DevRel like a High Schooler
It was a pleasure to rejoin Jack Bridger for a third time on Scaling Devtools, where I usually try to cram as much devrel metathoughts per minute as I can. Nominally the pod was about how DevRel is So Back, but informally I’ve been sharing a bunch of devrel advice that I would now loosely tie up as “do your devrel as if your audience were catty Mean Girls in high school”.
The TLDR is that although we’re all grown adults, we regress back to high school behavior as the target audience size grows and attention shrinks. I got this idea from a comedy skit I saw once that said something like “in high school everyone is known by (American) Indian names - and it’s usually the politically incorrect but instantly recognizable version of you - it’s not “Phoebe from Gymnastics”, it is “Short-Girl-who-is-an-arrogant-showoff”. Given that your brand is how people talk about you when you’re not in the room, it is a key part of your job managing your developer brand that you should engineer for what adjectives and descriptions other people refer to you by.
Own A Valuable Superlative
aka Be #1 at Something That Matters
In American high school year books, people get assigned “superlatives” that make them well known/memorable for their thing.
There exist lists and lists of superlatives — but it should be obvious that “Class Clown” and “Most Likely to Trip at Graduation” is not as valuable as “Most Likely To Succeed” and “Best Personality”. The VC version of this superlative is the “Presumptive Winner”, a label that is quite literally drives hundreds of millions of dollars of investment decisionmaking and compounds advantages in market shares (as long as you define the market favorably).
For founders and PMs going Uphill to developers, this means that you probably should be beating people over the head far more than you’re comfortable with the main superlative you’ve decided to own (you -do- have a thing you’re #1 in the world at, right? right?). As in high school, deduct more points the more words (actually, syllables) you need to use to describe your brand. Evaluate your brand by asking your friends (investors, customers etc) to repeat back in their own words what they think you’re good at, and really introspect the difference between what you say you are and what others say you are. If they’re wrong, it is DevRel’s job to fix it. If you’re wrong, it is a deeper product/engineering problem.
Bad Superlatives:
Most Complete: as mentioned in the podcast, if your primary competitive advantage comes down to “my list of green checkboxes is longer than their list of green checkboxes”, you probably don’t have conviction or market insight that will carry you anywhere meaningful. This is NOT a hard and fast rule; completeness stories do work, but they are usually secondary benefits after nailing a core thing (one of the other Good Superlatives).
Most Enterprise-Ready: a less bad version of the above but same vagueness
Most AI Native: a tasteless tell of un-self-aware lack of understanding of differentiation
Raised a lot of money: cool happy for you but what is it you do and why will you win other than jamming a bunch of sales guys and ads down my throat?
Best Developer Experience: a controversial one, but usually a cheap win (“my lines of code is less than your lines of code” reliably wins on Twitter) that indicates shallowness because it correlates highly but not perfectly with lack of attention to unhappy paths.
Cheapest: you get what you pay for
Most Decentralized: the web3-pilled people don’t seem to understand that this is a niche marketing message to those who have been negatively affected by centralization, and in fact most people usually vote with their wallets and feet and eyeballs for MORE centralization
Good Superlatives:
Fastest
Best Value For Money
Simplest
Most Capable
Most Reliable
As mentioned on the pod, “Fastest” is usually an easy one for startups because its easy to be faster with less cruft/competing priorities/singular focus, this was a starting selling point for Bun (now acquired by Anthropic) and ESBuild.
