What investors want from your DevRel program

Ashley Smith: DevRel gone deep dives. Yar.

Speaker 2: Hello. Hi. Good to see you. So,

Speaker 3: Ashley, can you introduce yourself as, you know, kind of what your background's been, what your relationship to DevRel is?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So based in New York City, had lived between San Francisco and New York over the last thirteen years when I've been working, in startups. Background is in engineering. My first job was at Twilio in the first twenty where everyone was doing DevRel. I think everyone has the Twilio t shirt with the, like, little wires that go through it.

Like, I still see that on the street sometimes. It's making me so happy, but that was our first version of DevRel. And then, obviously, it got taken to be much more scientific, I'll call it. Was it parsed after that? Led kind of go to market, left there, went to GitLab, first 10 people, was the CMO there, managed DevRel.

Of course, with the other marketing sides, the our marketing pieces as well as the presales BDR stuff. And then was it GitHub eighteen months prior to the acquisition? So the eighteen months leading in the acquisition, managed DevRel, and also all the other pieces of marketing design, lots of good pieces. After that, super fun adventure, left, financial investing, advising pretty much all of my career, decided to make that into a real thing, worked at a company or a fund called OpenView as a venture partner, led the work there at BuildKite, is, you know, we have a DevRel organization there, was the lead investor and board member, and every other deal I've ever worked on in DevRel is or a dev tool company as well. It's kinda all I know.

It's all I enjoy doing, which I've learned. And most recently, I have my own seed sons. It's called Vermillion Close Ventures. I live in Utah sometimes and hike a lot, so I just named it after what I love. And, doing seed deals only in companies that focus on making developers lives easier.

So, I've not ventured very far away from where I started and love that I've, you know, been the exec so I know what we're looking as leaders for from a DevRel organization, but also as an investor. I know when someone's kinda not quite understanding that building a community is super important to the success of their developer tool. And so how to kinda point that out and also help them measure that. So I've been on both sides of the table and and really enjoy it. Is that helpful?

Speaker 3: Yeah. That's great. Thanks.

Speaker 2: Awesome.

Speaker 3: I think there's there's some there's a lot of variety in the backgrounds of people who are working in in in running DevRel teams. And some I would say probably most of the people I come across don't really have much exposure to the world of of of venture capital other than that it's a fact of life of the funding model of the company they work in, but they don't understand how it works. They don't understand investor priorities or or that kind of thing. So I think there's maybe a bit of mystery, but also perhaps a little bit of nervousness around what these kind of shadowy figures are expecting. And because DevRel gets scrutinized and doesn't always have the best metrics, you know, it it feels like a a recipe for, not resentment, but a little bit of friction, let's say.

So what I'd like to

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 3: Ask you then is what is it that what let's take a step right back. Do do VCs even care about DevRel?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. So not all of them, and I can't speak for every VC on the planet. Right? I don't want to. But the ones that are investing in dev tools and software and and that, really kinda care about this space, most of them will say DevRel is super important.

They may not be able to go many layers deeper than that, but they know that we need to build a community. And so for a long time, I would get calls from people being like, we need build a community. I'm like, great. Great idea. Then what?

So, like, no one actually kinda knew what that meant. To your point about shadowy figures, one thing I've noticed that happens is a lot of early founders will say things like, the board says. The board says. And it becomes very scary because, you know, at Twilio or, like, you know, when I was earlier in my career, I had no idea what a board did. I had no idea what VCs were.

I just knew they would come to our weird developer drink ups, and I would give them alcohol, like, which is, in retrospect, probably not how I should have interacted. But, you know, it it's a little bit scary. And so there's been a lot of instances I've seen where founders will use that fear to kinda be like, hey. This is because our investors are gonna watch it. It's not exactly that's not what happens.

The conversation that should happen is here are our goals. Here is how your work ties to those goals. How are you going to create tactics, campaigns, events, content, yada yada yada K. That directly impacts these goals that we then present to the board, and then they give feedback on. Right?

Therefore, it takes the scariness out of it, and it also is, like, much more clear on why we're doing what we do versus, like, DevRel, go get more users. Like, that's really not like, okay. That means we wanna increase users. Why? Okay.

We're trying to sell this product. Great. And so it just if you tie it back to goals, versus just saying, the board says we need to do this. We're spending too much money on x. It becomes scary, and then people kinda start to resent VCs and board members from that angle.

