What's the ROI of developer relations?

Phil Leggetter: My name's Phil. Leggetter. Leggetter. Yeah. I'm headed to Population.

Is that of interest? Who's said of Pusher before? Okay. Not bad. Who's used Pusher before?

Okay. That's a good first metric. I'm gonna say 80%. So we're a hosted API that helps you integrate real time features into your web, mobile, and IoT apps. I'm gonna try and fly through this pretty quickly.

Woah. Oh, what's that? So I was I was out yesterday doing my daily training exercises, and I decided to pause and reflect in the midst about developed relations. Thanks to Joe for that one. And I kind of realized that developed relations is a bit like before.

Sometimes you can't always see it, measure it, feel it, and you need to believe. And then look at some point, you'll be in a situation probably around the board, like a big boardroom table and somebody will ask that question what's what's the ROI and sometimes it's quite difficult to not to you know use the force and potentially in the back. Can people see that? It's important. It's not really important.

Can we turn those lights out? No. Anyway, can see that one. So and I don't wanna be drawn towards the dark side. That's obviously marketing in sales.

We don't we don't want be part of that. Although we set up the marketing. Because obviously we're J. D. I.

S. Right? We're part of the J. D. I.

Order and we do things in different ways. We resolve problems patients, through apparently logic, tolerance, a tentative listening, negotiation persuasion, and calming techniques, but probably through stats. So this is what our this is what our, you know, relations meet up review sessions look like. So what I want to talk about now, honestly, is kind of what we do, what we can track, what we hope to be able to track. This is what we kind of have done in the past, which is I think everyone will admit is probably too much.

Like, for everything from maintaining libraries to to pre sell technical calls, doing the documentation, and so on. So push is in a fortunate situation right now that we're growing and we can focus a little bit. So most people remember this scene from Stowls where Hansel and Ajibat are discussing our metrics. And so we can focus on the two a's in that. So we're we're going to focus on acquisition, which for us is silence, and activation.

And activation for us is maintaining WebSocket connections for a single account and a 100 messages on that account. So we know that that means that well, we decided that that's the thing that says that that an application or an account is active and the reason we've gone with that is because we know that when they activate, the 48.69% of those accounts will eventually pay us some money which is, you know, a nice situation to be in. To understand that, if you can activate people, you will get money from the 50% of the time. Sounds a bit salesy to me. I guess you gotta get paid.

So from all of those things we did previously, our focus now is, you know, demos, tutorials, thought leadership stuff. So tutorials not only help people with sign ups, know, people become aware of what your product can do and they'll sign up, but also dormant customers will hopefully get an email or or come across this blog post and then start to understand the value that your product can give. Thought leadership in the real time space, I think it's quite important for Push to be seen as thought leaders not only in terms of real time but also you know generally technology which is obviously what we're evangelism. We want to be seen as knowing what's going on. And events.

Events, hackathons, in terms of our focus right now, we really want to get people using our API. We know they're great for product feedback, but the focus really is to, you know, exposure to our API and what we do. Talks like this, obviously, again, it's like what can you do with Pusher? Why should you use Pusher in a non pushy way? But also things like sponsorship booths where it's a great way of you could pick the right events, you understand the technologies that get most value out of your company, the types of developers, you can pick those well and get decent ROI from those.

So tracking. Digital is quite easy to track. It's the easiest of things to track. Whether that's the initial touching point or whether that's multiple touch points across by the process of them eventually signing up, if they've at least hit a digital piece of content at some point, we can when they sign, we know that they've signed up after touching a digital piece of content. Tricky things are, you know, in person, my multichannel stuff like in person and then online or multiple devices.

So they originally go to your site or a piece of content on their laptop, and then they eventually sign up on their mobile. That can be tricky. In person stuff is really difficult. Thinking about the the digital stuff, again, it's great that we are able to track 53% of our sign ups, have at some point touched a piece of digital content, whether that's a referral, whether that's a tutorial. Tracking events is really difficult.

There's no direct tracking. We've considered we can give out coupons, but we wanna be able to give out coupons at sign up. John Sheehan did a I think it's he did a talk a while ago and said that, you know, could Twilio tried coupons, and it didn't work. Twilio didn't work. Twilio didn't work.

Okay. So we might try it, but it maybe won't work. We'll maybe give everyone $3,000,000 credit. Will that work? No?

3. Maybe $3,000,000. We could get business cards of people and see what they sign up. Sounds pretty dull to me. Or we could just get digital with everything.

So I've seen a lot of trends going towards webinars and, you know, live coding stuff. Again, you've got that digital footprint, you can work out if they eventually sign up and relate blogs and so on. So when we do events, we we do qualitative analysis of them. We do similar stuff like, you know, how much did it cost, what the target what are types of folks we think get benefit on our platform there, How many attendees are there? What do we think of the other good talks at the event?

Were they of good quality? Did we engage with the attendees, or did they engage with the the speakers? Did they engage with each other? How many people were in your talk? Simple stuff.

And how many people have heard of push before, which is always quite a nice measurement. Correlation, I think, is the more interesting one. And what I mean by that is we do a bunch of activities. So I think, like, objects on geographic the stuff, which is something we haven't thought about, but that could be really valuable. So we publish a piece of content on some on technology x or attend an event on technology x, and then we we look at stats, so we look at sign ups using that technology, and we have a wizard when you sign up that users provide information about what technologies they're going to use.

So we know whether or we've just done a bunch of events on Python or PHP, and then we get loads of for instance, Laravel. We've done lots of on Laravel in a minute, we've we've seen a massive amount of sign ups using Laravel as a framework. And also API usage. So this is something we can track but aren't at the minute. So, you know, we have APIs for interacting with our we have SDKs for interacting with our our APIs.

So if we know which AP which SDKs are being used, we know which technologies are being used. And if we've just done a bunch of stuff around Laravel or or Node, and we can see those stats reflected in our API usage. Something I'm pretty proud of in terms of our developer relations activity. So Pusher was actually founded in 2010. In 2011, we got a million dollars, I guess, seeding funding stuff.

And from that point, we had a lot of money, so I was hired to do developer relations stuff. And and in general, the company focused on doing developer relations stuff. And from that point on, we had this nice line, this increase as we create content or we went to attend events. In early two we decided not to do as much of public relations activity, and this was the result. You can see this, you know, drop in silence.

And then towards the and then towards the end of 2014, we decided to do the congratulations activity again. Deserves a firework. Right? So awareness, sign ups, and if we can then activate those sign ups, we know it delivers value to the domain. There's a glaring omission in all of this.

Can I be see what I've not mentioned, developer relations? Right? So I haven't at all spoken about the important thing of building relations with people. How do you track that? Every time I meet someone, make sure I check their cloud score.

If it's below, like, 40. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. No. We don't do that.

But I think it's very difficult to build to do understand the value of relations. Actually, in this room, you have both relations, you access all of the developers. It's probably quite obvious to know that you build relationships with people here, that relationship and the value of that's gonna spread, but it's quite a tricky thing. Anyway, so we can measure the value of developer relations to a certain extent, but sometimes you simply need to believe and use the force. Right?

Luke didn't use he didn't use the goggles there. Like, totally blew up the dead star. That's the big round planet for bad people, Phil. Right? So that's me.

Thank you.