We chat with Christine Sunu and Dominik Kundel from Twilio about the importance of developer advocacy in a marketing strategy and how it can help build trust with prospective customers.

One of the keys of successful developer relations (DevRel) is to “meet people where they are” rather than trying to create a community out of nothing. This includes going to events and engaging developers on forums and chat rooms that already exist. However, you must make sure that your company’s offerings align with the demands of the community. Additionally, you must be an authentic participant in the community rather than attempt to sell products.

Dom announces the release of Twilio Insiders, which is an early access program for developers that use Twilio products. Such early access programs can make fans feel like part of a close-knit community as well as provide feedback to product developers.

DevRel is useful if your intended customers or audience are developers. If you are a solo business or find you don’t have time for full DevRel efforts (traveling to events, managing forums, etc.), you can simply blog about what you learned during development of your product. This helps connect you to potential customers as well as act as top-of-funnel marketing.

We want to thank Twilio for sponsoring this episode! Twilio is a cloud platform that helps developers automate phone calls, text messages, and other communications through their web API. Check out twilio.com/go/helloblink for more information about using Twilio for automated messaging and IoT applications.

 

Book - Ask Your Developer by Jeff Lawson

 

Christine Sunu is a developer, designer, and creator who builds emotive interfaces and experiences. Though her main area of focus is the overlap between technology and human emotion, she has worked extensively in product, marketing, and design in both hardware and software. She has often worked with developer education and trending content, appearing in videos for outlets such as BuzzFeed and The Verge and helping to coordinate IoT-related content at Twilio. Among other things, Christine has created soft robots for anti-anxiety, produced trending tutorial builds about sourdough bread, levitated paramecium in giant magnetic fields, and attended half of medical school at Yale. She writes and speaks widely about human motivation and interactivity in hardware and connected interfaces, and she engages an international audience through online open-source tutorials.

 

Dominik is a Developer Advocate for Twilio in San Francisco. He loves tinkering with anything that can run JavaScript, from the front-end over servers to CLIs and coffee machines. You can find him tweeting @dkundel or working on open source projects for CodeExchange and Twilio Labs. In his spare time, he's working on cocktail, food, and photography projects.

 

 

 

“Hello Blink Show” by Kenny Consulting Group, LLC and Skal Risa, LLC is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Intro and outro song is “Routine” by Amine Maxwell is licensed under CC BY 3.0