If that I think that was So then what? Shadowy.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Because I remember also earlier in my career, the idea that there were these people who had you know, it's almost like kinda Roman gods.

They had a they were inaccessible, but they they had a an intense interest in what you were doing. And, you know, they would sit around and make decisions about your future, but you couldn't influence that. But yeah. So then let's try and take away some of that that mystery. What are the things that DevRel people can report up to their own management that can then filter through to investors to help them get a picture of of the value that DevRel's bringing.

Speaker 2: Yep. I mean, it really just depends on the size or the stage of the company. Right? If you're looking at let's call it early stage. So let's see.

A. You know, you're the first DevRel hire at the company. You're gonna be much more involved, and you're gonna be tied to every single metric probably the company is tracking, including revenue, which can be scary for some people that work in DevRel. So what I would do is sit down with if your manager is the CEO, if your manager is the chief product officer, whoever is you're working with directly, I would sit down and say, metrics do you expect me to influence? Go hide away somewhere, come up with a plan.

Here's what I'm gonna do. There are these five pieces of content that are gonna go piss off developers, and we're gonna try and get them to, like, complain about it on Twitter or whatever. Here are all these events we're gonna go to. We're gonna give talks. I'm a huge fan of workshops and tutorials and, like, teaching.

So, like, here's the kind of teaching content we're gonna use and we think that we're gonna get x amount of engagement, x amount of eyes on it. We think that, you know, we'll get five sign ups from these key logo companies we're trying to go after. Like, you can tie it all the way back. And so I think that's a great way to do it. If you're in a bigger DevRel organization, let's say that you're on a team managed by a DevRel manager, a lot of times what I've always done is kinda specialize each of my DevRel people so that they're not just out there going after every like, go after everyone.

Like, someone's gonna be for, like, colleges and students. Right? So maybe your goal is to go interact at 10 different universities and work at, you know, a hackathon a year there and then maybe get, I don't know, 10 projects in each hackathon using your product or 50% of every project at this hackathon is using Twilio or whatever it is. And here we had some of those goals. You might be focused on enterprise developers.

And the thing about this concept with enterprise developers is they're just developers, which for some reason, a lot of people don't realize that. It's just a developer at work. That person goes home and is still a developer. So a lot of times you see the segment of, like, independent developer and enterprise developer, and I kind of blend the two when I talk. Because I don't know about y'all, but a lot of my friends and people that I know will go, like, toy around with the product while they're at home working on some silly thing, like hooking up their doorbell to a robot, which is a long story, but that's actually happened.

And then they'll later on be like, how can I figure out how to use this at work? I love this product. I enjoy it, or there's a use case that pops up. So figuring out that piece, that connection is super important. So let's say you have a 100 sign ups today for your company.

Good job if you have that many. Let's say 10 of them are from an enterprise company with more than, you know, a thousand developers or a 100 developers, whatever that segment is. If you can show that you've influenced any of those via your content, a talk, any of the things they kinda talked about to sign up, there's your metric. That is the metric the VCs are gonna be like, oh my god, including, your your leadership team, your VC team, your manager. Everyone's gonna just be like, oh, cool.

That's great. So figuring out how to measure that piece is the part that I've always found most valuable for for larger organizations. For when you're when you're DevRel in a small company, you're doing everything, and you're influencing every single metric, which I enjoy.

Ashley Smith: Yeah. I love your comment about, you know, trying to link what you're doing and you're measuring to some goal that is appropriate for the phase of the business. Right? So Yeah. What I've heard from some folks, especially in the early days, there's certain things they know are critical to go well for them to accelerate interest or adoption of their product.

And they focus like a laser on those, like, one or two things, whether it's a point of friction or a certain feature that you know is the way that they're going to acquire, and they obsess about that. Right? And then you so you can put all those activity and content metrics and sentiment scores in that context for the board so they have a good feeling of progress or how you're overcoming the friction. Yep.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I I just did a deal. And when I say deal, I'm listening.

Super awesome start up that I am obsessed with the founders. I love the product. It's called patch.tag. And we just had this conversation yesterday. It's me and the two founders.

I was like, what is our like, who are the 10 types of, know, companies that we wanna get in the next year? Okay. How are we gonna do that? That's really kinda DevRel. Like, I know that it gets squished into marketing and sales as you get bigger, but in an early stage company, everything is kinda DevRel.

