The Business Value of Developer Relations by Mary Thengvall

Author:Mary Thengvall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781484237489
Publisher: Apress

Don’t Start from Scratch

No matter what else you learn from this chapter, please take my word on this one salient point: Don’t try to start your community from scratch.

You’ll wind up spending too many resources and you won’t see the return that you’re hoping for. This is no “If you build it, they will come” situation. This is where you need to roll up your sleeves , get your hands dirty, and dig into the depths of Meetup, Twitter, GitHub, and conference-land to figure out where your community is and what they’re interested in. (See Chapter 3 for how to connect with your community online and Chapter 8 for information on in-person events.)

This takes time and energy and effort and is probably the longest of all long-tails you will encounter in community building.2 But if you don’t do this research at the beginning, you’ll wind up spending money to sponsor conferences that aren’t a good fit or pursuing relationships with segments of the community that won’t be a suitable investment in the long run.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, the best place to start finding these answers is with your current customers. Work with Product to gather a short list of your most active customers, both in terms of usage as well as feedback.3 Schedule 15 minutes to talk to them on the phone or put together a short survey for them to answer. If these are folks you’ve spent a fair amount of time getting to know already, there may be no need to offer anything for their time. In fact, as we’ll talk more about in Chapter 7, offering monetary compensation might actually be a turn-off to the loyal audience who simply wants to help. However, an unexpected thank-you note or small token of appreciation that shows up a few days after the conversation will never go unnoticed. If you’re sending the survey out to more than your trusted inner circle, offering a prize to a random participant is an option as well.

However you choose to gather this information, it’s important to get answers from a good variety of your customers. You don’t want to skew your results by basing decisions on a limited number of responses from one particular group or another. This will also come into play as you establish an inner circle of community members as well (addressed in Chapter 7). You don’t want to only talk to folks who are using your free developer tier, or vice versa, only chat with enterprise users. You want to speak to some in each of these levels and everywhere in between to make sure you’re getting the full spectrum of your community’s needs.

This spectrum will also protect your team from the classic assumption that your community is only made up of free customers. Making it clear that you have the same amount of respect and appreciation for the paying customers as you do those who use the free developer accounts helps maintain your credibility. This also adds weight to the requests you’re making on behalf of your community.

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