Using the Orbit model to demonstrate community value

Bryan Robinson: Debrael gone deep dives. Yar. So hello, everyone. I'm Brian. Nice to meet you.

I am a senior developer advocate at Orbit. Orbit is a platform that helps community builders build what we call high gravity communities. Primarily today, though, we're not really gonna dive into Orbit the product, which is kinda cool. We're actually gonna talk about the Orbit philosophy, which we call the Orbit model, and it's been around for longer than the the product itself has been around. So I I think that's pretty cool.

You can find out more about me at on Twitter at b Rob. You can go to my website, brianlrobinson.com. You can find out more about Orbit at Orbit Model, and you can go to orbit.log, find out more about the company. But the long story short, the tldr of it all is that I've been working on the web in some capacity for about fifteen years doing design development work. And in about ten of those years, starting personally but eventually branching out and doing it professionally, I've been building technical communities, both in my locality, which actually there there's a Memphis community member in Discord right now.

Lawrence is in there, and I'm super psyched to see him there. Anyway, that's that's my history. I'm no longer there, and I'm I was just excited to see it, see him there. Anyway, I've been doing that for about ten years. In the past four or five, I've been doing it professionally.

With that said, and and hopefully some intros over in Discord, I see at least Ramon is in there. Thank you very much for that. Let's go ahead and book it on and take a look at our agenda for today. So we're gonna be talking about demonstrating community value. So the first thing that we actually need to worry about is, like, why?

Why do we care that we need to demonstrate this value? We're gonna talk about that. Then we're gonna talk a little bit about how we want to talk about community. Spoiler alert, as I've mentioned, we're gonna get a little bit into my degree in philosophy, and we're gonna talk about linguistics. And it's a topic that I'm pretty passionate about.

Then in that section, we're also gonna talk about how we're not going to talk about community. We're actually gonna talk about how to talk to our executives and the language that they like to use and the language they like to see for convincing our executive teams to take on the activities we want to take on. And then after that, we're gonna talk through identifying our metrics, crafting some stories around that, and creating some what we call flywheel motion. And I'll define flywheels later on. Executive teams love flywheels.

It's great. So if that all sounds good, give me a thumbs up over in the Discord. Again, we're not really like, I'm not gonna force you to do the audience participation, but I think that we can, like, really learn from each other. And I really love seeing community members merging together and doing amazing things. So let's just practice that and give me that old thumbs up over in Discord.

So let's begin. Right? Why do we care about communicating this? Not why do we care about community? Why do why do we care about DevRel?

But why do we care about demonstrating the value? Right? Here's the deal. DevRels know that community matters. Everyone I know that's either worked in DevRel or worked in, like, developer advocacy or community, we know that community matters.

We've seen it. We felt it. We've also felt and seen the recent surge in companies wanting community. It seems like every company, every executive wants to build a community around their product. And this is a this is a good thing.

But if I'm being honest, it's a it's a pretty dangerous thing as well. But why is it dangerous? I mean, doesn't it let us keep our jobs? Doesn't it let us get more resources to do the things that we want to do? Sure.

It can do that. But it also can cause other problems. And I've got two words to describe those other problems, and that is mismatched expectations. They're super real. They happen all the time.

For every CEO that totally gets community, there are 10 more that think of DevRel in a very specific silo. Marketing. Excuse me. Pardon me. Got a got a tickle in my throat.

When we do activities that meet our expectations but don't meet the metrics expected by our leadership, we fight a losing battle. When we get the metrics handed to us with no input in them, we fight a losing battle. When when we don't talk to each other and don't work together inside of our companies, we fight a losing battle. So how do we fix this? To fix mismatched expectations, we need to be speaking the same language.

And to get on that same page, we are gonna go to a place that few DevRel presentations typically go. And that's back to the early twentieth century, and we're gonna talk about philosophy and linguistics. And, specifically, we're gonna talk about a man named Ludwig Wittgenstein, a prominent philosopher and linguist. He was in the, like, World War one era. He was born in the late eighteen hundreds, lived through, I think, the nineteen forties, fifties.

Been a while. Anyway, in his seminal work, which is called the philosophical investigations, he claimed, in most cases, meaning is use. And that's a super obtuse thing to say with no context around it. I hope hope that also helps prove my my point here. But what he meant was that we need to recognize that there are no, what we would call, platonic ideals of what a term means, that the meaning of that term is going to be derived from the use of that term.

In theory, this means that how we use the words that we use is just as important as the words that we choose. Unfortunately, what this also means is that we kinda have to figure out the context around the word and the term that the other person is using, and that's that's not, like, great. Oh, and and as as Lawrence mentioned in the in the chat there, yeah, Wittgenstein was actually, like, a super, I don't know, super sad, slightly angry dude. Just to be perfectly honest, wasn't, like, the best dude in the world, although there are worse people to talk about in terms of philosophy in the early twentieth century. But, yeah, not I wouldn't go hang out with him.

Let's just say that. Anyway, to understand where he was coming from, you do have to kind of understand what kinda led up to that. Up to that point, we kinda thought of language as a series of, like, pointers to objective reality. So there's actually you know, in Plato's work, he talked about the the forms, the ideal forms of things. And so he would have said, if I say the word triangle, it's pointing to this ideal form of a triangle that from which all triangles are derived, which sounds in a modern sense, like, kinda ridiculous.

Like, that's an odd thing to say that there's this otherworldly realm where the absolute model of a triangle exists, and our language points to that. That's super weird as in, like, our modern sensibilities. Right? And that's why, like, this kind of nineteenth nineteen hundreds shift happened. Right?

Wittgenstein posited that if I were to set to say shout water, just water, we may all roughly know what the word water means. Right? Liquid, drinkable, potable, h two o, these things all kinda come to mind. But the purpose of my utterance can't be known without context, without some sort of rules behind it. So am I answering a question?

Did you ask me a question and the answer is water? Am I dying of thirst and in desperate need of water? Am I issuing an order for someone to go fetch me water? Without that additional knowledge and context, you can only guess at what I'm talking about. And that's why Wittgenstein also liked to talk about what he called language games.

And he'd like to talk about them because language needs to have rules around it, and they need to be known rules. If we sit down to play a game and we're talking about different rules, we can't play the same thing. So the rules of these games, these language games, are the definitions and the syntax in the language. The rules clarify the use. And as we said before, meaning is use, so therefore, the rules clarify the meaning.

So what's this mean for us in the DevRel world in the practical sense? Well, it means that if we don't define our terms, then our leadership team is playing checkers, and we are playing chess. Sure. The boards look the same, but the pieces are different and the moves are different. So we want to combine these things together.

So, again, we're gonna warm up with some more commune or some more audience participation here. And I want you to answer over in chat, what do you think community means, and what do you think that your executive leadership thinks community means? So over in chat, post those up and be honest. Right? I know that you hope that your leadership team thinks a specific way, but think about what they say about community.

Think about what they do with community, and think about what you think that means. So post it over in chat. If we get anything, I'll read it out. But in the meantime, let me tell you a little bit about what I have seen in the world. Now this is generalization.

Right? Your mileage may vary, but it is probably a pretty high percentage chance that this is what a lot of people in in the industry are thinking. So executives, what do they think that community is? Well, they typically, and again, mileage may vary, think it's an audience that consumes our content, shares our content, signs up, activates in the product, does the things that we want them to do. In other words, they they they think of it as an audience from which they can capture value.

In the DevRel world, in the community world, we typically see a community as a group of individuals that are sharing some sort of common goal. Usually, it's gonna be, especially in DevRel, around learning and building and doing kind of thing those kinds of creator type things. And we seek to help them do all that better, either with our tool, with our knowledge, with our content. We seek to create value for our community. So you can see that there's kind of a mismatch happening here.

Right? One side is looking at value capture. One side is looking at value creation. One side thinks in funnels and views and eyeballs and users. The other side thinks in kind of circular gravity, bringing people to the core of our community, engagement, members versus users.

