The Jake Ward Interview. The power of developer advocacy with Data Protocol

in 2023 and beginning of 2024 the world of death is in a little bit of a bind it's not super easy to figure out this is what a death R does and this is how they impact businesses and you now see companies that have to be like okay we have to now start making money we're going to kill the free tier what do we do with the death RS we can of let's lay them off and then there's other companies that didn't make the money but still have the free tier like how do we then deal with def rails they don't attribute to an ARR or an mrr directly so where is their impact and so in this video I have interviewed Jake wart from data protocol and he created data protocol with this all in mind how to create a learning platform that developer relations teams can actually use and then create courses on it and get insights and make sure that these def rils have numbers and things to show that say Hey this is what we did and this is our worth and this is how we impact what death does for your company so without further Ado this is the interview with Jake Ward from data protocol good morning Tim uh it's great to be here thank you I'm Jake Ward I'm the co-founder and CEO of data protocol yeah 2023 and 24 is not off to a good start I think that the discipline of developer relations Is as important today as it's ever been but the appreciation for the people that are doing the job is decreasing with every riff right the many incredibly qualified and talented developer relations developer Advocates Pros have lost their jobs in the past 14 15 months a big chunk of that is because historically uh developer relations has has sat under either marketing or product or somewhere in between around engineering and that the it was understood that much of the value they generated was inherent that there was a need to communicate with your developer audience your stakeholders your customers your users but that it wasn't particularly um feasible to measure that engagement right you could you could correlate it you could understand that a reduction in tickets or breakage was directly related to the support you were providing on the front end you could look at growth and say that that was a matter of better product marketing etc etc but in tough e omic times and years of efficiency like we've had over the last two years the um the hard to Define and vague metrics around developer relations were the first to go all right they they were the the lack of concrete deliverables made them easy targets it's like is there seemed to be a kind of a hot and cold kind of thing going on with death RS over time they're all get hired because we realize oh we need like education we need um firstline support we need people that really know our product and then help developers directly and then at one point like this year and last year people get laid off because you know no ARR or no accrediation or like those kind of things and then it comes back around and so what do you make of this what it like being a startup founder yourself do you have any sort of insights in how does it kind of happen that these apps and flow so if we need death like how does that work I think some of it is in the the nature of developers as a target audience which is they are Mercurial right there's a real EB and flow to the way that developers adopt tools integrate tools the way that they use um different tooling and so there's a you're a startup founder youve raised money you've got an idea you're going to build this thing you know you need developers to use your stuff the first thing you do is go looking for developer Whisperers right somebody who knows where they are somebody that can do the technical work somebody that can go to the events can bring a following and so that there's a number of deol folks like yourself that have built personal Brands through content creation you bring an audience with you wherever you go and every founder that is going to build a business that's developer dependent needs somebody to unlock that first wave of users because that's how you iterate right that Innovation funnel is driven by users and feedback users and feedback but then what happens is many of them don't work because that's the nature of startups and they fail so so assume that those jobs are gone because those companies are probably going out anyway and then the next wave of folks is a more substantial company like slack or snap or box right these are companies with real market caps a ton of money but they're making decisions throughout their departments based on revenue and looking at kpis their life cycle when things are really good they put up new objectives new stretch goals let's do this wouldn't it be cool if we had a certification for that at snap they built an entire LMS program around a learning management system program around the lens product set so they could teach creatives how to use it that's a great idea right that's how you drive user base around a new product that nobody knew exist did three and a half years ago while creating a new industry around this idea of businesses focused on this platform but when times go the other direction and your your Shares are down you got to make cuts to make the street respond where do you look for those below the-line jobs it's the ones that aren't paying off right that's a long lead investment whereas there are database companies right now in the last two weeks that blew out their entire developer education program because they've made the move to be profitable right they're done being a startup they're going to move into this space where they don't have a free product anymore they're straight Enterprise they're going to sell then you don't need a team whose job it is to Advocate and generally build support for your free product all of those jobs are lost and it isn't because those people aren't incredibly talented and it isn't because they don't do good good work it's because their work doesn't directly correlate to revenue on a spreadsheet listen to this kids this is teaching us because death is quite young and I know there's a few people who've been doing this for like 10 years but this stuff is like relatively new and so when I hear you here do you think def is there to get like signups or is Def there to when the signups are there through marketing to actually keep them in and then start engaging more the one you know I think it depends no no it's I think it depends on the company right the the roots of devil actually go all the way back to Apple and the early days in the 80s where they were teaching developers how to build on this closed Network so that they would have