize that they didn't have the resource in their business to adopt this technology as well. The format of our talks, have naturally been a lot more about the what and the how, but as we've evolved with this attendance and, the members of the community have recognized this as well, they've started to steer their conversations around the why and its value a lot more than just the what and the how. We started on a call February evening, as Matthew will remember well, as an as an in person meetup event, and we only had about 30 attendees, which I feel quite happy about, for the first one. It was full of pizza and beer as a good old meetup is in person, if we can remember back that far.

Speaker 1: We continued in this format and slowly grew the acquisition of our 15 members a month for the next two years. And 2020, as the pandemic was dawning on us, I opened up discussions for sponsorship with Newcastle University to help enable the community to move virtually quickly as I could see what was gonna happen with the pandemic. And so that's what we did. We, moved straight onto Zoom, which was a real pain to manage and really restrictive. And, we you know, the first few events were huge successes.

Speaker 1: We had one of our biggest attendances online, which was 70 people, which overran by about an hour with the questions that we had coming through. But it was a really, really good energetic, event, which you can see on i0tnorth.uk/events if you wanna check them out. Because we what we did is we revamped the website, which we hadn't done before. It was just a simple page on what we did, and we really depended on Meetup. What I recognized was was that we need to provide more content and accessibility to, the recordings, so we updated the website and created a few new sections on there.

Speaker 1: One of the main ones being events. So every event that we have on there is hosted on there, and it's run live on there as well using YouTube and, using live streaming. In October 2020, we moved to using live stream and StreamYard, which is what the guys are using today, which is an absolutely brilliant tool. Really simple to use, really well, cost effective as well. And you can connect into your website very, very easily either using the YouTube link, or actually with updates now, you can actually get a direct link from, StreamYard.

Speaker 1: We grew dramatically due to the pandemic. You know? I know I observed the growth in online engagement very quickly and noticed that other meetups around the world were no longer having events due to the pandemic. There was this mindset of it being much more should be in person. But I see, content viewing and people getting a little bit over indulged on Netflix and such like, they start to look for more shows.

Speaker 1: Traditionally, we our shows had always been about an hour, two hours, but a lot especially the technical ones. We start to then reduce them down to size depending on the content and who we thought would be the market for it. So we've got a number of shows that are on there, like, twenty minutes long, thirty minutes long, which more roundtable types of discussions. We grew 300 members organically in one month, which is actually, after the first, lives the livestream show, because the word start to get out about it, and also the help with promoting across, using live streaming with LinkedIn, which then start to bring in more business decision makers wanting to, learn on the shows. We also started to get further afield, a lot more attendance from, colleagues and friends from The US and across wider Europe, especially across in Spain.

Speaker 1: As an example, we got some great interaction from there as well. What also happened was the IoT meetup communities across The UK were being underserved as I was being contacted to take them on, as the by the organizers because they had members asking for content, but the the, organizers were were struggling with a little bit. So starting with Manchester, we brought the that community into our fold, and we rebranded as IoT North. We were originally called IoT Newcastle. The brand IoT North is a play on where where it's originated from, but it's also given that, businesses and developers a direction in IoT and North, if you will.

Speaker 1: By h two twenty twenty, we had 3,000 members, huge increase compared to what we we were used to. And in early twenty twenty one, we launched the marketplace and forum, which was kindly funded by Newcastle University and developed by a great company called Woods and Walker. The marketplace, what's the logic? It's bridging the gap. As I mentioned, we had business decision makers joining these events here, and there was opportunity to be connecting with them and really sharing your solutions with them as well.

Speaker 1: But we didn't have that function and capability as a community. So the the marketplace, which is completely free to use to register and also connect, Simply register. We will advise on your content. It's broken down into very simple value proposition and then use case format, very clear simple terminology, try to keep the technology terminology out of it, talk about the value, and, we've we've got, some great information about what that is, which I'll touch on very soon. As we, added on the forum, we start to really accelerate the growth.

Speaker 1: A little bit of a help from the forum and with sponsorship from a company called Digi Key, that we've now grown to well over 7,500 strong community. And that is from the adoption of absolutely brilliant communities that were created that have come in, and then they've helped they've actually grown dramatically once we start doing the shows. A great example is the most recent one, IoT Scotland, which has a huge community of, well over a thousand, I think it's well over 1,500, members there that, after our show this month, they gained about twenty, thirty members within the first twenty four hours of that show, that hadn't been members to that Meetup community on there. If you do wanna find us, just search IoT North on a Meetup, and you'll find one of our show one of our communities. We have Solent.