Oh, I like what Sharon is saying over in the Discord. Community means a collaborative group that work together to create something. Absolutely. That is a quote, like, near and dear to my heart. That's exactly a great definition of it.

We are all working together to create something, create a great experience, create a great set of knowledge, create a great product. The community really does inform the product. And I think that that we're all looking even in paid companies, right, we're all looking to make a better product. The community is too. Leadership thinks the community means the group of people using our product or those we wanna sell our product to.

Exactly. Right? Sales funnel, value capture all the way, eyeballs users, not not somebody to collaborate with. I think there's a lot of collaboration that goes in to communities. So we talk about funnels when we talk to execs.

We talk about views. We talk about sales, all those good things. So how can we play the same game? How can we line this up so that we're all on the same page and working together to form a great community even if we're using a different thought process around it? Well, I'm pretty sure and, I think I think Ludwig would kind of be on board with this.

We we need to define our terms first. We need to be on the same page around what these words mean, and we can do this by not only teaching our team about some of the language that we use in community, but also being willing to use the language that they use and align those terms together in a lot of ways. And that's what this next section is gonna be about. We're gonna be talking about some of our terms, some of their terms, how we combine those two things together, and how we build a meaningful story around that. So let's define some terms.

I'm gonna start with defining some things out of what we call the Orbit model. The Orbit model is an open source framework around how we think about building communities, at least from an Orbit perspective. And it's been around, like I said, at the beginning since before the Orbit product came around. So that's why I definitely like framing things around it. Honestly, I've been at Orbit since January, but I've been using this terminology for a couple years now.

Because it really struck me when I was first getting into DevRel as a general area beyond just, like, content creation. So I'm gonna cover Orbits. We're gonna talk about activities and activity weight. We're gonna talk about community love. We're gonna talk about reach for community.

And with these kind of core vocabulary bits, we can start to teach our execs a new linguistic framework for thinking about communities. So first and foremost, this is a graphic directly from the GitHub repository for the Orbit model. And so I like to start with, like, what the heck even is an Orbit. Right? And like I said, I've only been at Orbit since January, but this kind of idea of gravity and space themed metrics really struck a chord with me a couple years ago.

So you can think of your orbits as the close and far reaches of either your community's solar system or your product's solar system or your industry's solar system or your localities. All these things work in all sorts of different ways. So what it really does is it constitutes a way of getting everyone into this one big idea. So it could be everyone who has just discovered your community. Maybe they left a star on GitHub.

They did a Twitter follow. You know, something real low low key. Right? Something that doesn't take a lot of effort. And it goes all the way up through what we would call your core contributors or your building orbit within your community.

So these are people who are creating content, writing code, moderating comments, and a whole bunch of more things that all require a lot of effort. And we usually talk about it in terms of four big orbits. Orbit four are people that are just kinda coming in. Three are people who are starting to have those conversations. Two are people who are contributing in, and then one are the people that are really building the experience of your community.

So how do we move folks between the orbits? That's what everyone kinda wants to know. They want people coming into that core area. To do that, we take a look at the activities we want them to do in our community, how those activities are weighted, and how they compare to the rest of our community. So then we start talking about activities and activity weight.

So we take a look at the activities, how they're weighted, and how it compares to the rest. In this chart, which spoiler alert, this is actually from our new Orbit model. We're releasing a new version of it next week, actually, and this is from the v two release. I'm really, really excited about it. I put together a number of the pages on that site.

But you can notice that we have a weight column, and not all these activities are weighted the same. So at the bottom, you can see like, hey. A person read the newsletter. That's cool. Like, that that's a metric that a lot of marketing teams are really interested in.

But from a community standpoint, not super compelling. They are in our orbit. They're exploring. They're looking at our stuff, but it's passive consumption. So let's give that a very low weight.

It kinda goes up through, hey. We have a forum, and this community member is answering a question in the forum. That's some sort of active contribution happening. So let's give that a higher weight, maybe a six times weight. So that weight is six.

And then, like, we get the big things. Right? Maybe we have a meetup program, and we have folks creating meetups in their locality. That takes a lot of work. I I ran a meetup for, like, seven years.

Like, that's that's no small feat. That's a very big weight, and that's like a monthly weight. Right? You're getting 11 points of this in one go. Right?

So we can't go from audience centric metrics, audience centric activities all the way through, like, building of the community. Right? Participation, contribution, ownership of a segment of the community. So when we talk about these weights in context, we typically refer to them as a love score. It's kind of the overall movement of one of these community members.

So we're calculating that off of a function of not just the gross activity weight over time, but also, like, the presence and the amount that they're in the community on a regular basis. The higher the weight of those activities, the higher the love. Right? Love is a metric that helps us see folks that are core members of our community, that are core contributors, that are people that we want to do different things with, collaborate with even more. They're not necessarily like, hey.

You're a person I wanna sell to. They're a person that we really want to nurture and turn into one of our community champions or community builders. And then we also have reach. Now reach is something that can be a tricky term. Right?

It really can mean a couple different things. What our executive team is probably gonna think about is, like, octopus reach, like reaching new people, going and finding an influencer, and getting their audience to like our product. That is to a degree what we want because we do want new fresh people coming in, but we actually also wanna talk about internal reach. So a new capacity that we're that we're actually exploring in this kind of two point o, the Orbit model, is how we talk about and think about reach in general and internal reach. Because internal reach is where we get strength in our community.

It is not necessarily how we grow membership. Big number goes up. That's not what we want necessarily because if the big number goes up too fast, our community will collapse in on itself. We won't have enough strength in it to hold tight. So we're thinking about it in, a graph kind of network.

Right? In this simple network graph, we have Jennifer whose internal reach is actually very high. We think about it as kind of the strength and the sum of the connections that people have with each other As opposed to thinking about just having people coming into the core of the of the community, the product, we want to also think about how these people play with each other and work together as well. So if we were to calculate the total connection strength for Jennifer, Jennifer has a reach of 14. You can see that these are actually probably around interactions between people.

Right? So she's interacted with Ursula four times, Tony six times, Mary one time, David three times. So she has a reach of 14, a personal gravity, if you will, of 14 compared to, say, David, who's, I think, our next highest person in this little network graph having a score of 10, that three plus that seven. Now there's a lot more that can go into this. This is a very simplified version of everything.

We need to account for, like, degradation of these connections over time, secondary relationships in the community, and more. But the, like, the TLDR version of this is that folks with strong connections to multiple community members are internal influencers in the community, and they become their own pockets of gravity. If I were to share something with Jennifer and she shares it, it's going to hit all these different people. Even though Jennifer maybe has, like, a 100 Twitter followers, but she has the tight connections in the community, and I can share something with her, and it's going to hit all those people. So that goes a long way.

And I see Richard Boot in the speaker questions channel talking about victim sign. So I appreciate that. Studying philosophy has paid off my entire life, my friend. So definitely. Anyway, these are often these people are often thought to be, like, your best champions in the community.

They're even better, in my opinion, than those external influencers because they always increase the strength. They don't increase the growth necessarily. And it means that when you have enough of these people, your team doesn't get overextended dealing with the growth that you might have from, say, a Facebook ad campaign or a Google ad campaign of people coming in. So, yeah, with that kind of physics analogy, reach can be considered either how you pull in external folks into your orbit or how the personal members' gravities help move folks from the further reaches of your orbit into the closer reaches of your orbit. So let's review.

We're thinking in orbits. We're thinking in, like, these kind of step by step pieces coming closer and closer together. They help us describe the overall motion of people exploring our community, all in the way to kind of, like, help build the community, not even necessarily the product. Love is a function of activity, frequency, activity, weight, and time. And reach is how influential members are externally, sure, but also how strong their connections are internally to help be that net that catches everyone as they come into the community.