Like I said, when at Twilio, being in the first 20, we were all doing DevRel. I was going to events. I was setting up really bad marketing operation pipelines, like, really bad. It should not have been like, I was answering I I was answering the actual telephone when people would call the telephone, which was just awful. So, you know, it's interesting that, you know, people like me who are either on the board or invested in your company are gonna say, how are we gonna get to those first 10 test customers in this first year, right, if you're a really early stage company?

And that's where my DevRel brain kinda kicks in. It's like, okay. There's our community of people we should go to. Like, who do we need to go work with to get test users? Like, is there content we create?

And so it it you're right. It's all about stage. I love early stage. Later stage stuff, you just look at the company goals and you figure out what you can do to hook in to those things and then they'll go do really cool programs and campaigns to influence those numbers.

Ashley Smith: Maybe one of ways to take the shroud of mystery off for people who are in DevRel that don't talk to VCs, it's it's always about the next milestone. Right? Like, what's the next milestone? How are you using your cash and resources to get to the next milestone?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. And don't waste money. Like, obviously, even we've all seen money being wasted in a crazy, crazy, crazy ways over the last for me, over the last decade. I'm just like, what are you doing?

But now I think people are being a bit more frugal with how they spend, and we're having to show what the ROI return investment is a bit more, which I love because I like I get very anxious about spending money that seems like I shouldn't be spending it. I don't know if that's just my natural, like, way. But I wanna make sure because I know that the money I spend needs to do something. That might just be like brand lift. Right?

And some people are like, brand lift's not a real thing and there's other things you can call it. Totally is a thing. If someone's evaluating two products and the development team saw you at an event talking about, like, a really cool way to do x, y, and z using those products, they're gonna go with the one that they've heard before. It's the same concept when you see stupid political signs on the side of the road here in The US. People put more signs out because the more times you see the name, the more obviously, like, you're gonna just check that box, which is super sad, but, like, that's why they do it.

So brand recognition is a huge thing. It can be hard to manage and I know that it can be hard to measure. I know that Orbit is doing a great job of figuring out how to do that, and I think that's why I've always been a huge fan of the Orbit team. But don't ever ignore the fact that brand lift is important. It's not just about, like, we draw revenue.

Like, it should also be about, like, brand air coverage, whatever you wanna call it.

Ashley Smith: So

Speaker 3: if if if there are good things that DevRel people can be doing to report back up, are there things that DevRel teams do that might act as a red flag? You know, you mentioned that people have been quite loose with money, particularly in DevRel teams. You know, there's been lots of travel. There's been lots of, hey. We'll throw 20,000 at this event and see what happens, and then you find that nobody's actually got a strategy for measuring the impact of of of that spend.

So but are there are there things that you could advise DevRel teams to avoid doing so as not to scare scare off investors?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Or just to scare off anybody. Like, it's okay to throw money at things that you're not sure what's gonna work or not. Like, you should save some of your budget, assuming you have a budget.

Because some early stage folks, you don't even have. There's no budget. You're just like, let's see what works. But, you know, don't be afraid to test things because you don't wanna be too conservative with your spend. So don't be afraid to say like, hey.

We're gonna take 20%, 25% of our budget this quarter, this week, whatever your time frame is, and do some fun experimental stuff. We're gonna have this weird event and somewhere we're gonna have to spend a little bit of money and we're gonna buy a lemonade stand that gives out lemonade that's branded. I don't know what it is. Right? That's great.

You should also make sure that you highlight that some of the work that we do that is free, there's no spend on good content. Right? There's emotional spend, there's, like, your your salary, right, that's going into the time you spent to create it. But don't be afraid to put not a dollar value, but, like, explain how important that is. Another thing I see is, like, a big miss that I've I've screamed about forever, I think, is if you go to an event and give a talk, that piece of content should become, like, 10 pieces of content.

Right? Like, you're going to an event, publish your slides, duh, create a quick blog post, it's a social media campaign, do a video recording of it, figure out a decent background and record it, and then don't be afraid to kind of rework it for different audiences and and put it out there more than once. So I think that when you are spending, you know, say 20 k in an event that's kind of a test event, if you come back with, five email addresses of people that might be interested in being either a tester of the product or, you know, wanna help you give you a feature request or to, you know, anything that's useful. Like, feature requests are useful and to, you know, building product road maps and and to improving the product. So, like, think of a way to value that.

