From building communities to building worlds

Eti: So, hi, I'm Eti and though I'm not in DevRel, I do manage to communities back in Israel, but today I am here as the VP of R and D at Wilco. Okay, the world about Wilco. Wilco/s mission is to empower every developer out there, regardless of the background or skill level to unlock the full potential lot of world. We basically build a platform that developer practise their skills, organ new skills by joining a fantasy company and performing tasks given to them by the new manager. So this is us and today I'm going to figure out the clicker by the end. And today I'm going to talk with you about how to use the trends of your community to build a better product or a better company. I'm going to echo some of my fellow speakers that spoke like the past two days. I think they have a lot of good tips.

And before I'm going to dive into my tips, I want to go with you the basic of the sales approach. We have the top down, which we identify like the key decision maker and we want to sell them our product. And only in the end the product is actually been used by the real users. But in the second one is bottom up when we cast a wide net and try to bring as many users as we can to use our platform. Hopefully they will like it and we'll also give them the motivation to share the platform and some tools to bring an open doors for us in their organisation, which is the actual buyer.

Daniel, the other day talk about the PLD approach, which is a great implementation of bottom up. And you can also think about GitHub and VS code, which is a great example of how to do it. Developers use the product for free. They love the product, they love the brand, and as a result they bring it with them to their organisation. So though we still need the approval of the decision maker, we need still to close the transaction. There is a lot of value in creating an army of advocates that deliver your message and recommend your product to the friends, to their colleagues and later on to the manager. So this is why this approach is being used by a lot of company and also for us to build community. Sorry. So I'm going to share with you three tips. Yes, I succeeded and give examples of company that I think have used the tips widely.

And I'm going to start with involving the community. So involving the community is kind of wide, right? You have a lot of ways to involve the communities and a lot of example that given in the past two days. But I want to show you the buffer use case. So Buffer actually let their community shape their, they open up their roadmap and invite their community to vote, to comment, to suggest features. Think about how close their community feels with their product after they've been invited to be part of their development process. This is amazing and if you need to think about some practical tools to do this. So obviously as Jira and a Trello, that Buffer was used, but you also have Canvas io, which is a little bit less known, but it gives you a lot of roadmap and feedback management capabilities. So this is the first step.

The second one is API first. So when you think about API first, we actually welcome your community to build things on top of your product. Your product is being served as an ecosystem that can be easily expanded and evolved. It helps the community to be engaged with your product, but it also enlarges stickiness, which is very important. You ask your community to invest the most valuable resource, which is the time in your product and to expand it to use cases that you haven't even think about during the other day. Mention giving back to the community or thinking about them and not us. So when you're opening your API, you actually give your infrastructure, give your platform to other people and hopefully they will use it to serve their needs and use cases. So I mentioned here us as Wilco. So as I mentioned, we build a platform, a simulated world when we can practise skills and evolve, but I didn't mention which skills.

This is where we invite our community, we invite our user, we invite you guys to be part of our platform. We just in a perfect timing. Just yesterday we launched a new product called the Quest Builder and it gives our community or users the ability to build Quest on top of our product and basically showcase the technology if there's company or showcase their knowledge if it's an individual and help in our mission to upskilling users, developers, sorry. So when you think about tools that can help you when you want to invite developer, use your product, documentation is a crucial part for this initiative to succeed. So I mentioned both Swagger and Postman Collection, which is known in the documentation of products that aims to developers. And my last and third tip is invest in open source. So if some large examples of company that started their core product as an open source, you can think about HashiCorp that created and maintain Terraform and Vault.

We also have Elastic and Redis, which our free version gives you a lot of capabilities and you can also for it and create your own version of the product. But I chose to present you with AppRight, which our dev is here in the cloud. Yeah, so the interesting story about AppRight, it's actually started as a side product of the maintainer. It is gained a lot of at traction of folks of contribution as you see, and only in the community of our prep is very, very big and connected and only at the later phase of the company it's actually raised money and build a company. So very interesting story. And you also can think about when you want to invest in open source. It doesn't have to be your co-product, it can be a friction of the product, it can be like a side product that support your main goal, but it's also can be an open source.

It already exists out there. The reason we want to invest in open source is we want to give back to the community. We want to invest our resources back to the community and show us we care. And we do want to give back. And so tool for this, I don't need to mention glab, right? Like the most big one for if you want to share a code, but I do mention Product Hunt and avo. That helps you attract more audience to your product and also manage the feedback and suggestion that you have. Oh, okay. It's okay. Feedback. That suggestion that you can bring from your community. So this is a summary of the thing. I want you to think about the sales approach that works best for your organisation. Try to involve your community in many ways. Then I think we have a lot of ideas and tips that was shared in the past two days. Think about API first and how you can invite people to contribute and build things on top of your product and also invest time in open source. It's very important and show our community that we care and that we are giving back. So thank you very much. If you want to join us and building Quest on top of top, this is the QR code. I'm on Twitter still. They didn't move there and any other, so thank you.