So let's get down to business now. Right? Like, that's that's how I kinda think of community. That's how we think about it at Orbit. That's what the Orbit model is is kind of all about.

It goes much, much deeper than a lot of that. But it's not really fair to our business side if we expect them to adopt some of our language and we don't meet them halfway. Right? And there's plenty of jargon in the business world. And while sometimes it feels wrong to use it in relationship to communities, it's it's important to get by, and it's important with the way that we tell these stories.

And so I think it's important that we kind of work through some of that. And so we'll start with, like, speaking sales a little bit here. Right? A lead is a person that is hanging around near a product that might be interested in buying it. We often talk about, like, cold leads, hot leads, warm leads.

A cold lead is a person that, you know, wanders in off the street. Right? They they have no prior experience. They've maybe just barely heard about a product. A warm lead is someone who has been nurtured in some way and is ready is already showing some kind of, like, intent to buy.

And I bet you can guess some things that we'll talk about later when we talk about community metrics. Metrics. Right? Like, getting these from the community works out pretty well even if it makes us feel a little icky in the process. So then we also talk about, like, we've got a lead.

Maybe they're a purchaser. Maybe they they get on the product. But, like, what what does it mean to activate a user in the product? And what that really ends up meaning is a user that has passed some certain milestone in the product. A few simple examples could be they can they signed up, but then they also confirm their email address, or they updated a piece of their profile, or they created their first hello world application or forked a repository or used one specific feature or some combination of features that we have deemed as a is an activation, is showing that they actually are using the product.

So an activation is also highly valuable, highly important there as well. And then there's this. Right? Like, sales, marketing, CEOs, they love they love funnels. Right?

Funnels are great. And honestly, funnels are actually pretty good overall in a very linear sense. Right? They're often at the core of a marketing or sales process. They're linear pathways from a cold lead to a conversion.

A lead goes in cold, activates, then purchases. Easy peasy. No big deal. An example of a funnel would be someone reads a blog post about your service. They dig a little deeper with maybe a webinar.

They watch a few video demos. They build something on a free plan, and then they buy a paid plan, or they enter into your enterprise sales. That's a very straight and narrow path, and you can optimize each step of that. Right? It's really great on marketing.

It's really great on sales. A lot of companies even view community as an important top of funnel area. Tofu. Top of funnel. I don't know how many how many companies actually call it tofu, but a few that I've been with have called it tofu.

So know that it can definitely work that way. As as you can see here, this is what we like to affectionately refer to as the the Orbit model ice cream cone. You have a community. The community is going to kind of automatically drip into your funnel. It just it does work that way if you have a strong community.

It can do that. But, also, community can increase and supplement the entire customer journey throughout a funnel. It can happen all along the way, and they may not even enter the funnel. They may just enter into a sale. So this is where we can start some of our alignment.

Right? So we've got some of our terms, some of their terms, and then we've this kind of idea that, like, we want kind of this this inward motion that sees multiple different types of activities and activity waves to generate gravity. And they're like, no. No. It's Step by step.

Right? Give me give me a linear path. So what we can do is we can pause for a second, and we can consider pirates. No. No.

Not that one. No. Mm-mm. I mean, maybe. No.

No. No. No. What we actually are going to talk about is what what Phil Leggett coined as pirate metrics. And they're a great way of mapping funnel metrics and community and DevRel metrics together.

And where we go from, like, all the way the top of funnel through the bottom and into product feedback. And I think it's actually a really great mechanism for combining what we care about, what our execs care about, and kind of marrying those two things together. That oh, so the the third pirate is from his flag their flag means death, I think. It's the it's the new there's, like, on HBO Max. It's a pretty cool show.

That and that's Taika Waititi who's playing Blackbeard. Anyway, I I move on. So the ARP framework stands for acquisition sorry. Awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and product. And like I said, it's a really good framework for mapping things over.

So let's take a few examples. Awareness is kind of word-of-mouth, either online or in person. In terms of community, we talk about that. Like, our current community members are doing some of this for us. Community generated content gets distributions, can drive people into both the community and into the product.

I think a really great example of this is Netlify's Jamstack community. Netlify's Jamstack community isn't about Netlify. Granted, they coined the term Jamstack, so there's a little bit there. Right? But they have a Discord community, formerly a Slack community, that is meant to not be a promotional piece for Netlify.

It's meant to promote the Jamstack. The more the Jamstack raises up, the better things are for Netlify. So it's it's a very word-of-mouth thing, and it encourages people to share content, share knowledge inside of it. Acquisition. Inspiration and social proof within the community.

This is going to encourage theoretically trials of the product as well. I think a really great example of this sort of methodology is all the, like, hosting platforms, at least the the cool ones, they've got some sort of, like, one click deploy button on GitHub. Right? So I could go in and I could create a repository, toss a button on it, you click that, and you automatically get this on Vercel, on Netlify, on DigitalOcean, on Heroku. It moves it into your GitHub account.

It creates things inside their products, and it basically is an immediate acquisition with very low effort on on the the new community members point. No effort once it's created on the company's point, and it just kind of works as an acquisition machine at that point. But the great thing is I, as a community person, can just also create content and not have to worry about it. And if I want to show you how to do something, I can give you a starting point and say, click this button and follow along with me. And that makes me happy as a content person in these communities.

I've used it. I use Netlify's deploy button on at least a dozen different projects. So it it works. Activation. So the community can provide tons of answers, resources, encouragement to keep people moving forward.

Right? They're able to basically say if you get hung up, there are community members that are creating content, creating question and answers. A couple examples of this would be Sanity, which actually my old employer worked with WesBoss on a mastering Gatsby course. We didn't ask him to do it. He just did it because he liked the product.

Nat Eliason's effortless output in Rome, there's a course for that as well. These are all great ways to help people get activated very quickly with very low effort from the the company. Retention, things that help people do things over and over again with your product. Zapier and Makerpad have a great flywheel from tutorial to adoption to product use. And there's lots of different ways to keep people using the product by community content through deeper connections with other people through knowledge share programs.

Referral is honestly a little bit of an obvious one. Right? Like, if people are having a great community experience, they want more people in the community with them. So many members will become new word-of-mouth advocates based on the positive experience they get in a community. And that doesn't mean answering questions about the product.

It just means they had a good time in the community. They want other people to know, and we get the the brand recognition out of that. Miro's community Miroverse is actually a really great community created set of templates, and it just kinda showcases that referral process. I did this cool thing over in their community. You should too.

And then it's often overlooked, but, like, one of the best things that comes from having a strong product community is frequent and, like, super high quality feedback, right, from people who are using the product every day. Obsidian has a great forum where they are they have kind of a very highly engaged feedback channel. So there's a lot of people coming in, posting feedback on things that could be better, things that they like, and then actually getting engagement back from the from the community team, from the product team, all kinda throughout. And that creates emotion that people are really gonna want to keep doing that in. And we get all the all the feedback, which means that we get to make our product better.

And as as we kinda said earlier, Sharon said, we're all collaboratively working towards something. It so happens that we are all collaboratively working towards a better product because our users want a better product. And so as we kind of go forward together, we have these conversations and it goes a long way. So all these things bubble up into something like an OKR, objectives and key results. Sometimes we talk about KPIs.

Sometimes we talk about input and output metrics. Most of the companies that I've been with have really liked the OKR framework. It's a framework that, is really about setting a small number of objectives for the whole company or maybe even for the team. And then that goal is broken up into key results, which are a little bit more concrete metrics that the team can plan around and we can plan activities for. So we can take a simple example, and we're gonna be doing audience participation again.

Right? So, like, we've had some. Let's get better. Right? So let's take a look at a simple example.

Right? We have an objective. We want to increase recurring revenue. Alright, community team. Go.

I mean, I know. It's a little gross. Right? We're talking about money. We're talking about very, like, capture metrics here.

But revenue pays the bills, y'all. Like, it feels gross, and that's okay, and it should feel gross. But here's the deal. OKRs are your best friends. I promise.

