Superfans

Matthew: Hey, welcome to episode two of the Devrel Book Club. And if you're joining us on the live stream or you can see on the YouTube video, I do have to say that for reasons that are not particularly interesting, I'm outside in the dark. Anyway, nevermind. How are you, Carmen?

Carmen: Thank you. I'm doing very well. It's good to see you, Matt. Yeah, it's a bit dark out there, but it's nice to see you in some peaceful nature as well.

Matthew: Yeah, you might hear the odd bird or something like that, so I apologise for that. Anyway, so while the light is washing out my face there, I'll say I, well, I'll introduce myself. My name is Matthew Revel, and I work as a developer relations consultant at Hoopy. And Carmen, why don't you introduce yourself?

Carmen: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Hi, I am Carmen. I'm a developer advocate at Suborbital. I just started yesterday. Very exciting. And yeah, also a developer relations consultant and developer educator having a wonderful time here.

Matthew: Awesome. Great stuff. Okay, so this is our second episode of the DevRel Book Club. Last time we spoke to Joe Nash about what was it, building Online communities or successful online communities. And today we're going to be talking about super fans by Pat Flynn, and we'll be joined by,

Carmen: We'll be joined by Tessa Kriesel. Very excited to have her on.

Matthew: Yeah, great to have Tessa join us. So let's bring Tessa in. And Tessa, why don't you introduce yourself?

Tessa: My name is Tessa. I am a DevRel coach nowadays and have been in the DevRel industry for, I don't even know, six years now, but have been building communities my entire technical career. My first community that I built was a guitar hero community, and the only reason I learned how to code is so that I could build this community. Now, here I am in this derail career, so to say it's fate would be an understatement. So very excited to be here.

Carmen: Guitar Hero as in the video game.

Tessa: Yes. And it was recognised by Activision. All of our tournaments were inside of their community. I got really awesome sweat. It was so cool. One of the coolest stories for my developer career start.

Carmen: That's amazing. That is so awesome. I'm so glad you can hear

Tessa: That with me on that.

Matthew: So Tessa, you are going to talk to us today about super fans, and I have a coffee here, and I would like to ask you, Hey, I would like to ask you, what brought you to this book? How did you come across super fans?

Tessa: Yeah, so oddly enough, it wouldn't be the traditional way that you would think and like, Hey, I want to do a thing, so I'm going to pick up a book and do it because God forbid I do things the easy way. But I like to throw myself into things. And what actually happened was in my very first more official DevRel role, I started noticing that we had all of these customers and prospective developers and just users in general that would say all these amazing things about us. I love this product. I love the developer flow, I love the tooling, I love whatever, lots of love. And to me, to get anything like that from a developer is like, whoa, okay, something must be really great because they can be very high energy people, but for them to get to that level of passion, it has to truly be really good. And so essentially, I started noticing all of this as I was a developer advocate and brought this to my manager's attention. And I was like, Hey, did you know we have all of this kind of fan base happening and we're really not doing anything with it?

I had chatted with marketing, I had chatted with some of the other teams and they're like, yeah, we see that every once in a while. We don't really do much with it. And I'm like, what? They're literally advertising for us. Why are we not talking to 'em? And so I just started getting these ideas of like, okay, if these folks are already out there advocating, they're essentially developer advocates externally, they're doing my job, they're making my job easier. And so I started partnering with them. We do blog posts, we do presentations, and I think we're doing something like this right now in this book club, bringing some like-minded people together and really raising awareness to something that we all feel passionate about.

And so started doing that, and it actually turned into this full fledged programme. Many people know them today, ambassador programmes, VIP programmes. I think there's a lot of great tech companies that have kind picked up this as well. But I actually picked the book up after I started pulling this together because I'm like, what is this programme that I've just kind of curated based on what I would want as a developer of this product, what I think my users would want, and how we think that this can build our business? And found the book. And I just instantly fell in love with the book Pat Flynn feels, I've never met him, but I can tell you, you all read the book. So I'm a super fan of Pat Flynn, and if you read the book, you'll be like, ah, I understand that. And I haven't had the chance to really join any of his communities and such, but I've been eagerly excited to do so.

