The Perfect First DevRel Hire for Devtool Startups

Hunger for glory drives experimentation. So if you hire somebody with hunger for glory, they will always experiment because they want to succeed, because they are obsessed with winning. Which I think is the main characteristics you need for the first five marketing hires, people who are obsessed with winning. Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of Code to Market. Today we have one long topic to chat about and one that is a bit shorter. We want to start talking about DevRel. There's two tweets about DevRel that caught our attention this week. We'll start talking about one and then we'll move into the second one. The first tweet that we want to talk about is actually a tweet from Jack Bridger. He has a really good podcast on DevTools that if you have never heard it, go and check it out. And he invited somebody who's handling his cases software to talk a bit about DevRel. And in that tweet, you'll see like a one-minute video where what he talks about is that you should never hire a DevRel person before you know in which areas they should focus on, because otherwise they're gonna get frustrated. They would write blog post but nobody would read them, and that it's first the founders who need to experiment, see what works, and then you hire DevRels. This is something that both of us disagree with, but I want to hear your thoughts, Hank, on this.

I think he's also speaking, his name's Keith Casey, is the guest, and I did like some of his points. But I think he's also speaking a little broadly too about, you know, perhaps you shouldn't hire employees until you've experimented in an area that you think they will be effective. And he gave an example of, you know, you can't hire a DevRel to write content if you've never written content and never gotten traction. So where that might be a terrible idea is what if your execution on those type of experiments, it's just terrible. Well, then you'll never go down those paths and you'll never hire those people. So that was kind of my first take on the actual like words he was saying, but at the same time, I don't know. There's something about it that feels right. I mean, talk me out of it. What are you thinking?

So at least for me, like, one, I agree with you, and I think founders sometimes are not that good at doing DevRel, and DevRel could be a lot of things as we talk in a second. But maybe they are not good, as you said, writing blog posts or doing YouTube videos or going to conferences or stuff like that. So trying something of that without hiring, I think, is really hard. I think not hiring somebody makes sense if you as a founder are really good at DevRel. But if not, and you're a dev tool, your first hire should be DevRel. And if you hire the wrong DevRel because maybe you're hiring a DevRel that is really good at writing content but they are not really good at doing videos, you learn that, and then potentially you part ways and you find some other way because it's not a good fit for both. But I think for dev products, ideally either you hire first a generalist DevRel if you can, or you use the founder, that failing, to see what type of DevRel it is, but if it's not him who will experiment?

Yeah, so one of the most important things about being at a small company and being a founder is your first hires have to be really dynamic. And I've been one of the first people at several companies now, right? Like I was the second marketer at GitLab. I was one of the first at Neo4j. I was the first marketer at Vercel. I'm the first one at Laravel. And the most important thing for that first person, and then the people they hire, like all the people I've just hired, is they have to be able to wear multiple hats. They have to be able to learn new stuff, and they have to have an incredible penchant or pedigree for learning and experimenting.

I'm a big believer that for the first hire for DevRel, you hire somebody who has never done DevRel before, because people who have done DevRel before I think are already like in a small square. And in the beginning, as you were saying, you need a generalist. You need somebody who can do multiple things. So to me, you find somebody who either have spoken at meetups or at conferences or has written good blog posts or is engaging with people on Twitter, have never done it, and then you give them the chance, which means they will have hunger for glory. At the same time, they'd be more of a generalist and be able to try multiple things. The one thing that, well, now maybe we can say, before it was politically incorrect, is that your first DevRel hire in my mind needs to be charismatic. Because some of the things you need to try, like going to conferences, doing YouTube videos and stuff like that, I think you need charismatic people.

I don't know. I don't know how that was ever, I don't know if that was ever politically incorrect to say that your DevRel has to be charismatic. Now we'll get into like some different types, but I want to highlight a thing you said. The hunger for glory is so important. Yes. And if you can pair that with a humility. So I actually just ran into Lee Rob last week. He was our first DevRel at Vercel. He'd never done the job before. He's like checking all the boxes of what you're saying, right? And when he did it, man, the guy had like a couple thousand followers on Twitter. He'd done engineering and then sales engineering, but he made some courses. Like he really wanted it and he did such a good job. And similarly at Laravel, the CEO hired the first DevRel like a year ago before I even joined and just told him, hey, like can you just try making videos? And that's worked out really well. Like it was an experiment. And I wanted to add, experiments don't have to be, or rather hires don't have to be so all-in. You can actually hire DevRel as contractors. Yes, give them part-time work, work on the side, and say, hey, I just need you to make five videos over the next, you know, two months. And if these are great, if they get any traction, if we like it at all, we'll hire you. Or maybe it's write five articles or five guides or something. So there are also ways that tiptoe into it.