So let's see how this goes. So these may not always be the key results that are owned by a DevRel team or a community team, but the activities that we do 100% inform these, and we can use that for our storytelling. Right? 100 new self serve customers, 20 plan upgrades, maybe going from a free to a paid or going from a low end paid to a high end paid, five new enterprise customers. We don't care about any of that.

We're DevRel. We're creating content. We're building community connections. We're doing livestreams and all these other things. We're not doing that.

Right? So let let's do some audience participation. Wake up, everyone. Alright? Wake up.

Here we go. End of the day. We can do this. I promise. So this time, I want you to think about those three key results that I just showed.

New self serve customers, new plan upgrades, new enterprise customers, and think about the DevRel activities that your team does right now. Not that you have to, like, do, but, like, that you already do. Can you map any of those directly to achieving one of those results? Post them over in Discord, and I'm gonna talk through a little bit of kind of what I think about with these as well. Right?

So, again, here are those key results. Post some ideas over in Discord. Because, again, we can all learn from each other. You know? There is no no silly idea coming out there.

Anyway, so let's talk about each of these key results. Right? A 100 new self serve customers. Self serve meaning they've come in. There were a couple roundtables today that talked I think there's one that's like, is self serve developer purchases a dying art?

And I I saw the end of end of it, they're like, no, as it turns out. Anyway, so we need more folks that want to use the product. I mean, hopefully, from a pre a free plan. Right? So if we create useful, insightful, or fun demos, we're gonna get people in the door.

Right? So we still do the content creation that we've always kind of done. But if we think about it and showcase it in a way that kind of ties back to that key result, yes, it feels a little gross, but we were already doing that. And we already want to do that because it helps educate our community. Want 20 people to upgrade from a low end plan to a higher end plan?

Then we need to do a better job educating the community about the features that exist in there. So let's do educational content, again, things that we already kinda want to do around that, or let's build some demos that kinda showcase the the power of those. Or let's let's host a community power user hour or something like that in the community, and we can showcase workflows. We can bring people who have already kind of started paying or upgraded to those plans and have them showcase what they're doing. We can promote what they're doing.

We can give them value. Want five new enterprise customers? Well, we need to build a community of champions. Right? We want to provide those champions with as much value as possible so that when a salesperson is talking to the company as a whole, there's actually an insider available.

Right? Somebody who's saying, I want to do more. I want more of this product That helps us close deals. All we did was nurture somebody. We said, alright.

Here are the things that you want to do. Do them more. Here are the things that I wanna help you with. I don't care if you convert. I mean, I do care.

But I I like, to you, I just wanna give you value. So if we do that, these things can happen. And all we have to do is kinda put on our our, like, our hat and say, we did these things. These things drove these metrics. They drove a certain number of self serve customers.

They drove a certain number of of upgrade plans, or we created x amount of content around these features in the hopes of doing these things, and we can kinda work through that as well. Makes sense? I know this feels really extractive. Right? It feels like, like I said before, a little little gross.

There's kind of we become steeped in the business side. And you're not wrong that it is extractive. I mean, insert remark about capitalism here. Right? But here's the deal.

Even though this is all extractive, we as DevRel's and community builders should always be stewards of our communities. So I developed a little bit of a framework to think through these things so that before that we start thinking about the metrics that we want to have, the flywheels that we expect to do, all of which are by their very nature, somewhat extractive, let's take a moment and think about value capture versus value creation. I've used these terms a little bit already, but I wanna go a little bit further into them and talk about why they're important. So first and foremost, value capture. This is what organizations want to get out of the community.

When we're thinking about value capture, think about things like sign up, paid plans, blog posts, ticket deflection, social sharing. These are all things that make the company better and that we are looking to get out of our community, and that's fine. We do want these things. Even the community wants some of these things. I mean, we want social sharing.

It'll help our community plans as well. But then we also want to think about value creation. Value creation is what we as DevRels do on a regular basis, And we create this value for our community in part because that's what most of us want to do. Like, that's how we want to go about it. But also so that when the organization needs to extract value, we've given some sort of requisite amount of value to make that ask and to make it in a non gross way.

Right? If I provided a ton of value, in general, somebody is going to be more likely to give value in return. So when we think about value creation, these are some of the activities that we might be thinking. And look. It's a much longer list.

Right? Lot more things on this list, and this is just a small segment. Right? When we think about creation of value, it needs to be more. It needs to not just equal what we hope to get out of the community.

In fact, it needs to drastically exceed it. So some things like we create blog posts. We do a knowledge base. We work in video, livestreams, curation, promotion of members. That's actually a very not often talked about thing.

Right? I want to promote my members. When they do something cool, I'm sharing that. Right? I wanna provide inspiration.

I wanna host q and a's and answer questions. I wanna build demos. I wanna give tips. I wanna have that collaboration. So either collaboration is is in the presentation.

Right? I wanna collaborate with folks. I wanna build something together. Right? So we need to do a lot of these things to do what we need to do.

So I tend to think that you need at least a three times amount of value that you create to the amount of value that you seek to capture. And this is kind of where we start talking about some mechanisms to think this through. This is a very abstract thought. How do I define value? How do I define value of two very different things, what I'm capturing and what I'm creating?

So with a bit of tooling, we can actually do some brainstorming around this. I recommend reviewing and updating your ideas around capture versus creation on, like, a quarterly basis. Usually, when we're planning out our activities, we do it quarterly, something along those lines. And I've actually created an Airtable template to help with this. It's still early days.

I'd love feedback on it just from a product perspective. It's it's my own little product. You can grab the template at brob.dev/ratio. And while I dive in, I definitely wanna hear in chat what sorts of value you and your org are seeking to create and what sorts of value you are looking to capture. And we'll view that all through this lens.

Again, you can get it at brob.dev/ratio. And so this is kind of the final view. There are three tabs in the Airtable. I also have like a Google Sheet, and I've got a Notion thing that I'm working on for all this. Airtable was the one that gave me the best UI with the least effort.

Sheets gave me the least effort, but the worst UI. Anyway, it shows a score for your activities, the activities that you are going to be doing as a community team, a score for the value you wish to capture, and then a ratio based on those two values. Right? So if you shoot for a a score higher than, three point o, I think that you're on the right track. That's where my brain currently is.

I wanna provide at least three times the value that I'm seeking to capture. So how does this break down? Well, there's this other tab. I like to start with what I want my members to be doing, because this usually ties directly back to business objectives of some sort. And, again, I'm all about tying it back so that I can get the resources I need to do the things I wanna do.

Right? So here's an example of some things that you might want to have. And there is a value to that. The value is a score of one to five, and there's an impact. The value is the the internal organizational value for something.

The impact is how this impacts the life of a community member. This can be time. It can be money. It can be some other form of extractive value. Right?

So a blog post takes more time than a simple social share of something. So it takes an impact score of three instead of an impact score of one. A self serve purchase takes almost no time but costs money every month, right, or maybe every year. And that requires justification. Right?

If I'm spending money, I either have to justify it to myself or to my boss or to my company. Engaging in Discord is a typically low impact example, but it's a medium value. It's not super, super valuable, but it is a little bit. Answering a question in Discord may be closer to an impact score of two because you have to, like, do a little bit of research to help somebody, but it's of a significantly higher value. Right?

So an engagement is a low score. A question answered is a much higher score. So this list is unique to your company and probably to each quarter in your company as you're talking about KPIs and OKRs. I've even put a little OKR, like, column in that. So you can actually tie these these things directly to the OKRs.

So what's important is that you kind of have a way of thinking through these things, and you evaluate these at the end of each quarter too to see, was I right? Was this an actual valuable thing? Did this actually take the time I thought that the community members would take on it? And then we move on to our team activities. And I think we've got, like, about five minutes now before breaks.