I think that this book is really incredible, but it really came across my plate after I started building something like a superfans programme like Pat Flynn breaks down in his book and just was really looking for like, okay, I think I know what I'm doing, but I really actually have no idea. I'm just shooting from the gut here.

Matthew: So for people who haven't read the book, what is a super fan?

Tessa: So a super fan, I think you can really break that down into many different definitions, but to me is a super fan is really one of your empowered or your power users. It's someone who, if you're putting them or giving them a net promoter survey for them to complete, they're a nine or a 10, they're a promoter. They appreciate your work, they want to engage with your work. A super fan really is so excited about what you're doing that they want to advocate for you. And I think so many of us see them naturally, especially in the DevRel industry, which is why, again, I was so passionate about doing this book is that it's getting those folks that love and appreciate your product and that want to speak about it more positively and will engage in any capacity and opportunity that you provide them because of that.

Carmen: That's wonderful. I to, I know this would break a little bit the flow of this podcast, but I'd just love to point out that in the chat today, Pat Flynn stopped by.

Tessa: Yeah, no way. Pat Flynn, I'm one of your biggest fans.

Carmen: Awesome. I'd love to read what he's saying if that's fine.

Matthew: Sure.

Carmen: He said, I saw y'all were talking about my book, just wanted to pop in and say hi. And thank you so grateful that you're spreading the word about how important generating and supporting Superfans are.

Matthew: Awesome. Well that's lovely. Cool. Thanks for pointing that out, Carmen, because on my tiny screen here, I can't fit this call on at the same time as the street. So Tessa then when I read through the book, it's divided into key points that are illustrated with stories. So what I would like to know is what are the points that Patrick raises that have been of most practical benefit to you in DevRel?

Tessa: Oh gosh, so many. I'm going to let all of the readers in on a little secret of how I read books. So I go through and actually highlight books. I'm assuming you do the same, but I go through and highlight. So as a techie, I think many of us can relate to this. I have ADD, so I get down tunnel vision. I get really excited about something and want to stay focused. So I actually read books through Audible where I listen to them, and then I have the physical book in front of me so I can highlight.

So I can tell you so many different things, but I think what the first story that Pat tells is this story about his wife and also I think it's just amazing that he brings his wife into the story. I have a very close marriage with my husband, so that also added some relatability of the family ties. He's building Superfans, he's putting it out there. And I think the part that really drilled it home early on was hearing that Backstreet Boys story, his wife just loved Backstreet Boys, this tote of all this stuff wanted to go to their concerts, wanted to meet them, wanted to engage with them. And I think we all have really fallen into that in some capacity. I think man, who was my band that I was just obsessed with as a teenage girl, I think it was the one where they sing Summer Girls. They weren't super popular, but they were a boy band that got just a little glimmer of time. Anyways, not on the same level, but when we find those things that we're super excited about, like April found Backstreet Boys, I believe that's what her name was.

Anyways, April found Backstreet Boys and just got invested heavily. And so I related that a lot to, again, kind of coming back to my days, a guitar hero. My early days when I got into tech and wanted to really build something and build my own community is that I loved Guitar Hero. And at that time you couldn't engage with books on the same level. You could play games, but you couldn't build a community together. There wasn't let me bring these crews together, an Xbox and PlayStation. Now it's like you can have your little squad of friends and you all work together and it wasn't the same. So I think hearing that story about that love for kind of Backstreet Boys and how that continued to trickle out through her life, even as an adult, he also references a story about Star Trek and the Trekkies Fan Club.

And I think that really sticks to me as a really great way to explain to folks what a superfans programme can look like. Thinking about Star Trek, I'm not a Star Trek watcher myself, I've never seen it, but I know of this Trek's name. And as someone who's never seen Star Trek, I still have heard that Trek is kind of naming convention or name for their fan club. And so when you take those two stories together, I feel like it really summarises the book and finding this way of, we've all got fans in some capacity, I can admit that I have folks that retweet things that I share who really help elevate me. And those folks become very clear in your life. And so when you're able to really take those kinds of relationships and bring them to another level, I think those two stories, like I said, really shined.