But also just be like, hey. We spent $20. Sure. But we also got this great piece of content that we can then go use and create 10 different campaigns around.

Speaker 3: And and you also touched on the idea that, you know, some some of the environment right now is changing. And so in in that case, if if money's becoming tighter and people are becoming, you know, perhaps a little more, conservative in in in in their investments, As a department that perhaps sometimes isn't as well measured, what what what would you advise DevRel leaders to be looking at right now to, frankly, ensure the survival of their team over the next year or two?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I think that stay away from the hand waviness of DevRel. And that doesn't mean stop that doesn't mean change any tactics.

It it totally just means here are our buckets. We get do we get developer feedback into the product? Great. We're doing that. Are we in control of content, making sure that good content goes out?

Great. Here's how we're doing that. Just be very, very clear about what you're influencing. Make sure leadership agrees. Make sure that, you know, if y'all have board meetings, it it's not a bad idea.

Like, this is scary to do, but it's not a bad idea before board meetings, and you can ask when they are. It's not that secret. They're either quarterly, sometimes monthly, sometimes less. It's not a bad idea to be like, hey. Can I provide a slide for you that you can put in the appendix of the board deck just so that in case they have questions or wanna understand, they can see the things that we're working on, the fit the metrics we're influencing and and whatever?

Single slide, super easy, or here's a one pager of memo that you could pass up to the board members. I love that. Like because I I really enjoy understanding that side of it. As someone who's managed DevRel and built DevRel teams and and done the work, I spend time with the person usually that works in DevRel at the companies I invest in. It can be one meeting.

It can be more. I have one that I meet with weekly, and we kinda just talk about what we're working on. Don't be afraid to get to know the investors. If you're early stage enough, you're probably gonna interact with them. We aren't scary.

The ones I've worked with are, like, were terrifying on paper, but in reality, were super helpful and have been helpful in my career throughout the years. So so my advice is, like, don't be afraid to just create a piece of one pager that's like, here's what we're doing because that's what you're supposed to be doing. Right? You're a good communicate. Like, your group is meant to communicate.

Build a slide, build a one pager, pass it off to the board, measure everything, tie it back to goals. And you can waste a little bit of money, but, like, waste that money knowing that they could be, like, one of those really exciting thing that takes off. Like, don't be afraid to experiment and and don't get too conservative in the work that you're doing.

Ashley Smith: Right. I think I think that your point about not being in flag waving mode right now is, I think, good advice to any leader, anybody actually to start up.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

Ashley Smith: Yeah. My god. Don't say about how this is how a strategic bifunction is is more of, like, here's what we're doing, here's how it affects the results.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Ashley Smith: You were learning even. Sometimes you make mistakes, and it's okay. Right? So we tried this. It didn't work.

We're not doing it again. Here's how we're course correcting. Right.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I love a good this is, like, so I don't know. It feels like enterprise old school, whatever, but I love a red green yellow chart. So I can be like, green is really working. Yellow, we gotta figure it out.

Red, we tried it. It didn't work really well. Because anytime someone's like, everything's great. I'm like, I have worked startups. Nothing is always great.

Something is broken.

Ashley Smith: It's super important to hear from VCs know. Right? Startups are about rapid experimentation. Right? And doubling down on things that work and not doing the things that don't work.

And so Yeah. You certainly don't want people to you don't want people to get into mode where they're not trying stuff. Right? Yeah. Disappear behind, but you should keep innovating.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And I'm always, like, pushing pushing people. Like, what's that one the other conversation the other day, was like, what is the controversial thing about your product? Like, why? Because we're creating categories.

So if you're creating a category, it's you're gonna make someone angry. Right? Like, for Parse, for example, back end as a service, that'll never work. Right? And it got killed by Facebook, so, like, maybe it didn't work.

Whatever. But, like, like, what that was a controversial thing because we're saying that, like, oh, back end, you could just outsource it. Right? There's the controversy. Twilio, you don't need phones.

You can do it all via API. There's the controversy. Right? And so I think that figuring out, like, what that thing is that might be a little bit testy for some people and kinda working with that, like, that could be your experimentation. You know?

I remember we whenever Facebook acquired Parse, like, obviously, our budget went up. Like, I didn't have a budget. Like, I was less than, like, $10,000 a month, which, you know, for the number of developers we brought in is not a lot of money. Then Facebook was like, here. And so we went and, like, rented an ice cream truck at South by Southwest one year and just, like, gave out free pars ice cream.

