DevRel University Workshop | Bianca Buzea | The Power of Developer Communities | ETHDam 2023

foreign the presentation for today will be around igniting the flywheel the power of developer communities I know it might sound a bit abstract but bear with me we're gonna find together what this is uh all about also another disclosure this is gonna be a bit theoretical it's a bit hard to build the developer community in 20 minutes but I'm confident that you're gonna take the learnings from here and apply them when you're gonna build your own developer communities so as I'm sure you all know it's not enough to have a strong product or service on top of that you need people to know about your product or service and also you need to have a great experience for those people for your users and I would take it even one step further further and I would say that you need a great Community for your product or service now remember the flywheel I mentioned uh at the beginning of the presentation this is the the flywheel I was talking about so when you have a protocol you have a bunch of applications built on top of the protocol and the more applications you have built on top of the protocol the more valuable your protocol becomes so for those of you that study telecommunications you might be familiar with melkov's law which basically says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users this is also known as the network effect so basically to fully benefit from this flywheel effect you need to have that community of developers who are building applications on top of your protocol now a bit about myself my name is Bianca Busa I'm the founder of devrel University that's the first program who offers guidance and courses for people who want to start into devrel the first two cohorts have been shaped to web free now we're launching one for web 2. you can find my socials over there I'm always more than happy to to chat back to our presentation on ethereum most of the transactions are done by Bots to come in with even more data you can see that on average in terms of smart contracts released daily they're like 11 000. and that's a 24.7 increase versus the previous quarter in terms of daily active users who have around 350 000 and in terms of smart contracts created per quartered we have 1.45 million so what does all this data mean how do we put all this data together so unless you're deploying Wire One new smart contract per month you need to make this hyper growth make a work for you and not against you so how do we do that how does success look like so you need to have an ecosystem so basically applications built on top of your technology and also a second part you need Integrations with um other existing applications and tools that are out there that's the definition of success now this brings us to Reid's law you might see that today we're talking about about laws in a summary what Reid's law says is that networks get more valuable uh when you form subgroups that can collaborate and exchange information this is also known as the compound Network effect and this is this applies really well for blockchain where everything is composed together and interacts with each other and the more you can make applications work with each other the more valuable those applications are and the network itself so I hope that by now I I convinced you that we need applications we need those applications to work with each other we need uh community of developers to build those applications for the protocol but how do how do we achieve that so my response to that is using developer relations for those of you that are not super familiar with the term that's okay the term has been introduced in the 1980s at the Apple at the Macintosh division so comparing to other areas out there this is uh somehow new and the way I like to present developer relations Is by looking at the two words that compose this term so first we have developer so what does it uh mean you have to take care of the documentation you have to take care of the tooling apis tutorial to ensure the support for developers in a nutshell and then the second part are the relations and how do we form those we form those at events building uh meeting people and supporting them we form those using content creation we also have developer marketing you might see that I put in codes developer marketing those of you a bit technical know that there's no such thing as developer marketing Developers detect very easily PS so you have to be careful how you communicate to them and also there is a relaying feedback and this goes both ways from the organization to the developers and from the developers to the organization now here are the main pillars of devrel first we have Outreach we can have this online or in person and this uh basically encompasses all the activities you make you take in order to make your product known we have the community element and I would say that that's the most important element it enables uh developer to be successful with your product then we have the product and here is very important to capture the feedback that you have from your community such that you can influence your roadmap and you can Define in the future the product and then there is education and support so again it's not enough only to build a very good product you need to help people learn how to use your product and also you need to give them support to use your product now I'm gonna break these pillars into a even lower fragmentation if you want so first part is going to be a documentation ideally this should be the source of Truth up to date and complete I'm saying ideally because that's in reality not always the case and this should be you should also have here like a a no-brainer a quick quick start app that should enable the developer to have their first uh win ideally they should be under 10 minutes such that if someone goes to your documentation portal they can go to your quick start they can do something really quickly and they can gain confidence and continue to use your product if they don't find such a quick start it might be more difficult for for the user to to stick stick around now there are different types of documentation out there there are tutorials those allow a newcomer to get started the way I like to present um the different types of documentation is by using analogy to cooking and food we all love that at least the food part so tutorials basically an analogy would be when you teach a kid how to cook so it's not that important how what you actually teach the kid to cook what is important is that the kid does something related to cooking they gain confidence and they want to repeat this process again in the future the next one is how to guys those help solve a specific