Hopefully, we'll get through this. This will actually be a great stopping point. So like member activities, we have a team activities page. Note that this list is significantly longer, just like the list that we had before. Now this also has a little bit more calculation to it.

We're looking to give value to as many people as possible because we want our value to be out in the full community. So it's broken out by the value that we're giving as well as the reach of that value. So we do an activity at Orbit that's called study groups. I love them. I think they're a really great event type.

They're very collaborative. They're very, like, conversational. And these are all relatively small events. In fact, if we were to exceed 50 people in these events, they'd be too big to handle. Like, we would we we couldn't do them for more than 50 people.

They're incredibly valuable to the community too, and they help build connections between members. But the reach is relatively small. Right? I got a 50 person cap because I honestly believe if we got, like, 70 people, it wouldn't it wouldn't be good anymore. So compare that to, say, educational content, I can reach hundreds of people with a blog post.

I can reach thousands of people with multiple blog posts. That reach and that value together are a higher value proposition. Right? So if I were to look at study groups, I have a value of three and a reach of, like, 1.5. Right?

That's worth what? What is that? That's five? One 4.5, something like that. I don't even know.

Math's hard. That's what their table's for. But if I were to look at the videos, right, the community videos that I create, the value is about the same as a study group. The reach is further, but the effort has gone up too. Me doing, like, video work for a quarter is much higher than what we do for our study groups.

Our study groups, each one total, like, live interactions and prep is less than half a day. And so the effort's not particularly hard on that. So the value to effort ratio on that is not significantly lower than what we get out of our community video projects. Right? Because the effort went up.

So none of this is exactly like scientific. It's meant to be very, very flexible for your team. It's meant to be a brainstorming idea. And the goal is that once a quarter at the at the end slash beginning, you go through, you figure out, did these things that we did do accomplish the value and the reach that we said they were, and then you can adjust these values. And, again, I'll go back a couple screens.

And then you can look and see, like, did this work? Did these also match up to our OKRs? Are our OKRs changing? Let's do a brainstorming session on what our new activities need to be and what our new capture mechanisms need to be. So we're able to use all of this as kind of a framework to plan out our activities.

Whatever whatever cadence that we're doing the planning on, I think this ends up working out really, really well. So, again, you can try this out. And, again, this is a good stopping point for for the first half year. You can test it out, prob dot dev slash ratio. It's an Airtable template.

Put your stuff in there. Let me know how it goes, and and we'll go from there. When we come back from our break, we're gonna be talking about metrics and flywheels. And this is where I definitely want some audience participation. So go go get a drink of water, get some caffeine in your system, and let's let's go from there.

So we're going to talk about metrics now because that's that's kind of what we're here for. We're gonna talk about them in some very specific ways. And at the same time, we're gonna talk about this concept called flywheels because these things work so well together, especially in storytelling and working internally with your organizations that it's really hard not to just put them together as we talk through them. So we're gonna talk about metrics and flywheels. And you may be asking, because I don't know your familiarity with this term, what in the heck is a flywheel?

Like, That's what? This is kind of a flywheel. A flywheel, if you think about a bicycle, right, like an exercise bike, you pedal. And as you pedal, like, wheel on the front, like, gets going real fast and then, like, keeps going after you stop pedaling, that's a flywheel. So in physics, it's just kind of this idea of using engineering to use kind of a small amount of energy to create bigger motion.

So we use this kind of small area in the middle here of this kind of gear, and it makes this outer rim go a further distance for the same amount of energy much faster, much less energy spent, and it can continue far longer than simply spinning that outside. You spin that outside, it kind of slows down much faster. So from a business perspective, when we talk about flywheels, we want to engineer a process where the outcome of actions becomes the input for the next round of actions. This is a a force multiplier on your teams. If we start a flywheel motion, but our community continues it, we can put effort into other things, new flywheels, community growth, community strength, personal interactions with our community.

And in terms of storytelling, like, it's a it's a really great method for gaining buy in. So, yeah, Sharon in the in the Discord is asking a question. What do you think about using the Orbit model to show a company's Orbit around an existing other community? It might sound a strange question, but my company relies on products developed by open source communities. Yeah.

That's actually a really great question. We're gonna have time at the end. I think that'll be a good question for the end because it's it's it's super interesting, and it's kind of a a bigger topic of conversation, I think. It's a great question, though. I I got it for later.

So yeah. So the other thing about all this, about our metrics and about company buy in is that DevRel and community in and of itself is an incredibly cross functional role. My my colleague, Erin, who's one of our community community advocates at Orbit, she likes the term bridge role. Community is a bridge role. It bridges the community to the product, but also bridges all the internal teams as well.

It's a way of us being able to provide and shepherd the product with a community focus. Depending on your org structure, whether you're actually in a marketing team, in a product team, no matter what, you're always going to also have impact on all the other teams, on marketing, on sales, on customer success, on product. Often, these are teams that have the actual direct correlation to those OKRs. So when telling your story for any given activity that you're doing, we wanna marry that up with a metric that will help those teams. Right?

We don't actually don't need to like, we can own some objectives and or key results. It is entirely possible that you may one day have a quarterly objective that is growth of community or strength of community. But, really, that's okay that we don't have that. We're a cross functional role. We're a bridge builder, and that's fine.

So let's take it from easiest to hardest of of some of those. So I think one of the easiest things to talk about in terms of how community and DevRel can work is how we tie together with marketing. And we're gonna do audience participation in Discord again, so let's let's gear up. What are some metrics that the marketing team cares about? Your marketing team?

Whether you sit on the marketing team or next to the marketing team or or in product or wherever you are, what are some metrics that you know about from your marketing team? And then what are some metrics and activities that we, as DevRels, as community builders, care about that can influence those numbers? Oh, look. Erin is is in Discord. Perfect timing.

I mentioned you and you appear. It's just like our office hours with Lia. It's amazing. Anyway, so let's put that over in the Discord, and I'm gonna go ahead and move forward as if there's no such thing as audience participation, but I absolutely love there to be. So marketing typically, and again, your mileage may vary, is targeted with or is tasked with getting as many eyes on the product as possible.

Right? They're often at the beginning of a sales funnel. They have their own marketing funnels as well, and they're looking for content, and they're looking for eyeballs. Right? They're looking for views on various things.

Marketing is often where we are going to do our metrics that our big number goes up, which we don't really wanna focus on that much, but it makes them happy. And that's okay. Right? It's where we can help the team. Eyeballs will always be big number goals, but seeking content can also mean nurturing champions.

Audience participation over in Discord. Right? What are some metrics that oh, I've already done that. This is what this is why I don't read from scripts. This is why I just kinda go ad hoc.

Let's see what we have over in Discord, actually. So marketing metrics. Share of voice. Oh, that's a fancy one. Leads in the top of funnel conversion ratio.

That's actually hadn't thought about that one. That's a great one. Number of sign ups. Yeah. Number of sign ups being, like, you know, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel.

Number of leads captured at event at events. We're gonna talk about events. Events are a really great cross functional piece for for community and and marketing. Content views and leads, absolutely. Leads being a big deal.

Right? Leads are kind of the end of funnel for marketing. Right? Marketing gets eyeballs in, and then what hopefully comes out is a lead. Right?

Maybe it's a purchase, and that's cool. And maybe it's some sort of, like, growth metric around activation. But overall, its leads come out of the marketing funnel. So some of the things that that I kinda think about for marketing metrics, we've heard them in the in the chat a little bit, content views, Tofu growth, external reach. A lot of marketing teams are looking for that growth metric.

Right? They wanna do some piece of viral content, or they want to do what, one of my former bosses used to call x with y content because it's a great way of doing growth. Right? I, I work at company x that makes a CMS. I want to pair with Next.

Js or with with Angular or with React. If I do this, then those communities come over to my community. Again, that's like a super growth hack kind of situation. And then they're also usually looking for partnerships. Right?