And today, I would kinda be like, did that matter? I I don't know. Like, I don't I don't know if that mattered. Like, is there audience even there? Like, maybe at the time, there were mobile developers and that's when all the VCs were screaming like, mobile apps.

Mobile apps. Right? So maybe it made sense. But, like, things like that can also be pretty awesome. So just don't be afraid to go do some some fun stuff, and and don't just don't make your dev role be boring for the sake of, like, oh, no.

Don't spend money.

Ashley Smith: Yeah. It was kinda weird as a I'm also an angel investor as well as being an operator. Like, the I've also found the fastest way to kill innovation is too much money too quickly.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. Yeah.

Ashley Smith: Because you don't think of what you really need to do and how to do it creatively. You just throw money at the proper for all the obvious stuff that everybody else is doing.

Speaker 2: Or you you just hire more people that end up doing less. Like, what I really enjoy is figuring out, like, content and tutorials, workshops. Like, there's all these things you can do, and teaching is the best way to get people to buy into what you're working on and actually give you feedback and be helpful. So I like kinda coming at DevRel from a place of teaching, as well as, you know, spending money on t shirts and rewarding your community with things like that. But, anytime I've hired anyone in DevRel who came to me with a giant budget and there was, like, nothing on there that was, like, the free stuff, I'm always like, let's figure out let's make that blend a little bit better.

And and as a VC, it's it's gotta be both. It's, you know especially now with the pandemic events, there's more of them, I feel like, and they're all online, so travel has decreased in price so we can do more. But then you get burnout when you're traveling a ton. So it's just there's there's a whole there's a whole delicate balance, but I think it's it's about spending dollars, but it's also about using your time wisely and creating great things that may not cost, you know, budget money.

Ashley Smith: Can you talk a bit more about the controversy part? Because I think, my experience talks to lot of people in the DevRel industry is that, you know, education is a huge part of it. So education by intent, you think, oh, how do I be helpful? But sometimes you also people wanna or gravitated towards things that challenges them. Right?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It's more

Ashley Smith: like balance those two things, you know, being helpful versus maybe telling you to think differently.

Speaker 2: I think both. Right? Like, I I get bored when someone's just agreeing with the way I should be building something. Like, yes. You do this, then that, then this.

I'm like, okay. But I like when someone's like, have you considered adding this layer between, which is gonna make your life so much easier in, you know, two years' time? And then I'm like, oh, no. We shouldn't do that because then it's a security issue. Okay.

Well, maybe they've solved for that. Well, you know, and so I kind of enjoy that piece and so I like having that conversation. So when I say controversy, it's not even like the negative connotation of the word controversy. It's more just, like, challenge the way I was gonna build because if we didn't, we would all still be using terrible tools from twenty years ago. Right?

So all the best things that came out and, like, redefined the category, at first, everyone's like, no. We're not gonna do that. Like, Twilio. Right? Like, we're still gonna use that weird thing where you put the phones and do this, and we're not doing that anymore.

It's a simple API call. Like, parse was push notifications, which I now hate. But, like, it was really, really hard to set up push notifications that we were just like, here you go. Like, it's super easy. Then I got it reused.

Imagine, like, collaborating on code without GitHub or GitLab. Right? Like, we can still do it, but it's a nightmare. It's still kind of a nightmare sometimes, but it's just it those are those moments of controversy or or challenge that you need to find and you need to build content around it and training around it because otherwise, people are just gonna keep doing what they've been doing forever.

Ashley Smith: And and controversy is usually the reason why people work with a startup, not a big company. Right?

Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah. It's also but it makes it super exciting. Yeah.

Speaker 3: But, also, going back to that that that Twilio era, by which I mean that the time when Twilio defined what DevRel meant or technical evangelism meant for for for a lot of people back then, it was easy in some respects just to go and buy developers a load of beer because you even if not all developers were beer drinkers, you could hit a good number of people by going into a city. And, like, GitHub did the drink ups early on and that kind of thing. Whereas now, because so much money is chasing a developer attention, I think if you don't have a point of view, whether it's you know, to speak to your your point on controversy, then no one's gonna pay any attention to you anyway. So, yeah, I think being opinionated at the very least is important.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I love when people are opinionated to an extent. And I love that when you can have, like, a healthy healthy conversation about something that everyone's passionate about in the deaf community. And, you know, there's still I enjoy getting coffee with people and talking about random developer related things still. Right?

