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

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

• Proposes monthly active developers as the north star, while conceding it is lagging and multi-causal, so it needs leading indicators.
• Rejects GitHub stars, UTM-attributed traffic and badge scans as quantity metrics, and calls NPS easily gamed.
• Use the Sean Ellis question instead: how would you feel if you could no longer use this.
• Argues email subscribers are worth 100 to 1000 times a social follower, so treat content DevRel as a media company inside the company.

Three outbound plays a developer would genuinely welcome: find and report a bug in their open source repo, read their terms of service to infer the backend stack, run PageSpeed against them and show the gap. Gonto ran growth at Auth0, so this is not theory.

Mastering Developer-Led Outbound

From Hypergrowth Partners Playbooks by Martin Gontovnikas and Matteo Tittarelli 15 min read

• Three concrete plays: flag a real bug in their open-source repo, read their backend stack out of their terms and conditions, or send a PageSpeedInsights comparison against competitors.
• Target on GitHub signals: which projects they contribute to, how much, and whether they are an IC or a manager.
• The rule is value before the pitch, because a developer's filter kills anything that opens as a sales message.

The scale-up half of the Postman story, including the world's largest API community with 75,000 public APIs shared, and Asthana on getting past the assumption that a global developer product could not come out of Bengaluru.

Abhinav Asthana and Postman: Putting India on the global tech map

From Forbes India by Harichandan Arakali 12 min read

• By August 2021 Postman had 17M-plus users, 500,000 organizations, and 98 percent of the world's largest corporations as customers.
• Series C in 2020 was $150M at a $2B valuation; Series D in August 2021 was $225M at $5.6B, over $430M raised in total.
• Headcount more than doubled with 300-plus hires from 13 countries from the start of 2020.
• Asthana's framing: everything traces back to solving a customer pain point, and without that understanding you do not succeed.

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