Scaling DevTools

Ana Hevesi is a Developer Experience Researcher and Ecosystem Consultant. She has experience marshalling technical products and communities at companies including Stack Overflow, Nodejitsu and MongoDB.

What we cover

• An introduction to developer user research
• Research at DevTools startups
• How to use findings and insights
• How user research can help extend runway at a startup

Where to hear from Ana

• Twitter: @anthrocypher
• https://www.anahevesi.com/

Tools Anna loves

• Dovetail

Nimrod Kramer is the CEO at Daily.dev. Daily.dev is a community of developers getting together and exploring Dev news.

What we cover

(00:39): Why has Daily.dev been such a sensation from your perspective?

(02:13): Could you share your thoughts on good developer marketing and what it is?

(04:52): Could you talk about how you work with Francesco and how that's been working?

(07:28) Could you talk a little bit about examples?

(09:19) What is a developer?

(13:12) Have you got any examples of companies that have created really successful marketing campaigns with Daily.dev?

Where to hear from Nimrod

• Twitter: @NimrodKramer
• https://daily.dev/

Megan Reynolds is an investor at Crane Venture Partners. Crane are an early stage VC who have invested in developer tools such as Gitpod, Encore and Novu. 

What we cover

• What is happening in the market right now?
• Critical path for developers
• What can devtools do to make themselves more critical?
• Understanding your landscape
• What are the good founders doing? Gitpod example
• Why Megan invested in Novu
• What Megan is looking for in devtools

Where to hear from Megan

• Twitter: @meganreyno
• https://crane.vc/

Dev Tools mentioned

• Gitpod - open source remote developer collaboration
• Gitpod // Factorial case study
• Novu - open source notification infrastructure
• Encore - backend development engine
• Firebase - backend as a service
• Supabase (open source alternative to firebase)
• Posthog (open source alternative to mixpanel)

Richard Moot is the Head of Developer Advocacy at Square. Square helps millions of sellers run their business-from secure credit card processing to point of sale solutions. 

What we cover

(00:32): Could you tell us about the work that you're doing on YouTube with Square?

(01:00): If a startup is thinking of getting started with YouTube, how would you suggest they get started?

(03:39): Could you talk us through the types of tasks that you or other members of the team do?

(07:28) Could you talk a little bit about examples?

(09:16) How do you approach them quality vs quantity when it comes to good examples?

(11:52) Where and how does fun come into it all?

Where to hear from Richard

• Twitter: @wootmoot
• https://squareup.com
• https://developer.squareup.com/us/en
• https://www.youtube.com/c/SquareDev

Wesley Faulkner is a Senior Community Manager at AWS. Amazon Web Services provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis.

(00:40): Would you be able to tell us a little bit more about higher-order thinking?

(05:31): Could you share some examples of higher-order thinking versus a lower-order marketing campaign or communication that didn't work so well?

(11:06): Could you share your thoughts on developers wanting to understand how things work?

(13:38) When it comes to higher-order thinking and understanding your audience, investing long-term sometimes feels like it may have a slower payoff. How do we justify this kind of investment? Especially if we're a startup that needs users or signups really quickly.

Tweet we are discussing

Where to hear from Wesley

• Twitter: @wesley83
• https://aws.amazon.com/
• https://www.communitypulse.io/

Dylan Fox is the Founder & CEO of AssemblyAI. AssemblyAI is an AI company that researches, trains, and deploys State-of-the-Art AI models. Thousands of developers and product teams build with AssemblyAI's simple API to automatically transcribe and understand audio data at scale.

What we cover

(00:20): Could you tell us a little bit about AssemblyAI?

(01:10): Could you talk about your content strategy?

(03:37): How do you balance the goal of promoting AssemblyAI with creating authentic, useful pieces of content?

(09:59) How are you able to produce such in-depth content?

(11:22) What was it like going through YC and acquiring your first users?

Where to hear from Dylan

• Twitter: @YouveGotFox
• https://www.assemblyai.com/
• https://twitter.com/AssemblyAI

Juri Strumpflohner is the Director of Developer Experience at Nrwl Technologies. Nrwl works with global enterprises to provide remote consulting, training, and engineering. Nx is Nrwl’s open source product which provides advanced tools that help scale enterprise development. 

What we cover

• The  story, Nrwl, and Nx?
• Solve the problems you see
• Open source business model
• How Nx got to 2million downloads per week 
• Hiring for growth
• Taking over an existing open source proejct

Where to hear from Juri

• Twitter: @juristr
• https://nrwl.io/
• https://nx.dev/
• https://www.youtube.com/c/Nrwl_io
• https://nx.dev/conf

Ronak Ganatra is the Director of Marketing at Lano, a global software solution enabling businesses to hire and pay full-time employees and contractors. Ronak was previously VP of Marketing at Hygraph and has also founded https://marketingto.dev/.

What we cover

(00:37): What was it like on your first day working at Hygraph versus three years later?

(07:03): What do you think being a better developer marketer means?

(08:36): How do you approach things like performance marketing?

(12:17) How should developer marketing teams be working with sales teams?

Where to hear from Ronak

• Twitter: @gunnyganatra
• savepad
• https://marketingto.dev

Sarah Jane Morris is the Senior Manager of Developer community at HubSpot. Hubspot is a CRM platform that brings everything scaling companies need to deliver a best-in-class customer experience into one place.

What we cover

(00:21): How should early-stage startups be thinking about community?

(06:09): Once the community has found momentum, what would the next focus be?

(12:27): In terms of tangibly measuring how well you're doing, what kind of things do you care about?

(18:39): Community can sometimes be put on the back burner, but at the same time you see so many of the most successful dev startups invested in community really early on. Do you see a pattern or do you have any advice for startups that are at this stage?

Links mentioned by SJ

• Twitter: @SarahJaneMorris
• https://www.hubspot.com
• https://haxor.sh/
• https://www.twilio.com/
• https://www.commonroom.io/ 
• https://projectinclude.org/

Phil is the founder of Tiiny.host. Tiiny.host is a web hosting application that allows you to simply host & share your web project. 

What we cover
(00:28): What has growth been like at tiiny.host?

(04:44): Why does the world need a new hosting provider?

(10:50): How did you decide to position tiiny.host?

Where to hear from Phil

• Twitter: @_baretto
• https://tiiny.host/