In a past life, long before becoming an Investment Partner at Variant, I led developer evangelism for a Layer-1 blockchain called Hedera after we launched Mainnet. Frequently, teams within the Variant portfolio ask me how to build their initial developer relations team. If they already have one, they ask what the DevRel team should focus on. I’ve also seen a number of recent discussions on crypto twitter about what the role is, and, honestly, I think many of y’all are mid-curving it. Let’s discuss.

Shh.. don’t scare the developers…

DevRel spans three stages of a sales funnel—dressed up as one organizational function, wearing a very large trench coat. The people a majority of blockchain projects are selling to simply happen to be developers. (Don’t forget, software developers are sensitive; they don’t like salespeople and don’t want to become one. Thus, the career has successfully rebranded.)

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In traditional software organizations, we can handwave a sales funnel to look like this:

• Top of funnel: Create awareness
• Middle of funnel: Establish trust
• Bottom of funnel: Convert to customers

The job descriptions for each might look like this:

Developer “evangelists” (top of funnel)

• Creating new awareness, growing community

  • Speaking at new conferences, meetups, events
  • Posting on new types of media, or to new audiences
  • Creating attention-grabbing demos, videos, or other content

Developer “community managers” (middle)

• Gaining trust and legitimacy, nurturing community

  • Creating self service content to FAQs
  • Speaking on existing conference circuits
  • Posting to existing social media audiences
  • Answering questions, wherever they may be, eg. Discord

“Solutions” or “integrations” engineers (bottom)

• Helping customers get to production with integrations

  • Producing integration guides
  • Debugging customers implementations
  • Writing {Deployment, In-Production} Documentation

While many organizations put these roles into a singular set of responsibilities, you can start to see that these roles should be distinct. The same developers who are going to be world-class at creating inspiring top-of-funnel sales content to attract new audiences, and thus potential customers, are absolutely not going to be the same people who are world-class at bottom-of-the-funnel customer integration support.

Sure, a few are going to be “sufficiently good” at different stages of the funnel, and teams will have to work together to cover all their bases, but if your goal is to build a truly world-class team (and you have the resources), it’s better to hire one person who’s world-class at the top of the funnel, one who’s world-class at the middle, and one who’s world-class at the bottom. Each can exclusively focus on what they’re best at.

With this in mind, let’s circle back to what I teased in the introduction: whether it’s worth hiring a DevRel team at all and, if so, when?

More than anything, you need to contextualize your “developer relations team” within your organization and its goals. While obvious, it’s worth restating that hiring must always be predicated on which functions or skills are necessary to achieve those goals are under-addressed by the rest of your team. So, before hiring, goals must be well defined, and projects must know how likely it is that new hires will increase their chances of success.

To answer this, you have to understand your customers very well. If they’re organic, bottoms-up developer communities, consider hiring a developer relations team at some point—maybe even very early on! It’s also notably important to have a top of your sales funnel that feels as organic as the developer community you’re trying to curate. The first few hires truly do set the vibe.

Developer relations can single-handedly determine how you are perceived because it may own a majority of the meaningful interactions in your customer lifecycle. Generally, a good rule of thumb is that your developer relations team should be better engineers than your customers. In a majority of these scenarios your project is not going to get the opportunity to sell via traditional negotiations or contracts, so it’s important to have qualified, experienced leaders who can help inspire and lead your developer community to success.

In fact, they should be among the most respected engineers at your company. If they’re not, consider promoting one of your best engineers who is good at {top, middle, bottom}-of-the-funnel developer relations (whichever you need the most). They need to be someone your developer community looks up to and who can help them get answers to their questions or problems quickly. This means the world-class ones are not only very hard to hire for, but may also take up larger entries on your cap table than you expected.

If the target customer is going to be sold via hand-to-hand combat, i.e. a more traditional sales process, it is unlikely that hiring a developer relations team early on will meaningfully impact sales. That’s typically true of custodians, genuine B2B SaaS companies, and organizations that require traditional contractual obligations—those for which code is certainly not law, and they need to have legitimate deal closing processes with contracts being negotiated, signed, etc.

At best, someone on your developer relations team can develop relationships with internal champions, who will become advocates for the conversion from mid-to bottom-of-funnel. However, the best solutions in these categories often do not need these types of personal relationships—the products, and their competitive advantages, often speak for themselves. In those contexts, the primary type of support this style of developer relations can provide is at the bottom of the funnel, and it may ultimately look far closer to solutions engineering than what you envisioned for a developer relations job.


If you’re building peer-to-peer infrastructure that enables developers to build new kinds of applications, feel free to reach out. I’d love to help build your sales developer relations team.

Send me a message, feedback, or questions: @cooper_kunz on 𝕏