What VCs and founders want from DevRel

Cherish Santoshi: So thanks everybody who who joined me and who's listening to this talk. I'm really excited to kind of be here at DevilCon. This is the third time I'm here. Thanks, Matthew, for having me all. Great.

I'm always a huge fan of DevilCon, and I'm finally glad, you know, to do this again for all of us and all the Devil leaders across the globe. I I get asked this question quite a lot. Right? Like, recently, I've I've, you know, I've I've had this conversation with a lot of different leaders, and they've spoken about, how this matters to them, how they will of how they start with the dev like, devils for startups and enterprises and, you know, what what their founders and investors care about so that they can build the defensibility and the opinion, of the investors and the founders, you know, so that they can get their projects and program programs funded and then go ahead and lead the product. So a little bit about me.

I'm Cherish. I head the community here at Savolabs. I've spent eight years in Devil. Some of the companies that I worked with are Google, Amazon, and Hackerwood. Both worked with both their, community teams, Devil teams, product teams, operation teams.

And that's that's what I've done in last eight years. And still, I at Sabolabs, I had three verticals which are developer ex marketing, developer experience, and community management. So that's a little bit about me. I'm gonna talk you through a few things today, and one of those are, like, startup stages. Like, whenever you think of DevRel for startups, how do you divide your KPIs?

How do you divide, you know, what are the responsibilities, based on the stages? And then, of course, there is going to be I will walk through the business startup stages, stage wise expectations and KPIs that your founders and investors might have, and, of course, business value and of your community, indirect benefits, and question and answers. Now starting with the start up stage. Right? Now one of the things that you'll see is that this this is called the SaaS funding napkin.

This is released by point nine every year. What they do is they kind of divide the downsizes of the valuations of every startup based on the stage. Now it's fairly accurate, based on, you know, a few marketplaces, but, of course, these can differ based on, you know, recent market trends, which industry you're operating in, what is the downsize, and what is the valuation that your founder and investors care about. Right? So are we going through seed a series e series a seed series a and then series b, and then we'll finish up there.

And then we'll have any questions if you guys have. So the first thing that you do is whenever so let's say there's there's a person called, you know, John. John picks up. John has an idea, goes to the investor, and says, here is my idea. I have you know, I I'm just building an MVP, and this is I'm just raising a seat down so that I can hire my team.

So the first, first funding that John will pick up will probably anywhere between 1 to 4,000,000 and, again, you know, could defer. And even if round sizes and valuation defer, the team responsibilities and KPIs will remain pretty much the same. The valuation immediately touches between 4,000,000 to 12,000,000 of, you know, of any SaaS company, which is probably a dev tool. And, you know, once that is taken care of, what they do is John goes out and builds the first team. Now John has two two options here.

The first is he can build the team bottom up, which means he can hire the bottom most layer of the pyramid first, which means people who will be out in the out on the field and actually work out, or he'll just hire one person who's the head of the community and or a community manager, then they can build under them. It's usually the other way around, like, you know, the latter part where you build somebody on the top of the funnel because they align better with the vision, then they can build their team based on where the thing the company said it. So the first thing John does is hires head of community. Right? Now the responsibility that John will have is, of of course, establish the community vision and team strategy.

Now the minute you think about communities, right, everybody thinks that, what exactly will communities kind of help with? Now depending upon your founders or your company's goals, you could actually contribute towards the product, by improving product features or distribution features that community can can contribute towards. You can also contribute towards engineering, because a lot of the developers that you will be probably working with, and they'll be building wrappers for you, documentation for you, and a lot of other things that your product will be easier to consume for other developers. Right? So you can help with engineering effort, and they can also help you with growth PR and, just in general community, you know, branding out there.

Because the more people know about your brand, the better it is overall for for, you know, for your company, for your valuation, for investors, for your founder, everybody. So, obviously, you establish the community vision and team strategy right at the beginning. Tell tell your founders this is what we're do. And because it's just at a seed stage, you might pick up another round between six to nine months. So having a vision only for nine to twelve months seems to be, like, a fairly decent way to go about.

So if you have, like, a plan which is between nine to twelve months, you're okay. Sorry. So the next thing you do is, you choose this community platform. Now we have great community platforms available for almost every startup. Now it depends upon the kind of consumers or the product product owner, what kind of community you're building, what your product managers think, what kind of user persona are you working with.

And once you have that, you know, jot down, you can narrow down to your community platform. It could be something like Ovid, Comso, or you can pick up Discord, Slack, whatever works for you the best. Right? Now every platform has its pros and cons. Every platform has the most desired user audience.

Right? Now once that's taken care of, you can set up the awareness and acquisition channels and, of course, initiating feedback loop. These are the few responsibilities that you would be working with. The KPIs, are key performing indicators, are clear vision and goals, which means you tell exactly what you're gonna do and how and obviously have a deadline around it. And goals are obviously SMART, which are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time bound.

So if you can create SMART goals against your vision, you're gold. You of of course, you can set up acquisition and awareness channels. Now the first thing that you do now not only will you be helping the, helping the company with all the goals that you've set up, also hire the right team. Right? And a lot of these people will come from the community route itself.