Not just the x with y content, but but active partnerships with other companies and working towards having those pieces kinda merge together. Let's see. Erin's all saying, create awareness of what the community as a whole is doing. Yeah. Absolutely.

So we also talk about marketing community metrics. So we can map some of the things that we do over to what they need. So they need more eyeballs. Right? And that's why where I've kind of, like, landed on with some of our community metrics here.

So I don't like to talk about total community size. Total community size is a complete vanity metric. Honestly, total active members in the community is still a little bit of a vanity metric. Right? But if we talk about active members on a week over week basis, the things that we do to encourage people coming back into the community are the same things that mean that we have a community that's an audience as well.

Right? So if we're keeping people coming to the community with engaging content or with a lot of help or with whatever the activities that we're doing and we keep our community base active, that equals the eyeballs that our teammates on the marketing team need. They can post something with good value into our community and get a response that they're looking for out of it. They can also know that the people in our community are highly engaged people. And again, active members in the community, not just a total community member number.

We can also talk about the members of our community oh, these were supposed be in the opposite order. The attender community events. I'm gonna skip to the third bullet point here. So every time we do a community event, we probably should also mention the things that we are also doing from our marketing team. Right?

Oh, did you see that blog post that we wrote? Oh, we have this new video over here. Did you know we have an event coming next week? And, hey, did you know that Orbit does? Right?

So we can mention these things. And, it's about building its audience metrics at that point. For us, we're doing what we do, and we are keeping track of these things. But for them, it's another audience they can tie into a highly engaged one. And then here's one thing that I really, really enjoy.

And one of things you can kinda keep track of is community members that are attending marketing events. Right? And that's why it should be the third one and not the second one. So we nurture our community. We provide value for our community members.

If they then go to the marketing event, that's a direct correlation. Right? A, it lets like, it lets us know that the marketing event is a good one. Right? Let's keep doing that.

But, also, that itself is a metric. Right? And so I can say, I would actually correlate this to maybe, like, orbit level one and two folks. Right? Orbit levels one and two are attending a marketing event.

In fact, like, we are doing I I made a joke. We are doing an event next week that is a very, like, marketing centric event. It's about some new product stuff. And one of the reports that I built in Orbit for the the Nexus team, the team that is is running the event, is around what orbit levels the various sign ups are in. So of the 500 plus people who have signed up, I know that half of them or a little under half of them are in orbit levels one and two.

And then I also know that the highest group is from orbit level fours. So that means that they're doing good outreach, and it means that we have an active community that is wanting to take part in that. So I've got, like think it's, like, 45% of the overall sign ups are from our core, like, building and contributing roles inside of our Orbits, in those Orbit levels one and two. So that's a that's like a really great metric to say, the community is a solid community that is driving some of these other things. And we don't have to use, like, click through rates, and we don't have to think about, like, tracking mechanisms.

We know that you are in Orbit level one or two, and we know that you have signed up. And that itself is a great metric, I think. And then finally, like, we do need content. Right? Every marketing department needs content.

It's why DevRel's typically are in marketing for a lot of ways because we're we're great content machines, but you really can't do all the content on your own. Right? If you if you were to try to increase views and increase activations and increase users all based on just content, you're gonna burn out super fast, or you're gonna have to hire so many people that it's not worth it, or you're gonna have to seek external people that you're that you're paying. But if you have a great product and you have a community that provides value and uplifts the people who are creating cool things inside of it, you're going to get people that are going to want to create content. And those people who are champions that are content creators are going to naturally rise up.

And then you can mark them as such, and then you can track them, and you can see, hey. We have x number of new champions in our program this quarter. These champions have produced x amount of content, and that's a great metric to kinda showcase what's happening within these community metrics inside of marketing. And then we also have activities. Right?

We need to move these metrics. How are we going to do that? We can do that with creating more spaces for things to happen. Right? We have more events.

We create more content. We have more engagement areas that naturally is going to lead to more eyeballs. The more we produce and the more quality we produce, the more people will be consuming that, and the more people will be taking part in them. Also, terms of eyeballs, what I'm doing right now, external event, right, going someplace and just talking about what we need to talk about. I'm as you can see, there's not been a slide on here that talks about the Orbit product.

Right? We talk about the Orbit model and, like, making these cases to our execs. This is still raising that eyeball awareness. Right? Sharing.

Right? Community share shares is a is a pretty important thing. We can encourage that behavior by showcasing it as well. So we can share it with the community. We can curate content.

We can create newsletters. We can share it in social, and we can encourage that behavior as well. That's also kind of creating space. Right? We create something that is shareable or we share it ourselves, and that opens the door to more folks sharing.

We're also modeling that behavior, which I like to talk about as well. And then content. We want people to create content. If we're not doing anything with that content and we're not providing value back for that content, we're not going to get more people sharing. One of the greatest things you can do is boost up your content creators.

So as we're kind of talking through things, we if we want more content creators, more champions that are doing that, we need to provide them value. We could create a guest authorship program and provide monetary value, and that's a a very valid way of doing things. But if we're talking organically, when somebody creates something cool and shares it with the community, blast that out from every channel you could possibly imagine. Right? You have a community newsletter.

Put it in the newsletter. You have a company newsletter. Put a community spotlight in that. You have somebody that created three articles in a month. Make them the community spotlight person.

Right? Like, showcase them. Share it on Twitter from the company account, from personal accounts, all these things, and that will encourage that behavior as well. So we do all these activities to encourage that. And you can put these in that kind of Airtable spreadsheet that we were talking about before.

A lot of them on this are lower effort, which is nice. And then we like to talk about flywheels too. And, again, starting that motion where the output of our of our flywheel is the input for the next one. Right? So I put UGC just because the title wouldn't fit, but really we want content creators.

Right? We're gonna create champions that are content creators. So we've got a community member. Let's call her Peggy. She writes an article about a new feature.

She does it on her own. We didn't ask her to do it. She just is a blogger, and that's cool. I do that. Right?

The article is shared in our newsletter and is shared in the announcements channel of our Discord. Community member Neil sees the article and learns about the new feature, and he's psyched because he likes that feature, and he's very appreciative to to Peggy because she shared this new information that maybe we didn't have a great doc on, something along those lines. So he appreciates the value that he gets from the article, and he wants to write about feature because he saw that Peggy got featured. And to be fair, right, that seems like super vain, but we're humans, and getting positive feedback is a huge deal. Like, I love positive feedback.

I'm hoping there'll be positive feedback over in Discord, you know, hearts and flowers and all those good things. Right? We we like that. It's hard not to. We have to train ourselves not to.

But, anyway, Neil then shares an article in the community and talks to the or shares his article in the community and talks to the community team and wants to be featured in the in the newsletter. Absolutely feature him in the newsletter. Neil's article is featured in the newsletter in the and then community member Walter, right, gains value from the article and goes back to step three. So as we model behavior, sharing people's content, other people will share that content. Other people will want to create that content, and the cycle goes on and on.

So the output of this is those content creator champions. The output of this is also new people into this UGC flywheel. Again, keeping that wheel in motion. And then marketing was so nice. I named it twice.

We have two different flywheels for this one. We're actually again, I mentioned we've got a v two of the Orbit model coming out next week, and there's actually an entire section dedicated to flywheels. So these are flywheels that will be on that as well as some other ones. Definitely stay tuned for that. But word-of-mouth sharing is an important thing too.

We mentioned it in the pirate metrics. We mentioned it as one of the marketing things that they're looking for. It's also important for us to to make sure that we're helping spread the word about the cool new things. So let's talk about when a new feature is released. So instead of counting on Peggy to make that content, we need to make the content too.

Like, that's just part of what we do. Right? New features release, and we send out an orb an email to our Orbit one members talking about the details and giving them promotional materials, social templates, giving them maybe some one click starters, telling them about all the cool stuff, maybe even having a specific we talked about, like, the power user hour earlier. Right? Like, maybe there's a a special insider event that happens on a monthly basis, and we give them easy calls to action around that to share.