problem so again to the cooking analogy uh here would be teaching someone to do a specific following a specific recipe for cooking something for example you want to do pizza so in order to to make pizza you need to follow certain steps in a particular order the next one is technical reference this basically describes the system so going back to our food analogy if you want here it would be the technical specification of a certain ingredients so for example garlic you might think about the Wikipedia page for garlic you found there it's a scientific name you find it's a chemical constituents properties potential issues so on so forth and then last but not least there is the explanation and this one helps you understand how different things work together so if you want here an example would be how cooking and human health how they influence each other you can have a book for example about these two also I attached and in here a picture from divio so for those of you interested to learn more about the documentation that's a very good resource and as you might see uh here it differs like some some of these are oriented to work towards the working phase such as how to guides and the reference whereas others are more oriented towards the understanding phase such as a tutorial and explanation now user feedback this is really important and here you might have like one-to-one interviews you might do those as often as weekly of course with different users not not the same user every week and here it's very important to act as if you are not actually there what do I mean by that you should not influence the user so we might be tempted to say if you're with the users of hey press that button or hey put that command but that's not really valuable because what you want to do is to see how the user interacts without your help and where they get blocked and how in the future you can make sure that they don't get blocked again next we have questionnaires you might make those less often for example you might have them either quarterly or twice a year and these also are very valuable in terms of data about your product and how you can optimize it and the third one that I think personally the most valuable ones are in person so basically during events if you're running a hackathon you're going to have developers come to you with their questions and their feedback hey this is not working hey you're missing this part of the documentation and also you might be surprised like how people like people will remember you and will ask you whenever they get the opportunity to meet you so that's valuable to capture that field feedback now another pillar is to help your community achieve their goals and it's important here to help people uh well where they are this means that even if they are not planning uh to integrate with your product if you're able to help them you should still help them like for example if you're a hackathon and someone asks for your help as Solange mentioned earlier even if it's not for your company you're still going to help that person and another important fact here you shouldn't artificially try to convince people to use your product when your product it's not a good fit because sooner rather than later they are gonna discover that it's not a good fit and you're losing their trust however on the other side if you're actually telling the truth and you're like hey I don't think this is like the best fit uh for this situation you're getting their trust and in the future you'll be surprised but they're gonna find a way to use your product next we have Grant's program and these are a great way to help projects go one for one step further so for example for a hackathon winner the the grant might not be enough to go with the project to the next stage so here is where they can access a grant and they can have a fully fledged proof of concept and then we have accelerator program these are fixed term cohort based and usually they include mentorship educational components and sometimes even Financial components now events we all love events here you can have meetups these are rather focused on a given topic for example if you want to build a connection a relationship with the Berkeley Society of of blockchain you might want to organize a Meetup in collaboration with them similarly you can use meetups as a mod to research when expanding to a new geographical area look you can see like what meetups are out there and how you can integrate with them next we have hackathons uh Beware these are a resource in intensive and I'm talking here both in terms of human but also in terms of capital so what do I mean in terms of human you'll need to make sure that you have developers and Engineers on your site available to answer questions to offer support to hackers and also to to judge the submissions and in terms of capital the bounties that you need to offer are pretty substantial so you want to make sure that you're allocating these resources correctly so it's really useful before committed to a certain hackathon to have goals for a hacking on like why are we joining this hackathon maybe you have like a new feature that you released or a new product you you want to test that out and you see how people integrate with it that's great maybe you want people to play around with your documentation and tooling that's also perfectly fine or you want to hire hackathons are great for sourcing Talent or even getting feedback doesn't matter what's your reasoning for participating but you should have this established before joining the hackathon next you want to decide if the hackathon fits the target audience for example if your product is for very Advanced developer developers and the hackathon is rather for newbies this might not be the perfect fit so you might want to reconsider in a similar way you want to see the difference between large versus small events with large events those are great there are a lot of participants a lot of sponsors but the relationships built during such events are not always the best sometimes it's still worth to participate in such a big event but in some cases you might want to look to a smaller event and also here it's good to optimize for targeted geographical areas so for example if you want to expand to Southeast Asia maybe it's worth organizing a hackathon in Vietnam and last but not least we have conferences usually those have multiple tracks as is the case here you might have like defy tooling security you name it so you need to optimize for the best track you might want to check the sponsors and the target audience before committed to committing to a conference and also look at the previous editions of the conference to get a sense about how the talks look likes who's participate so on so forth if