So setting up that acquisition channel not only for your users, but also for your for your potential hires, which is usually what community teams helps, you know, helps a lot with. Because a lot of exposure of force and great engineers comes to the community team. Right? So if you could hire somebody for your team as well, for that, you need to set up acquisition channels and awareness channels too. And, of course, product feedback is something which is very important, especially at the seed round because understand that you're still building your product.

Right? I mean, you'll not necessarily decide this is exactly what I'm gonna sell. Nothing like it. Right? And you're still trying to find that product market fit at seed stage where you build that confidence with your investors that this is what we're gonna do, and this is the market that we're serving.

So having that product market fit comes very naturally if you're getting the feedback from the market itself. So what you could do is you can ask, you can ask your, your community to kind of build that on on you and give you more about, more goals and more product realistic feedback that you can go ahead and actually integrate. The next thing is SDK and API documentation video tutorials. Now one of the things that that your acquisition and awareness will be fueled by is the documentation in the video tutorials of your product. Now keep in mind that developers are somebody who's are are are people who usually like to figure things on their own.

Right? They need not necessarily, need somebody to handhold them or to give them spoon feed them a lot of information. So what they do is, they go ahead and find information for themselves. And documentations are a great way to kind of get that information to them where they can stumble upon themselves and get that integrated within their projects without you actually able or need to step into the fund. And the better you the better documentation you have, the better it is for your developers who experience a product and the better you scale.

Right? So better you you the sooner you, adopt a product market fit. And that that being said, that's some of the goals that you would do at Seadra. Alright. So John has done all of that.

You as a community manager or, like, the head of community will establish all of these things. And once you have, you know, a ball rolling, you now know peep you now want to peep people to kind of build a certain program. So what what now has happened is that John realizes that he has a certain like, has a community vertical that's going well and beyond. It's helping in product marketing, PR, and engineering. Now he moves to another round and releases another series of funding called c c.

Now, if you look at look at the valuation, it goes from four to 12 to 20 to 50. So it pretty much, you know, triples in size, at least, and, goes out to actually build, you know, raise around of 7 to 12,000,000. Now you hire developer advocates, program managers, and content managers. Now the reason you you, as a head of community, will hire all of these people is because you've realized there's a product market fit for your product. You need more and more people to talk about your product to the other to other developers and to other developer communities.

I participate in forums. I help them adopt your product. Program managers should run programs like, you know, like a conference like this or more thought leadership talks or just like more programs like student ambassador programs, MVP programs, you know, and such so forth. And content managers are people who are going to talk about who are going to create and as well as, propagate your, community road map and community content to your, channel. So if you've set up Slack, Discord, or wherever your your community is existing, you can go ahead and hire a content manager who can create that content and post about it, and then, you know, you can keep propagating for them.

You could also say that content managers and social media manager is something that you could hire. Right? Now, again, the responsibilities that happen here are acquisitions at a much larger pace. Now you have a better team. Right?

Now you have acquisition channels that you'd set up in seed stage. So your acquisition channels would now be social media, word-of-mouth content. Now you also have reason of round of funding, to actually go out and engage with the with the community. So you go out and, sponsor active sponsor sponsor hackathons, other programs, conferences, go speak at them, and you've you've now you have enough eyeballs looking at you because you've just raised a fund you know, round of funding, and you can go out and actually build build these programs either in house or go out and sponsor them. And you have program managers to do that for you.

Right? So you can go ahead and do that. So, John, get let's give you the budget to hire all these people. You make sure that these are the responsibilities that you're taking care of. Now one of the things that you have to be in like, we have to ensure is that ensuring that developer experience is as frictionless as possible.

Now the what a shame it would be if your product manager and founder builds a beautiful product, but because of lack of documentation, lack of integrations, the rappers that developers want to work with, the adoption, takes a hit. Right? So you as a community manager or head of community would actually go out and build these things. You will build a lot of, a lot of assets that can bring in frictionless adoptions. Now the fourth one is transitioning to a freemium model.

Now whenever you go out and give out adoptions, you would wanna make sure that your developers are using it as effectively as possible. So you give them the freemium models, which are which are basically in you know, like, they can use the product either with limited limited amount of usage or limited amount of features or limited amount of time. Right? So you could do all of that, bringing out what the freemium model is. And once they like what they think, they can actually go out and buy it.

Right? And this is this is the essential, goal behind moving towards a freemium model. The KPIs that you wanna take care of are, acquisition curve. You wanna show that you're bringing people into the community day in and day out. You wanna show, you know, 20 to 50% month on month growth and increase in adoptions.

Build programs like students, campus, or MVP programs where people can come students can come and actually spread out the word for you in their own developer communities. Now these guys may not necessarily be students, but anyway, you know, these these are people who will go out and talk about your product. And, of course, sales and marketing efficiency. So you wanna spend the minimum amount of dollars for maximum returns. So if you can hire one developer advocates that talks about in five communities and everybody from that community, there are two people who's signing up for your for your product.