Speaker 1: We have IoT Engineering London. We have IoT Business London. We have Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, and as I mentioned recently, IoT Scotland as well. So there's plenty of spaces there. All the content and events, are the same, just keeping those communities alive with the content.

Speaker 1: The we have a great list of, guests, and we have actually quite a long list of people asking to speak. And, so we're always looking for more, and we like to combine as well. So you'll see brands like Purple Beard. Here is a a training company technology training company. We have Chooch AI, the AI company.

Speaker 1: Obviously, we've got the big ones like IBM, AWS, Microsoft, who do lots of great shows with us, as well as the company I represent in my day job, Intel. But we also have a lot of the smaller companies and start ups as well, and we like to combine them and connect them and especially if there's something in in connection with each other as well. Great example, Xelient, from Australia, who have some absolutely amazing AI vision technology there as well. What we also do as well is we we've broke we recognized with the value of of our attendance and bring it bringing this gap together of developers and business decision makers that, some of the content was an opportunity, especially going through the pandemic, to have great people like doctor David Cliffe on the show talking about psychology and mental health, and not and not just about with the pandemic, but also about the challenges that you have when you're trying to build a business, when you're trying to build a new product. Culture changes.

Speaker 1: You know, it's one of the biggest things in IoT is, with the adoption, is the challenge of, of, you can sorry. I just got distracted by a notification there. You the the the challenge of breaking through cultures internally, but also with your customers as well. With IoT and manufacturing, if businesses had adopted when it was forecasted earlier in sort of, like, 2015 type of time, then a lot of them would not have been as badly impacted as what they were through the pandemic because they would have had that real time data and potentially have moved on to the stage of autonomy as well, which has actually helped stir on, the accelerated adoption of IoT since the pandemic. As I mentioned, we have those two two different shows.

Speaker 1: You know, often the challenge can be the procurement process as well. We had a fantastic show, with Chris Thompson and Paul Armstrong there, who are from local councils here in the Northeast Northumberland Council and North of Tyne Council. And we were talking about the adoption and the the the barriers of getting public sector to adopt, IoT. And it was really interesting. It wasn't actually a technology problem.

Speaker 1: They were, very well educated in it. They were really keen to adopt it. But the challenge was that everybody was trying to sell to them, but they needed to prove that it worked. And so, you know, we talked about, how that we could make that easier by if businesses are willing to make that investment in time with their technology, they will happily give the space and connectivity to be able to demonstrate the power of the solution that they have. And so that then once that's done and they've put a business case together, the access to the funding is actually quite a quick and easy process for public sector, especially with some of the funding that was made available, due to the pandemic as well.

Speaker 1: So these are really key things for developers and engineers and data scientists, but also the business decision makers to recognize and collaborate and work together to be able to succeed in what they want to achieve with the technology and solutions they want to, in my space, IoT. As I mentioned, the marketplace, you know, we've tried to make it as easy and as descriptive as possible on the value of the marketplace with a simple infographic, but also the process that it works. We want to make sure that the content on there is very clear and simple and to understand, and also understanding the value at the end is connecting you with customers so you can win business and accelerate the adoption in IoT. So we've got some good good news stories to also share going through. We did consider making this a commercial, system, and in fact, we developed it so we could do that.

Speaker 1: But we've made made the decision as a community that we're not gonna do that. We we are sticking with the the the strong principles as a community for a community, that we want to help everybody in IoT to be able to promote and connect with customers and build out together. As you can see here, it's a very simple, clear, design. This is the, homepage for the marketplace where you simply click on the different use cases. We have such a huge variation.

Speaker 1: We've got around about 30 plus use cases on here now ranging from consumer products to, quite complex manufacturing products, but also simple things like sensors in emergency lighting that can actually stand alone as a system or they can be integrated into a wider system as well. If you'd like to join the community, as I mentioned, go on to Meetup, search IoT North, and you will find us there, or the easiest place of all is register on our website, iotnorth.uk, and you'll get access to the forum, which is forum.iotnorth.uk. You can find us at iotnorthu on Twitter, and we're on LinkedIn if you simply just search IoT North, and the the meetup as well. I hope this gives you a little bit of insight on why we've driven the way forward that we have in trying to bridge that gap and really understanding. My my key thing and my passion and what I get out of building out this community is discovery, product customer discovery, understanding what's going on in the market, and that is absolutely enough for me to take from this community so I can give into it by creating it and working with community.

Speaker 1: And I have to say a quick big thank you to a guy called John Stavely, who's my technical right hand, with the community who, really helps me a huge amount in organizing events but also keeping the technical conversations going to a deep layer that I I just don't have the skill set to. Thanks.