a system and an ecosystem to support and then that that churned and churned and churned um Danel Luen who is now the the head of the Computing Museum in the valley was the head of deell at Microsoft in like 1986 this is not this is not a new new profession but the discipline that we think about where it's it's conference going it's speaking it's supporting technical writing and doing support through blogs and announcements that's relatively new that um that requires at least three disciplines within a team and maybe even with within a person one of those is being able to advocate for your product and say this is what we do this is really great here's how you can use it I think of twilio 10 years ago right where Rob Spectre and and Keith Casey and those guys were out doing direct onetoone often showing people how to put twilio in their apps when it became this big ecosystem player the next piece is marketing is thinking about where your developer lives your ICP individual developer on a mass scale and then informing the product cycle with your marketing team right what is the language on your website what are your ads ads look like what does your event schedule look like that straight marketing which is a frankly a that I'm terrible at but that is required of many devel Pros now um and then the last piece is being an internal Advocate it's being able to take the feedback from your developers in Mass whether it's through your common room engagement through event programming playing with the tool yourself and saying to your engineering team this is great but we also need to do this or this is wrong can we fix this or documentation is lacking here we we we're getting too much breakage right it's done well developer relations can be the heart of your programmatic approach to product marketing product sales and product support that sounds like it's a really it depends kind of job based on your company and what direction you want to go and so let let's scope it down a little bit to talk also about what data protocol is actually doing because when we look at how people learn like there's a few different ways right and so can you talk to me about what you do at data protocol and what kind of captures people the best in your experience so my my experience with the developer ecosystem started in 2012 when I I launched the application developers Alliance which was the first of its kind sort of advocacy Organization for then about 25 million software developers I think we closer to 32 million now but the the idea was born of an experience that I had working with Google and Intel on Google TV a thousand years ago long before every TV was a smart TV the this is this is Google and Intel not knowing where developers were not knowing how to engage them not knowing how to build cool uh killer apps and sort of chasing the coattails of Apple coming out of the box right and so we I started this process and it it was a real moment of oh nobody knows how to talk to developers nobody fully understands how to uh engage and ask questions pull that information out and apply it to a broader problem data protocol is the natural continuation of my my hopes and dreams of being able to do that at scale think of data protocol as as a it's a web app it's a web application that scales your developer program in a way that treats every single partner as if they are a managed partner right as if they can pick up a phone and call you and say Tim I broke this thing can you help me that is the goal most developers are stuck reading Dev docs reading blog posts asking Reddit going to stack figuring going to chat GPT now going to co-pilot like figuring out how to solve a problem which is inherent to the job of being a developer but if you could watch a three-minute video which is a lot of what YouTube has become but that's largely promotional not problem solving if you could watch a three minute video on how to navigate a particular compliance requirement from your largest partner for example instead of taking the chance that you're going to get it wrong or reading rading command fing your way through a Dev doc that's a better way me all the way by the way totally it's most people I mean that's how that's the the value of of developer documentation is that it's right there on the page the yeah the real drawback is that there's no order that's in inherent to the prioritization you're dealing with it's inherent to the prioritization of the person who wrote it yeah video is a way of delivering information to you in a conversational form where on data protocol we ask questions we deliver notes we give you the resources we curate the links it's like you sat down with a developer relations Pro for three minutes and the end result is you feel smarter that's the learning part of it you have more confidence which is inherent to knowing more and then ultimately you break things less right you build more responsible you build faster that information also sticks longer the proficiency the retention all of that is is cooked into it this is not an LMS for developers what it is is an engagement platform that empowers companies to better support their developers by teaching them things by giving them information by talking to them in a way that feels more like a conversation than sending them a memo and so when you make a program like that let's say I work at HRA we going to do one of those programs do you then also offer things that other lmss offer like certification badges gamification you did well stickers you know things like that is that something that you feel Works do you have all that we we do have it we think it works we do a pretty good chunk of that depending on the partners but let's say let's say we were building something for hgraph right you you have a new new product coming out or or your your documentation um is fairly successful but you're getting a lot of Bounce pre-registration my my team comes in and says all right Tim walk me through the life cycle they do a 30 minute Discovery call and they identify the breakage points based on your experience then they write the outline and show it to you and then they write a script of a four and a half minute video in which you are saying to an audience of pre-registered like this is before they convert what welcome to the welcome to the page developers and you're then we come in we shoot it right we do all the post production we do all the graphics all the animation the end result is what we call a short code that is a four and a half minute video that uh somebody can watch and know everything you'd want them to know if you had them in front of you for four minutes and the end result is they can make a decision then