It's a great efficiency for your sales and marketing. Right? So that's that's what we wanna probably do. Alright. So John does that, and you as a community manager, our head of community, have built all of these funnels.

You have people taking care of each vertical now. And, you've you've clearly have people rolling in, and you have month on month adoptions. And now you seem set to take it to the next round. Now you're going to be a bigger company now. Right?

Alright. So what's what's the next stage? John goes out and raise another round of funding. The round size goes from 20 to 50, and the valuation touches 90 to 300. Right?

And this is great now because now you're a bigger company. Right? Now everybody knows in your everybody knows that you have a community. There are people now you already have most likely, you already have paying customers. And a lot of these paying customers have their have their developers or product managers and so forth actually part of your community.

Right? So you go out and build a team of evangelists and ambassadors, who will, not only, actually help your prop product to go properly, but also help your help create a support group between your users, your customers, and actually make sure that they have a seamless experience within, within the community and have a great product experience. The responsibilities that you will have are now building a community revenue stream. Now so far, so far, like, till series eight, you've had a lot of budget rolling into your community. Right?

You spend a lot of time actually building bottom of strategies, people going out and and and finding great ref great products for you, great rappers for you, building things for you. Now you have to find a way where your community builds or brings in a revenue stream and actually, make sure that the revenue is also retained within the country or within the company. So the referral, some of the things that you can do is create a referral system, and you can also create retention via x y zed factors. One of them is loyalty ecosystem. Your KPIs or key performing indicators will be anywhere between 1.5 to three times, year on year growth.

Right? Sustainable acquisition pipeline. Now at at this point in time, when you've had enough round of funding and enough people who are working for you, the acquisition should almost be on autopilot. Right? You need not actually step into an ecosystem where you're actually going to act you know, find what are the loopholes, have a, like, have, like, a pipeline where people kind of come in by themselves and kinda stay within the community.

One of the things that you can also think is community monetization plan. How do you intend to monetize the community? Is there, like, a specific super community that you're going to give people access to? Is there a specific feature that your certain kind of community will get kind of get to? Right?

And, obviously, net retention rate of your community. Now that being said, your series b is done. Alright. So one of the questions that I get asked a lot is what how much like, how do I show that? What is how much my community is worth in advertising, like, in actual dollars?

Now I've I've got this question quite a lot, and this is a fairly difficult question to answer. Right? Because people are like, I have a community of 5,000, but what does that mean? Like, how much is it worth? How much should anyone pay to buy it?

Now this is the formula that I gave up with. Right? Let's say you have a community of thousand members. Right? So out of those thousand members, you have 200 people who adopt your product.

The freemium model that we spoke about, you know, the least amount of the package of your product, which is at the bare minimum, you could sell it probably for $10. Right? And the last is stickiness code. The stickiness code is how likely it is, to replace your product. So if you have an API.

Right? API is once integrated in a product, it gets integrated at various different levels. So it's very hard to change an API overnight. Hence, it has a better stickiness score. So if you have a t shirt t shirt buying website, your stickiness score is going to be less.

But if you have something which has, like, a great stickiness score, you you know, it could be anywhere between 0.1 to one. Right? So let's say thousand members, you have 200 people who adopted with a minimum spend of $10 per month, and then point seven is the stickiness score. So your thousand member community is worth $1,400 right now. You can use this formula to actually show how much your community is worth in in actual dollars.

Your referrals are and the referrals that these guys will bring will actually be twice as likely to stay, as compared to an actual organic, inorganic paid advertising spend. The third is attention. Of course, you have reduced churn. You have more developer success and user ownership. If there are people who have built, your product right from ground up, from starting from day zero, they feel more, you know, attached to your product.

Some of the indirect benefits of a community are more to defensibility if you have a community which is very hard to break in. Like, we have a tool here in India called Tally. And, like, Atlassian has a great tool. Right? There are a lot of people.

Like, Notion, for example, is a great example where people build for the product. And if you have a community that builds for your use case, you have a great moat. Or you can also hire people from your community. Like I said, you get access to world class engineers foremost before the rest of the team does. You can hire them.

You can also find people to create great quality content for you. We have some of our most viewed blogs were created by our community, so user generated content is one of them. Distribution inaccessible areas. You sometimes can't even actually reach out to the places where your community can reach. So if you if I my community members may have cousins, right, or their friends.

I may not know them directly, but if I reach out to them and your community reaches out out to their person circles, those inaccessible areas become like a distribution channel for you. The fifth is, of course, unidentified use cases by developers. As a company, you may have, like, a very tunnel vision, but of you know, if the the more people you have, the better use cases they'll be able to find. And the sixth is thought leadership. If you have, like, a community that believes in a vision and believes and subscribes to your opinion, imagine the ideas and the, the power that you will have to actually propagate certain, you know, your your point of views.

That's about it. I hope I was this was too not too much of content. And and if you have any questions, I'll be happy to take this, further as after, Olya's session. I hope this was helpful for you. You can, let me you can reach out to me more on my LinkedIn, Twitter, or just write me in.