Gonto: 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 handles security 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 going to get frustrated.

They would write blog posts, 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. 

Hank: I think he's also speaking, uh, 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 is 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? 

Gonto: 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'll talk in a second, but maybe they are not good, as you said, at 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’re 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 guide filling to see what type of DevRel it is. But If it's not him, who will experiment?  

Hank: 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, or pedigree for, for learning and experimenting. 

Gonto: 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 has 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, and at the same time, they'll be more of a generalist, and be able to try multiple things.

The one thing that's, 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 charisma and it will work better.

Hank: 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'd made some courses that like he really wanted it.

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. 

Gonto: Yes. 

Hank: Give them part time work, work on the site, and say, Hey, I just need you to make five videos over the next, you know, two months. And if that's, 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 to tiptoe into it. 

Gonto: 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 dev rel hire should ideally be something, 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 are potentially 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.

Hank: 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 going to be a winner.

Gonto: Exactly. Like the video  made me feel um, I think you said this and I agree with this that the guy is afraid to mishire.

You should never be afraid of mishire. 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 you'll make a mishire 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. 

Hank: Yeah, they're very few. I would say, I think the more senior the person, the more consequence there is for a mishire. 

Gonto: Yes. 

Hank: 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. 

Gonto: 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 DevTool 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 experiment. 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. 

Hank: I think I tend to agree there. Now, related to this was Hassan's, um, tweet. He wrote a post about the different types of DevRell. Cause 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 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 I Yeah, you have your three Cs. 

If you ask people about DevRel, everybody thought in the past that it was C, Triple C, like content, community and conference. And if you look at Hassan's tweet, he talk about community content and product as the three different type 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 be the dogs, we'll do X, We work on the wording etc. But then community and content, I think online 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, uh, speaking at videos, uh, 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, in his mind, the content person 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 and bad. I think online and offline based on this charismatic and not as charismatic or maybe charismatic but maybe not a great engineer, or of like, non charismatic, but a fantastic engineer.

Again, that's not all of their profiles. That, I think, is a better mix to think about the activities for, for the DevRels.. 

Hank: Here's where maybe I differ from both of you. I, I think it's entirely about playing to the player. Like, playing with the team you've got. Cause, like you said, some people are good at different things.

And, you can mix and match these things. I, 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 desilo 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.

Gonto: 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 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. 

Hank: Yeah, you need to have dividing lines. What's also interesting is you can, 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. 

Gonto: 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 branded 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 and 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. 

Gonto: And I think they did it in a very elegant way where they move from the education on what branded emails are, what the icons are and why, into then showing how it's done with the products.

Hank: It was seamless. 

Gonto: 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 life cycle 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 on making sure it's educational and useful for everybody. 

Hank: Yeah, I like that. It was good. Even if you don't use Resend, as you said. 

Gonto: Linking this to a previous topic, the guy is not very charismatic. Like I didn't feel the guy was very charismatic on the video. He, it felt like he was reading a script. 

Hank: 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. 

Gonto: I think it's real too and that's where I think it's awesome on 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's 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 that's the case, it can work. But you cannot script offline 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. 

Hank: 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, 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 DevTools that's worried about this is going to hone in. 

Gonto: Exactly. It's charisma or really good scripts. Both can work. 

Hank: Both can work. I like it. Cool, well, that's it for today. Um, 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 that was sent in Slack. I don't know about BlueSky, but we'll see. We'll see how it goes.  

Gonto: I have BlueSky. It's not as bad as LinkedIn, but it's not that bad.

Hank: Whatever, LinkedIn's great. We'll talk about that another day. Alright, thanks everybody.