Right? So we're gonna go back to Peggy. Right? This time she doesn't have to write an article. She just is going to share it on Twitter.

Saw this new cool thing in the in the Orbit power user hour. Right? I thought it was really neat. Thought you you all could could benefit from it. Now because Peggy or if maybe if we go back to our network effects earlier and talk about Jennifer, because she's got all these connections, not necessarily influencer, right, but internal reach, when she shares something, a lot of our already semi engaged user base see it.

Right? And then because it came from her and not a company person, they're more likely to go look at it. They're more likely to share it. And as they kind of post and share the level twos, just by the nature of doing these activities, they convert to level ones because they were doing a certain number of activity, and then they're doing more because they see what Peggy's doing. And so when the next feature is released, our level one email list that we create on a regular basis has grown, and the flywheel begins again.

Right? So these are our marketing kind of metrics, actions, activities, community things, and a couple of flywheels around that. So we're gonna move on. We're gonna talk about sales next. So same thing.

Right? Over in the Discord or down below or the link up above. Right? We're gonna do some more audience participation. So what are some metrics that your sales team cares about?

Right? And this is both easy and maybe hard, because, like, the easy ones are low hanging fruit, and all the harder ones are a little bit further along. And then what are metrics and activities that we care about that influence those? Right? So Discord, metrics that sales care cares about, metrics that we care about, activities that we care about.

If you have an idea for a flywheel, we can talk about that too. But let's talk about sales. I see Matthew typing, but sales wants sales. Right? Again, I mentioned low hanging fruit.

Sales is always looking out for revenue. Oh, Matthew, you've got all the insight, my friend. I appreciate it. Deal size and renewal. Hadn't thought about those, but deal size is actually really interesting, and we can talk about that definitely.

So what are the metrics that the team is looking for, and how can we match that up? Same deal as before. So we've got sales metrics, leads, both warm and cold leads. Right? They oftentimes at a big enough company, there's actually people who are involved in getting cold leads in, and there are people who who are there to nurture and continue warm leads through completion.

Company champions. They want people inside of the companies that they're trying to target to help them. We talked about that a little bit earlier as well. And then active prospects. Right?

We want prospects that are really deep down in our in our product already. So let's take a look at checks. We have audience participation. Good job, y'all. I appreciate it.

So deal size and renewals, new users and retention. So, yeah, top of funnel and then bottom of funnel pretty much there. We want people sticking with us for a long time. I would almost say that I I like that. I I the things I'm gonna talk about for active prospects can go in with that as well.

That's a great great thing to have. DevRel, targeting whales. Interesting. We'll talk about that a little bit too. Enabling existing developers to make renewals more likely.

Exactly. Yeah. We wanna make sure that we become ingrained in in the workflow. Sales, very interesting closing deals. Absolutely, Aaron.

DevRel, is our community actually providing value? Yeah. Value capturing creation. Right? We wanna make sure that for these prospects, for these members that sales wants to convert, our community needs to be, like, hustling and giving as much value, not just to them because that smells a little bit.

Right? I think I think our dev audiences will know that, like, you're just targeting me because because salesperson x over there really wants me to convert. No. No. We're giving value to everyone, but we're doing it in a way that definitely provides value to these members as well.

So let's talk about some sales community metrics. Right? Leads. Great source of leads are our Orbit levels one and two. People who are so active in our community that they're literally building and and participating at high levels, they're they're potentially great prospects.

Right? I actually have a have a, like, warning label in a couple slides, so don't worry. I know there's some warnings that need to go on with all this. Also talking about leads, users in the community. So at Orbit, we not only care about our overall active community members.

That's important. We like them. We also care about people who are active users of the product that are also community members. So we have a special tag inside of Orbit that we apply to people when they sign up for an account, and then we know if users are in the community. I can I can tell you again talking about the marketing flow from before that we have, like, 45% of our Orbit ones and twos that are also going to Nexus or event next week?

But over 50% of our Nexus registrations, I think it's, like, 58%, are current users of the Orbit product. So those are solid leads. Right? Those are people who are really good to know about. They are, again, to talk about where is it?

Renewals. Right? Renewals is very important. If they're falling out of love in the community, then we wanna make sure that we are not falling out of love with the product. Right?

So we also want champions inside companies. Right? And we can target that by checking on active members in the target organizations. We can check that metric. So let's say you're targeting I don't know.

What's a what's a big company? I would never target Meta or something like that, but Meta. Right? You're targeting meta. You want them as a as a user in whatever product that you're doing.

Checking to see who in your community is active in their organization. That, again, is a very great metric because it shows that the community is providing so much value that they naturally came into it. We didn't reach out to them, but they're there. And then prospects, number of activities from orgs, number of members from orgs. We also have a tag inside of our Orbit workspace that is a prospect tag, and we report on it weekly to our to the whole company.

It's on our our metrics. Right? I wanna showcase x number of prospects that sales has marked in our orbit, are doing activities this week. They did x amount of activities, which is an average activity of, 2.2. That's higher than the average community member.

This is a good sign. Let's push ahead with these things. So we can kinda keep track of the health of these motions with these metrics. Sales community activities. Did I there we go.

Sorry. It's been a long day, y'all. It's been a long day. Alright. Generating leads and nurturing leads.

We don't actively nurture leads, but we nurture leads all the time. We run office hours weekly. We say, come by, get your questions answered by the community team. It's great. We'd also can do that in an asynchronous way just with, you know, a help channel or just with inspiration.

We can do these things, and we can watch people come in, and they go deeper into the, quote, unquote, funnel from our Orbit at that point. We can actively monitor and scan for people who are doing these things, and we can then report back to sales. Hey. Did you see so and so? They've posted five different messages in help.

Two of those were around features that will probably be paid in the future or that are that are currently paid. They haven't bought yet, but I think they're about to. We can do these things. Again, we're not gonna just stick our salespeople on somebody, but that can be very informative for our sales staff. And they can also go again, we build a platform for this.

They go check our Orbit workspace, and they can see all the activities that somebody's doing. They go into a into a sales call much better prepared because they know what the community member has done. We can also foster our leads and our champions in q and a programs. So if somebody is answering questions in our community and they're at one of the companies that we are targeting, they're an internal champion already. Like, that's somebody that that if we're talking to somebody not that person in a company, we might wanna bring them in in some way or at least get some insight from them on how those teams work together.

And And then we can also foster champions through one on one connections. It's not a great use of time at all times, but sometimes scaling community also means doing non scalable things. So doing one on ones with with folks can go a long way, again, to nurture them into somebody that is not just a champion inside of a company, which sales cares about, but they're also a champion out in public too. And they're champion in the community, which is something that we care about as well. And then here's an example flywheel.

Again, Peggy. I wasn't as creative with naming as I probably should have been, but developer Peggy tries the product. Peggy then joins the product's Discord community, and community builder Buzz, I got a little alliteration, happy there, nurtures Peggy's community journey through events, through community support. When Peggy is asked questions, Buzz has been there to answer them or at least point her in the right direction. And then Peggy's organization one day gets marked by one of the by account executive Alan as a prospect.

So based on love, Peggy gets marked as an internal champion. And when Peggy starts talking about needing more stuff, again, Buzz or or Alan doesn't just immediately glom onto Peggy. Right? But when Peggy seeks out more information about things that are payment oriented, Peggy is in due introduced to Alan by Buzz. So Peggy helps Alan navigate the complexities of internal politics.

Allan closes and onboards that new customer. And part of that onboarding flow is Peggy's coworkers and teammates, they come in to what we call, like, a new customer flywheel, and those people get onboarded into the community and help grow our community in that way in a very positive way as well. While this one doesn't output directly back into the input of this flywheel, it does go into another flywheel as well. Here are my two important sales caveats because I am a DevRel, and these are important. Sales should be respectfully active in the community.

