I just hit 100 episodes of Scaling DevTools. It feels symbolic for me because of this Mr Beast quote I read early on.
"If you are just getting started on YouTube, do not expect to pull any type of viewership in your first year. If this isn't something you can accept, don't start. But if you can, then you need to do this: make 100 videos. It doesn't matter what they are because they will be terrible, but do something you like doing. Your first 10 videos will be garbage. But eventually, things will start to improve. The best way to improve your content is to make content and see what people like. Then you'll notice something with your 101st video. It will be in a whole different league from your first video."
- Jimmy Donaldson (Mr Beast)
I'm still a long way from where I want to be, but the reps do make you better.
So if you have a content area that you're passionate about and you think will drive growth for your company, maybe set a goal to reach 100 articles or 100 videos or 100 podcasts. And just start.
What I learned from 100 episodes
To mark 100 episodes, I spent 50+ hours listening to old episodes and writing up the key takeaways.
He had me at "understand your users". So many technologists don't understand this, and jump straight into solution-ing. Every day, all levels of seniority. The sheer resistance to having coffee with a user and understanding what they want is incredible.
DevRel - just a ZIRP phenomenon?
I just released an episode with someone I admire a lot - swyx. We talked about his polarizing article "DevRel's Death as Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon".
I say polarizing because, while I nodded my head throughout, at least one friend felt it was kicking DevRel while it's down.
I think this summarizes the crux of it well:
Many companies never needed DevRel.
But there are many roles which you don't need if you can do within the team. You don't need HR. Is HR dead? No. It's a choice whether or not you want a dedicated role to that or you wanna spread out that responsibility to the rest of the team.
But with just core engineers and founders, most DevTools under-bake their marketing efforts:
Most normal DevTool companies over-index on doing too many things and they are terrible at telling people about it. And so DevRel is hiring people who whose job is to yap all day long to artificially extend that [telling people about your company].
So swyx argues DevRel is not dead but ZIRP-era DevRel is dead and there is a lot of bad DevRel out there:
ZIRP DevRel is dead. Travel around the world giving giving talks and, really just seeing seeing the same people every talk. That that is basically dead.
And, the bottoms-up model is being challenged:
You actually don't need to be loud on Twitter. You actually, can just ship products to a small set of big name customers and then have everyone else show up later. Temporal was like this. Our second customer was Snapchat. We weren't loud on Twitter, we didn't have launch week 5, launch week 6. We didn't do any of that. Just build what your big customers want. And then the big customer likes it. The slightly smaller customers, like, look up and they go: it's good enough for them. It's good enough for us. We'll pay you $X. And every one of those customers is worth 10,000 of the smaller ones. So why bother?
For another perspective: this week I hosted a DevTools meetup in London. One founder attending told me they were considering hiring DevRel but changed their mind. They referenced swyx's post.
Another founder told me they just hired the first DevRel and are hiring one more. They want to try it as way to drive growth.
Scaling DevTools London meetup
Scaling DevTools is now sponsored by WorkOS. They're hosting the Enterprise Ready Conf dedicated to Enterprise Software on the 30th October in San Francisco. Speakers include the CEO of Vanta and the Head of Product for ChatGPT. Reach out to them if you want to join.
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