That's been trickier lately, but I don't know if the the drink ups are still as fun as they used to be. Back in my day, they were a lot of fun. We would also have ping pong and and, like, have always, like, a signature nonalcoholic drink. And I loved it, and I I wish that I I I think we're gonna have a resurgence of that sort of thing because everyone kinda misses hanging out with each other, I think. But you're right.

It's gotta be from a brand or a set of brands that the products actually matter and you care about to wanna go and have those conversations and meet people working on it.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Are there then so there there are certain investors that people know of who specifically go after developer tools. So, I guess heavy bit comes to mind as as as one fund. And then, you know, OpenView are doing all the stuff in product led growth, and, you know, we had a roundtable, with them yesterday. Well, with one of one of them, not the entire company.

And then, you know, what you're doing with Vermillion Cliffs. So when it comes to learning a bit more about how to interact with VCs, are there people out there that you would recommend DevRel leaders go and go and seek out on the Internet to find what they're publishing or or or what they're saying on social media?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I hide from social media. It's probably my my worst and best trait. So I am the wrong person to ask, who to follow on social media. Don't follow me because the only thing I tweet is if someone tweets at me that I'm speaking, and I'll retweet it.

I'm gonna get better about it, I swear. Honestly, the way that I feel more empowered when I'm working with the VC community is by learning what everything means because it's so confusing. Just like the basics of fundraising, the basics of any of it, the basics of stock options, the basics of board meetings. It is all so confusing. So I would probably and what I did is I went and just educated myself about, like, what does all this mean?

AngelList has a ton of good resources. Obviously, the heavy bit content is way more developer focused and incredible. OpenView has great product, like, growth stuff. I think it's less about, like, what is a VC's perspective because every VC has a different perspective and they're all somehow right or wrong. I really like just having the knowledge of what it actually means because, again, when I started working in tech, I had an engineering background, came into startups, had no idea what venture meant, didn't realize that we were taking money from these strange people who had lots of money to give to us and then there were these board meetings.

And I knew we had goals, but why we had goals? And, like, I knew we wanted to make money, but I didn't know that we needed to, like, get none of that was clear. And it's more clear now, I think, because it's it's more talked about, but I think just educating yourself on what all those pieces are is great. And then don't be afraid to talk to the founders of your company or if you're a founder, making sure that you're communicating it to your company. Like, hey.

We have a board meeting in a month. The goals of this board meeting are gonna you know, we're gonna make sure that everyone's aware of what our product road map is. Here's why that matters. That matters because it shows momentum in the product. That also matters because we're shipping things that people have been requesting, which we know from our DevRel team.

So just kinda, like, either ask the questions or make sure you're communicating if you're a founder, I think is a great way to kinda get involved. And then if you do work at a company that is, you know, got some of the top developer, investors in the planet, don't be afraid to reach out and say, hey. Would you mind either introducing me to people other people within y'all's portfolio that are also working in DevRel? Or do y'all have resources that you like to share with the people doing developer tools companies in your portfolio because most of them do. My fund is tiny, and I am just a single person with a very part time associate that, like, I go find deals.

I invest in them, but I'm a seed fund. A lot of the bigger funds are gonna have all this stuff set up and might even have events. At some point, I will have all those things, but I'm still on fund one. So

Speaker 3: We're coming to actually the end of of our time together by the looks of it, which is surprising to me that it went that quickly. But I I guess, Robin, do you have any any other comments or or or questions?

Ashley Smith: Well, just maybe one as as people graduate from investors like you that are very savvy and and maybe a little bit more hands on and aware of DevRel, and now you're getting to that series a stage where things gets more serious and more economically driven. Like, how does how does the conversation change? Right? So what should DevRel people be? Whereas, hey.

We're at this next big milestone. We got a big check. Now we got a scaled top line. How should they change what they think about what they communicate?

Speaker 2: Honestly, I wouldn't change it that much. I would just be more specific. Right? So, like, all the companies I've worked out have been series a, b, and beyond. The companies I've invested have been seed and a.