Carmen: Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you. And one thing that I really enjoyed about this book as well was the personal nature to these stories because it's something that It kind of documented something that I found myself doing just subconsciously. I love connecting with people. That's one reason I like being in DevRel so much is because it's one of the things I have to do every day is connect with people. So one of my viscerally favourite things about it and some of the things that Pat shares in that about, for example, sharing personal sides to yourself today, just today I was doing a lesson and in the middle of it series started talking to me. I dunno why that happened, but it just happened and it kind of made it more human to just be like, Hey, thank you for chiming in Siri. Everybody had a laugh and it was disarmingly human in a really good way.

And that's what I appreciate about the stories as well. And folks, if you're interested in the book, I listened to the audiobook myself while keeping notes on an electronic version. And one thing that I found interesting is that Pat added even more of himself to the audiobook. So there's a whole bunch of side notes and side stories that are adding onto that, and that really drew me in, which I found super, super interesting. So personal baby aside, I wanted to ask Tessa, how do you find yourself mapping that very personal one-on-one thing of Superfans to then doing so as a company, as a tech company on behalf of a company? Is that something that you found is, is there a transition there that you found was easy to map?

Tessa: Yes, I have actually. And I think that you all have those pivotal points in your career. For me it was like, whoa, I got so passionate about a video game that it taught me how to code, or I taught myself how to code a pivotal point in my career. I think that building my first Superfans programme and then picking up this book and really relating that from what my experience was as a developer and what I wanted out of a programme and then bringing in Pat Flynn's great advice. And then again, being aware, I think all of us, probably after we've read the book now, we're a little more aware of the things that are happening. We can kind of spot a super fan. We spot superfan programmes a little easier, at least I do for sure. But I think that the thing that's really drilled home for me is, and I actually shared this slide the other day, but my slide was a little bit messy, but I ended up pulling out, and I'll share it as a tweet afterwards, and maybe I'll even put it in the comments here, but what you can really do is even at a high level, and I'm going to drop it in there and hopefully it looks good.

Nope, it broke it into a big paragraph anyways. But at a high level, it gave you 11 steps to think about. And so as you're thinking about this, I think that especially right now, there are so many companies that want DevRel programmes, they want a DevRel team. There are not a lot of us to hire from. I think we all can relate and experience that. But the thing about it is that you can start with such a small community. And I think that's one of the myths that I feel like a lot of folks think about when building a community. I need a hundred people to start a community.

I need a thousand people to start a community. And I think at the end of the day, when you have what those folks need and you're actually doing the things that they need, you only need five to 10 of them to truly start a community. And I think that a lot of that was really learned from the lessons that Pat Flynn broke out. So to kind of speak to my long jargony thing that I posted there, learning their language, I mean, that is 0. 1 of DevrRel, who are your users going to be? What do they care about? How do you get to know them? How do you learn their language?

And in our case, their actual technical language. But that's just step one. And Pat Flynn breaks all this out per chapter. And so if you actually pick up the book, look at each chapter and pull out one quick thing from it, he really guides you through this whole 11 to 13 step process, depending on how you want to expand it, of building and curating a community with such a small group. And that's those steps I created there, learn their language, create the space, bringing them together that discord, if that's what it is early on, maybe it's an email chain. It's just like something small. And I think that although Pat Flynn doesn't speak to DevRel specifically, it does give you a lot of kind of innuendos of like, oh, okay, yep, that works. Okay, I definitely have to learn their language first.

I surely need to give them quick wins. If they don't know what we're doing or they don't know how to engage with us, they're just going to run away. And so I think that many, many things that came out of this book that drove towards that, but really breaking it down and really thinking about conceptually how you build a group of people because that's what community is. And so when you take the advice from the superfans book and think about how do I create this kind of army as I call them, of superfans, it really is just your early days of building that very niche, that very small, kind of tight knit maybe invite only community that you eventually are like, okay, I followed all of these steps to build this tight community. Now how do I expand this and scale this so I've got a full fledged developer community that's actually serving my users in a greater scale. So kind of coming back around, I think that thinking about DevRel and DevRel programmes, I think encourage more folks to think about it that way is you have a very small group, even if you are just getting your product out there and you've asked 10 people to try it, if those 10 people are excited, maybe they're even your friends, they're your first army. Learn from them, expand on it, build on the things in the book, and then start to scale that right externally to some of those actual users.