they're beyond Discovery they're into evaluation and they're about to get to adoption now you you know because they are registered user on data protocol who's leaving why they're why they're churning what they came for in the first place and you can prove the front-end marketing as well as the conversion point for registration if that then grows into a full curriculum in which you're you're doing courses and short codes and certifications where there's a series of um what we call learning tracks right you have to take this course before you take this this one then yes we would certainly do badging we would do certification we would do progress tracking so that there I mean a lot of a lot of developers are completionists I don't think there's any question about that and there's there's a ton of value in that but we also build programming where we're begging people to get off the screen right where we're we're putting notes and links everywhere so that when you get the answer you need you click and then you're gone so we have we have thousands of videos that are 26% completed and we think of that as a as a win because they got the answer that that's I'm obsessed with this idea of a problem index where it's like how many problems did we solve today which is links clicked uh answers to questions yeah answers to questions like an extended nobody watches a video for 93 seconds if they uh if they aren't interested in the topic right it's not like they came in saw it and was like this isn't for me and left they stayed until they got an answer to their question that's what I I want to know that we solve their problem and as long as we can push that through on all of our courses all of our short codes all of our uh even the work that we do where we're promoting uh information and hosting it on your site so that's another thing that another offering we have is you know you obviously have uh all of the capability and all the technology you need to record video videos but if you're expanding your program my team can help you with the scripting and the graphics and all the post production so instead of doing one a week you can do five that content then lives on your site it doesn't have the questions it doesn't have the CLI interface it doesn't have those sentiment components but what it does have is the initial metrics of who of how many people are taking it and what links they're clicking and those links could then come into Data protocol or onto your platform the end result being you have a clearer picture of what people want are they getting what they need are they making good decisions based on the information you're giving them I love this because it's kind of coming back to that how can I as a death show my worth without having an ARR that goes up it's actually we made this video and changed these docks that way and then suddenly people started clicking and we know this because of data protocol and that's really interesting and so there isn't that much infrastructure architecture or around for death rils to kind of manage community and figure those things out like we have companies like orbit that do pretty well so how how do you guys do do you guys do something like orbit or do you have some tracking of community or is that maybe just a separate part that you don't deal with it's a it's we're sandwiched in between orbit and common room right like we're we're we're the we're the layer in between where information is exchanged in this video first way the the model around orbit and common room that is um inherent to a community component or a uh super user Advocate empowerment side right like so there's there's there's the everybody needs to talk and then there's the everybody needs to listen to this one person model and we're the thing in between which is let's take that one person and let's put him on demand in the box so that you can engage with them anytime you want to it's uh so we're right in between those two things I I don't see any reason why a developer program looking for tooling wouldn't take all three when people watch this and they feel like hey this is a cool platform to use for me let's say I work at some product let growth startup super developer first can you give us the elevator pitch in like two three sentences of how these folks can talk to their bosses and say give me the cash to start using data protocol how would you pitch that with that Contex say I would say two things right uh as as I said to you if you had five minutes with your entire developer Network and you knew they were listening what would you tell them what would you ask them because that's what data protocol enables right a fully captive audience and data feedback both um data they enter questions they uh answer as well as data around proficiency engagement time on site etc etc and then I would say because frequently I get yeah but we don't want to send people away from our site during that was my next question which is why we now build we call Studio content which is what we build for you that lives on your platform and the the science behind that is fairly simple is that you don't always need them to be points of data what you need them to be is informed and we can we can do that faster and cheaper and better and because we are vertically stacked and instructionally design Le what we're going to deliver for you is better if video matters if developer engagement matters to you we are by far the best solution for the creation of video content and content generally for developer engagement awesome um thanks Jake this was a really exciting conversation for me because I am in this world and we are trying to do those specific things and it's always great to have someone who builds a product specifically for that and I can just ask any question I want so that's awesome I'm thank you for your time and so to end this where can people find you what what are like the few little ctas you want to push in here so the uh I've been told that this is borderline insane considering our audience but I want to hear from your listeners and from every developer that has feedback on data protocol you can email me Jake dataproc call.com I want that direct feedback uh so please let me know what you think I'm also on Twitter at Jacob M Ward uh and eager to hear folks thoughts at a minimum go to the site sign up it's free it's always going to be free for every developer there's no charge and you have the run of the platform check out the courses check out the the structure I want to hear your thoughts thank you so much for dis Jake and um hopefully we see you see you soon make deals let people go to your platform and experience it cheers thanks Tim I appreciate it