I like to tell this story. It just happened last week. Our sales team just had an off-site where they were talking about, like, their sales kickoff and all that. One of our sales members who is one of my favorite sales members of all time from multiple companies, Leah, she is super active in our community. She attends office hours every single week.

She comes to our study groups. She is answering the occasional question inside of the community, not in a salesy way. She was not able to make it for the beginning of office hours. I was a little sad because Leah's a friendly a friendly face in office hours. We were talking about some things, and somebody brought up a pricing question.

I was semi equipped to handle it, and I informed them, hey. It'd be really great if Leah were here. She could answer this much more educatedly than I can. Here's here's what's gonna be my best guess. And I kid you not, thirty seconds went by, and Leah magically appeared.

No one messaged Leah. She just happened to to break free from the sales kickoff and came. She came to the meeting despite having all this stuff going on. She came to office hours and magically it's like I summoned her. It was like the most beautiful thing ever.

But she is very respectful in those spaces, and she's there to supplement and be educational, and she's never never salesy in it. And I think that's an important important thing. But if they're active in it, it means that they themselves are a community builder, and that means that somebody's going to trust them more. If you see Leah, when Leah is your point of contact for sales, you already know her. You know that she's got kids or you know that she lives in a certain area.

You know these things because you've had these conversations, and it's a very organic thing that has come from these conversational events. And then for noncommunity sales, for sales that don't stem from the community because, hey, sales techniques still work. You don't have to have community to make a sale. The sales teams should 100% onboard the new customers to the community. It is an upsell.

Right? Like, free information over here in the community. Free people talking about the things you care about with your product. Go over there. You will flourish over there.

These are people that that you will enjoy. So your sales folks should be totally respectful, but should totally be active in the community. And when they onboard customers, they should onboard to the community as well because it's a super valuable thing for the customers, and it's really great for the community as well. So as as Erin said, because she actually saw yeah. I'm pretty sure Leah at Orbit is magic.

She she totally is. I I respect Leah so much. So next up, and I think this is last. So definitely queue up your last bits of audience participation and queue up your questions. We're gonna talk about customer success.

So same deal as before. Audience participation. Discord link up there. Discord chat down below. What are some metrics that customer success cares about?

What are metrics and activities that we care about in relationship to customer success, and how can we influence the numbers between the two? So customer success is often a team that is helping customers at every stage. Right? They might be nurturing leads. They might be helping people who are already in go further into the product.

They might be answering support. They might actually have support falling under them. They want as little confusion in the product as possible. So they're also often very knowledgeable about docs. They do a lot of work around that.

They work one on one with customers to help them get the most out of the products. They're doing all these things. It's a it's a big team. Right? So they've got their own set of metrics that they care about.

Sometimes they care about number of tickets opening. They care about questions answered. They care about people having deeper product knowledge. Customer success, almost certainly measured by churn. See, you can see I'm not, like, great with my with my, like, sales hat.

Right? With my customer success hat. Totally. Like, one of the one of the metrics would be if a customer is not succeeding, they will leave the product, and they will go find another product. So absolutely churn.

I'd say, like, deeper product knowledge and getting more value out of the product is a is a high thing around that as well. Deeper activation is what we were actually looking for on that. Have a list of of product features, check their activation against it. DevRel. It's all about enablement.

Dev education support, good good feel to the community. Absolutely. I love all of those, Matthew. So community success metrics. We can actually talk about tickets in the community.

Right? If there are actually fewer tickets in your support team, it might be because your community answered them first. It might be that the person went to the community, asked a question, and was either answered by the DevRel team or answered by the community themselves. At a company I used to work for, we actually had a competition that was in our community. We wanted our community members to beat us in terms of speed and knowledge for our people opening questions in the community, and we tracked time to community answer around that.

And so we always like, we had support mechanisms that were, like, deeper than just our live chat community, but we wanted to make sure that in the live chat community, we gave an opportunity for the community to answer questions. And in doing so, we actually saw they never beat us. They they got to about I think the highest I ever saw while I was there was, like, 45% of the questions to be answered. They answered them, which is huge. Right?

Like, in terms of, like, mitigating the support needs, huge. And then, yeah, knowledge and depth of product. Right? Community created content. Again, as Matthew said over in Discord, it's all about enablement.

Right? Developer education, support. These are very important things. Tips and code shared. Right?

That's not just what we do, although it very much could be what we do, but we're tracking what our champions are doing. We're tracking what people are doing with the product that would be useful to these other folks. And when possible, making those connections can be super, super powerful. And then, again, we want to kind of track activities around this as well. So when it comes to tickets, a part of a champions program could be being active in the in the help channel, doing office hours, which, again, I've mentioned Orbit does.

Every every Wednesday, we do it. And that can mitigate tickets. Right? That can they can say, you know, we're working through this. If you want some insight, go to office hours.

Or in the community, we can say that, and that they can come and get their tickets answered. And maybe somebody who's watching also kind of had that question and no longer needs support for the answer. Rewarding accurate community answers. So finding ways and this could be champions program. This could be a knowledge sharing program.

It could be literal literal rewards like swag. It could be literal rewards like money. It also could be metaphysical rewards like praise and letting everyone know just how valuable they are in so many ways. You probably want some combination of all of these because you're saying, hey. Great job providing so much value that we're capturing that we don't have to worry about these things.

Maybe find a champions program to give them some value in return as well. And then knowledge. You can you can build a huge repository of both community generated content as well as our own content as well. And then knowledge, we can work through that UGC flywheel as best as possible and create value, create content that way as well. And, oh, I've just been told backstage that seven minutes, I was worried I was gonna run short, but we're not.

So we're gonna talk about a specific flywheel in in customer success slash support, which is the ticket deflection flywheel. Again, very capture focused here, but product user Conrad comes on into the community and has a question. Post it in the help channel. The the question is answered because Catherine, a community member, already knew the answer to it and happened to be in the community at that time, and so she posted. I didn't post it as a community builder.

But what I did was I gave huge positive signal to Catherine publicly. Right? Thank you so much for answering that question. You're totally right about that. That's exactly, you know, how you're going to do it and exactly the thought process.

And maybe you go a little deeper and give maybe a couple more insights to Conrad. Conrad then remains in the community because, again, as Matthew pointed out with our enablement, the good feel of the community is present. Community members are helping. And he stays in the in the community, and when he is presented with additional value, again, office hours, events, these things that are educationally focused, he sticks around. Quentin comes into the community, asks a question.

And this time, because maybe Conrad came in for office hours and happens to be in the community listening to, in our case, me and Aaron drone on about something, he's available and answers Quentin's question. Conrad has given that positive signal from the team again. Thank you so much. Here's a little bit more insight as well. Quentin now goes into that flywheel.

Quentin is now the Conrad from step one. So, again, all about that kind of motion of continuing that throughout. I'm no longer in my slides. Let me click over. And then I'm gonna sum up at this point.

Right? Because we have five minutes left probably, and I do wanna make sure there's a few minutes for questions. But we need to convince our org to care about the things that we care about and keep things running smoothly. We need resources. We need money.

We need whatever we need. So we have to convince them that community matters. We can do that by first getting everyone on the same page linguistically. If you missed the first half, I'm sorry, but you missed out on some great Wittgenstein quotes and some great philosophy, but we want to define our terms. We also then want to use the alignment that comes from that linguistic framework to choose and communicate our metrics.

Choose the metrics that line up with what the other teams needed because DevRel and community is a cross functional bridge role. And then after we choose our metrics, we wanna create sustainable activities. I mentioned, like, I love building sustainable communities via nonsustainable activities. We also wanna make sure that the activities become sustainable via flywheels. And we want to be able to tell the stories that showcase that success.

And we can tell them via the flywheels, via the metrics, and then roll those up into the greater OKRs or KPIs or however your company does these things. DevRelcon deep dives. Yar.