Matthew: One of the things that Pat mentions in the book is the idea of, and Carmen, you touched on this as well, is the idea of giving of your personal self in order to make connections with people. And as I read that part, I think that's one of the parts that perhaps sat least comfortably with me because not everyone in DevRel you shouldn't have to have that kind of connection with your developed community if you don't feel comfortable about that. So I wondered if you could maybe speak to that a little bit around, do you have to really make that deeply personal connection that he advocates in order for a community to work?

Tessa: Yeah, I think that there's two sides to that answer. I can completely understand your answer. I think for me, I'm extremely extroverted, which if that's not ridiculously clear in this conversation already, I love people. And for anyone who has followed me on Twitter for a long time, my life is on Twitter and not everything. I keep a lot of things to myself, but I am very open and I have learned that very early on as a child, I had some experiences that led me to where I was. I did a lot of sticking up for people who were bullied just due to some situations I was in. And I think as my life has gone on, that's just who I am. And so it's actually served me very well in the DevRel space that I am very open.

But the thing is is that there are a lot of folks, especially those who go from being a software engineer into finding themselves in DevRel as their very first career, and they're like, no, this is not me. I'm not putting myself up to the world. And I know many folks that don't. There are tonnes of DevRel people who are wildly successful in DevRel that have under a thousand followers, and none of those things should ever be correlated and be related because it doesn't strive and push to who we really are and the success we can really find. What I think is important is being able to be candid with the folks that we do engage with on a one-to-one level. I think putting yourself out there publicly can be very scary. I think putting yourself out there and sharing things about yourself can be scary and it is not a necessity for a community to find success. You can definitely find tonnes of success by putting more of your company things out there by putting more information out there from say, founders or key leaders across the org that are comfortable doing that.

Maybe engineering leaders who want to share more, or maybe you do that from a product side, sharing more about your product, sharing more about your roadmap. I think it doesn't have to be a personal one-to-one, but I do think that as he frames it, open up the factory, open up your factory doors in some capacity, and he tells a story about Hershey and how folks can go into the Hershey quarters. Now, I think in Philly, maybe Philadelphia, somewhere in that area, you can go in and actually tour Hershey and see their operations. And so coming back to that story, there are many ways that we can kind of open up the doors to what we're doing. And it doesn't have to be on a personal level, I will say, in a community building set, I think when you can be somewhat candid with someone at least on a one-to-one basis, I think it can drive some impact. But it doesn't have to be personal. It can be, Hey, I just learned to react last year myself, and so this is new technology for me too. I'm starting to pick this up.

Here's what I've learned, and here's some resources for that. And that's not putting out your personal life, that's not telling everyone that you've got three dogs, which I tell people all the time or anything else. It's just letting them know that you're in the same space with them. And I think that that relatability is really where people find that success in DevRel of like, Hey, I am in the same as you. I can relate to you, and if you want to share personal, great. But I think more than anything, they just want to understand that you understand their journey and that you can help them on that journey in some capacity.

Matthew: I think there's a difference between being authentic, your authentic self, but also maybe leaving a portion of yourself at home. Exactly. For people who've just joined the stream, I'm never going to explain why I'm in total darkness. You only get by joining the stream only. But anyway, seriously, I think that is a really important part is that I don't mind talking about the fact that I've got two docs, but there are certain parts of my life that just don't seem relevant, which I wouldn't go into on Twitter or in a work situation. I just wanted to flag that as something, if people are thinking about going into Dev Re and they look at a book like this that says, well, you've got to share yourself. I don't think that should be a reason to avoid DevRel or community work generally.

Tessa: Totally agree. Which is why I tried to give as many examples as possible of other ways you can do it right? Open up the company, open up the product, get someone else to open up themselves, right? Because then you can leverage that. Or hey, maybe your super fans are crazy extroverted like I am, and maybe they want to do it. And that's a great way to do it too.

