How the best do it

Developer relations as a pipeline channel: who made it work, and what did it actually take?

The short answer

Devrel works when the product is adopted by the person who does the work, and it fails when it is treated as expensive brand marketing. Postman and Hasura both built from developer adoption in India and then monetised upward into teams, which is the only sequence that reliably holds. Measure it as monthly active developers rather than GitHub stars, conference talks or UTM tags, because reach-based devrel is roughly ten to twenty times more expensive per thousand viewers than just paying a creator. The sharper modern version is developer-led outbound: find the bug in their open source repo, spot the stack in their terms of service, send something a developer would actually thank you for. Do not send them a nurture sequence.

Go deeper, your way

4 hand-picked resources, 2 India-specific, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

▶️ Video
✓ Link checked India Freemium Advanced

Why we picked it Hasura's own account of the two hardest transitions in developer-led growth: moving from a project people like to a product people buy, and moving from free open source to a commercial model without losing the developers. Full session needs an Inc42 Plus membership.

How Hasura Built India's First Open Source Unicorn

On Inc42 Academy 60 min watch

Open inc42.com →
✍️ Essay
✓ Link checked Free Advanced

Why we picked it The most honest piece written on devrel accountability, by someone who did the job. It splits devrel into community, content and product archetypes with different metrics each, lands on monthly active developers as the north star, and calls reach-chasing what it is: very expensive affiliate marketing.

Measuring Developer Relations

From swyx.io by swyx 18 min read

Open swyx.io →

The same ground, at another level

How inbound, content and demand gen reads from a different seat.

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People also ask

Everyone says do content. What does inbound actually mean for a startup with no audience? Inbound means someone with the problem finds you while they are looking for an answer, and leaves you a way to follow up. For a startup with no aud... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → I write blog posts and nothing happens. What am I doing wrong? Usually one of three things. You are writing for a persona you invented instead of a real person you have spoken to, so the piece is generically co... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → How do I decide what to write about so it brings in buyers and not just traffic? Sort every topic idea by how close it sits to a purchase. Comparison pages, alternatives pages, integration pages and "how do I do X with Y" pages ... Doing the work 3 resources → Our product is self-serve. How do we get users without a sales team? Product-led companies get most of their new users from two places: organic search (about forty percent) and product virality (about sixteen percent... Doing the work 3 resources → How much of my pipeline should come from inbound versus outbound, and when do I add the second channel? Early on almost every B2B company grows through one dominant channel, so the wrong move is to run four at half strength. Name your primary channel,... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → I run demand gen for an Indian SaaS selling globally. Does the US content playbook work here? Partly. If you sell to the US and Europe, the standard playbook applies because you are competing in the same search results as everyone else, and ... Leading a GTM team 4 resources →

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