Communities aren't funnels
In this session from DevRelCon London 2019, Josh Dzielak introduces the orbit model, an alternative way of thinking about developer roles within communities.
Video
- Software is adopted not sold in the year, 2020.
- If you work in dev rel, you work on adoption and adoption requires a different way of thinking.
- As the funnel is to conversion, the orbit is to adoption.
- Identify your developers with the highest gravity and make a plan for extending their love and reach even further.
- Developers have enormous power to choose the tools that they work with from amongst a vast amount of proprietary and open source options.
- Developers are drawn to tools that do a difficult job well that have great documentation, complete SDKs and very importantly have a welcoming and knowledgeable community.
- Developers adopt software first, and often long before they buy it.
- Happens slowly over time.
- It can take a developer months to truly adopt new technology.
- People expect to get value out of a product, out of new technology for a long time before they actually go and buy it.
- Discovery happens with word of mouth and community is really the engine at the centre of all this.
- Providing both resources for people to learn how to adopt the thing.
- DevRels work on adoption, we also work closely with marketing and sales teams who are a lot more established.
- And as a result -- DevRels are forced to think about adoption with that 122-year-old lens, the funnel.
- And this leads to problems.
- Applied to adoption, the funnel turns into a downward spiral.
- Why is it so painful?
- From a meet-up even a really successful one, the number of leads that you can say you got is low.
- Could be because you didn’t feel comfortable making every attendee give you their email address just to get in the door.
- You don’t feel like leads are the right way to judge the success of a meet-up.
- These awkward questions come from the funnel mentality, so they’re going to be hard to answer by people like us who work on adoption.
- The Orbit Model is an alternative to the funnel that's designed specifically for community-driven adoption.
- The goal of the funnel is conversion but the goal of the Orbit is adoption.
- The Orbit Model helps you explain what you’re actually trying to do as a dev rel.
- Helps you identify and prioritize the developers who should be working with.
- “Who’s in my community, and who matters?”
- Help you measure and communicate your impact.
- Gravity equals love x reach.
- Everyone in your community has some amount of gravity, some ability to attract others.
- And the gravity that that person has is a product of two things, love and reach.
- Love is their love for what you do.
- Expert Knowle
- High Satisfaction
- Part of the thrive
- Reach is a measure of how well they can help spread love.
- Well-connected
- Respected by peers
- Passion for teaching
- Reserved for ambassadors.
- Communicate with them via one-on-one, email, even WhatsApp or texting or DMs on Twitter and Slack
- Don’t need many of them, but because each Ambassador counts for quite a bit like their own little community because of the love and the reach that they have.
- Folks are passionate about our technology.
- Can easily explain what it does and how to use it.
- Are connected to some kind of work community or local community.
- Might not have the love or the reach of the ambassadors, but can do so, someday.
- Folks who have some kind of working integration. some kind of sustained activity.
- Most customers fall into this level, and there can be thousands of them.
- Helps drive adoption for the community,
- Find the ones that can be promoted to fans and learn how to motivate them.
- Folks who have read our blog posts watched our talks, kick the tires with one of our sample apps or just followed us on Twitter.
- “At some point in the future, many of these observers might need our technology for something.”