from Hacker News

Unlocking the 'aha' moment: Developer relations for startups

by jonmarkgo on 10/7/24, 4:40 PM with 10 comments

  • by physicsguy on 10/8/24, 7:33 AM

    This is only worth paying attention to if developers are your final audience. So the products he mentions - Auth0, Twillio, Docker, great, this strategy is applicable. But if it’s something that the API is available but isn’t the product then spending lots of time on DevRel is wasted.

    In the medium term, I expect developer focused startups to become less and less funded. Higher interest rates mean the landscape is very different and profitability is much more important much earlier.

  • by TheJoeMan on 10/7/24, 7:09 PM

    This is good advice! I would like to propose a corollary:

    If your main API function has multiple parameters, in the documentation example you need to use all of them, and absolutely do not shadow the parameter names! “foo foo = foo” might make your demo look slick, but the developer learns nothing. This is a lost opportunity to explain the parameters with the variable name instead of a comment.

    I’ll give an example: RevenueCat’s demo for using SyncPurchases [1] returns a tuple of (value, error), and they throw away the error, not even showing the 1 line of how you have to typecast it. This results in much digging needed.

    [1] https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/getting-started/quickstart#4...

  • by ChrisMarshallNY on 10/8/24, 1:25 AM

    Apple used to have the best developer relationships ever. You would get assigned an “evangelist,” who would act as your factor, within Apple. I think Guy Kawasaki was very involved with that.

    The company I used to work for, did a very similar thing, with photographers.

    These kinds of programs are really hard to represent as ROI, though, so they are hard to “evangelize,” within the company, so to speak.

  • by neom on 10/7/24, 8:30 PM

    Whenever I'd hire someone new into DevRel at DigitalOcean back in the day, they'd always ask to see my demo.

    I'd spin up a droplet and ssh in. I never took the full 10 minutes in the demo's for conf's we sponsored. 1.5 minutes and you can go watch someone else more interesting than me.

    Get to the aha moment and get onto the next group of potential customers.

  • by keyle on 10/7/24, 8:35 PM

    That's the importance of a good landing page or Readme.md

    Tell me why I should care and assume I don't want to.