I think if they are charismatic, they will be able to try videos. They will be able to try conferences. Maybe they are not that great writers, but with AI now it's becoming easier for charismatic DevRel to do the other thing and not the other way. So that's what I think charismatic matters. I think your second DevRel hire should ideally be somebody potentially that is popular, because then you leverage their platform. But for the first one, no. The only thing I think is useful for the first one is people who have never done DevRel but that potentially are already known in the community because they go to meetups, they go to every conference, they engage with people on Twitter. And those I think are the best. But even if they don't yet engage with the community, if they have charisma and they have this hunger for glory because they've done some of these conferences and some of the meetups, I think that's the first one. Hunger for glory drives experimentation. So if you hire somebody with hunger for glory, they will always experiment because they want to succeed, because they are obsessed with winning. Which I think is the main characteristics you need for the first five marketing hires, people who are obsessed with winning.

Yeah, and not afraid to put it out there. Not afraid to try stuff and to fail and to fall flat on their face, you know, in one video or on one topic or one tweet and still send the next one thinking it's gonna be a winner.

The video made me feel, I think you said this and I agree with this, that the guy is afraid to mis-hire. You should never be afraid of a mis-hire. Like, you hire somebody and if you fuck it up, you'll find somebody else. But if you find somebody with charisma and hunger for glory, I think it's very unlikely that should make a mis-hire, and they will work out because they'd be so desperate, as you the founder, to learn and grow and potentially be actually better at this than you. There's not that many founders that are really good at DevRel, to be honest.

Yeah, they're very few, I would say. I think the more senior the person, the more consequence there is for a mis-hire. Yes. Which is also why I like your advice that, you know, for your first DevRel, and I think also for your first marketer, typically you should be hiring someone junior who's very hungry, who has proven they can learn stuff rather than proven that they have experience with the stuff. And in some cases, experience with the thing you want them to do can actually be a detractor.

Actually, now they do the same as what they did in the past. Not for everybody, but yes, for a lot of people. And what wins is being different. It's always better to be different than better. If you can do something different, I think you'll win. Every company, every dev tool that I talk, I always recommend first hire DevRel, hungry for glory, no experience. Second hire, growth person, because a DevRel person I think will want to try things, but they won't have a framework to experiments. They won't know how to set it up, how to measure success, how to see if it's working or not, how to know whether to double down. And I think a growth person are really good at analytics, at doing the frameworks for experiments, at waiting the needed time, at doing the right research and interviews and stuff like that. So I think growth, hunger for glory as well, and DevRel is the best mix to actually experiment and explore.

I think I tend to agree there. Now, related to this was Hassan's tweet. He wrote a post about the different types of DevRel, because this is also somewhere where you could mess this up if you think, oh, this person wants to be DevRel, but they're not the charismatic type of person who wants to make content. And maybe they're more on this side of like, no, I care about developer experience and the product flows and that type of stuff. That doesn't help you get more top of funnel. That doesn't help you go to market. That doesn't help more people use your product, who will ultimately give you the same feedback, by the way. But I'm curious what you thought about this. I know you had some thoughts, and like, yeah, three C's.

If you ask people out there, right, everybody thought in the past that it was triple C, like content, community, and conference. And if you look at Hassan's tweet, he talked about community, content, and product as the three different types of DevRel. But I actually disagree. I think if you ask me, the three types of DevRel are online, offline, and product. So on the product side, I agree. It's somebody who will build the docs, will do the DX, will work on the onboarding, etc. But then community and content, I think online and offline is a better mix, mostly because of charisma. Like, there's people who are just charismatic, who are nice, who smile, who people want to be with. Those people are really good at being in person with people, at speaking, at videos, at doing conferences and stuff like that. There's other people that are maybe DevRel that is less charismatic but really fantastic engineers who might be really good at writing deep content and deep articles and understanding what the product engineers are saying and what they are doing and translating that into some type of content. Who might be really good at building some type of video that has a script, in which case they can actually explain and talk about it. So that I think matches better the personality of people. Because if you separate, as Hassan is saying, in community and content, the content person in his mind needs to, for example, go to conferences and do talks and then do blog posts as well. The person who might be really good at conferences might not be that good at content. So then you're fucking it up by mixing people that, people are good at that. I think online and offline, based on this charismatic and not as charismatic, or maybe charismatic but maybe not a great engineer, or like not charismatic but a fantastic engineer, again, that's not all of the profiles, but I think is a better mix to think about the activities for DevRel.