Carmen: That's an excellent point, and it kind of made me think about what you were saying about one-on-one, right? And at the risk of sounding cliched, it is called developer relations. Our job is to relate with other developers. And I think the multifaceted, multifaceted nature of DevRel speaks to that, how there are different types of DevRel work one can do, for example, what is it? I think during, I heard learned about the term partner engineering where your job is not so much to build a large community, but rather have those one-on-one relationships with other vendors or clients. And there that ability to relate is really important without having to go into a public situation. So I think those tips are really important to keep in mind as you decide which part of DevRel you wish to check out

Tessa: A hundred percent.

Matthew: One thing that moving on a little bit that stuck out to me in the book, sorry, did I just freeze? No,

Carmen: No, you're totally fine.

Matthew: Oh, cool. Everything froze with me. One thing that stuck out for me in the book was the exercises at the end of each chapter line up really well with the design claims from the book that we covered last month, the Building Successful Communities Online by MIT press, which is a look at all those PostIt notes. I love it. And that's a work of social science research backed by the scientific method and all that good stuff. And Pat's book, without taking away from it, is personal experience distilled. And I just think it's interesting. I don't really have a point, but I just think it's interesting that the same things kind of hits up in both books. But

Tessa: I love that you brought that up. I have not read the book that you covered last month, but now I want to, so I actually have some time off in the next few weeks and I'm taking things slow. And so I'm going to catch up on all these books that I've started one chapter on and then put back on my shelf like Radical Candour and just work by Kim Scott and just some other kind of community books. David Spinks book, I have not, shoot, I can't remember the name of it, but David Spinks has a book that I hear is lovely on community. I think the business value of community or something, I don't recall. But anyways, I'm going to add that one to my list because I think having, I'm a very data driven person and I feel like a lot of folks in DevRel are the same way. And I think that's why metrics is always this conversation for us because it's like, wait, what is the best way to track? We all know that.

Sure, we can say, Hey, yeah, we got a blog post and there's a hundred views on it, but at the end of the day we're like, yeah, those a hundred views don't mean anything if they didn't take that next step. And so I think it's this ever-growing conversation in DevRel to talk about metrics. So coming back again to where I was getting to with the data is that learning about how folks actually think and operate. The more that I've been in DevRel, the more I want to get into psychology and understand the human mind. I understand developers, I understand and can relate. I am one myself, but I know that I'm different. I know that I want things in a different way, but it really makes me curious, how do all of our minds really think in this way? How is it that we're just able to just say sales and marketing?

No. And so coming back, I think reading that book would be incredible because for me, I need those stories. I need the relatability. And Pat Flynn does such a great job of saying, Hey, here's a story. Here's something I personally experienced or something I've personally see happen in someone's business and really drive that impact. The storytelling capabilities that man has is amazing, but having some of that data to say, okay, cool, super fans really hits at home. I can relate, but having some of that psychology would be really cool. So very interesting that you brought that up.

Those exercises are so incredible. I think that for me, I get and understand how to build these programmes. I've been in DevRel for a while and it helped build many successful programmes, but even in my own community, I had four different tools that I was trying to hodgepodge together, and I'm like, what am I doing? Nobody wants this experience, but when it's so close to yourself, you don't do it. So I actually found myself going back and doing the exercises to really think about Devocate and how I build up our developer relations community and how I think about super fans in that way. So I just launched our superfan programme last week, so it's all really exciting and cool to hear that the books actually relate to each other these first two months that you're doing this podcast.

Carmen: In fact, it kind of feels like a practical application of that theory. So it's kind of really amazing. I'd love to take an opportunity for folks who are listening and don't really know about it. Do you want to tell us a little bit about Devocate?

Tessa: Oh, sure. I mean, it's been a whole bunch of stuff. That's kind of the long answer, I guess is I've done Devocate. For me, eventually what I do plan to build is almost a, I don't want to say almost, it will be a platform to engage and leverage super fans, but in a very authentic way. So bringing in your audience, who are those super fans? How do you identify them? How do you build campaigns for them? And when I say campaigns, not like icky marketing campaigns, how do we curate an experience for them?

