Thriving on a budget: Success with a 'community of everywhere' approach

Jason: Hey everyone, since I'm the last Lightning talk, I mean let's put a hand together for or multiple hands together for our entire lineup of Lightning Talks and all the talks today. They were really great. In fact, a lot of them already said what I'm up here to say, so I'll try and think of other things to say. So where is the clicker? Here

MC: It is. Should have done that first. No. Having a hard time here with the clicker. Where's the thing? Sorry about this. Okay. Point it there and right. Thank you.

Jason: Alright, cool. Alright, we're good now. So like we said, I'm Jason Baum and I'm the Senior Director of DevRel for Sauce Labs. Sauce Labs. If you haven't heard of us, have you heard of us? Okay, some, yeah. We're a cloud-based testing solution. People probably are more familiar with Selenium. Selenium is a browser automation library. Primary use case is testing. And 20 years ago, this is actually the celebration shirt that we created to honour the community. 20 years ago, our co-founder Jason Huggins, founded Selenium and then four years later founded Sauce. Fun fact, he gave Selenium to the Software Freedom Conservancy before taking any VC money purposely. So hands up for that. Alright, that's awesome. I live just across the river in Rutherford, New Jersey. Give it up for New Jersey. No, probably not anybody. No buddy. And this is my family, my wife Jill, and my six and a half year old daughter, Lily.

She really insists on the half. Okay. So for a really long time I can't see my notes, so I'll just go off the cuff, whatever. Why not? So back in the days of Weezer, let's talk about that. In 19 98, 19 99, I got really curious and went on to the A OL chat rooms and found a Weezer community to talk about a band that I liked, but none of my friends did. And we had a really good time and we never talked about Weezer, but we formed a really cool bond and then a few years later found that the band actually had forums. And so in 2000, 2001 during the middle of maybe journalism class or something, I spent a lot of time on the forms and thus got involved. And from there, that sparked my love of community. And I've been lucky to be paid to work in community for just about 20 years in the introduction set.

So back then when in 98, 99, there were really only a couple options to find an online community and that was either forums or chat rooms. And there was really only two places to go. It's kind of similar today, I feel like where people think about the nucleus of their community is going to be a forum or a chat channel. And I thought that way too for a really long time. And I had to evolve recently. COVID helped do that, but I had to think of other methods and I wanted to see what it would be like minimal viable community if we didn't have a brand community at all. In my past, I found that they're expensive to start. You have to hire someone. We didn't have a budget and I decided to spend a lot of time in our open source communities. And that's when I started to learn more about community of everywhere. And what that is, is you basically don't necessarily have a proprietary chat forum or what have you, and instead live in multiple spaces, whether it's open source communities, like I said, blogs. And it would be really helpful to have my notes. I'm totally forgetting a lot of stuff, but I'll just keep talking.

And that's when we realised we were the Selenium company basically. And we totally were not spending enough time in that community. I knew that several people at Sauce worked within Selenium as contributors and committers and we're on project leadership positions. And so I kind of repositioned my team, I brought them on and we spent a tonne of time in the Selenium community. And then we started to do the same with Appium, which is essentially the mobile web driver standard. And the same with a web driver io, which is a lesser known JavaScript version of that. And we started doing events for no cost to the community. We founded something called Continuous Testing Meetup. We gave it to the community. We host some meetups ourselves in our offices, but overseas it's hosted by the community completely. We plan to give the San Francisco one away and we doubled down on our YouTube content and our YouTube content has just completely taken off.

We scaled our show. We started about a year ago. We are upwards of 50,000 plus monthly viewers of our two YouTube shows. We are scaling at about 10 to 15% month over month, which has been awesome. And we're going to continue to invest there. We also invest heavily in our swag. If you've heard of Sauce Labs, you probably thought we were a hot sauce company. Many people hit me up still on Twitter or LinkedIn for Hot Sauce because their spouse, they ran out of it and their spouse thought that they could just go pick it up at the store. Not joking. And Angie Jones still contacts me for Sauce and we did a lot of this on a budget. I'm going to briefly go over these because I'm sure that's what a lot of people came here for. Even though I didn't really do a lot for budget, it was don't spend overspend on fancy tools. Tools are great. There are a lot of really good community tools out there. There's no perfect tool yet. I'm hoping one comes along, but I use several.

I wouldn't overly rely on them and expect that if you build a community all of a sudden you're going to have a tonne of people rely on organic growth. This means obviously community taking your stuff and running with it. We don't spend on any of our YouTube content, we don't spend on any of our content. Actually all of it's community driven sponsor wisely. I think Rebecca said ICPI was really happy to hear Ideal Customer Profile mentioned because I was going to mention it as well, make sure that they're present. It's really fun to go to developer conferences, but if your ICP is not necessarily a developer, make sure they're at least there so that you can then take that information back to your boss and say, we at least got something out of this conference. But I will say that being with the community, being part of the community, if you haven't gotten that point by now, is incredibly important. Keep the team small. We went through a lot of risks. Like everyone else. We were not touched because we were a small team. Well, I'm sorry we were touched in a very early one. But after that we were not, because we learned to keep the team lean. We hired t T-shaped people only, meaning not generalists, and we deployed them. Everyone has a unique role. There is no duplication and therefore everyone's vital to the team.

And that's it for today. I hope to catch you all and we could talk about this more. This was a lot of content that I wanted to put in here in an incredibly short period of time. So it's not nearly the amount of time that does it justice. But I really appreciate Dev recon. Thank you all and hope to see you soon.