Here's where maybe I differ from both of you. I think it's entirely about playing to the player, like playing with the team you've got. Because like you said, some people are good at different things and you can mix and match these things. I really like his post from the perspective of listing the different types of tactics that can be employed. But when you're forming a team and a strategy and assignments, you can mix and match all of those things and totally de-silo everything based on the person you have. You might have someone who can literally do everything the best. They have absolute advantage and therefore you need to be really picky about what they do and what they ignore. And you might have people who are just good at like the one thing, and great, get them to double down on that. And I don't know, I think I don't like to draw the line so much, and you know, maybe I need more experience with it.

Now, I like your idea of like, if you have a good team, you try to find what they are good at and you try to put them at that, so then the separation is a bit more blurry. I think more about the separation when I'm hiring somebody. And what I mean by that is, if I already have three people that are really good at online, I won't hire another online person. I'll just hire an offline one. If I already have a team and some are good at different things, you do what you can with the team. I actually think one thing that I always thought you're really good at is hiring. And I think what you do good at that, Hank, is that you hire people when they are good and you'll figure out what they do in the future. And I think that works for DevRel as well, as long as you don't end up having three people that do the same thing.

Yeah, you need to have dividing lines. What's also interesting is you can also have dividing lines based on products if you're a multi-product company. If you have multiple open source packages, you know, these sort of things.

So you wanted to chat about the recent video you sent me today. What is it about?

Yes, so it's a video where Resend walks you through Apple's new Brand in Email feature, where Apple has made it easier and they have a preferred path now to put your logo in the email client and make it clear it's an official email, yada yada yada. And what Resend did so well was they basically demoed exactly why this thing is important and how you can go do it. They demoed how to do it in the product, but even if you aren't using Resend, it just felt educational and useful. And so I'm not using Resend right now, but I watched the whole thing and I sent it to my RevOps guy. I was like, hey, we should figure this out. It feels like a good way to like get marked as spam less and to get caught by the email client less. But it just felt like good classic educational marketing in DevRel.

And I think they did it in a very elegant way, where they move from the education of what branded emails are, what the icons are and why, into then showing how it's done with the product. It was seamless. Exactly, it was seamless, and in that way it was like, okay, I get it, you're selling the product, but I still learned something and it's useful for my company. So I send it now, as you said, to my RevOps team or to my lifecycle team. And if they didn't know about Resend, even if you're not using them now, at least they learn about it and potentially either research for this job or for the next one. But I think that makes a huge difference on how they put so much care or making sure it's educational and useful for everybody.

I like that it was good even if you don't use Resend, as you said.

Linking this to a previous topic, the guy is not very charismatic. Like, I didn't think the guy was very charismatic on the video. It felt like he was reading a script.

I actually double-watched the video. I was like, is this an AI generated video? I had to check because we're gonna get those, and I was like, is this one that like almost fooled me? I think it's real.

I think it's real too, and that's where I think it's awesome. In the sense that going back to the online and offline, like even though this is a video, because it's useful, it's educational, and likely scripted by every word, which I think is what non-charismatic people do, the video was still awesome even if they weren't charismatic. For charismatic people, they do not script videos, and people will like it, they will share it anyway. For non-charismatic, if they script it and it's really good, that's this guy's, it can work. But you cannot script offline in life. You cannot script your conference talk with others. So that's what I think this guy actually did a really good job with the video.

Yeah, I like that, and it's a good lesson that even if you think you're not charismatic, you can still just do a great video and it'll do well if the content is liked. And if you have, I mean, he had a great hook. Immediately I knew what the video was about and immediately I felt it was important. He was invoking Apple and email. And if you invoke those two things in the first 10 seconds of a video, any marketer and anyone in dev tools that's worried about this is gonna hone in.

Exactly. It's charisma or really good script.

Both can work.

Both can work, I like it. Cool, well that's it for today. As always, send us some feedback, give us a follow. Oh, as a side note, I finally created a Bluesky account because I had to reply to somebody. They've sent in Slack. I don't know about Bluesky, but we'll see, we'll see how it goes.

I have Bluesky. It's not as bad as LinkedIn, but not that bad.

Whatever, really, LinkedIn's great. We'll talk about that another day. All right, thanks everybody.