And the only difference I found that if someone's a seed company, everyone's kinda doing DevRel, series a, everyone's doing DevRel, but you're hiring probably a DevRel person. If you are that person with the title DevRel or whatever your title is, but, you know, you're doing DevRel as a function, Just make sure that the company has set out goals and that when you're before you're hired. When you're in the interview process, learn how am I going to be measured, what are the expectations of me, am I gonna roll into marketing, am I rolling into product, am I rolling into engineering, Am I if you're rolling into sales or sales engineer, like, it it's that's, like, more of the role. So just figure out kind of, like, how the structure is going to work. Is there a structure longer term that they know about, they've already thought about?

And then what are the goals to be measured on? And then, you know, when you work on your thirty, sixty, ninety day plan, make sure that in that plan, part of it is, you know, these are goals, here are the tactics, here's the budget I need. Do we agree? Okay. Great.

We agree. I'm gonna go do my job. I'd love to give a board update. I need five minutes in the board meeting. I'd love to give a board update once a year, once every six months, whatever it is.

And even if it's just a slide like I mentioned, that's another great way to get ahead of it.

Ashley Smith: Awesome.

Speaker 2: And so then like super

Speaker 3: No. Go ahead.

Speaker 2: Yeah. If anyone has specific questions or, like, wants to talk more about this stuff, this is the stuff that I really enjoy talking about. I think my email is probably somewhere. If not, it's just a@ashley.capital or ashley.smith@gmail.com. It's easy to find me.

I'm on social media. You can find me on Twitter. I don't know my handle. But if you find me, you can message me, I'll respond.

Speaker 3: Cool. Thanks. I'd just like to finish off from from from from my point of view with a a question around, for someone who's dealing for the first time with being a leading a a DevRel function in a in a venture invested company, is there one, like, one or two numbers that you would tell them to take away, or is it just too variable from one company to the next?

Speaker 2: I mean, honestly, all companies are kinda looking for the same stuff when you're a venture capital backed startup. ARR, annual recurring revenue. Like, that's gonna be one that you're always looking at. I wouldn't say that as a DevRel person, you're gonna, like, completely tie yourself to that number. But if you know that your company's goal for the year is to hit $1,000,000 in ARR, 2,000,000 in ARR, maybe a third or half of what you're working on, try and kind of directly tie it back.

Right? So, like, that might even be something as simple as I'm gonna create 10 pieces of content. They're gonna get 10,000 views each. Of those 10,000 views, five people are gonna sign up, and of those five of those five people, one person's gonna come become a paid $5 per month member or whatever it is. Like, it can just be as simple as that, but just tie it back to that revenue number.

And it's all guesswork. We don't know. Like, the joy of being in a startup is we we don't it's not scientific yet. It's not as repeatable as you want it to be. So you're kinda guessing, and then you're gonna look three months in, look at the data, and change it around.

Brand lift, I hate that, like, idea, but the idea of figuring out word-of-mouth like, tracking word-of-mouth, which I think is something that is so important to the growth of every company I've ever worked on that I've ever invested in. When I invested in BuildKite, afterwards, I went and talked to every single, like, of the customers that we that were over a certain threshold. They'd be like, how'd you hear about us? Oh, I heard about you from this event I went to where Keith, the CEO, was speaking. Or, oh, so and so from so and so told me about this product.

So, like, measuring that, oh my god. And and we could tie almost every single deal back to word-of-mouth. And so there's a point in the company's, you know, trajectory where that's the case, especially for good products. And I I would like to think that all dev tools are good products. Maybe not the case, but word-of-mouth, if you can figure out how you wanna measure that and quantify it, write it down.

We're gonna influence 500 people. Here's the goal. Here's why it matters. And then if you're really good at your job and you go get a sales leader or, like, a chief, revenue officer, say, hey. Can we do a we do a survey of every closed customer that's over a certain amount and ask them how they heard about their product?

Because I guarantee you, a very high percentage is gonna say, oh, I saw so and so at DebraCon giving a talk about blah. And then one day, I would really realize that I need the thing because it's the problem that makes sense. And, like, that piece, people don't realize how important that is, but it's always the case. As someone who, like, I talked to almost every customer over, like, that I think Twilio had in the first few years, and then probably all of it, like, stay close to your customers, ask where they heard about you and who that developer was within that company that brought the product in. I guarantee you, probably word-of-mouth or in some community online or read a piece of content, saw a tweet, etcetera.

So I would say those two metrics.

Speaker 3: Great. Thank you. Alright. That's awesome. Well, Ashley, thank you so much for for joining us.

Ashley Smith: Deep dives. Yar.