you're looking for a list for different conferences and events in web free I recommend to you crypto Nomads club I'm not affiliated with them by any means I just like their work I think they did an amazing job of putting together a comprehensive list of all the events now awareness these under this goes content creation you might have a blog post case studies Twitter threads podcasts videos you name it you can be as creative as you want however what I want to emphasize is here is that you can really leverage this awareness using cross-pollination so you can do this content Creation in collaboration with another protocol and by doing that you're basically leveraging your audience and your community with theirs and you're exchanging them at the same time similarly you might want to do an initiative together such as organizing an event now the last part I want to talk about is to identify and reward your Superstars and here you might consider to have an ambassador program it's uh I would say it's important not to start with financial compensation because that might attract the wrong people instead you might want to be creative and to offer other types of incentives for example you might want to offer access to the core team you might want to organize something like a private Channel where people can connect between each other but also you connect them with your core team uh you might want to send them swag you'd be surprised how good they feel when you send them swag you might want to share their wins and support their initiatives and you can be as creative as you want with this type of Rewards now I know this sounds a lot and you might ask if this is hard work yes indeed this is hard work but it's absolutely worth it so if you are interested about this I would like to invite you to check out devrel uni it's a program that helps people get into devrel so you might learn way more about what I presented here you get five sessions with professionals from the space you get industry knowledge assignments and a very supportive community and if you scan the QR code out there it's gonna point you to a form there is a code one of the questions will ask you for a code for and for two people who are completing the form today who have followed the session we're gonna have two seeds reserved for them into the next course so that's it on my side thank you are there any questions hey uh firstly thanks for the talks really insightful um I guess two questions like firstly there's quite a lot that you've covered there if you were to prioritize some certain areas with that maybe you're just starting a devrel function or something on those lines where would you start or what would you say as a priority and then also wondering how would you form like what kind of kpis not to get too regimental there but how would you understand if it's working or not sorry what's exactly the first question where I should where I would start what would you prioritize maybe there's a couple of things that you'd start with if you just kind of starting to build a devrel function I guess like where would you start yeah so I would say I would definitely prioritize the documentation because without proper documentation there is no way for anyone to to figure it out or it's extremely hard to figure it out how to use your product so I I would start there and then in terms of kpis like for each of these sections you might apply kpis those can be quantitative and also qualitative so to give you an example for uh let's say a blog post you put out there you might count like how many uh people uh read out that post like number of clicks number of likes number of comments those are quantitative and then qualitative you might see in their comments like hey these blog posts helped me uh in do build a new feature for my project that's type of qualitative like how how your work out there has helped someone thanks question a great presentation again um I might have missed it because I was a little bit late but I was wondering how much technical knowledge you would need to be involved in the devrel because obviously there's a large marketing component to it but at the same time you have to have depth of understanding of the technical tool that you're looking to onboard developers into so uh do you for example advise people to have two halves of the function like someone who's focused more on the marketing side and then someone who's focused on the technical side or do you think that you can have someone competent enough to do both that's a great question in fact a dirty little secret most of the people in devrel have been engineers in the past so they are quite technical however I would say under the devil uh umbrella there are various roles you may have uh developer relations engineer as the name says these people are quite technical focused you might have developer Advocates a bit more oriented towards advocacy but still technical you might have someone like a technical community manager developer relations manager who manages the whole team my point here is that this role have like different degrees if you want of technical knowledge but in principle yes technical knowledge it's needed and the more you have it the the easier you're gonna navigate the role last question what's the difference between between the like from your understanding community in our world of web3 and team sorry I'm not sure like what's the difference between community and team in Dallas I've seen that as a question I'm not sure what you're what's your perception of the difference of how the management is in Dao's like in community and in a team a core team yeah so I guess the first difference is that it takes more time in a dial to agree to come to a consensus so that's something you should have in mind and probably you might want that some decision be taken faster and you might want that a certain subset of decisions are taken by the core team and the rest is decided uh with the community some some decisions sometimes are time sensitive and you can't wait for for snapshot and all that time not necessarily foreign do you think like branding yourself like um that well is important um in terms of gaining like yeah reputation in the space and trust and the network among the developers is important to be a good death well I mean if you're a devil definitely developers will will sense if you're a good devil so just attaching the name without doing the facts is not of a lot of help but if you're actually doing the actions as well then I see no problem yeah I think branding is a little bit like two yeah purposely intentionally doing that actually if you have been already helping the community they they will recognize your iPhone like I I get that yeah so thanks thank you Bianca thank you