Understanding the DevRel role can be a little bit difficult, since the answer to what someone in this role does can change a lot depending on who you ask. This role can be focused on sales, improving the Developer experience or just creating technical content. But at the end, it shouldn’t matter what your tasks are, you should have a main goal, right?
We talked with Fabri, former DevRel in Lens protocol, now working at XMTP about what has led him to become a successful web3 DevRel and what goal really matters for this position.
Becoming a DevRel
Fabri is a Software engineer who started his career creating websites, working at E-Commerce platforms and creating projects as a Full Stack Developer but he found himself being burned out from the routine of just writing code and started to do a lot of research into the Ethereum ecosystem and decentralized technologies.
This led him to learn more about web3 and he tried to get a Full Stack Developer job in this ecosystem but then he found a different job description: DevRel. When he read the responsibilities of the role he found out that “This role was the match between my technical and sales skills” and he decided to cancel the Full Stack interviews and go for this new role. And he did: he got the DevRel position in Lens Protocol.
Increasing awareness of Lens Protocol
In that moment, Lens wasn’t the Lens we all know about right now, of course they already had good technology but they didn’t haved the awareness they do right now and they needed to connect with developers that could build using their tech.
That’s were Fabri contributed the most as DevRel, he had a very specific and goal oriented definition for his role:
“DevRel includes more than improve the product, it includes sales, customer support. It’s attracting more builders to your tech and give them the best experience. The best way to track your success is the amount of apps that has been built with your tech, one new app means the builders understood, tried and had success using your technology”
With this in mind, he understood what Lens was promoting: it wasn’t just their tech but the opportunity to create potential businesses using web3 social. So he started to organize the developer ecosystem to increase the awareness of those opportunities.
They created a grants program for devs, taught how to use their API and got the chance to give support to at least 90 teams of people building in Lens.
Best practices and the focus of a DevRel
One of the best practices that were successful in increasing the Lens awareness was to focus on relations with his own team and the developer community, even rejecting projects for the grant program was a very important process for him. He tried to explain to the applicants why their project wasn’t ready for it yet and this helped him to connect again with some teams when they were ready.
“That’s the case of Waves, I meet them in a hackathon. It was their first web3 project and they didn’t won the prize but then they came back to Buenos Aires to show me their project because they wanted to hear our feedback and it improved so much that they got a place inside the grants program. They keep iterating and that’s one of the stories I remember the most”
This shows that every relationship that you build as a DevRel can be really valuable, it’s not just giving support for their first experience but also being with them to see how they continue to experiment with the tech you are promoting as DevRel.
Finding new challenges
Now Fabri is part of the XMTP team, and he found a whole new challenge: “Every company is in a different stage so it’s a different challenge, this time I’m focusing a lot in the docs, to tell a story on how to create your app with this protocol. With this we can reduce the friction of all the complexity to let anyone build an app in 5 minutes”
His goal in this company is the same that he had with Lens: getting more developers to build with XMTP tech. For this, he will continue using his sales skills in the documentation: “I want to show the uses cases, write articles is a very effective way to bring some technologies together and show how to use our tech with other players in this ecosystem”.
Conclusion
After this interview, it’s very clear that we will continue finding different ways to define the DevRel role, but the way Fabri sees it can help anyone to understand that one of the main focuses should be increasing the amount of people building with the tech you are promoting.
If you have this as your main focus, it will be part of your journey to create content, improve the developer experience, create libraries and other tasks that can lead you to increase awareness as the DevRel of any company. But the main idea is not to lose the focus on what matters: building a developer ecosystem.