How do we welcome them in the best way? How do we nurture their relationship? And then how do we take that nurturing and allow them to have that space and capability to go out and advocate for us in whatever capacity that is, whether that be on a community side or whether that be, Hey, I'd love this product, you should go check it out. And so taking that into a SaaS platform and then having some really great reporting metrics on it. So very early on just found kind of my technical co-founder, and the two of us are really diving into that this year of bringing that to an actual fruition. But while I ideated on that, and that was a couple of years ago that I've been thinking about this and have just kind of been, I don't know, lots of excuses, but just dragging my feet of career plus business, how do you do it both and also be the breadwinner of your household and have children? But as I've been thinking about that, I've written a lot of content on DevRel. I think that there's so many great things.

I know Matthew, you've contributed a lot of great stuff as well that I've seen out there. The state of developer relations reports are so, so impactful. But I've tried to take that shift and really talk about how to do DevRel kind of change because there are so many ways to do DevRel, and it's impossible to say, yep, this is how you do it, because there is no one way. But how do we give folks more opportunity to join into our industry? I think more than anything, I found my passion and my career path, and I know that there are many other technical folks who fall into that same excitingness of like, wait, I can talk to my friends. I can help them find success. I can take them and do cool events and host parties for them. And of course, that's all the glamour of DevRel, right?

There's a lot of non glamour, but there is a lot of greatness to it. And so the more that I feel I can instil to folks, the better. So it's eventually a SaaS platform right now, it is a community of folks who are in DevRel who are aspiring developer advocates who are engaging in some capacity. I think there's a lot of product managers. There's a lot of recruiters that actually come in and read my content. But it's a full fledged blog full of lots of random content on DevRel and slowly becoming one cohesive community that will actually have some really great impactful resources. And some courses, I have launched one course on how to bring together a developer relations campaign, not the marketing word either, but really how do you take a blog post and a conference presentation and a webinar and a Twitch stream and bring that all together and have metrics that relate back to a whole entire campaign of work. And so lots of continuing education for DevRel at the end of the day in its current state.

Matthew: Awesome. Very cool. Thanks for sharing that.

Tessa: Thank you for letting me share that. It's a little ramble, but thank you.

Matthew: So I think we've covered a great deal of super fans. The book, one thing that Pat mentions in the book is there's all this other material, and you touched on Carmen with perhaps some of the bringing himself to the audio book, but there's a whole kind of other set of material. Can you just touch on that a little bit please, Tessa?

Tessa: Yeah. Are you talking about the course that goes with it?

Matthew: Sure, I am. Yes.

Tessa: Yeah. Yes. So I haven't dove into that in great detail yet. I have some little notes to do that. But the nice thing, and one other thing I want to share about Pat too is that he has this course. And so there's all these additional exercises and things that you can go and do, not only at the end of the chapter does he say, Hey, here's a way for you to go in and actually do a thing. So one of them that really stuck out to me was quick wins. I think that we all bring people together, and I've been bringing people together for a long time, but I didn't really think about when you've got that first touchpoint with someone, how do you deliver that quick win?

How do you take that and shift it to a way where they're like, oh my gosh. And the person who does this really well is Adam DuVander, and hopefully that's how he pronounces his last name. He has a book called Marketing does Not Exist, or Developer Marketing Does Not Exist, and his Nurture emails are like, so coming back around, I think that what Pat does through these exercises and through these courses is that he really tells this great story in the Audible book. He gives you even more context, which is so great to listen to because for me, I was reading through the pages, I'm like, wait, I can't highlight this. It's not in the book. And I'm like, oh, this is bonus content. And brings this into a course that really walks you through it. You get to have video content of him explaining it.

You get to see that face to face conversation, which for me really sets it home when I get to see someone's face. I love doing things like this and then helps you work through those exercises and has just a little bit of additional context to them. And so you can step away with hearing a story and seeing like, oh my gosh, look at Star Trek and Trekkies. Look how successful that fan Fan club became and hear a lot more about how that started in the book. And then move on to the exercise that he outlines in the book and then pick up that course, which is free to anyone who bought the book. If you know what the URL is, you can go pick it up and really be able to dive into that even deeper, which I think is just so great, especially for early community builders, because everything that's in this book is really just the basic traits of building a community. It's the basic fundamentals of bringing people together. And so going through that can really start to shape, okay, cool.

Not only am I setting myself up for super fan programmes and being able to bring people together on that scaled level, but I'm starting to learn about how to actually leverage and do this inside of my own community. And like I said, I've got notes in my book of Do this with Ate, do this with some of your other users. You should bring people together in this way. And so it's just really fun to read through it and actually think about those exercises as you go through it.

Carmen: Thank you. I love this. It was super inspiring to know that this is something that this real life application of the theories that we were talking about are now being reapplied in real life, also to that success. And that's such a powerful thing I find. And this has been absolutely wonderful, Tessa, and I wish we could go on, but I'm afraid we're running out of time. So I wanted to ask if you could give us, I dunno, a short version of why folks should go out and read this book. What would you, a sort of quick pitch on why they should read it? I'd love to hear what you think.

Tessa: Oh gosh. I don't know if I could do it quick, honestly. Okay, so I'll try to do quick pitch, right? I think that there are not a lot of books out there on DevRel, right? There are a couple handful of books. Adam's book on developer marketing doesn't exist. There's Caroline James's book, which is incredible. I'm just going to do a little snap to it.

Absolutely. Pick up this book if you're in DeVere, it's so, so good. And then another book is Mary Thengvall's book The Business Value. Now I got books falling Everywhere, all great books, right on DevRel in general. And it gives you a good insight into what DevRel is and how you can apply it to your business. I think what Superfans does is allows you to say, okay, I've got a good understanding of DevRel, or at least I have a good understanding of developers, maybe a little idea of what they need, some of the impact and things that I'll struggle through with a company through some of those other books. But what Superfans does is actually tells you how to apply it. How do you apply these community building techniques and gives you real stories that you can relate to and think like, aha, okay, pat Flynn did it in this way, or he experienced it in this way.

How do I relate that to my daily life? And so for me, I think that it's just a great book to pick up and be like, okay, I need to build a community. I've got a few people in my community. How do I take those few people and scale them to hundreds to thousands and really build a truly amazing community that new folks can come into and be like, wow, where have I been this whole time? I can't believe I missed this. And just gives you that. This is how you can go about doing it.

Carmen: I love that. Thank you.

Matthew: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed discussing this book. It's been a good one. So thank you. Tessa. People can find you @devocate.com, is that

Tessa: Right? Yep. devocate. com. And also on Twitter, I'm all over on Twitter, not so much on LinkedIn. I decided to dump my LinkedIn profile the other day, which is very liberating and actually spend a lot of time on PolyWorks. If you haven't heard of Poly Work, definitely check out Poly Work. I've got a portfolio of awesome stuff that I've done there as well.

So devocate. comcom, Twitter poly work, or just Google me.

Matthew: Awesome. Great. Thanks. Well look, as we're wrapping up, I would just like to mention next month's DevRel Book Club. So Suze Shardlow from Redis is going to be joining us to talk about the Art of Gathering, and that'll be on the 15th of March at 10 30 in the morning, UK Western European time. So uk, Ireland and Portugal, and Iceland I think. But 1130 if you're in France, Germany, or places like that. And also four in the afternoon in India.

So join us here live dot developer relations. com for that. And also, if you want to catch these episodes as a podcast or video, go to develop relations and follow the links there. So Tessa, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Hope you have a lovely rest of your day.

Tessa: Thank you so much for having me. Excited for next month's book club, and I'm going to catch up on last month and grab that book myself. So thank you for those tips.

Matthew: Great stuff. And Carmen, thanks again. Lovely to spend some time with you

Carmen: As always. It's a pleasure. And if I may say, Tessa, this was such an I feel fired up from this conversation. This was so much fun. Thank you.

Tessa: The book makes me feel so successful.

Matthew: Great. Well, goodbye.

Carmen: Bye everyone. See you next time.